Some of the impulses that underlie "political correctness," before this pejorative label came into existence to denote their misapplication, are admirable. They consist in the conviction that no individual should be discriminated against because of facts about them that are not of their choice, namely ethnicity, age, disability (if any), sex and sexuality, and in the allied conviction that every individual, just in virtue of being an instance of the class of things worthy of moral regard, should be approached with courtesy, consideration and fairness, until or unless they give good reason why either of the first two should be withheld. (The third is non-negotiable in any circumstances.)
"Political correctness" is a misapplication of these ideas. It began legitimately enough by arguing that historically induced distortions in social relationships should be corrected by changes in both attitudes and practices, requiring that people be challenged to think differently about others they had previously regarded—and therefore treated—in disadvantaging ways, and by remedying the effects of negative discrimination by deliberate enactment of its opposite.
This last is controversial, but arguably necessary, and for as long as it takes to effect a major corrective in the distortions at issue. But the self-appointed PC police are not content to remedy injustice justly. The salient example is their "respect" agenda. For the PC police, it is insufficient to require that one's default first approach to others be courteous and considerate so long as they merit it; one must respect them almost no matter what their choices and attitudes, their proclivities and associations. An assumption underlying this is a degree of relativism that puts any such choices beyond evaluation, and hence beyond criticism. So anyone who criticises or disparages across the sealed borders of difference is automatically indictable before the high court of PC.
The respect agenda completely overlooks the fact that respect is something earned, not claimable by right. The world pullulates with profoundly unrespectable people, views and actions, at all levels and in all neighbourhoods, and PC's reflex tendency to attack most of those who attack many of them makes matters worse. True discrimination—careful and fair-minded separation of worth from dross—is bundled by PC with all discrimination, and banned; hence the trouble.
What began as a movement to rectify relationships has become a minefield of suspicion and anxiety. Much of the anger that has made it so is understandable; none of the humourlessness and puritanism that keeps it so is acceptable. It is particularly a pity that its excesses have stained left-liberal thinking, of which it is a strand; but not, thankfully, the whole.
Sent in by Michael Moodie, Dorset. Send your philosophical queries and dilemmas to AC Grayling at question@prospect-magazine.co.uk
