The rational impermissibility of accepting (some) racial generalizations

Abstract

I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations (e.g. believing that Jones is a janitor, on the grounds that most Salvadoreans at the school are janitors) are not solely objectionable because acting on such inferences would be problematic, or they violate a moral norm, but because they violate a distinctively epistemic norm. They involve accepting a proposition when, given the costs of a mistake, one is not adequately justified in doing so. First I sketch an account of the nature of adequate justification-practical adequacy with respect to eliminating the ¬p possibilities from one's epistemic statespace. Second, I argue that inferences based on demographic generalizations tend to disproportionately expose group members to the risks associated with mistakenly assuming stereotypical propositions, and so magnify the wrong involved in relying on such inferences without adequate justification. 1 Introducing the Problem There are cases-some familiar from debates over racial profiling, others from debates over naked statistical evidencein which even though an agent's evidence makes a proposition p very probable, it seems she still shouldn't believe that p. This holds even when the evidence seems to justify a credence in p that would ordinarily suffice for rational belief. Gendler (2011) offers one such case: Cosmos Club: The night before he is to be presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, John Hope Franklin hosts a celebratory dinner party at the Cosmos Club. All the other black men in the club are uniformed attendants. While walking through the club, a woman sees him, calls him over, presents her coat check ticket and orders him to bring her coat. It seems the woman shouldn't have assumed that John Hope Franklin was an attendant, but as Gendler notes, it isn't obvious what the nature of her error is: Franklin had been the Cosmos Club's first black member, and was still one of very few. By contrast, nearly all of the club's numerous attendants were men of African descent. So when the woman was presented with the visual experience of a black man in the club's lobby, she endorsed an empirically well-supported hypothesis-one that took full account of the prior probabilities. The likelihood that a black man present in the cosmos club was a member of the staff rather than a member of the club was very high-high enough, perhaps, to make it rational to assume that even though he was wearing a suit rather than a uniform, he was nonetheless an employee rather than a host. 1 There are several ways to gloss the case. We could say the problem is purely practical: that while she (for epistemic reasons) ought to have made the assumption, she (for reasons of morality or politeness) ought not to have acted on it. Or purely moral: that while epistemically permitted, the woman morally ought not have even believed that Franklin was staff. Gendler's discussion of the case suggests one of these two readings; on either, the woman's assumption violates no epistemic norms. 2 Recently, a number of theorists h...

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