The Badness of Discrimination
The Badness of Discrimination
DOI: 10.1007/s10677-006-9014-x
C Springer 2006
KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
ABSTRACT. The most blatant forms of discrimination are morally outrageous and very
obviously so; but the nature and boundaries of discrimination are more controversial, and
it is not clear whether all forms of discrimination are morally bad; nor is it clear why
objectionable cases of discrimination are bad. In this paper I address these issues. First,
I offer a taxonomy of discrimination. I then argue that discrimination is bad, when it is,
because it harms people. Finally, I criticize a rival, disrespect-based account according to
which discrimination is bad regardless of whether it causes harm.
1. INTRODUCTION
2. DISCRIMINATION DEFINED
in a more narrow sense allowing that while discrimination is unjust, it need not be bad.
168 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
X discriminates against (in favour of) Y in dimension W iff: (i) X treats Y differ-
ently from Z (or from how X would treat Z, were X to treat Z in some way) in
dimension W; (ii) the differential treatment is (or is believed by X to be) disadvan-
tageous (advantageous) to Y; and (iii) the differential treatment is suitably explained
by Y’s and Z’s being (or believed by X to be) (members of) different, socially salient
groups.
Let me fill out the details of this formula. First, the variable ‘X’ ranges over
both individuals and groups of individuals, as well as super-individuals
such as governments, private companies, and social structures. Obviously,
‘Y’ and ‘Z’ range over (groups of) persons and human beings as well.
While it is not essential to my argument, I shall assume that ‘Y’ and ‘Z’
may also range over non-human animals – so that, for example, speciecism
may be said to involve discrimination against animals.3
3 There are many forms of discrimination and discrimination-related harm from which
animals cannot suffer, e.g. those involving lowered self-esteem. However, this does not
imply that speciecism is not a form of discrimination.
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 169
against people with the relevant kinds of bad luck in the genetic lottery. Since these people
170 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
do not constitute a socially salient group, this does not qualify as discrimination on my
account. However, nothing is lost, and perhaps some clarity gained, if we discuss cases
of “genetic discrimination” as cases of unjust, albeit non-discriminatory, use of genetic
information.
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 171
direct discrimination. For instance, many observers would probably say that
much of the employment discrimination against women that takes place
nowadays is indirect – that women are discriminated against not primarily
because men prefer to hire men, but because of the way the labour-market
is set up, and the connected difficulty of reconciling the demands of one’s
job with being pregnant and giving birth to children (MacKinnon, 1987, p.
37, p. 44).7
Direct as well as indirect discrimination may involve structural elements,
whether of an informal character, e.g. sex-based family norms or sex-based
cognitive schemes,8 or of a formal character, e.g. laws forbidding women
from driving cars. Direct discrimination divides into cognitive and non-
cognitive discrimination.9 Direct cognitive discrimination occurs when a
subject’s beliefs are formed in a way that is biased towards certain people,
e.g. when comparable evidence for men’s and women’s ability to become
good managers will lead the subject to believe that men are capable of
becoming good managers but will not persuade the subject that women
are similarly capable, or when this bias manifests itself in behaviour.10 For
obvious reasons, subjects are rarely aware that they are cognitive discrim-
inators, although this is possible.11
Similarly, non-cognitive discrimination obtains when a subject’s desires
and values are biased, or when this kind of bias manifests itself in be-
haviour.12 The bias is transparent when the content of the subject’s desires
and values refers to the group that he discriminates against, e.g. when the
subject prefers the company of members of his own race to members of
7 Unlike me, some prefer to say that such cases involve oppression, exploitation, or
simply injustice, but not discrimination, e.g. (Young, 1990, p. 195). These differences need
not reflect anything other than a terminological variation.
8 See note 10 for an indication of what I mean by “sex-based cognitive schemes”.
9 This distinction applies directly only to cases of discrimination in which the relevant
occur even in the absence of direct cognitive discrimination, e.g. when individuals apply
norms of enquiry in an unbiased way but where the norms themselves are biased. For an ex-
ample of structural, cognitive discrimination based on the differential cognitive framework
of white and black members of the jury, see (Wasserstrom, 1977, p. 598).
11 Reverse, cognitive discrimination can occur when the agent’s desire to see two groups
as identical in certain factual respects skews his evaluation of the evidence in this direction.
