Event Detail

A person is directly racially discriminated against only if her race caused her worse treatment. This implies that race is an attribute sufficiently separable from other attributes to isolate its causal role. But many hold that race is embedded in a nexus of social factors that resist isolated treatment. If race is socially constructed, in what sense can it cause worse treatment? Some propose that the perception of race, rather than race itself, causes worse treatment. Others suggest that since causal models require modularity, i.e. the ability to isolate causal effects, attempts to causally model discrimination are misguided.

We address this problem differently. We introduce a framework for reasoning about discrimination, in which a protected attribute, such as race, is a high-level abstraction of lower-level features. In this framework, race can be modeled as itself causing worse treatment. Modularity is ensured by allowing assumptions about social construction to be precisely and explicitly stated, via an alignment between race and its constituents. Such assumptions can then be subjected to normative and empirical challenges, which lead to different views of when discrimination occurs. We show that by distinguishing constitutive and causal relations, the abstraction framework pinpoints disagreements in the current literature on modeling discrimination, while preserving a precise causal account of discrimination.

(Based on joint work with Kara Schechtman, Frederick Eberhardt, and Thomas Icard.)