Samantha Brennan – ^The Moral Status of Micro …...Lecture 19: Micro-Inequities Samantha Brennan...
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Lecture 19: Micro-Inequities Samantha Brennan – “The Moral Status of Micro-Inequities: In Favour of Institutional Solutions” Rebecca Solnit – “Men Explain Things To Me” 1
Transcript of Samantha Brennan – ^The Moral Status of Micro …...Lecture 19: Micro-Inequities Samantha Brennan...
Lecture 19: Micro-InequitiesSamantha Brennan – “The Moral Status of Micro-Inequities: In Favour of Institutional Solutions”
Rebecca Solnit – “Men Explain Things To Me”
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Agenda
1. Samantha Brennan
2. What Are Micro-Inequities?
3. What Makes Micro-Inequities Wrong?
4. Institutional Solutions
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Samantha Brennan
• Professor of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, Canada.
• Member of Western’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the graduate faculty of the Department of Political Science.
• Vice-President of the Canadian Philosophical Association.
• PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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What Are Micro-Inequities?
• Micro-inequities are small, unjust inequalities.• “‘Inequality’ is a normatively neutral term while
‘inequity’ assumes there is some injustice involved” (2).
• How small?• Depends on context. Brennan suggests thinking of
micro-inequities as “inequalities that fall beneath the threshold of legislation or actionability” (3).
• Mary Rowe defines ‘micro-equities’ as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be ‘different’” (3). 4
What Are Micro-Inequities?
Examples of micro-inequities:• consistently mispronouncing a person’s name• making eye-contact only with males while talking
to a group containing both males and females• taking more questions from men than women• confusing a person of a certain ethnicity with
another person of the same ethnicity• mentioning the achievements of some people at a
meeting but not others whose achievements are equally relevant
• consistently ignoring a person’s emails for no good reason
• making jokes aimed at certain minority groups (3-4)5
What Are Micro-Inequities?
Why care about micro-inequities?
• Why do good people do wrong things (even unintentionally)?
• Micro-inequities, though seemingly invisible, can add up to macro-inequities, larger harms, or systematic injustices.
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What Are Micro-Inequities?
How are micro-inequities different from micro-aggressions? Micro-aggressions are “subtle verbal and nonverbal insults directed toward non-whites, often done automatically and unconsciously. They are layered insults based on one’s race, gender, class, sexuality, language, immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname” (4).• Not all micro-inequities are insults or express a view
about a particular group or individual. Some micro-inequities are unjust distributions of positive acts.
• Aggression and wrongdoing seem built into the idea of micro-aggression, but the question of wrong-doing and culpability is precisely what is at issue when it comes to micro-inequities.
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What Are Micro-Inequities?
How are micro-inequities different from implicit biases?
• Not all micro-inequities are implicit biases, because micro-inequities can result from an intentional and explicit act of bias. For instance, lecturer intentionally ignoring the contributions of female students.
• Not all implicit biases are micro-inequities, because implicit biases can be large and substantial. For instance, “shooter bias.”
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What Are Micro-Inequities?
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Micro-Inequities Implicit Bias
Micro-aggressions
What Makes Micro-Inequities Wrong?
• “My view is that an intention to do wrong is not necessary for wrongness.”
• “Intention might be required for blameworthiness but praise and blame are a different matter from right and wrong. We should not assume from the claim that it would be a mistake to blame someone if they intended no harm that what they did was not wrong” (7).
• Is an intention to do wrong necessary for an act to be wrong? What do you think? What would a utilitarian say? What would a deontologist say?
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What Makes Micro-Inequities Wrong?
Three possible answers:
1. Threshold Wrongness: Micro-inequities taken by themselves are too small to be wrong. However, cumulatively they can add up to a wrong (for instance, by causing a macro-inequity.
2. Strict Additive Wrongness: Every micro-inequity is a little bit wrong, and cumulatively add up to a larger wrong.
3. Not wrong at all, too small.
Some micro-inequities are wrong because they lead to an unjust distribution. Some micro-inequities are wrong because they are wrong simpliciter (or intrinsically wrong, wrong in themselves). 11
Institutional Solutions
“Aren’t we as a society responsible for our sexist, racist, homophobic and ableist beliefs even if they are implicit in our thinking? My answer here is that there are questions both larger (for example, the societal beliefs that inform implicit bias) and smaller, (for example, individual responsibility) but that the most practical place to address the issues is that the level of the group in which we find ourselves, in the middle, at the department and university level” (9)
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Societal
Institutional
Individual
Institutional Solutions
“Three different sites of moral inquiry:1. Circumstances under which decisions and choices are
made.2. The acts themselves, and 3. The results.
I argue that focusing on 2, the question about the wrongness of the acts themselves, is potentially dangerous for movements interested in social change” (9).
• Institutional collective solutions can correct for wrongs in ways that infringe on liberty less than individual solutions.
• Can we do anything about micro-inequities on an individual basis?• Blame, micro-sanctions, and micro-affirmations.
• What might be some institutional solutions for micro-inequities? 13
