What was the consensus of professional philosophers as the morality/justification of racism/sexism in the 1940's.

by TheTallestOfTopHats

Were the philosophers way ahead of their time? Would the majority of philosophy professors decry racism as a really bad thing?

LoveSomeLove

First of all, the idea of consensus in philosophy is absurd. Depending on your beliefs about truth, you might not be comfortable arguing a position you can't defend. So philosophers tend to be very militant about pushing their point of view over others.

Second of all, I don't believe any 20th century philosophy directly addresses racism. Philosophers have been talking about xenophobia since the Greeks at least, but I've seen conversations on this topic make very good use of the hegelian dialectic. The best source of this, by far, is Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. (Recently a new translation was released that makes it much, much more readable as a philosophical work—get that if at all possible.) I'm pretty terrible at explaining the hegelian dialect and the constitutive other, but she uses the idea of "us" vs the "other" as a method of exploring inherent bias and power dynamics between the two perspectives. She explicitly applies this to an exploration of exploitation of women through history, but it's easy (trivial, I would even argue) to "queer" other attributes than gender and see her arguments applied to e.g. skin color, nationality, accent, any of the things racism usually associates with.

Anyway, if you ARE interested in exploring the use of philosophy to combat sexism, here is an excellent formal overview of the work, looking at its philosophical roots.

Personally, I'd also like to say that a) Simone de Beauvoir was OBVIOUSLY a better writer and thinker than Sarte, and b) she said everything he had to say about existentialism better without mentioning it much at all. I highly recommend a full read of the second sex—it's one of the most important works of the 20th century.