Such a case need not involve non-cognitive discrimination.
12 By “desires” and “values” in the present context I have intrinsic as well as extrinsic
other races. Non-cognitive bias is non-transparent when this is not the case,
e.g. when the subject finds certain ways of avoiding taxation worse than
others and the explanation of this is that this activity is mostly engaged
in by members of a certain immigrant community while comparable ac-
tivities that he judges less bad are mostly engaged in by members of the
non-immigrant majority to which he belongs.
Direct discrimination need not involve negative attitudes toward the
discriminatees, as is shown by cases involving reaction-qualifications. Thus
a shopkeeper may discriminate against black applicants, not because he
dislikes them, but simply because he wants to earn a profit and, justifiably
or not, thinks that, given the racist bias of many of his customers, he is
more likely to do so by hiring white assistants. Here, of course, his desire
not to hire blacks reflects no intrinsically racist attitude.
A distinction cutting across the last one is that between valuation-based
and non-valuation-based discrimination. Discrimination is valuation-based
if, and only if, it satisfies either of the following two conditions: either it
reflects the subject’s view that X’s interests count for more, morally speak-
ing, than Y’s; or it reflects the subject’s view that, while their interests count
equally, X and Y should not relate to each other in the way they should relate
to members of their own group, e.g. as in the case of those who subscribe
to traditional family values and, accordingly, hold that while the interests
of men and women count equally, there is a gender-determined division
of labour. I shall refer to the first variety of valuation-based discrimina-
tion as hierarchical and the second as non-hierarchical. Discrimination is
non-valuation-based when the subject (i) judges that the interests of the
group against which he discriminates are no less important than the inter-
ests of the group against which he does not discriminate (almost always
the group to which he himself belongs), (ii) does not judge that members
of the relevant groups should not relate to one another in the way that they
relate to members of their own group, and yet (iii) prefers to marry, em-
ploy, accompany etc. people with whom he shares (or does not share) his
own group identity. In this case the discriminator has brute discriminating
desires. A brute discriminating desire is hierarchical when it is a desire that
some group will become, or remain, better off than others.
Valuation-based and non-valuation-based discrimination are often con-
fused. Yet, it is important to see that they differ. The way in which they
do so depends on the account of valuation we accept. On an influential
account, valuation can be explained in terms of second-order desires, i.e.
desires with the desirer’s own desires as their objects (Lewis, 1989; Frank-
furt, 1988). Appealing to this account, we have a case of a valuational
non-racial discriminator but non-valuational racial discriminator in some-
one who desires to consort with persons of his own race and yet has a
second-order desire not to act on this desire.
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 173
So much for explaining the formula. Before proceeding to discuss why
discrimination in the above sense is wrong, when it is, I want briefly to
explain three implications of my formula. The first is that discrimination
essentially involves (potentially, at least) treating some individuals dif-
ferently from others. This might be denied on the following ground: to
discriminate against a person it is sufficient to allow one’s treatment of that
person to be guided by facts about him that are irrelevant, or to fail to allow
one’s treatment of him to be guided by facts about him that are relevant.
Thus, a person who complains that he has been a victim of discrimination
when his application for a certain job is turned down on grounds of his race
need not retract his complaint when he learns that members of all races
are equally likely to have their applications turned down on racial grounds
because racists of different colours sit occasionally, and with the same fre-
quency, on the hiring committees. In response, I prefer to say that while
he can complain that, on this particular occasion, he was discriminated
against and that the decision-procedure is a bad one in that it allows irrele-
vant factors to determine who gets hired, he cannot complain that the pro-
cedure was discriminatory, since a procedure cannot discriminate against
everyone.13 In this sense the example is misleading because its target is
unclear.14
Second, reflexive discrimination is possible. It is possible for discrim-
inators to be members of the group members of which they discriminate
against. This happens when female employers reject female applicants be-
cause of their sex. It is even possible for a person to discriminate against
himself, as when an African-American living under Jim Crow laws would
train himself to be deferential in the presence of whites to survive. This is
worth pointing out, I believe, because some of the most damaging forms of
discrimination are those in which discrimination is, so to speak, internal-
ized by the victims of discrimination and involve some sort of abhorrence
of what one is.
