Recent philosophical discussions about discrimination have focused on what makes discrimination wrongful in paradigmatic cases, such as in examples involving sexist hiring committees or racist university admissions procedures. The purpose of this course is to provide a forum within which to build upon these foundations by exploring the further complications that arise in more controversial cases of the kind that we encounter most commonly. Throughout the course, we will explore questions such as the following:
- Is it wrong for the manager of a nightclub to hire on the basis of an applicant’s good looks?
- Is it wrong for someone to choose where to live, or where to send her child to school, based upon the racial or ethnic makeup of the local population?
- If so, is this kind of discrimination wrong for the same reasons, and to the same degree, as discrimination in professional contexts?
- May the state interfere in individuals’ private lives so as to minimize wrongful discrimination of this kind (assuming that it is wrongful) and, if so, which kinds of interventions are justifiable?
Answering these questions requires us to reflect upon whether the wrongness of discrimination varies when it intersects with concerns relating to personal autonomy, bodily integrity, privacy, and family life.
This one-week course will have three parts. First, we will spend one-day surveying competing accounts of the wrongness of discrimination so as to familiarise students with existing debates in the philosophical literature. Second, we will spend two days investigating more controversial aspects of discrimination, focusing on discrimination in our private lives and on appearance-based discrimination. Third, we will spend two days evaluating various policy responses to wrongful discrimination, exploring the justifiability of affirmative action and of various policy responses to gender discrimination and the gendered division of labor.
This course has two distinctive merits. The first is that we will expose students to cutting-edge research from an assembly of world-class philosophers on the morality of discrimination. The second is that we address issues of enormous political concern, and so we will equip students with the transferable analytical skills to scrutinize policies that emerge in this domain.
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