Abstract:

Recent developments are pressing a shift in philosophical interest in discrimination. The question of what it is to discriminate, in the first place now emerges as a surprising puzzle that grips legal and philosophical interest. What exactly constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex or race or religion or any other “protected” grounds? What does it take to discriminate on these bases? The leading proposals so far advance a causal account of discrimination—roughly, an action discriminates on the basis of X (race, sex, religion, and so on) if X causes (in the right way) the adverse outcome. Presently formulated, the line of inquiry that pursues discrimination via causation is a dead end. In the range of difficult cases that have recently sparked debate over the causal account, resolving whether, say, sex caused the outcome at issue necessarily involves begging the central question at issue. Or so I argue. But in my last act, I want to propose that we might yet be able to preserve a key role for causation in an analysis of discrimination—without claiming to overcome the circularity charge. The way through is to grant normative ethical judgments about race and sex a place in a theory of race and sex causation. I will sketch such a normative-causal account of discrimination and make a proposal for why I think such a route is promising indeed.

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