Third, discrimination need not be asymmetric. It is possible for someone
to discriminate against others who in turn discriminate against the first
person, and the dimensions of discrimination in each direction may be the
same or distinct. The view that discrimination is necessarily asymmetrical,
because it incorrectly represents discriminatees as having lower moral status. The denial
that discrimination is essentially comparative, would therefore strengthen my argument
against the disrespect-based account below.
174 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
e.g. because only those who have power over others can discriminate against
them, is problematic for reasons that have been set out by Lawrence Blum
in connection with racism (Blum, 2002, pp. 36–39).
I now turn to the issue of what makes these forms of discrimination pro
tanto bad. By saying that something is pro tanto bad, I mean that, from
a moral point of view, that thing is in one respect regrettable. I do not
mean that it is regrettable or impermissible, all things considered, al-
though of course it may happen to be that as well. Another issue that
I intend to steer clear of here is that between consequentialist and non-
consequentialist accounts of what makes discrimination impermissible
(when it is). Advocates of both accounts can accept the harm-based account
of the badness of discrimination that I shall discuss in this section. Their
disagreement will concern what it is permissible to do to eliminate discrim-
ination, e.g. whether it is permissible to discriminate against some people
to eliminate discrimination against more people when these are the only
options.
In my view:
An instance of discrimination is pro tanto bad, when it is, because it makes the discrim-
inatees worse off.
This rubric covers all the forms of discrimination mentioned in the pre-
vious section. It implies that discrimination is contingently bad. Because
of this, some might object that the harm-based account is about as helpful
as an account of the badness of pushing buttons that says that an instance
of button pushing is pro tanto bad, when it is, because it harms someone.
In response to this challenge, note, first, that, in contrast with the case of
button-pushing, many would say that discrimination is non-contingently
bad. Note, second, that many would say, of paradigm cases of discrim-
ination, that the discrimination, even if it is not necessarily bad, is bad
for reasons independent of any harm caused. Finally, again unlike in the
case of button-pushing, certain common, salient, non-contrived types of
discrimination are bad. Hence, given the dialectical setting of the debate
about the badness of discrimination, the comparison with button-pushing
is misleading.
The harm-based account can be specified in various ways. Thus the
relevant baseline for determining whether a discriminatee has been made
worse off and the dimensions that determine how well off someone is can
both be adjusted. Accordingly, what may at first seem to be an objection to
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 175
the harm-based account will often turn out to be an objection to a particular
version of it.15
Consider first the question of the relevant baseline. One could say that
an instance of discrimination is bad when it makes the discriminatee worse
off than she would have been had she not been subjected to it. This would
imply that when someone who is subjected to discrimination that per-
versely makes her better off than she would have been had she not been
so subjected, the discrimination is not bad. Another possibility would be
to say that an instance of discrimination is bad when it makes the dis-
criminatee worse off than she would have been in a just, or the morally
best, outcome. This account has a similar implication in cases where
the discriminatee is not made worse off than she would be under a just
distribution.
In defending the harm-based account, I want to remain neutral on these
two options. However, before proceeding to the second dimension in which
harm-based accounts may differ, I want to show that the second, moralized
baseline view is much more attractive than it may seem at first. First, almost
always when someone raises a complaint on behalf of a discriminatee, the
complainer alleges that the discriminatee is worse off than he should be.
The moralized baseline motivates this focus. Second, it also explains why
there is a moral asymmetry between reverse and non-reverse discrimina-
tion. Reverse discrimination tends to close the gap between how well off
those who benefit from it are and how well off they would be under a just
distribution. Non-reverse discrimination tends to widen this gap. Third,
harm-based, moralized baseline accounts are compatible with the view
that some of the forms of discrimination that I have identified tend to be
worse, because more harmful, than others. Such accounts may distinguish
between being a discriminatee and being a victim of discrimination, i.e.
a discriminatee that is harmed as a result of being discriminated against.
Not all discriminatees are victims of discrimination and some victims of
discrimination are harmed more than others; and normally, just how much
harm it does to a group to be discriminated against depends crucially on its
level of income, education, and cultural self-confidence. Fourth, suppose,
accordance with the harm-based account one has to appeal to a particular version of that
account; that in order to explain the badness of another type of discrimination one has to
appeal to another version; and that these two accounts are incompatible. If this were so, then
my argumentative strategy would fail. However, as far as the second of the two issues that I
discuss below is concerned, there is no inconsistency involved in multi-dimensional, harm-
based accounts that accommodate all the dimensions in which discrimination may harmful
and, thus, bad. As far as the baseline issue is concerned, it is unlikely that anyone will think
that the explanation of what they see as the badness of different types of discrimination will
require appeals to different baselines.
