•  357
    The Etiquette of Equality
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 51 (2): 97-139. 2023.
    Many of the moral and political disputes that loom large today involve claims (1) in the register of respect and offense that are (2) linked to membership in a subordinated social group and (3) occasioned by symbolic or expressive items or acts. This essay seeks to clarify the nature, stakes, and characteristic challenges of these recurring, but often disorienting, conflicts. Drawing on a body of philosophical work elaborating the moral function of etiquette, I first argue that the claims at iss…Read more
  •  599
    Patterned Inequality, Compounding Injustice, and Algorithmic Prediction
    American Journal of Law and Equality 1 (1): 252-276. 2021.
    If whatever counts as merit for some purpose is unevenly distributed, a decision procedure that accurately sorts people on that basis will “pick up” and reproduce the pre-existing pattern in ways that more random, less merit-tracking procedures would not. This dynamic is an important cause for concern about the use of predictive models to allocate goods and opportunities. In this article, I distinguish two different objections that give voice to that concern in different ways. First, decision pr…Read more
  •  58
    Discrimination and Disrespect
    Oxford University Press UK. 2015.
    Hardly anyone disputes that discrimination can be a grave moral wrong. Yet this consensus masks fundamental disagreements about what makes something discrimination, as well as precisely why acts of discrimination are wrong. Benjamin Eidelson develops systematic answers to those two questions. He claims that discrimination is a form of differential treatment distinguished by its special connection to the differential ascription of some property to different people, and goes on to argue that what …Read more