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Wrongful Discrimination

New book by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen in Cambridge Elements series in Political Philosophy

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Wrongful Discrimination

Online ISBN: 9781009596749

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

You find the book here


Summary

In a generic sense, to discriminate is to differentiate. Generic discrimination is not wrongful. But many instances of a more specific form of discrimination – differentiating between people because they are members of different socially salient groups (henceforth: group discrimination) – are wrongful. This means that people subjected to group discrimination are often wronged, and this bears importantly on whether such acts are morally impermissible. The three main accounts of what makes group discrimination wrongful appeal to considerations of harm, disrespect, and social relations of inequality, respectively. While each of them can explain the wrongfulness of some paradigmatic instances of wrongful direct discrimination, they explain the wrongfulness of a set of three important non-paradigmatic forms of discrimination – indirect discrimination, implicit bias, and algorithmic discrimination – less well. Overall, the prospects of a monistic account of the wrongfulness of discrimination are bleak.