What's Wrong with Stereotyping?

What's Wrong with Stereotyping? offers a refreshing and accessibly written philosophical take on the ethics of stereotyping. Stereotyping is woven into every aspect of human experience: conversation, psychology, algorithmic systems, and culture. It relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. But when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype? This book tackles this deep and enduring puzzle. To solve it, Erin Beeghly delves into the relationship between stereotyping and another phenomenon, discrimination. Not only does stereotyping cause discriminatory treatment, she argues, stereotyping can itself be discriminatory. This insight-that to stereotype is to discriminate-enables a novel philosophical methodology, which builds towards a theory of wrongful stereotyping by analyzing the lived experiences of marginalized groups and existing theories of wrongful discrimination.

Core chapters evaluate important ethical wrongs: the failure to treat persons as individuals, disrespect, harm, prejudice, threats to freedoms, and the failure to treat persons as equals. One finds that there is no "essence" of wrongful stereotyping, a single property or set of properties that all problematic cases share in common. Nor are the wrongs of stereotyping reducible to an elegant number, two or three. Instead, wrongful stereotyping is a messy normative kind characterized by clusters of wrong-making properties, including all the ones noted here (and perhaps more). Readers will come away with a radically pluralistic, open-ended theory of wrongful stereotyping that they can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their own lives and our contemporary world. Filled with thought-provoking examples and models for social change, this book emphasizes the messiness of moral reality and the importance of looking to the past in order to understand the ethical perils of stereotyping.

Erin Beeghly

Erin Beeghly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. Her research lies at the intersection of ethics, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. She and Alex Madva are co-editors of the first philosophical introduction to implicit bias: An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (Routledge, 2020). Beeghly's research has been supported by the NEH, ACLS, National Humanities Center, the AAUW, and Townsend Center for Humanities at Berkeley. Beeghly received a PhD from UC Berkeley in 2014, a BA in PPE from the University of Oxford in 2006, and a BA in History from UC Berkeley in 2004.