The article to which I linked lists a few stereotypes that seem clearly true to me, and any reasonable person would readily act on them. (Would you really get equally scared of old ladies and young men when walking in a bad neighborhood?) So how exactly does your common sense alone let you sort out true stereotypes from false ones, and to conclude that most stereotypes (by whatever measure) fall into the latter category?
Moreover, if you believe that acting on some kinds of stereotypes is unethical, that’s a defensible position which I’m not going to dispute in this discussion. However, this position leads to the awful problem of what to do when some stereotypes are at the same time unethical and accurate—and a common attempt to get out of this problem is to argue that all these unethical stereotypes must be inaccurate, which you seem to be doing. But this is clearly wishful thinking; reality is never aligned so conveniently with abstract moral theories.
The article to which I linked lists a few stereotypes that seem clearly true to me, and any reasonable person would readily act on them. (Would you really get equally scared of old ladies and young men when walking in a bad neighborhood?) So how exactly does your common sense alone let you sort out true stereotypes from false ones, and to conclude that most stereotypes (by whatever measure) fall into the latter category?
Moreover, if you believe that acting on some kinds of stereotypes is unethical, that’s a defensible position which I’m not going to dispute in this discussion. However, this position leads to the awful problem of what to do when some stereotypes are at the same time unethical and accurate—and a common attempt to get out of this problem is to argue that all these unethical stereotypes must be inaccurate, which you seem to be doing. But this is clearly wishful thinking; reality is never aligned so conveniently with abstract moral theories.