Humanities Midterm

Structure of John Rawls’ Theory on Justice

• based on justice as fairness

• principles of justice are agreed to in a neutral original position w/ decision-makers behind a veil of ignorance (they do not know their social position)

• metric: distribution of primary goods (goods that every rational agent wants more of/value similarly)

Rawls’ Principles of Justice

• lexical ordering: no tradeoff between principles

• First principle: equal distribution of basic civil and political rights/liberties

• Second principle: equality of opportunity

  • careers open to talents: competition for valuable occupational positions must be open to all

  • fair equality of opportunity: morally irrelevent circumstances shouldn’t create inequalities in outcomes

  • the difference principle: inequality is acceptable only if it improves the standing of the worst-off

Roemer’s Theory of Types

• differentiating between traits caused by uncontrollable social/identity factors and those caused by choices

• based on statistical variation in outcomes among reference group

  • variation between groups is caused by circumstances

  • variation within a group is caused by individual effort

• possible way of implementing Rawls’ “Fair Equality of Opportunity” principle

Robert Nozick’s “Historically-Oriented Transactional Theory”

• idea of justice based on property ownership: if one is the legitimate owner of property then any transaction with it is just and anything flowing from these transactions is just

Friedrich Hayek’s Epistemic Critique of Distributive Justice

• distributive justice is contrary to liberty because it necessitates an authority capable of distributing goods to competitors in a predetermined way

Utilitarianism

• key thinkers: John Stuart Mill & Jeremy Bentham

• metric = utility

  • aim to maximize the satisfaction of individual preferences

• egalitarian: everyone counts for one

• suggest that maximizing utility will require reducing inequalities

Critiques of Utilitarianism

• Rawlsian: utilitarianism does not recognize the distinction between people and does not protect individual laws. There are no limits to the tradeoffs in satisfaction

• It is anti-egalitarian because it allows for the integration of discriminatory preferences in the social utility calculus

• does not account for adaptive preference formation and how people adjust their desires to realistic options, which is shaped by their background/past experiences

Equality as Equal Respect and Concern (Ronald Dworkin)

• sometimes entails non-identical treatment (i.e. sick child gets medicine) and other times it requires identical treatment (i.e. voting rights)

• does not require equal impact

• Application - Palmer v. Thompson (1971): city government closing all pools to avoid integration is unconstitutional even though it’s equal because it implies a lesser respect for African Americans

Distributive Paradigms for Equality as Equal Respect and Concern

• Ronald Dworkin: Equality of Resources

  • give people = resources, what they do with it will reflect free will

  • critique: does not account for differences in ability to convert resources into other resources (i.e. disabled people)

• Richard Arneson: Equality of Welfare

  • focus on outcome (satisfying welfare needs)

  • critique: ignores adaptive preference formation + the effect of expensive tastes

• Amartya Sen: Equality of Capabilities

• Equality of Opportunity

  • Competition for social goods should be open to all and based on relevent meritocratic criteria

  • critique: what is the acceptable inequality in outcomes? what about the impact of social and family background on qualifications/

Luck Egalitarianism

• Ronald Dworkin, Gerard Allen Cohen

• see the goal of public authorities as eliminating/compensating for all inequalities resulting from social circumstances/undeserved features. Inequalities are acceptable to the extent that they derive from voluntary choices of individuals

• critique: all individual choices are influenced by unchosen features + some goods should be distributed regardless of individual responsibility

Michael Walzer’s Complex Equality

• There can’t be a single principle that dictates distributive justice for every sphere → distribution of major social goods in an uncorrelated, local, good-specific way, depending on irreducible criteria of their value within the community

• Inequality in certain spheres is ok because it is evened out by other spheres

• critiques: values of some major social goods lie in their convertibility into other goods, provides no basis for unsettling conventional locally dominant unfair distribution practices

Ordinary/Minimalist Conception of Race

• defines races as morphologically distinct communities of descent linked to a geographic region

