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Risse and Zeckhauser on Racial Profiling: A Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2010

REGINALD WILLIAMS*
Affiliation:
Bakersfield [email protected]

Abstract

This article criticizes Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser's recent utilitarian defense of racial profiling. I use a novel thought-experiment to argue that even if a negative phenomenon could be reduced by profiling members of certain groups who happen to be disproportionately associated with it, the practice can be implausible. Specifically, I explore the possibility that in a given society, platinum blondes have a higher per capita incidence of a serious sexually transmitted disease, D. And I argue that doctors and health officials in the society would not be justified in profiling such blondes, given that there is nothing about being a platinum blonde that causes one to have D.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 ‘Racial Profiling’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (2004), pp. 131–70.

2 ‘Racial Profiling’, p. 150.

3 ‘Racial Profiling’, p. 132.

4 According to the US Census Bureau, in 2006, 22 percent of all African Americans lived below the American poverty line, compared to 10 percent of all other races. For such statistics, go to <http://www.blackdemographics.com/housing_poverty.html>.

5 This phenomenon has garnered much attention in the literature. See, for instance, Risse and Zeckhauser, ‘Racial Profiling’, p. 138, and David Harris, ‘Driving While African-American: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways’, American Civil Liberties Union Special Report (1999).