Re: Offending peaople's minds

N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Fri, 30 Aug 96 17:03:53 GMT


Sarah:
The main reason why I think there is greater hope for the
sentence ascribing stupidness to a group of people to be
freed from improper emotional connotations is that everybody
can believe the sentence to be true, and yet hold the
highest opinion of his or her own intellectual abilities. I
therefore do not think that people belonging to a group must
feel insulted when that group is said to be stupid. For
example, consider the group consisting of you and I and all
humans with IQ<85. We admit that this group is stupid but
feel non the worse for that. (Perhaps you have taken "Blacks
are..." to mean "All blacks are..."?)

Nicholas Bostrom n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk