This confused me:
Most liberals have what I would characterize as a deontological opposition to discrimination. That is, they think that discriminating against or maligning someone on the basis of membership in a protected class — women, trans people, black people, and other racially oppressed communities, etc. — violates a rule that should be inviolable.
In this view, such discrimination (be it legal, or expressed through hate speech, etc.) is not just wrong because it has bad effects, or because it harms members of the groups in question; it’s wrong because we have a duty to treat humans as equals, and it is never acceptable to violate that duty, even when doing so seems politically expedient.
I’ve argued that liberals are basically consequentialists (more specifically utilitarians.) This Vox article claims that liberal views on discrimination are deontological. But the argument makes no sense to me. If you deleted the term “protected” from the first paragraph, then it would make perfect sense. But as written it looks like the author is claiming that the principle of non-discrimination only applies to groups where discrimination can and does major harm, and does not apply to groups where discrimination is not a big problem. That’s probably a correct description of “liberal” (progressive) views on discrimination, but it’s a consequential argument.
I suspect this ambiguity reflects that fact that progressives are conflicted on this issue. Deontological arguments seem more inspiring. Think about the phrase “it’s a matter of principle”. At the same time, progressives cannot easily escape their basically consequentialist moral intuitions.
This inconsistency is probably sensed (if only at an intuitive level) by the general public, which makes it hard for progressives to have electoral success on “identity politics” issues. The public correctly senses that many progressive arguments are a bit phony.
PS. On the right, white nationalists exhibit a similar inconsistency, wavering between deontological and consequentialist arguments. They often try to justify their opposition to low income minorities on consequentialist grounds, but their sympathy for unsuccessful white groups (such as hillbillies) and distrust of successful minorities (Asians, Jews, etc.) is the “tell” that something else is at stake.)
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Jan 28 2020 at 4:32pm
I think, at least ‘at the margin,’ anti-discrimination sentiment is rooted in deontology – that it’s wrong to ‘punish’ someone for something beyond their control, and ‘protected classes’ are a way to avoid taking that to its potentially disastrous logical conclusion (e.g. that it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of intelligence, personality type, physical ability, and other largely genetic traits).
I imagine that even if one could mathematically prove that some type of discrimination some group against whom it’s unacceptable to discriminate passed a cost benefit analysis, I don’t think that would change most people’s mind on the matter. Maybe there’s an argument that it’s utilitarian to have a generally anti-discrimination bias, even if that means a few particular situations where discrimination is utilitarian will slip through the cracks. But then I don’t think people do have a general anti-discrimination bias. We actually discriminate based on immutable characteristic routinely; the areas where we don’t may be more the exception than the rule. I think maybe it’s just that there are some axes along which people are more likely to self-identify, organize, and leverage social bargaining power to improve their lot than others.
And even if Darwinism imposes utilitarianism on our norms (e.g. a society that forbids discrimination based on natural ability will tend to fall behind one that doesn’t), I don’t think most people are consciously utilitarian about it.
nobody.really
Jan 28 2020 at 5:19pm
“[O]ne of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability….”
Tom Lehrer, “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier” (1959)
nobody.really
Jan 28 2020 at 5:03pm
To what extent does progressivism derive its support from consequentialism, and to what extent deontological concerns? Consider: For what purpose do we have civil rights laws?
In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), SCOTUS upheld the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. That is, SCOTUS held that the Constitution lets Congress promote interstate commerce—and that includes regulating private discrimination on the basis of suspect categories regarding employment, housing, and public accommodations (hereafter “public accommodations”). This seems like a consequentialist argument: We’re trying to avoid the bad consequence of, for example, needlessly reduced GDP that results when people lack equal access to public accommodations.
But what about the goal of defending “dignity” distinct from access to public accommodations? A Senate Commerce Committee’s report stated that the bill was designed to “solve this problem, the deprivation of personal dignity that surely accompanies denials of equal access to public establishments.” And Justice Goldberg cited that fact in concurring with the majority opinion.
This objective has the form of a consequentialist argument: Even if I ultimately gain access to public accommodations, I feel bad when others express their discriminatory attitudes towards me. Regulating people’s expression of this attitude may shield me from feeling bad.
