34 research outputs found
Equal Rights for Zombies?: Phenomenal Consciousness and Responsible Agency
Intuitively, moral responsibility requires conscious awareness of what one is doing, and why one is doing it, but what kind of awareness is at issue? Neil Levy argues that phenomenal consciousnessâthe qualitative feel of conscious sensationsâis entirely unnecessary for moral responsibility. He claims that only access consciousnessâthe state in which information (e.g., from perception or memory) is available to an array of mental systems (e.g., such that an agent can deliberate and act upon that information)âis relevant to moral responsibility. I argue that numerous ethical, epistemic, and neuroscientific considerations entail that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility. I focus in particular on considerations inspired by P. F. Strawson, who puts a range of qualitative moral emotionsâthe reactive attitudesâfront and center in the analysis of moral responsibility
Biased against Debiasing: On the Role of (Institutionally Sponsored) Self-Transformation in the Struggle against Prejudice
Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an âexistence proofâ that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissedâby philosophers, psychologists, and activists alikeâas lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these âdebiasingâ procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases awa
Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility
Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, âintrospectively inaccessibleâ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individualsâ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individualsâ partial awareness of their implicit biases makes them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods
Intersectionality as a Regulative Ideal
Appeals to intersectionality serve to remind us that social categories like race and gender cannot be adequately understood independently from each other. But what, exactly, is the intersectional thesis a thesis about? Answers to this question are remarkably diverse. Intersectionality is variously understood as a claim about the nature of social kinds, oppression, or experience ; about the limits of antidiscrimination law or identity politics ; or about the importance of fuzzy sets, multifactor analysis, or causal modeling in social science
Introducing Implicit Bias: Why this Book Matters
Written by a diverse range of scholars, this accessible introductory volume asks: What is implicit bias? How does implicit bias compromise our knowledge of others and social reality? How does implicit bias affect us, as individuals and participants in larger social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat biases? An interdisciplinary enterprise, the volume brings together the philosophical perspective of the humanities with the perspective of the social sciences to develop rich lines of inquiry. It is written in a non-technical style, using relatable examples that help readers understand what implicit bias is, its significance, and the controversies surrounding it. Each chapter includes discussion questions and additional reading suggestions. A companion webpage contains teaching resources. The volume will be an invaluable resource for studentsâand researchersâseeking to understand criticisms surrounding implicit bias, as well as how one might answer them by adopting a more nuanced understanding of bias and its role in maintaining social injustice
Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition
The Black Lives Matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punishment in response to what it calls âthe war against Black peopleâ and âBlack communities.â This article defends the two central contentions in the movementâs abolitionist stance: first, that US capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defendants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty
Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias
This chapter is centered around an apparent tension that research on implicit bias raises between virtue and social knowledge. Research suggests that simply knowing what the prevalent stereotypes are leads individuals to act in prejudiced waysâbiasing decisions about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprisonâeven if they reflectively reject those stereotypes. Because efforts to combat discrimination obviously depend on knowledge of stereotypes, a question arises about what to do next. This chapter argues that the obstacle to virtue is not knowledge of stereotypes as such, but the âaccessibilityâ of such knowledge to the agent who has it. âAccessibilityâ refers to how easily knowledge comes to mind. Social agents can acquire the requisite knowledge of stereotypes while resisting their pernicious influence, so long as that knowledge remains, in relevant contexts, relatively inaccessibl
Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias
Social psychologists often describe âimplicitâ racial biases as entirely unconscious, and as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content, e.g., we associate âblackâ and âathleticâ in much the same way we associate âsaltâ and âpepper.â However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. Moreover, evidence suggests that implicit biases are not âdumbâ semantic associations, but instead reflect our skillful, norm-sensitive, and embodied engagement with social reality. This essay draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic methods and concepts to better understand what social-psychological research has begun to reveal about the conscious access individuals have to their own racial attitudes, as well as the intentional contents of the attitudes themselves.
First, I argue that implicit racial biases form part of the âbackgroundâ of social experience. That is, while they exert a pervasive influence on our perceptions, judgments, and actions, they are frequently felt but not noticed, or noticed but misinterpreted. Second, I argue that our unreflective racial attitudes are neither mere associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. Their intentional contents are fundamentally indeterminate. For example, when a white person experiences a âgut feelingâ of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it a fear of black people? Is it anxiety about appearing racist? There is, I argue, no general, determinate answer to such questions. The contents of our unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended, although I explain how they nevertheless take on particular shapes and implicationsâthat is, their content can become determinateâdepending on context, social meaning, and structural power relations. (If, for example, a perceived authority figure, such as a politician, parent, or scientist, encourages you to believe that your uncomfortable gut feeling is a justified fear of other social groups, then that is what your gut feeling is likely to become.
Can Capital Punishment Survive if Black Lives Matter?
Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940âs, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movementâs call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a âracist practiceâ that âdevalues Black lives.â We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually taken such evidence to warrant reform but not outright abolition. We argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in significant part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition, we contend, rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law
The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue
I defend Frickerâs virtue-theoretic proposals for grappling with epistemic injustice, arguing that her account is both empirically oriented and plausible. I agree with Fricker that an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice is working to cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. But Fricker does not claim that her specific proposals constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat epistemic injustice. I therefore build on Frickerâs account by beginning to sketch a fuller picture of the structure of cultivating epistemic virtue. Virtue cultivation must, I argue, occur on two broad but interrelated fronts: first, the direct retraining of more automatic and unreflective patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting to epistemic social reality, and second, the cultivation of more reflective, metacognitive virtues, such as the ability to swiftly identify contexts in which our first-order epistemic intuitions are likely astray. Although I articulate a range of individual-level obligations, my account is not individualistic. With Fricker, I argue that individual self-transformation is a necessary but not sufficient component of the struggle for epistemic justice. Accordingly, I sketch several ways in which individual virtue cultivation must be a socially and institutionally embedded process. Moreover, I argue that this process is ongoing. While most individuals cannot actually achieve such moral-epistemic ideals, many can (and therefore should try to) get much closer than they already are