EQUALITY RESEARCH

Must rights for women reify oppression? Can racial profiling be justified if we care about racial equality? Is it wrong to discriminate against people based on their appearance? These are some of the questions that I have tried to answer over the years. I am now beginning to draw these strands of research together, into a larger project on discrimination. It will connect conceptual and normative questions about discrimination to competing conceptions of equality (such as equality as sameness, equality of status, equality as non-domination) and to the metaphysical and political dimensions of race, sex and personal identity. In this way, I hope to explore the similarities and differences amongst familiar forms of discrimination (race, religion, sex, age, disability), as well as to clarify how far we are justified in trying to prevent discrimination by law.

Meanwhile, the invitation to write on ‘racial profiling and jury trials’ for The Jury Expert , a publication of the American Society of Trial Consultants,  piqued my interest in race and the construction of juries. and prompted me to write a short piece on the subject for The Guardian’s Comment is Free, in March, 2010. I presented a longer, more developed version of these ideas at a conference on racial profiling which was held in Denmark in May, 2010.  The article is called "Treating People As Equals: Ethical Objection to Racial Profiling and the Composition of Juries", and will be published along with other papers from that conference in a special issue of The Journal of Ethics in January 2011.


Go to Publications on Equality