To connect this to Evelyn's comment, I feel as though people are carving out a smaller and smaller domain of humanity where their dualistic, morally-inflected thinking about human behavior still applies. If you have an IQ just just below a certain threshold, you fall into a protected category of persons, whom it would be shameful to mock…
To connect this to Evelyn's comment, I feel as though people are carving out a smaller and smaller domain of humanity where their dualistic, morally-inflected thinking about human behavior still applies. If you have an IQ just just below a certain threshold, you fall into a protected category of persons, whom it would be shameful to mock, insult, and exclude in showy ways, but also to whom the typical standards of behavior don't apply. If you have an IQ just above the threshold, though... Is there an insult more ubiquitous in our culture than "stupid" and its variants? The same implicit threshold reasoning divides "lazy people" from "people with ADHD". No one wants to bite the determinism bullet and admit that we are all equally products of forces beyond our control, that the same laws of physics and biology apply to someone with an IQ of 70 and an IQ of 71. Maybe we all need that kind of moral grace anyway, and not just people with obvious differences.
To connect this to Evelyn's comment, I feel as though people are carving out a smaller and smaller domain of humanity where their dualistic, morally-inflected thinking about human behavior still applies. If you have an IQ just just below a certain threshold, you fall into a protected category of persons, whom it would be shameful to mock, insult, and exclude in showy ways, but also to whom the typical standards of behavior don't apply. If you have an IQ just above the threshold, though... Is there an insult more ubiquitous in our culture than "stupid" and its variants? The same implicit threshold reasoning divides "lazy people" from "people with ADHD". No one wants to bite the determinism bullet and admit that we are all equally products of forces beyond our control, that the same laws of physics and biology apply to someone with an IQ of 70 and an IQ of 71. Maybe we all need that kind of moral grace anyway, and not just people with obvious differences.