User blog comment:Hippogriff12/The Scarcity of Racists in Skyrim/@comment-75.155.156.90-20130323003608

I know that this blog was a long time ago and everyone has likely forgotten about it, including the author, but I just wanted to comment in case he was still interested, and because it helps me to write out thinking. As I suppose there's little chance of it being read, I'll try to be concise. From the second paragraph, two points. First: “... That, however, is not true in Tamriel; there, the races really are different species, with totally different attributes and origins” Technically, if men and mer are interfertile, such that they could progenerate the Breton race, then by definition they are the same species, or at least share a very recent ancestor. There aren't any cases in the lore of which I'm aware of Argonians or Khajiit reproducing with men or mer, but it seems likely they are separate species. But secondly and more importantly: “... you will typically find in conversation with NPC’s in TES games is that practically everyone makes judgments about the people around them based on their race. This does not translate to hatred or bigotry, it is simply a fact of life in Nirn – different races are different creatures, plain and simple, and unlike the human beings of Earth, one’s race is a fairly accurate indicator of how an NPC will react in certain circumstances.” I'm afraid this translates directly to bigotry, no matter what objective racial differences exist. I mean bigotry in this context as applying a perception about some race to every member of a population of that race. A population is an abstract notion, applied on top of a number of individuals in an attempt to describe them in some more general way, when all that really exists are those many, separate individuals. The effect of a racial bonus, like +10 to lockpicking and sneak, for example, inherent to every member of that population may be to skew that population in favour of occupations and habits that use it, like assassins and rogues and such; but even if this is an objective change, it is only a change in statistics, effectively increasing the probability of a member of that population behaving that way. There exists no necessary change, such that the behaviour of an individual is necessarily determined by that increased natural ability, so that “your race is integral to your personality”, as said. The habit of thinking this way does not become logically legitimate at some point on the way to total uniformity, so that there being 'enough' Argonian thieves and assassins justifies a man or elf thinking or speaking of Argonians as such generally. It may be that the shift is substantial, and that some assumption about a population is 'fairly accurate' based on it, but it will still fail to give certain knowledge about any individual of that population the opinion-holder meets. Note that this argument is independent of Western morality, and is derived from the inability of people to speak about what they do not know—so if you want to argue I'm being influenced by Western thinking through Socrates, very well, though as a point of logic I think it stands. But I would challenge a point from Western thinking you used, at the end of paragraph six: “... if you were truly a different person who was born and raised into a completely different country and culture, with a different language and belief system where the gods all had different names, that other you wouldn’t see the world in the same way or believe quite the same things as the present you does. This is even more true if the other you wasn’t a human being at all, but a talking, self-aware orangutan – point being, a different species has a different identity completely, and a different moral compass, if any at all“ The effect of culture and upbringing is of course very powerful and may be a very good predictor of how a member of that culture behaves in many respects, but without certainty, it remains fallacious to assume that behaviour on an individual basis, which is the act of your everyday Nord or Elf applying it to the other. As for different species, it may be there really exists an objective difference in behaviour between all members of two populations, or to paraphrase one philosopher, “If we could speak the language of lions, we would not understand them”. But for sapient species, their members assumed to be capable of at least some of the same abstract thinking, that which defines self-awareness, mathematical ability, or so on, this objective difference cannot be held as fact, and there may still remain enough of an ability to understand the other's thinking, however difficult it might be across cultures and beliefs. Basically what I'm saying is even if there exists an objective difference between two races and they do in some way have different universal attributes, so that there are stronger reasons for a resident of Tamriel to speak about them in some way, to the question of whether their words are bigoted are not, this is actually irrelevant, because it still provides no certain knowledge about the behaviour of any individuals they apply it to, and it is the act of assuming things about people without knowledge that is bigotry. It is still bigoted thinking—it's just easier to cover it with arguments as to their racial differences, as humans have done for a long time on Earth.