Wisse, Robin; (2021) Are bad things worse when they happen to you because of who you are? Discrimination and Status Wrongs. Masters thesis (M.Phil.Stud), UCL (University College London).

Preview

Text THESIS 2021 with MINOR CORRECTIONS - ready to upload.pdf Download (660kB) | Preview

Abstract

Intuitively, discrimination and identity–based harms are distinctively wrong. Why would that be so? I argue that we have no reason to think that socially incurred harms are distinctively wrong apart from our intuition that it is so (chapter 1). I then move onto status–based accounts of the wrong of discrimination and identity–based harms as presented by Chambers (2008), Moreau (2020) and Hellman (2011). I argue that while they are right to focus on status, they fail to capture the distinctive and personal wrong incurred by people in these circumstances for two reasons. First, I argue that they mistakenly rely on risk of harm, and put forward an alternative status wrong account (chapter 2). Second, I argue that Hellman’s account rightly relies on interpretative value judgements, but that it lacks a convincing account of how these can be objectively valid and therefore can be taken seriously as a source of moral knowledge (chapter 3). I trace both of these shortcomings back to an insufficient metaethics on which objectivity and subjectivity are mutually exclusive. If we want to maintain and develop the view that identity–based mistreatment is distinctively wrong we need a metaethics to underwrite it. To this end, I put forward Crary’s alternative Wittgensteinian metaethics (Crary, 2016). This shift in metaethics allows me to rephrase the question. Instead of asking ‘Why are identity–based harms and wrongs distinctively and personally wrong?’, I can now ask: ‘Does this intuition tell us something about how the world really is, or is it just a misleading sentimental response?’ I argue that there is no reason to doubt that this intuition tells us what the world is really like by drawing on and developing Crary’s metaethics (chapter 4). I develop Crary’s view by showing how it can reject racist literature. Finally, I show how the view can help us assess the meaning of social practices like affirmative action (chapter 5).

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item