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19 - Respect and Discrimination

from Part IV - Paradoxes in Moral Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Heidi M. Hurd
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Summary

Some claim that discrimination is wrongful, when it is, because of the disrespect it involves. This claim is plausible in part because, say, racist discrimination appears wrong even if, by sheer coincidence, it harms no one. I discuss two different disrespect-based accounts of the wrongfulness of discrimination: one offered by Larry Alexander in a seminal 1992 article, which focuses on beliefs about moral worth, and one by Benjamin Eidelson, which focuses on giving appropriate weight to the equal moral worth and autonomy of discriminatees in the discriminating agent’s deliberations. Both accounts are vulnerable to the same sort of counterexamples. Moreover, Eidelson’s account oscillates between a fact- and an evidence-relative account of disrespect in a way that is problematic. In accordance with Alexander’s more recent views, I conclude that we have yet to see a satisfactory disrespect-based account of the wrongness of discrimination.
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Chapter
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Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities
Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander
, pp. 317 - 332
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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