176 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
16 See Hare’s distinction between judgements of rightness of the act, judgements of moral
rationality of the act, and judgements of character of the agent in (Hare 1989, pp. 212–230).
Note that the harm-based account can be widened by substituting “. . .it makes or is reason-
ably expected to make the discriminatee worse off. . .” for “. . .it makes the discriminatee
worse off. . .” This should appeal to those who, unlike Hare, think that wrongness and, thus,
badness is tied to reasonably expected rather than to actual consequences of acts. See the
helpful discussion in (Hooker 2000, pp. 72–75).
17 For a related point about intentions and moral impermissibility, see (Thomson, 1999,
An act or practice is morally disrespectful of X if, and only if, it in some way presupposes
that X has a lower moral status than he or she in fact has.20
other than the one I am deploying for present purposes, e.g. disrespect constituted by
behaviour that violates conventional norms of etiquette or role-related norms.
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 179
deontologists and consequentialists, I prefer to use the inclusive evaluative
term “morally objectionable”. Similarly, I use “individuals” and “moral
status” as placeholders that may be filled out differently. Most Kantian
theories would substitute “persons” for the former term and “dignity” for
the latter, but I intend my disrespect-based account to be more general – to
include views according to which we should respect non-persons and views
in which the moral status that gets misrepresented in cases of discrimination
is something other than dignity. The equation of moral status and dignity in
the Kantian sense only results in an unhelpfully narrow sense of disrespect.
Offhand, it would seem possible to disrespect someone by expressing the
view that he has no basis for self-esteem, e.g. because his plan of life is
worthless or because he is unable to realize it 21 or by refusing to treat
him “exclusively on the basis of those aspects of his particular character
or circumstances that are actually relevant to the issue at hand” (Frankfurt,
1999, p. 150).22 Note finally that in speaking about acts and practices that
in some way presuppose that X has lower status than he or she has, I aim
to cover cases in which X’s status is not in the discriminator’s mind at all.
Thus if, for purely egoistical reasons, someone ignores the interests of an-
other person in a way that would be morally permissible only if the second
person’s status were lower than it is, the relevant presupposition may be
said to have been made.23
Disrespect-based accounts cannot explain the badness of several of the
forms of discrimination that I have identified. In fact, it seems that the
moral status account can explain at most the badness of valuational, non-
cognitive discrimination. Indirect as well as non-valuational and cognitive
discrimination need not involve representing the discriminatee as having a
lower moral status than he has. It is possible for someone to have all sorts of
cognitive biases against women and yet judge that they ought to be treated
no differently than men.
21 Rawls, of course, would say that as he defines self-respect, this is a denial of self-
respect: see (Rawls, 1971, p. 440). However, as several commentators have argued, Rawls
is using “self-respect” in a non-standard way here (Eyal, 2005, pp. 201–206).
22 Note that one could modify Frankfurt’s remark to make it compatible with my earlier
point about discrimination being essentially comparative, i.e. one could say that disrespect-
ful discrimination is when X treats Y differently in a certain way from Z in dimension W
on the basis of Y’s character or circumstances that are actually irrelevant to the issue at
hand. However, suppose that X treats Y worse than Z on the basis of Y’s character; that
Y’s character is irrelevant to the issue at hand; but that X does this because if he treated Y
according to properties that are in fact relevant to the issue at hand, he would treat Y even
more badly. Here it seems misleading to say that X treats Y disrespectfully.
23 Presumably, if an account of the badness of discrimination says that an act may
constitute disrespect even if it is not suitably related to the claim that the discriminatee has
a lower moral status, it is not a disrespect-based account in my sense. However, typical
accounts of disrespect do involve some such claim.
180 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
It might be argued that, while this is true, the crucial difference be-
tween the disrespect-based and harm-based account is that non-cognitive,
hierarchical, valuational discrimination is disrespectful and hence bad on
the former account, but need not be bad on the latter. To tackle this re-
ply, I now want to argue that there is a deep underlying problem with the
disrespect-based account.
