Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias: A Character-Based Approach [Workshop Talk]

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Speaker: Lori Gallegos De Castillo, Ph.D. Candidate, SUNY - Stony Brook

When: Jan 20, 2016 - 03:30pm - 05:00pm

Where: Humanities 518

 

Description:

Unlike ordinary conscious beliefs, implicit social biases are not things over which we exert direct control. How then can we be morally responsible for them and their effects on our behavior? Moral philosophers typically divide in two camps on this question. The first camp argues that the structural nature of social inequality mitigates individuals’ responsibility for their unconsciously internalized prejudices. The second camp argues that insofar as individuals can exert indirect and long-term control on the ways in which bias manifests, they are properly subject to moral blame. In this paper I offer a third way between these two extremes. I argue that implicit bias differs in significant ways from other belief and action types in that it operates at a liminal space of moral agency, at the intersection of individual indirect control, and social structures that are largely beyond individual control. Given that implicit bias is unique in these ways, it behooves us to adopt a more nuanced view of moral accountability. I propose a habit-based account of implicit bias that emphasizes one particular moral function of blame. In addition to being empirically supported, my account integrates the most important insights of the other two views while avoiding the shortcomings that result from their reliance on an inadequate conception of blameworthiness.