• used by anthropologists

• visibility of racial figures is not a universal conception of race

Racist Conception of Race

• an ideology

• based on 6 beliefs

  • humanity can be divided into groups that share an underlying essence

  • these natural features of immutable in the short/medium term

  • these traits are heritable

  • those traits determine other traits

  • a hierarchy of groups can be created

  • This hierarchy justifies the domination of inferior groups by superior groups

Sociological/Constructivist Conception of Race

• race as a social construct

• non-transparent because people often see it as natural

• kwame anthony appiah: “there are no African Americans independent of social practices associated with the racial label”

• race legitimizes a pattern of domination

Genetic Conception of Race

• even though there is more genetic difference across racial groups than between them, race can sometimes be taken as a proxy for genetic features that help predict susceptability to disease

Descriptive Definition of Discrimination

• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen: a practice imposing a relative disadvantage on individuals based on perceived membership in a salient social group

• Salient Social Group: group in which being a member shapes social interactions in a large number of decision-making contexts

• descriptive rather than normative definition allows for distinction of racial but not racist discrimination

Unintentional Direct Discrimination - Social Psychology

• categorize and stereotype formation are necessary and automatic

• bias in recall and causal attribution that reinforce stereotypes

• automatically activated stereotypes, can be regardless of race of stereotyper (i.e. Shooter Bias)

• Implicit Association Test - Anthony Greenwald ; indicator of implicit bias against POC

• Malleability of Implicit Bias → self-fulfilling prophecy

Gary Becker: Economic Analysis of Discrimination

• discrimination is economically irrational so market pressures will cause it to disappear without any legislative intervention

• racial wage gap: racist employers will pay white applicants more rather than hire an equally qualified black applicant

• critiques:

  • does not take into account reaciton qualifications (Alan Wertheimer) which can be based on rational economic concern about the perceived reaction of others

  • discrimination equillibrium: self-sustaining discrimination based on economic incentives

  • past discrimination causes differences in qualifications, so the discrimination is not always economically irrational

Statistical Discrimination

• discrimination based on the correlation of a visible intrinsically irrelevent trait (i.e. race) and an invisible intrinsically relevent trait (i.e. hard-workingness) that a decision-maker reasonably cares about to reach a legitimate goal

• correlation may be the outcome of past and present discrimination (i.e. correlation btwn race and crime is an extension of the correlation btwn race and class)

• Glenn Loury: acting upon statistical generalizations can trigger a consequence that may reinforce the generalization (i.e. black man and cab drivers)

  • Robert Merton: self-fulfilling prophecy

Bernard Harcourt’s Critique of Racial Profiling for Law Enforcement

• not a rational strategy with negative affects that far outweigh the positive

• effects: self-fulfilling prophecy, overincarceration of POC, cause POC to distrust the police, incentivizes terrorist orgs to recruit people from non-profiled groups, members of non-profiled groups will take advantage

• limitations: unavailability of substitution strategies + inelasticity of non-profiled goods depending on the nature of the crime, profiles can be amended to deal with adaptive strategies by criminal organizations, knowledge of racial profiling is not universal/equally distributed

Contextualist Critique of Race-based Statistical Discrimination

• Randall Kennedy: racial profiling should be banned despite its efficiency in some contexts because of its wider social consequences

• ban is best response to mitigate the risk of overusing the racial proxy b/c trying to disentangle empirically grounded from ungrounded discrimination is inefficient

• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen: statistical discrimination can still be unjust because it arises from past non-statistical/intentional discrimination, it would thus prolong the effects of past discrimination

Immutability/Uncontrollability Focused Account of Why Discrimination is Wrong

• people shouldn’t be discriminated against for things they can’t control

• but: there are unjust examples of discrimination based on controllable features and there are situations where it is ok to discriminate based on an immutable trait

Effects-Focused Account of Why Discrimination is Wrong

• discrimination with negative effects is unjust

• but: all discrimination causes short-term disadvantage but not all types are wrong, long-term effect isn’t a good metric either b/c some harmful discrimination leads to better results in the longterm but are still wrong

Deborah Hellman: Meaning-based Account of Why Discrimination is Wrong

• discrimination is wrong whenever it expresses a demeaning message denying equal moral worth to a person/people

• judgement is independent of the discriminator’s intent and the victim’s preception