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Seeing Difference: the Ethics and Epistemology of Stereotyping By ! ! ! ! ! Seeing Difference: The Ethics and! Epistemology of Stereotyping ! By! ! Erin Marie! Beeghly ! A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the degree requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley ! Committee in charge: Professor Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Co-Chair Professor R. Jay Wallace, Co-Chair Professor Victoria! Plaut ! ! Spring! 2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Abstract Seeing Difference: The Ethics and Epistemology of Stereotyping by Erin Marie Beeghly Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Co-Chair Professor R. Jay Wallace, Co-Chair ! When we call something a stereotype, we tend to mean it as a criticism. If someone says, “Asians are good at math” or “women are empathetic,” for example, I might interject, “You’re stereotyping” in order to convey my disapproval of their utterance. But why is stereotyping wrong? One tempting idea is that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. Yet this idea itself is puzzling. How should we understand it? One possibility, to which many people are drawn, is to articulate the wrong in epistemic terms: we see the world in an incorrect way when we stereotype. Call this the epistemic hypothesis about the wrong of stereotyping. Another pos- sibility is that the relevant failure is moral in nature: stereotyping is always morally wrong. In this dissertation, I consider both the epistemic and moral hypotheses and show that neither is de- fensible. Actually, stereotyping can be morally and epistemically permissible. One upshot is that we must give up the idea that stereotyping as such is wrong and think more carefully about how to distinguish permissible and impermissible cases. I argue that there will be no simple way to make this distinction, as there is no one wrong—epistemic or moral—that unifies all bad cas- es. So we must be pluralists about what’s wrong with stereotyping. Moreover, we must recog- nize that the wrongs of stereotyping are purely extrinsic in nature, i.e., due to bad causes or con- sequences rather than due to features intrinsic to the very act of stereotyping. A second upshot is that we must think of stereotyping as normatively diverse: sometimes epistemic and moral norms prohibit it; other times, they do not. Epistemic and moral norms also have the potential to con- flict in specific cases: a person might be epistemically rational to stereotype even if stereotyping is seriously objectionable from a moral point of view. I examine cases of alleged conflict and argue that, in fact, bona fide conflicts between moral and epistemic norms are far rarer than one would expect. Moreover, I demonstrate that—despite first appearances—they do not present tragic normative dilemmas in which people are forced to choose between morality and epistemic rationality. People can do the right thing without being irrational. ! #1 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! To my mother and father, Amy and Brian! Beeghly. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #i ! Acknowledgements! !This dissertation could not have been written without the help of a great many people. The philosophy department and graduate division at Berkeley have been generous in offering me both fellowships and teaching throughout my eight years of graduate school. My first year of graduate work was funded by the Frank and Patricia Yeary Fellowship for Ethics in the Humani- ties. I also received year-long dissertation fellowships from the Townsend Center for Humanities at Berkeley in 2011-12 and the American Association for University Women in 2012-13. A spe- cial thanks to Mary Ann Mason for securing normative time funding for me and all other UC Berkeley grads in her tenure as dean of the Graduate Division at Berkeley. I also want to thank Suzanne Martinez and Mark Zimmelman of Lang Antiques. Had I not worked at Lang through- out my undergraduate and graduate careers, I would have been neither financially solvent nor !half as happy as I actually was. Friends helped to emotionally sustain me throughout the long road to finishing and to make life good: Richard Frey, Jing Jacobs, Laura McKee, Courtney Dillon, Kimberly Conley, Nandini Pandey, Katrina Winzeler, Benjamin Boudreaux, Annie McClanahan and Ted Martin, Lindsey Crawford and Anna Bailey, Lisa Igelesias and Paul Gerlitz, Aja Gabel and Katie Bellas, Nicola Maayan and Katie Wood, Stephanie Soileau and Harriet Clark. Here my family deserves special !thanks, especially my mother and sister Alison, for always picking up the phone. I have also been blessed with a supportive community of scholars. I came to this topic—stereo- typing—through a seminar at Boalt School of Law in Fall of 2009 with psychologist Victoria Plaut. Véronique Munoz-Dardé convinced me of its philosophical worth. She, Mike Martin, Vicky, and Jay Wallace helped me to develop and revise the arguments presented here. I owe whatever is correct in the manuscript to them. Other faculty