Insult and Injury: Toward a Comprehensive Account of Discrimination

Abstract Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.