While the harm-based account of the badness of discrimination implies a
moral symmetry between discriminating against someone and discriminat-
ing in favour of someone, no such symmetry exists on the disrespect-based
account. On this account, the problem with discrimination is not that the
person who discriminates is too respectful of some (those in favour of
whom he discriminates) but rather that this person is disrespectful of oth-
ers (those against whom he discriminates). Being excessively respectful
of some people does not entail being disrespectful of others; and one can
be disrespectful of some people without being excessively respectful of
others. Suppose a discriminator believes one group of people to be a moral
elite, and that this belief logically implies there to be at least one group that
has a lower moral standing. Nevertheless, the discriminator may never have
entertained any thoughts about the logical implications of his judgement.
Indeed, whenever he is being presented with examples of non-members
of the relevant group, he may deny that they should be treated any worse
than members of the group that he thinks of as an elite. 24 In such a case,
the discriminator is not disrespectful of anyone, although what he says
logically commits him to such disrespect. Accordingly, if the badness of
discrimination consists in actually being disrespectful, as opposed to say-
ing something in which disrespect is implicit, discrimination in favour of
a group need not be bad.25
This implication of the disrespect-based account is bound to seem
unattractive: presumably, people who wish to account for the badness of
discrimination in terms of respect will want to say that discrimination in
favour of some (e.g. racial) group is bad. Fortunately, however, there is an
obvious way in which the disrespect account can be revised in response
that only in the case of the first group does he entertain the thought that they have a higher
moral status. In some cases we may conclude that the discriminator does not believe that
the relevant group has a higher moral standing after all, although he says that this is what
he believes. I doubt, however, that this is what we would conclude in all cases.
25 In making this point I assume that what matters is comparative respect. If instead it is
absolute respect that matters (i.e. not how one is respected relative to others, but how one
is respected relative to the absolute level of respect due to one), my argument would be
strengthened. It is possible to be excessively respectful of X relative to the absolute level of
respect due to X, while being respectful of Y to exactly the extent that is due at the same
time.
THE BADNESS OF DISCRIMINATION 181
to the problem. According to the revised account, discrimination is bad
because it involves a false representation of someone’s moral status, where
the falsehood need not consist in representing someone as having a lower
moral status than he in fact has and where that person need not be the
discriminatee, i.e. the immediate object of discrimination. In a rich arti-
cle, Larry Alexander proposes an account along these lines.26 Alexander
notices that the form of discrimination that most reject is differential treat-
ment of the members of different groups that manifests a judgement of
differential moral worth or status. Such conduct is wrong for the following
reason: “. . . biases premised on the belief that some types of people are
morally worthier than others are intrinsically morally wrong because they
reflect incorrect moral judgments” (Alexander, 1992, p. 161). If discrim-
ination is bad for this reason, it is bad whether or not it harms anyone.27
Moreover, discrimination against and discrimination in favour of are bad
for exactly the same reason, i.e. that both are premised on a false assump-
tion concerning differential moral worth. This, however, introduces a new
set of complications.
First, incorrect moral judgements about a person’s moral worth can be
absolutely or relatively incorrect (or both). An individual, X, may incor-
rectly consider himself morally more worthy than Y and at the same time
consider himself and Y to be morally more worthy than they in fact are.
Presumably, X’s bias reflects incorrect moral judgement, but what makes
the bias disrespectful is X’s incorrect judgement about relativities, not his
incorrect judgement of absolute moral worth.
Second, the direction of the incorrect moral judgement matters. Suppose
X has a positive bias for Y that is based on his incorrect judgement that Y is
morally more worthy than he is. While X may be disrespectful of himself,
and of others who are like him in relevant respects, he is not disrespectful
of Y. Many will consider this bad, but it is not clear that this amounts to
a case of “wrongful discrimination” as Alexander puts it. Whether it does
depends on whether we have a duty to respect ourselves or others whom we
are in relevant respects identical to. If we have either duty, then there is no
26 Alexander thinks that only some forms of discrimination are wrongful, and that of
those that are, only some are intrinsically wrongful. Alan Wertheimer has defended a similar
view: “. . . a preference is less legitimate if it is based on hierarchical judgments about social
groups” (Wertheimer, 1983, p. 107). It is not clear if Wertheimer’s view would be better
expressed if “unjustifiable” were inserted between “on” and “hierarchical”.
