There’s value in listening to your self-critique.
If I were a better human being, I wouldn’t have had that experience. Most of us, at some point in our lives, have thought this to ourselves in response to something we heard or saw.
For example, suppose you think your colleague’s voice sounds shrill — not just high pitched. And you wonder, “If I were nicer or a better human being, would her voice have sounded that way to me?” Your worry might get more specific. You might wonder, “If I were less subject to bias, if I lived in a different cultural landscape — one where my background assumptions about voice and authority had been shaped differently — would my colleague’s voice actually just sound high?”
Here’s another example: The North American media landscape tends to be white centric in its portrayals of “good” grooming and beauty. So if you — regardless of your own racial identity — have had little exposure to people with tightly coiled hair worn naturally, you might perceive that hair as dry, where “dry” has an implication of being unhealthy. You might think, “Intellectually, I know that’s perfectly healthy hair. If I had been less exposed to biased media, maybe that person’s hair would look different to me.”
However, having those realizations doesn’t shake the perceptions of the hair, or of the colleague’s voice. You can know that “a different me might have a different perception” and can even think of your original perception as problematic, but it doesn’t disappear. In that sense, our experiences seem beyond our immediate control. But there’s still something right about seeing our moral selves as invested in them. In part, that’s because of some practical implications.
The debate about whether beliefs, desires, or intentions can directly change perception matters, for example, in legal contexts. Suppose someone is testifying in court that they saw another person do something incriminating. The person testifying might think to herself, “If I were less affected by racist media portrayals, I might have seen or heard things differently.”
So, what do we do about all of this? Part of what I’m arguing is that our perceptions are another area of life in which you could subject yourself to moral critique. You could say, “My better, more authentic self wants
to be different.” But exactly how could that be managed?
One of the things I’ve been researching is the role vivid imagination plays in reducing certain kinds of bias. It’s an empirical hypothesis that is still being tested, but I became interested in it because, through imagining, you can recommit to how you think it is appropriate to see things.
Here’s an example most parents can relate to: You’re having trouble getting your 3-year-old’s bedtime routine underway, and you’re tired and cranky. His face strikes you as having a rude or a disrespectful expression. But you remember the previous night when you were cheerful and well rested, and you were having fun goofing around. You think, “I’m not sure there’s much difference between what he’s doing now and what he did last night when he just looked cheekily affectionate, or mischievous but loving.”
When you vividly imagine the way his face looked yesterday, that’s part of what pulls you to the awareness that maybe your current experience is not just being driven by his face but also by your emotions, because you can remember a similar face yesterday that looked very different to you.
So, alternative imaginings are vivid considerations about what it would be like for someone to behave in a counter-stereotypical way — like a large man being gentle, or an elderly person displaying rapid-fire wit. But, you can only do that imagining if you believe it is in fact possible for the person to be going against the stereotype. You have to do that work. And that is a commitment to prevent your negative assumptions, or your emotional state, from clouding how you view someone.
It’s philosophically significant — that gut sense of “I did not come off well at this moment.” It’s something to trust, and then consider what it reveals. Getting to that worried reflection actually strikes me as a self-improvement; you’re trying to restore a balance between what inside of you and what outside of you is driving your perceptions.
Tumulty delves further into this topic in her new book, Alien Experience (Oxford University Press, January 2020).