Abstract
Chapter 3 argued that discrimination is distinguishable from other forms of injustice because it embodies, and puts to work, an interpretation of its victims. In discrimination individuals are systematically disadvantaged as members of independently identifiable groups. Nevertheless, there are contexts (such as selling insurance ) in which it is considered permissible to make such judgements about individuals, which lead to their being systematically disadvantaged, but which we do not consider discriminatory. Consideration of these potential counterexamples highlights the role of stereotyping in discrimination. In addition to being a factor in discrimination, stereotyping proves to be an interpretive moral wrong in its own right. Stereotyped judgements made about individuals as members of identifiable social groups may be true or false, but are not morally innocent on the condition that they are true, since they may involve judging individuals on the basis of factors that affect them only as a matter of regrettable historical contingency.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, everything would then turn on what should be considered to be a ‘like’ case. But that is, in a way, my point. It is certainly possible for the insurer to argue that the relevant form of likeness is age, rather than driving ability.
- 2.
Henceforth I will use the phrase ‘categorisation-generalisation complex ’ to refer to the clusters of beliefs and assumptions which, allied to a particular social ‘taxonomy’, form the basis for decisions of this kind – which are also in play in, for example, social scientific studies of the causes of injustice .
- 3.
That said, it may be acceptable to bring ethnic origin into play in relation to e.g. health insurance , where there is a firmly established and fundamentally asocial connection between ethnicity and certain health conditions. But this tends to reinforce the general point. Only where the connection between ethnicity and risk factors is asocial do we feel that it is not discriminatory to take it into account.
- 4.
With factors such as gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation we will equally tend to regard differential premiums as discriminatory unless the relatively high- (or low-) risk behaviour can be tied to some largely asocial causal mechanism. Care needs to be taken here however – I am certainly not defending the idea that while assessing by ethnicity would be discriminatory, assessing by (e.g.) gender is not.
- 5.
I am assuming for the sake of the example that younger drivers are typically high-risk , and that the causal basis for this high-risk nature is reasonably well understood, and predominantly asocial – having to do with inexperience, excitability etc., factors which are likely to be associated with youth under any social conditions.
- 6.
The statistical correlation could be a matter of sheer coincidence, or it could reflect the presence of some genuinely relevant factor that a subgroup of members of this group share with each other, and with others, who don’t belong to the group at all.
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
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Lucas, P. (2011). Stereotyping. In: Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_4
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