Simone Sommer Degn

Can friendship and love be bought and sold? I argue yes, contrary to philosophical consensus. The prevailing view rests on the common error of over-reliance on idealized conceptions of friendship and love that bear little resemblance to actual relationships. Realistic approaches offer more recognizable standards for friendship and love, and support the view that commercial personal relations are possible. I reconstruct and respond to three main objections to my argument: the Involuntariness Objection and the Transformation Objection fail on theoretical grounds; mutual care can be willed, and market mediation need not determine how parties value one another. The Bizarre Objection – that actual cases are too peculiar to count as friendship and love – fails on analysis of four cases (virtual companionship, healthcare companions, Victorian lady's companions, and sex work companionship). The cases demonstrate that actual commercial relationships exhibit the core features of realistic friendship and love. The article finds that the gap between paid and unpaid personal relationships is narrower than commonly assumed. The existence of the market in personal relations raises many questions for future research.

Dating platforms generally prohibit commercial sex on their platforms and warn users that they will be deplatformed if they engage in the sex market on them. Sex workers, however, report experiencing deplatforming even when they are seeking personal, non-commercial relationships on dating platforms, which raises complaints of whorephobia. The article offers a conceptual analysis of whorephobia and proposes revisions to the concept. It argues that deplatforming sex workers qua daters constitutes wrongful discrimination on three influential accounts which raises the need for justification of the practice. Potential justifications for excluding sex workers are considered but found unpersuasive. The article finds one exception, namely, that dating platforms are morally justified in prohibiting sex work on their platforms due to an incompatibility between sex work and the dating sphere. Ultimately, morality seems to require that dating platforms permit sex workers qua daters. The paper concludes by proposing promising platform governance solutions for ethically responsible platform moderation.

This article examines whether the folk concept of DISCRIMINATION is inherently evaluative or purely descriptive. Two corpus analyses reveal a historical shift, with “discrimination” evolving from a neutral to an evaluative term. The results of a cancelability test show that denying the evaluative aspect of “discriminatory” leads to contradictions, indicating the communication of moral judgment by default. In a vignette study, we demonstrate that cases often cited as examples of descriptive discrimination are judged either non-discriminatory or morally wrongful. These results support the Moralized View, challenging the Descriptive View, and propose DISCRIMINATION to be a thick concept blending descriptive and evaluative content.

Many believe that we have a duty not to discriminate when we act in certain ‘public’ capacities, for example when it is our job to select among various candidates for a job. In contrast, they deny that we have duties of a similar kind in our private lives, for example in our romantic lives. In this paper, we challenge this well-entrenched asymmetry. We do so primarily by canvassing and rebutting central arguments to the effect that acting discriminatorily, for example when we date, is something we have a right to, including arguments from: (1) freedom of association, (2) legitimate self-interest, (3) power and (4) love versus duties. In this way, we challenge a common permissive view regarding private discrimination.

What does morality require of individuals in their dating and sex life? In this article I challenge recent outlines of antidiscrimination duties in the dating sphere and present a plausible alternative: the deliberative duty. This duty avoids the risks and limitations of earlier outlines: it is time-sensitive regarding the malleability of intimate preferences, it avoids being too demanding on the duty-bearer and minimizes the risk of generating mere dutiful attraction behavior towards right-holders. In addition, it is better suited for universal action guidance in the dating sphere than earlier outlines of individual antidiscrimination duties.

Can a minority agent, Jamal, discriminate against a majority agent, Dave, conceptually speaking? Taking an experimental-philosophical approach, this article addresses the conceptual puzzle by investigating both the ordinary usage of discrimination and whether the academic literature reflects the folk concept. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of discrimination as it is used across the discrimination research field. The analysis produces two novel definitions of discrimination: a symmetric conception, which implies multi-directionality, and an asymmetric conception, which implies uni-directionality. Then, I empirically investigate the US lay concept of discrimination (N = 1,487). The highlight of the paper is an experiment on whether US ordinary usage is symmetric or asymmetric (Study 1), tested across four contexts and three traits (Hiring: Gender, Club: Sexuality, Dating: Race, Parental: Gender). In addition, I study which groups are most often discriminated against, according to respondents, to record potential sensitivity to the frequency of discrimination (Study 2). Overall, the results show that ordinary usage in the US is symmetric across different contexts and traits, and that paradigmatic minority groups are most often discriminated against. So, according to respondents, Jamal can discriminate against Dave, although Jamal is more often discriminated against than Dave.

According to many theorists, discrimination either requires a better treated comparator or can occur only if the discriminator belongs to a socially salient group different from that of the discriminatee. Both claims are philosophically important since they have important implications for which account of the moral wrongness of discrimination is correct, e.g., if no comparator is required, the wrongness of discrimination cannot result from treating different people as unequals since the unequal treatment of persons is not an essential feature of discrimination. Most theorists who have written on the topic see their account as articulating the folk concept of discrimination. However, none have subjected their putative articulations thereof to experimental testing. This is what the present study does. Its results are mixed, interesting, and call for further studies. Regarding comparativity, surprisingly, respondents are more disposed to classify a situation as discriminatory when there is no comparator than when there is one. Regarding reflexivity, respondents are more likely to classify our vignettes as involving discrimination when the discriminator is from another socially salient group than the discriminatee as to ethnicity but not when it comes to gender. Hence, non-reflexivity does not appear to be a conceptual requirement on discrimination. Remarkably, our study also shows that the mere reference to a majority, outgroup person in our vignettes makes respondents more likely to classify the vignette as involving discrimination against a minority person, even when the majority group person does not play the role of a comparator.

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past.