Speaker: Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Centre Director, CEPDISC

Title: Direct Discrimination Without Disparate Treatment

Abstract: It is virtually universally assumed that to directly discriminate against someone, one must treat them differently from others, i.e., non-discriminatees. It seems as if, by definition, disparate treatment discrimination requires disparate treatment. In this paper, using Kripke’s notion of rigid designators I argue that this assumption is false. We can discriminate against someone, even if we treat them no differently than others. This is because, essentially, direct discrimination is treatment – whether differential or not – resulting from a particular psychological mechanism. If this is correct, this has important implications for how we can account for the wrongness of discrimination. For instance, we cannot say that discrimination is intrinsically wrong because of how it involves treating people differently. At best, it is a contingent truth that instances of discrimination involve treating people differently.