Katharina Berndt Rasmussen, who is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, at Stockholm University, and a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies, will give a presentation on "Structural Discrimination".

Abstract:

A common understanding of discrimination, roughly, goes as follows: a discriminating agent treats a victim worse, in some sense, because of the victim’s social group-membership (Lippert-Rasmussen 2014, Altman 2020). This frames discrimination as an agential concept. As such, it has been criticised for being unable to acknowledge structural and institutional forms of oppression (Young 2011). In this talk, I aim to rebut this criticism, while acknowledging its underlying concerns. I propose that our common understanding of discrimination can be easily extended to accommodate these forms of oppression, and exemplify with structural and institutional forms of 1) implicit bias discrimination and 2) epistemic discrimination. I argue that extending our understanding of discrimination comes with the advantages of avoiding drawing arbitrary conceptual boundaries, of covering a wider range of related phenomena, and of laying the ground for providing a unified explanation of their moral wrongness.

 

There is a text that can be read before the seminar. Email eric.brandstedt@mrs.lu.se if you would like to have a copy of the text. It is also possible to join the seminar on Zoom, also send an email if you need the Zoom-link.