What about practicing membership? What about identifying as?
Well, what about it? There are people who practice Catholicism and people who don’t. There are people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I actively follow the rules of Catholicism”, and and people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church when I was a kid”. They all go down as Catholics on the census. Practicing Catholics are a subset of the number of people recorded as Catholics in the world.
How so? What’s the relevant difference, and why? Especially when the comparison is with something like “fraudster”?
To be quite honest, simply because I think there’s a category of group-memberships that includes things like nationalities and political affiliations and religions, and doesn’t include things like “fraudster”, “golfer” or “rationalist” and it was the former meaning I intended to convey in my original post. Group is clearly too vague a term. If I said “demographics” instead of groups would that be clearer?
Why is the size relevant here?
Moral uniformity and broadness of political platform, I’d say. As the party gets larger the pool of potential beliefs/positions that can be held under that party’s banner becomes more broad—I accept that those two things don’t always go hand in hand, but they do usually in democracies where people are free to choose their party, and in systems where people are less free to choose their party there’s a whole other moral aspect to membership. As the potential beliefs or positions that can be held by an individual who still calls themselves an X-member rises it becomes less accurate to ascribe one specific noxious characteristic to all group members.
And to bring it back round to the initial topic of debate, would you say that it is useful to hate all members of a particular political party given that you thought that membership in it was immoral? Can you give an example? And what about the liars? I’d like to understand your position more clearly.
Well, what about it? There are people who practice Catholicism and people who don’t. There are people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I actively follow the rules of Catholicism”, and and people who say “I am Catholic” meaning “I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church when I was a kid”. They all go down as Catholics on the census. Practicing Catholics are a subset of the number of people recorded as Catholics in the world.
To be quite honest, simply because I think there’s a category of group-memberships that includes things like nationalities and political affiliations and religions, and doesn’t include things like “fraudster”, “golfer” or “rationalist” and it was the former meaning I intended to convey in my original post. Group is clearly too vague a term. If I said “demographics” instead of groups would that be clearer?
Moral uniformity and broadness of political platform, I’d say. As the party gets larger the pool of potential beliefs/positions that can be held under that party’s banner becomes more broad—I accept that those two things don’t always go hand in hand, but they do usually in democracies where people are free to choose their party, and in systems where people are less free to choose their party there’s a whole other moral aspect to membership. As the potential beliefs or positions that can be held by an individual who still calls themselves an X-member rises it becomes less accurate to ascribe one specific noxious characteristic to all group members.
And to bring it back round to the initial topic of debate, would you say that it is useful to hate all members of a particular political party given that you thought that membership in it was immoral? Can you give an example? And what about the liars? I’d like to understand your position more clearly.