Lesson: The Ethics of Racial Humor
The question—‘What makes humor racist, when it is?’—provides a rich platform for discussion about several philosophically interesting topics. The subject broaches issues in aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, and even the philosophy of language. Challenges for constructing a theory of racist humor involve (1) distinguishing between humor and non-humor, (2) determining what racism is, (3) distinguishing the kinds of speech acts involved in humorous discourse and how they can give rise to racist utterances