Cody Gomez

Do I have a moral right to do something which is all-things-considered impermissible? On some accounts, the answer is ‘yes’, on others ‘no’. However, no current accounts allow a parity of reasoning about rights between the law and morality whereby a right to do something wrong sometimes applies and sometimes does not—e.g., in US 1st Amendment case law speech is sometimes protected and sometimes not. This paper uses a novel account of the defeasibility of rights to show how some morally wrong things can sometimes fall within our moral rights, and other times not, consistent with the protected/unprotected distinction in US free speech case law. The results follow without a discrete right to do wrong using a revised notion of the distinction between rights infringement and rights violations that can also solve related puzzles around rights infringement and compensation.

Currently, three broad families of theories (structural, ideological, and volitional) aim to capture the metaphysics of racism. In this paper, we argue for an alternative descriptive theory, the “Racism as Psychological Essentialism” view (RPE). On our view, racism is, at its core, the instantiation of psychological race essentialism (i.e., the tendency to represent races as having discrete “essences” which make their members’ characteristics natural, unified, and stable). We argue that what other theories have identified as the “core” of racism are actually the downstream consequences of race essentialism. This approach allows us to account for both the cases competing theories aim to explain, and those they cannot. The RPE view also sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms which contribute to racism’s prevalence and persistence over time, and opens the door for empirically informed anti-racist strategies. This robust explanatory power makes the RPE view a particularly strong descriptive theory of racism.