"Most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives. Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an anything seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, "hate crimes"."

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I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.

— T. M. Scanlon