Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

To stereotype someone is to judge that person by real or perceived group membership. When and why is stereotyping wrong? Call this the puzzle of stereotyping. In this talk, I introduce a conceptual tool that could help to solve this puzzle: the constitutive claim. According to the constitutive claim, stereotyping constitutes a form of discriminatory treatment in a non-moralized sense. Though non-moralized in nature, the constitutive claim has the potential to yield rich normative resources. Notably, it reveals that theorists looking to understand why and when stereotyping is wrong ought to study theories of wrongful discrimination. If stereotyping constitutes a form of discriminatory treatment, it could be that stereotyping is wrong for the same reasons and under the same conditions that discriminatory treatment in general is wrong. I end by introducing two hypotheses, which require further testing. One hypothesis —normative symmetry— says that the wrongs of stereotyping and discrimination are identical. A second hypothesis —called normative asymmetry— says that wrongful stereotyping has a distinctive normative profile.