members generously shared their time and expertise with me: Lara Buchak, John Campbell, Niko Kolodny, Tania Lombrozo, and A.J. Julius, who sponsored me during a visiting semester at UCLA in Spring 2011. I would also like to thank audiences at the Birbeck College, L’École des Hautes Études, the University of Utah, the Townsend Center for Humanities at Berkeley, Princeton’s Political Theory Conference, the Implicit Bias Conference at the University of Sheffield, and the Society for Applied Philoso- phy Annual Conference for thought-provoking discussions. Special thanks to Sally Haslanger, Rae Langton, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Kate Manne, Jennifer Saul, and Jacob Stegenga—and also my !Berkeley colleagues Alex Madva, Joseph Barnes, Lindsay Crawford, and Katrina Winzeler. ! A few people deserve to be singled out for special thanks. Véronique Munoz-Dardé has been like a second mother to me. She and Mike Martin have been a constant presence in my life since I arrived for graduate school at Berkeley, and I thank the stars for sending them my way. To my mother, Amy Beeghly, I owe my love of reading and writing—and my sense of possibility in the world. To my husband and favorite poet, Joshua Rivkin, I owe both my sanity and daily happi- ness. You are my Vera, and I am yours. May we grow old together and keep our patience with !the incomparable Esme Rivkin, who always smiles, even when she fails to sleep. ! #ii Table of Contents! ! !Introduction 1 !Chapter 1: What are Stereotypes? What is Stereotyping? 5 !Chapter 2: What’s the Wrong of Stereotyping? The Epistemic Hypothesis 28 !Chapter 3: What’s the Wrong of Stereotyping? The Moral Hypothesis 49 Chapter 4: Normative Conflict in Cases of Stereotyping: ! Does Morality Require Stupidity? 70 !Conclusion 102 Bibliography ! 106 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #iii ! ! Introduction Human societies are marked by diversity and difference: ethnic and racial difference, gender dif- ference, religious difference, sexual difference, difference in age and ability, difference in social !status and wealth, in professional status and political affiliation. Faced with diversity, humans stereotype. We seek to find order in the world, to classify people as types, and to imbue these classifications with meaning. We generalize. We form expectations about individuals based on the groups to which they belong. It is hard to imagine human psy- chology without these tendencies, essential as they are for simplifying and understanding a com- !plex social environment. But for these tendencies, we would not be fully rational. Nonetheless, stereotyping is problematic. Stereotypes have the reputation of being false, unreli- able views of social groups. Deemed uniformly bad, they have been associated with cultural im- perialism, prejudice, oppression, and all manner of moral and political evil. Moreover, stereo- typing is thought to be inherently objectionable. “You’re stereotyping,” an interlocutor might interject, if I say something like “Asians are bad drivers” or joke that this or that Asian person !will be terrible behind the wheel. These reflections should bother us. What are stereotypes, exactly? How do they affect judgment and behavior? Is stereotyping always morally wrong? Is it ever rational? In so far as stereo- types are part and parcel of how we cope with a diverse social world, what’s wrong with stereo- !typing? In chapter 1, I introduce readers to the psychological literature on stereotypes and stereotyping. Then I argue for what I call the descriptive view of stereotyping. According to this view, stereo- types can be expressed in speech—for example, when we say things like “little girls wear pink” or “doctors wear white coats.” However, we cannot not think of stereotypes as generic proposi- tions about social groups, which are typically expressed in speech acts. After all, we know that stereotypes can influence people’s plans, expectations, and actions even if they are not expressed in public, either directly or indirectly. We must therefore think of stereotypes as having a psy- chological reality, and it becomes tempting to identify them with concepts or as associated with the use or formation of concepts. To stereotype, according to the descriptive view, is thus to em- ploy a generalized view of groups associated with one’s concepts or their formation or use. In the chapter's last part, I consider an objection to the descriptive view, namely, that it does not in- clude the idea that stereotyping is always problematic. I argue that this is actually a benefit of the view. Moreover, I demonstrate that the view is not question begging: it is consistent with the idea that stereotyping is, in fact, always problematic. One would have to argue for that conclu- !sion, however; it wouldn’t follow merely from the term’s definition. In chapter 2, I begin to investigate claim that stereotyping is always wrong. One tempting idea— just mentioned—is that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. Yet this idea itself is #1 puzzling.
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