My theory so far has been largely normative. The thought is that it depicts which cases of discrimination would be permitted in an idealised society and provides a general algorithm (Base Omega) approach to attain said ideals. This idealisation has certain weaknesses however; it depicts each individual as acting perfectly in accordance to the theory. It happens that in reality, people lack the same degree of perfection. This is of course common with normative theories, the idea being that we should attempt to act in the idealised way. For example in epistemology we say that rational agents will not believe in contradictions and their credence functions ought to be probabilistic. The issue is that our theory of discrimination has considerable moral and political impacts. In this sense we have additional reasons against complete abstraction. We must recognise that agents are not ideal and in fact I suggest this should be incorporated into the theory.
According to our theory, individual agents ought not discriminate based on protected characteristics unless there is a significant reason / it is mandated in relation to the context. (A clarification point: base Omega says innocent until proven guilty, unless in the case of protected characteristics where we apply base Delta concepts of guilty until innocent) The scope of our theory is meant mostly to cover action, additional moral and epistemic argument would need to be established for the theory to have impositions on the thoughts and beliefs of ideal agents. That is, the theory tells us how to act, it doesn't in itself tell us that we should actually believe it. Thus it allows for agents who for example hate German people but do not act upon their beliefs. In practice however, this allowance is only available to ideal and rational agents. This is because only they are able to fully separate belief from action, metaphysically speaking. Ordinary agents are imperfect in seperating their beliefs and their actions. Their actions inevitably are based around their beliefs. Furthermore, sometimes this is unconscious.
Unconscious bias involves making quick judgements and assessments on entities without our conscious realisation. These biases can be influenced by our background, the cultural context as well as our personal experiences. Notably, these biases can influence our behaviour; we may for example be more intimidated at night by a black man than white woman. I leave it neutral at the moment as to whether this is justified. The main thing is that idealised agents would not be susceptible to these biases. They are consciously aware of all of their actions and can act perfectly in accordance to our normative theory. However since humans are non ideal, unconscious bias is a topic that should be accounted for.
One way to do this is by separating the theory into conscious and unconscious cases. In some sense this is quite intuitive; there seems to be thought that conscious discrimination is (if impermissible) worse than unconscious discrimination. The idea presumably is that conscious discrimination bridges one's beliefs and one's actions. If the individual consciously discriminates against black people, then this suggests that the individual believes / is in favour / supports some kind of discriminatory practices. On the other hand, an individual can be unconsciously discriminating in action whilst having non discriminative beliefs. For example some data suggests that science faculties may be more inclined to hire male candidates over female candidates. Our theory of course states that this is impermissible, and it is likely many recruiters in said faculties agree with the theory. Regardless, they may still be discriminative due to unconscious biases. It seems that faculties that behave as such unconsciously are morally better (although still wrong) than those that consciously do so, for example by actively giving credit on the basis of gender.
In terms of action guidance, it seems considerably easier to deal with conscious discrimination. The thought here is that consciousness discrimination is at least easy to notice. An entity is explicit in their discrimination, which if impermissible should be dealt with. Unconscious biases and the resulting discrimination are harder since it is not so explicit. Standard justifications of normative theories tell our imperfect agents to mimic our idealised agents. Thus we want to say that individuals should behave away from their unconscious biases. This unfortunately is not particularly helpful; it is not useful to tell me not to be fooled by things I can't actively control. In terms of guidance however we can still appeal to things such as education or ways for us to recognise our unconscious biases. The discussion here however ceases to be normative. The best way to deal with unconscious bias will thus seem to be a matter of empirical investigation.
No comments :
Post a Comment