Wrongful Discrimination

This Element critiques leading theories of discrimination and their limits in explaining indirect, implicit, and algorithmic cases.

This Element critically examines leading normative accounts of group discrimination-harm, disrespect, and inequality-and their explanatory limits in non-paradigmatic cases such as indirect, implicit, and algorithmic discrimination. It argues against the viability of a unified theory of wrongfulness.In a generic sense, to discriminate is to differentiate. Generic discrimination is not wrongful. But many instances of a more specific form of discrimination – differentiating between people because they are members of different socially salient groups (henceforth: group discrimination) – are wrongful. This means that people subjected to group discrimination are often wronged, and this bears importantly on whether such acts are morally impermissible. The three main accounts of what makes group discrimination wrongful appeal to considerations of harm, disrespect, and social relations of inequality, respectively. While each of them can explain the wrongfulness of some paradigmatic instances of wrongful direct discrimination, they explain the wrongfulness of a set of three important non-paradigmatic forms of discrimination – indirect discrimination, implicit bias, and algorithmic discrimination – less well. Overall, the prospects of a monistic account of the wrongfulness of discrimination are bleak.