ABSTRACT
All justifications of prejudice will be mere adhoc-constructions, if the Enlightenment succeeded - as some of its exponents have claimed - in establishing a critical standard to condemn prejudice. Like prejudice, presumption was originally a legal term. Unlike prejudice, however, the domain of presumption is the law of evidence. With the elimination of prejudice, the Enlightenment set itself a problem which is either insoluble, or leads to undesirable solutions. One logical as well as historical consequence of rejecting prejudice altogether, it has been suggested, would be to subject all human behaviour to scientific scrutiny and run it through a process of experimental testing. To put everything on the agenda is the logical consequence of the Enlightenment ideal of an open-mindedness which results from removing all prejudices; it has in fact been its historical consequence. Our fundamental moral beliefs are prejudices in a well-circumscribed sense.