But this argument strikes me as a pretext. Recall that in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), SCOTUS upheld the rights of protestors to picket at military funerals with signs saying “You’re going to hell”, “God hates you”, “Fag troops”, “Semper fi fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.” In short, the First Amendment defends people’s right to say things to emotionally vulnerable people that seem quite threatening to dignity/likely to make people feel bad based on their suspect category. This may seem harsh, the Court held, but that’s the price of free speech/freedom of religion.
So … back to civil rights laws: Imagine that a commercial baker refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, but refers the couple to another nearby baker who would be happy to provide them with comparable goods/services as a comparable price. What is the consequentialist harm? Is it the kind of harm that government should try to regulate, or the kind of harm that unavoidably accompanies freedom of speech and religion? And if we cannot identify a cognizable consequentialist harm, can we concede that we’re really engaging in a deontological argument?
I favor keeping civil rights laws focused on cognizable consequentialist harms. Accordingly, I propose creating the Market Power Affirmative Defense to claims of undue discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that a proposal defending people’s rights to engage in undue discrimination has generated neigh unto NO support. In opposition, people raise many consequentialist arguments—yet even when I can address their arguments, the objections remain. In short, commenters generally regard discriminators as bad, and want to punish bad people, regardless of any other consequences. Sounds like deontology to me.
Floccina
Jan 30 2020 at 11:25am
The damage would be in the effort the customer made to go and talk to the baker. So one could argue that “We bake wedding cakes” is fraud because one could assume that they could buy a wedding cake there, but in that case I would assume that if you advertised “We bake wedding cakes for heterosexual couples” then denying homosexuals a cake would be perfectly legal because that assumption would not be made.
nobody.really
Jan 30 2020 at 12:14pm
1: Indeed, people may walk into a public accommodation relying on the idea that the proprietor will serve them, and may feel aggrieved to learn the contrary. While generally people have no duty to aid a stranger, at common law a proprietor assumes such a duty when he enters certain professions:
Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769).
But even if we can agree that a proprietor had a duty, and breached that duty, what damages would apply—especially when the proprietor provides a referral to another nearby proprietor offering comparable goods/services at a comparable cost?
2: Regarding signs: Some proprietors put up signs saying, “No shoes, no shirt, no service,” or “We reserve the right to refuse service to ….” But as far as I know, the proprietor has that discretion with or without such signs—Blackstone notwithstanding.
Note that civil rights laws defend only people in protected classes. I know of no prohibition on a proprietor saying “HEY—we don’t serve blonds here!” or “I’m a USC grad, and we don’t serve UCLA grads here!” or “Once a Marine, always a Marine—so you Navy pansy-asses should clear out now!”
And under the Market Power Affirmative Defense, proprietors would be free to openly discriminate against members of protected classes, too. I could envision proprietors hanging all kinds of ugly signs: “We don’t serve Irish here. Take your business to O’Malley’s down the street; his stuff otta be good enough for the likes ‘o you.” (Ok, maybe I should get my dialogue from more contemporary sources, but you get the idea.)
Thaomas
Feb 3 2020 at 12:32pm
I think that anti-discrimination laws are based only partly on harm prevention and partly on a “teaching” norm-establishing function of the law. I think that a waiver for small, individual proprietors who announce who they discriminate against should be acceptable on both grounds.
Scott Sumner
Jan 28 2020 at 7:19pm
Everyone, I would distinguish between what “people” believe and what liberals (progressives) believe. Many people believe that discrimination is wrong. Progressives do not agree, at least as a matter of principle.
Lorenzo from Oz
Jan 28 2020 at 7:44pm
Yep. Especially not in academe. See here:
Henri Hein
Jan 29 2020 at 2:31pm
I have to share this Christopher Hitchens quote:
nobody.really
Jan 29 2020 at 3:45pm
I share Hitchens’s frustration–but I often cannot tell whether someone is expressing a conceptual error rather than failing to speak with precision. The legal term we’re discussing is “undue discrimination.” By convention, many people shorten this to “discrimination.”
This would seem like just another harmless linguistic convention–except that I occasionally encounter people who seem to take this shorthand to heart and regard any effort to discriminate between groups as suspect. “Oh? So you want your brain surgery to be done by a certified brain surgeon–and you’re willing to blatantly discriminate against all the other physicians?” Well … yes I am.
Peter
Jan 29 2020 at 5:56pm
TBH I don’t think you will find anybody that doesn’t believe in the merits of discrimination. I for example would discriminate against marrying a homosexual given I’m not gay. I would discriminate against a known meth addict from babysitting my children or doing surgery on me.
