Racial Profiling And Cumulative Injustice

Abstract

This paper tries to explain why racial profiling involves a serious injustice and to do so in a way that avoids the problems of existing philosophical accounts. An initially plausible view maintains that racial profiling is pro tanto wrong in and of itself by violating a constraint on fair treatment that is generally violated by acts of statistical discrimination based on ascribed characteristics. However, consideration of other cases involving statistical discrimination suggests that violating a constraint of this kind may not be an especially serious wrong in and of itself. To fully capture the significant wrong that occurs when racial profiling is targeted at black Americans or other similarly situated groups, it is argued that we should appeal to the idea that this basic injustice is exacerbated when it forms part of a larger pattern of similar actions that collectively realize a state of cumulative injustice.

Discrimination Without Traits: From Social Construction to the Politics of Discrimination

“…While this aim is forward -looking, a salient way of recovering the contingent nature of the way the grounds of discrimination function is to engage in a backward -looking effort of exploring the politics of the unjust past (Nuti 2019). This can inform not just the search for remedies by highlighting, for example, the role of the unjust past in practices of racial profiling (Mogensen 2019), but also the way remedies once identified are delivered. For example, affirmative action policies that seek to increase the participation of racial minorities in higher education usually identify beneficiaries in terms of their racial or ethnic origin rather than our structural responsibility for an unjust past.…”

Recent work on the proof paradox

“…Demographic statistics, for example, about race or sex, provide one example. Relying on such statistics might constitute an oppressive pattern against certain groups (Mogensen, 2019) or expose them to an unfairly heightened risk of mistaken conviction (Di Bello & O'Neil, 2020). Rather, the interesting debate concerns whether relying on bare statistics is never acceptable or is sometimes acceptable.…”

Untitled

“…Gender studies view this problem in the context of gender-based discrimination, with "attempts to define woman risk excluding or marginalizing some women" (Jenkins, 2016: 394). The problems of racial and ethnic affiliation are also a source of developing the principles of recognition of the Other (Mogensen, 2019;Gordana & Smeriga, 2019).…”