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Is Racial Profiling a Legitimate Strategy in the Fight against Violent Crime?

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Abstract

Racial profiling has come under intense public scrutiny especially since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This article discusses two questions: (1) whether racial profiling is sometimes rational, and (2) whether it can be morally permissible. It is argued that under certain circumstances the affirmative answer to both questions is justified.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nathan Cofnas, Rafael De Clercq, Steven Pinker, Ante Sesardić, Matej Sušnik and Omri Tal for useful comments on earlier drafts. None of them, however, should be assumed to agree with the main claims of this paper.

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Sesardić, N. Is Racial Profiling a Legitimate Strategy in the Fight against Violent Crime?. Philosophia 46, 981–999 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9945-1

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