27 Some might argue that being disrespected is in itself harmful to the discriminatee.
Accordingly, it is not possible for discrimination not to harm anyone. Whatever the merits
of this view, it does not collapse the disrespect-based account into the harm-based account.
Defenders of the former are committed to the view that even if, per impossibile, discrimi-
nation were not necessarily harmful to the discriminatee, it would still be wrong, because
it reflects incorrect judgements of moral worth.
182 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
flaws reflect moral flaws.29 One possibility here is to say that while acts
based on unjustified, false judgements of differential moral worth are no
worse than acts based on justified such judgements, the character of the
first sort of discriminator is worse, morally as well as epistemically, than
the character of the latter. The alternative is to say that the epistemic flaw
somehow amplifies the moral badness of the discriminatory act in those
cases where an epistemic flaw constitutes a moral flaw. For present pur-
poses, however, this issue can be set aside. Our question, as to what moral
difference it makes that the discriminator has false beliefs about the moral
status of the discriminatee, pertains to cases in which the discriminator is
either epistemically justified in holding these beliefs or not thus justified
but in a way that reflects no moral flaw on his part. Compare the following
two cases.
Case (1): An agent discriminates against animals in a way that reflects his false beliefs
that there is a huge difference in the moral worth of animals and human beings and that
it is permissible to inflict almost any amount of pain on any number of animals to benefit
human beings (e.g. he performs a large number of very painful experiments on animals
to test the tendency of a certain perfume to elicit a mild allergic response in a very small
group of human beings). The agent cannot be blamed for having this view.
Case (2): Like Case (1), except that the agent does not believe that there is a huge
difference in the moral worth of human beings and animals. There are three variants of
this case. In the first (2a), the agent has correct beliefs about the moral status of animals
and human beings. In the second (2b), he overestimates the relative worth of animals.
In both these variants, the agent pursues his aim of obtaining the test results despite his
belief about the moral status of animals. In the third variant (2c), he has no beliefs about
the relative moral worth of animals and human beings.
Now compare Cases (1) and (2a). It is plausible to suggest that if they are
not morally equivalent then what the agent does in (1) is less bad than what
he does in (2a). For, while what the agent did in (1) was wrong, at least he
believed, or had beliefs to the effect, that what he did was not wrong. In
(2a), by contrast, not only were the agent’s actions wrong, he believed them
to be so. The same point applies with even greater force to a comparison
of (1) and (2b), but with less force to a comparison of (1) and (2c). But if
one’s discriminatory activities are less bad when they are accompanied by
an underestimate of the moral status of the discriminatee than they are when
they are accompanied by a correct estimate of the discriminatee’s status,
it follows that discrimination cannot be bad simply because it reflects an
incorrect judgement of moral status. For if it were bad for this reason, the
29 In other cases, epistemic flaws may reflect moral virtues. E.g. if, despite evidence to
the contrary, you continue to believe that your friend is telling you the truth, you may be a
better friend than you would be if your view of the matter simply tracked the evidence.
184 KASPER LIPPERT-RASMUSSEN
presence of the incorrect judgement would make the act worse. This is a
very significant result, because it applies to disrespect-based accounts as
such. Note that it does not imply that the falsity of such belief is not in any
way explanatory of the badness of the discriminatory act. It is merely that
it is not explanatory in the relevant sense. If someone beats a child, falsely
believing that it is not morally impermissible to do so, the falsity of this
belief explains the moral impermissibility of what he does in the sense that
it entails it. However, this is not a fact in virtue of which his beating of the
child is wrong. Rather, it is morally impermissible for him to beat the child
because in so doing he inflicts pain on the child.
While the present paper by no means offers a complete defence of the
harm-based account of the badness of discrimination, it does at least show
that account to be plausible, to accommodate views that are often seen
as incompatible with it, and not to differ from one of its main rivals, the
disrespect-based account, in implying that discrimination as such is not
pro tanto bad. Moreover, if the argument above is right, disrespect-based
accounts are mistaken in trying to ground the badness of discrimination in
the discriminator’s false views about moral status.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
REFERENCES
University of Copenhagen
Section of Philosophy
Njalsgade 80
2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
E-mail: [email protected]