A law requires black bus passengers to sit in the back of the bus. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves a drug for use by black heart failure patients. A state refuses to license drivers under age 16. A company avoids hiring women between the ages of 20 and 40. We routinely draw distinctions among people on the basis of characteristics that they possess or lack. While some distinctions are benign, many are morally troubling. In this boldly conceived book, Deborah Hellman develops a much-needed general theory of discrimination. She demonstrates that many familiar ideas about when discrimination is wrongÑwhen it is motivated by prejudice, grounded in stereotypes, or simply departs from merit-based decision-makingÑwonÕt adequately explain our widely shared intuitions. Hellman argues that, in the end, distinguishing among people on the basis of traits is wrong when it demeans any of the people affected. She deftly explores the question of how we determine what is in fact demeaning. Claims of wrongful discrimination are among the most common moral claims asserted in public and private life. Yet the roots of these claims are often left unanalyzed. When Is Discrimination Wrong? explores what it means to treat people as equals and thus takes up a central problem of democracy.

This text addresses these three issues: What is discrimination? What makes it wrong?; What should be done about wrongful discrimination? It argues that there are different concepts of discrimination; that discrimination is not always morally wrong and that when it is, it is so primarily because of its harmful effects.

Everyone agrees that discrimination can be a grave moral wrong. Yet this consensus masks fundamental disagreements about what makes something an act of discrimination, as well as precisely why (and hence when) such acts are wrong. In Discrimination and Disrespect, Benjamin Eidelson develops illuminating philosophical answers to these two questions. Discrimination is intrinsically wrong, Eidelson argues, when it manifests disrespect for the personhood of those it disfavours. He offers an original account of what such disrespect amounts to, explaining how attention to two different facets of moral personhood — equality and autonomy — ought to guide our judgments about wrongful discrimination. At the same time, however, Eidelson contends that many forms of discrimination are morally impeachable only on account of their contingent effects. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral arguments against racial profiling — a practice that exemplifies how controversial forms of discrimination can be morally wrong without being intrinsically so.

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people, in particular, through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial to them of access to a basic good.

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.

Exploring the philosophical foundations of discrimination law as it exists in several jurisdictions, this collection of all new essays bridges the gap between abstract philosophical work on justice and fairness and legal work on specific types of discrimination.

While it has many connections to other topics in normative and applied ethics, discrimination is a central subject in philosophy in its own right. It plays a significant role in relation to many real-life complaints about unjust treatment or unjust inequalities, and it raises a number of questions in political and moral philosophy, and in legal theory. Some of these questions include: what distinguishes the concept of discrimination from the concept of differential treatment? What distinguishes direct from indirect discrimination? Is discrimination always morally wrong? What makes discrimination wrong? How should we eliminate the effects of discrimination? By covering a wide range of topics, and by doing so in a way that does not assume prior acquaintance, this handbook enables the reader to get to grips with the omnipresent issue. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook is divided into six main parts: • conceptual issues • the wrongness of discrimination • groups of ‘discriminatees’ • sites of discrimination • causes and means • history of discrimination. Essential reading for students and researchers in applied ethics and political philosophy the handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as law, sociology and politics.