What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Author
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”!
2. Book Summary
Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.
The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way.
He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:43 - What is “discrimination”?
07:17 - Irrelevant features
10:48 - Framing the project
18:43 - Socially salient groups
23:44 - Connection with the law
26:49 - Empirical research
28:04 - Vagueness
33:12 - Political beliefs
35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination
38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination
43:35 - Statistical discrimination
46:24 - Different category?
48:41 - Structural discrimination
52:40 - Wrongful discrimination
55:09 - Rejoinder
1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts
1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts
1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts
1:19:16 - Monistic accounts
1:23:05 - Value of philosophy
1:27:10 - Conclusion
