Harm and Discrimination

Abstract

Many legal, social, and medical theorists and practitioners, as well as lay people, seem to be concerned with the harmfulness of discriminative practices. However, the philosophical literature on the moral wrongness of discrimination, with a few exceptions, does not focus on harm. In this paper, I examine, and improve, a recent account of wrongful discrimination, which divides into (1) a definition of group discrimination, and (2) a characterisation of its moral wrong-making feature in terms of harm. The resulting account analyses the wrongness of discrimination in terms of intrapersonal comparisons of the discriminatee's actual, and relevantly counterfactual, well-being levels. I show that the account faces problems from counterfactuals, which can be traced back specifically to the orthodox -comparative, counterfactual, welfaristconcept of harm. I argue that non-counterfactual and non-comparative harm concepts face problems of their own, and don't fit easily with our best understanding of discrimination; hence they are unsuitable to replace the orthodox concept here. I then propose a non-orthodoxcomparative, counterfactual, hybrid (partly welfarist, partly non-welfarist) -concept of harm, which relies on counterfactual comparisons of ways of being treated (rather than well-being levels). I suggest how such a concept can help us handle the problems from counterfactuals, at least for my account of discrimination. I also show that there are similar proposals in other harmrelated debates. An upshot of the paper is thus to corroborate the case for a non-orthodox, hybrid concept of harm, which seems better able to fulfil its functional roles in a variety of contexts.

Is Discrimination Harmful?

“…The definition of discrimination which I assume in this paper is non-moralized. ground, "some suitable alternative situation" must be specified in a non-arbitrary and non-counterintuitive way (for discussion of why this might be difficult, see Rasmussen (2019)), and in such a way that it continues to be a harm-based account, and, second, it still might not solve the problem in overdetermination cases.…”

Implicit Bias and Discrimination

“…The above functional definition of implicit bias refers to social categories, which points to a concern with, specifically, group discrimination, that is, discrimination due to group membership:

(GD) An agent, X, group discriminates against someone, Y, by Φ‐ing if, and only if: There is a property, P, such that Y has P or X believes that Y has P, By Φ‐ing, X treats Y worse than X would have treated Y, had Y not had P or had X not believed Y to have P, It is because (X believes that) Y has P that X treats Y worse by Φ‐ing, and P is the property of being a member of a socially salient group (i.e., a group perceived membership of which is important to the structure of social interactions across a wide range of social contexts) (Berndt Rasmussen, 2019, para. 7) 3

…”

Gender differences in under-reporting hiring discrimination in Korea: a machine learning approach

“…Discrimination harms people’s lives [ 1 ]. It can deprive them of socioeconomic opportunities in daily life (e.g., education, employment, and income), and these disadvantages can accumulate over the life-course [ 2 - 4 ].…”