Speakers: Postdoc Lauritz Astrup Munch and  Professor Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, Department of Philosophy, School of Culture and Societ, Aarhus University

Abstract: What makes wrongful discrimination wrong? Extant accounts struggle to identify what is characteristic about wrongful discrimination while accurately predicting the moral status of all discriminatory acts. So far, any moral wrong claimed to be characteristic of wrongful discrimination have failed to generalize to all cases of wrongful discrimination. Motivated by this situation, we propose to abandon the assumption that the characteristic wrong of wrongful discrimination must be a moral wrong, and hence that an account of wrongful discrimination should predict the moral status of all discriminatory acts. Instead, we argue that the characteristic wrong is a normative flaw in a more general sense: the characteristic wrong of wrongful discrimination is that of being biased. Drawing on Thomas Kelly’s (2022) recent work on bias, we show that this account provides a unified and plausible answer to the question of what makes wrongful discrimination characteristically wrong, while being sufficiently flexible to accommodate the nuances there are to different cases of wrongful discrimination. 

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