Thaomas
Jan 29 2020 at 8:21am
I think that Liberals have made the a mistake in not arguing more strongly for the economic benefits of immigration similar to freer trade and lower deficits. Even if their opponents are not persuaded, it at least shows their sympathy for groups who have done less well from decades of slow growth.
KevinDC
Jan 29 2020 at 11:29am
This is interesting. I usually get the impression that progressives are less consequentialist than assumed. Different example – price gouging. I’ve debated this topic with progressives many times, using the standard supply and demand arguments which I’m sure any reader of this blog post can fill in for themselves. But what I’ve noticed is that most of the time, the person I’m debating will (albeit grudgingly) concede the case about the consequences of those laws, but remain in favor or price gouging laws. When I press a little further, they’ll admit that while price gouging laws probably do make things worse from a consequentialist perspective, they should be in effect anyway because price gouging is just wrong. Or another topic I know Scott has written much about – organ sales. Lots of left leaning philosophers (Like Debra Satz in her book Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale) will basically agree with Scott about the consequentialist calculus is for allowing organ sales – they would massively boost utility and bring good consequences etc, but they still argue organ sales should be illegal because it’s just wrong to buy and sell organs, because of a moral duty to treat the body with respect and not commodify it etc etc and these moral duties transcend “mere consequences.”
I see this pattern reflected in a lot of policy debates between people who lean progressive and people who lean libertarian. The libertarians, especially the economists, will try to change the progressive’s mind with arguments about unintended consequences the policy might have, or toss in some cost benefit analysis, and these kinds of considerations move the progressives at a rate of approximately zero point nothing percent. They’re not concerned with the costs and benefits, or the unintended consequences, because it’s just not about consequences to them.
Or so it has often seemed to me.
P Burgos
Jan 29 2020 at 11:50pm
My impression is that as people live their lives day to day, they view the actions of other people mostly in consequentialist terms. That is, they look and ask if they like the outcomes of someone’s actions, and if so, they figure that person’s behavior is good. I cannot think of a good example that would explain why people view someone’s behaviors as good when they lead to bad outcomes, though I know that does happen. I think that people take a more “deontological” stance to a behaviors that indicate that they cannot trust a person. There, the immediate consequences don’t matter, just that the information that the person cannot be trusted matters.
Scaling this up into thinking about politics and policies, I think you need to make sure that you know when people are actually talking about policies, and when people are talking about those things as a kind of performance. As Sumner notes, liberals like the sound of deontological arguments, which makes sense in the context of social signaling. But in the context of actual policy, the outcomes are what you really care about. I am not sure that this is really phony, as opposed to a natural result of trying to signify something about trustworthiness and group identity by talking about policy.
I think that explicit “identity politics” doesn’t appear to be a winning strategy for the left for a different reason. The reason being that outside of the identity appeal of Obama to black voters, appeals to ethnic identity don’t do all that much to motivate ethnic minorities in the United States to vote.
Chris
Jan 30 2020 at 4:28pm
Just putting this out there, but the majority of the ‘general public’ leans liberal, so stating that the public believes that progressive arguments are phony doesn’t seem to follow.
Also, white nationalists are not conflicted, they are post-rationalizing their bigotry. Comparing the wide group that is progressives to white nationalists is a bit phony.
Rajat
Jan 30 2020 at 6:49pm
Interesting question. Maybe on the whole you are right. But as you go deeper into identity politics, any link to consequentialism seems to fade away. Pecking orders of ‘privilege’ seem to take over and it is often far from obvious which group has the ability to criticise others. For example, gay people have the right to call out homophobia by straight white people, but what about by Mexican or Middle-Eastern migrants? If not, I don’t think it’s because muslim homophobia in America doesn’t cause harm, but because muslims in America are seen as oppressed. Someone who lives and breathes this stuff like Ezra Klein learns the ropes, but for the uninitiated, it is a minefield. Tyler Cowen has previously remarked how identity politics has created real problems for progressive academics and intellectuals because if they put a foot wrong, they become ostracised. To be honest, despite not being a card-carrying progressive, with his profile and audience, I think he faces the same challenges. My impression is that he tries to skirt around commentary on issues that could get him into hot water. Anyway, I think it’s a stretch to say that the hierarchies that apply in identity politics are consequentially-based.
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