Secondary menu
An Interview with Professor Sophia Moreau about the Right to Equal Treatment Today
Professor Sophia Moreau speaks about her recent book, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination
To listen to the audio version of this interview, click here or find our podcast available on both Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Professor Sophia Moreau is a professor of law of philosophy, cross-appointed in the Department of Philosophy as well as a Faculty Associate at the University of Toronto Center for Ethics, and at Victoria College. Professor Moreau’s book Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination, presents a unique pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Rights Review (RR): How do you summarize your book, and what do you see as the key lessons you hope to impart to your readers?
Professor Sophia Moreau (SM): Faces of Inequality tries to elaborate on what the subtitle says. It’s a theory of what makes discrimination wrongful and when it is wrong. The book doesn’t assume that discrimination is always wrong, but it’s trying to give some explanations of why it’s wrong in the many situations where it seems to be morally objectionable.
The book starts from the idea that we have this moral phenomenon: wrongful discrimination.
My idea is that part of what makes wrongful discrimination wrong is that it fails to treat certain people as the equals of others. The idea underlining the book is that this is a kind of common thread running through all cases of really objectionable discrimination. The problem is, really, that some people have been treated as inferiors — they’ve been subordinated to others.
But of course, to say they’ve been subordinated to others isn’t that helpful on its own. So the book [examines] three different ways in which a law or an individual act can treat a person or a group as though they are inferior to others. One way is by contributing to social subordination: by perpetuating a state in society where one social group has generally more privileges, attracts more deference, and their needs are responded to more quickly than the needs of other groups.
A different way in which you can treat someone as inferior is by denying them certain forms of important freedoms. For instance, you may have heard recently about the controversies surrounding female athletes who have naturally high levels of testosterone, and there are questions about whether they should be allowed to compete as women. Many of these athletes have said that the regulations that bar them from competing as women discriminate wrongly against them, primarily because they force these women to live their lives in a way that isn’t authentic to who they are. They want to be able to live their lives as women and run as women. I try and capture that by saying sometimes discrimination wrongs people and treats them as inferiors because it denies them a certain kind of important freedom that I call a “deliberative freedom.”
Lastly, I talk about a set of cases where people are denied access to certain kinds of basic goods. One such example would be the Indigenous water crisis in Canada. There, we have so many Indigenous communities lacking access to clean water, and I think this is important not just for reasons of health and sanitation, but also for its impact on Indigenous women, who are in many Indigenous traditions, the keepers of clean water.
The book also aims to argue that indirect discrimination that often doesn’t explicitly mention the name of the group it disproportionately disadvantages is equally morally problematic. Many people think that direct discrimination is somehow worse or that it requires more urgent rectification. I argue that we can see both direct and indirect discrimination as involving each of the wrongs that I’ve just identified. Both can contribute to social subordination, can deny people’s autonomy or deliberative freedom, and can leave people without access to basic goods. So really, it’s a mistake to think that something of great moral importance hinges on which category you’re putting a certain case into.
Lastly, the book poses a more general question: when do we have a right to be treated as equals and not as other peoples’ inferiors? Our legal protections against discrimination protect us from acts by the government and also acts by certain people who stand in special, more public roles towards us. But there are lots of social contexts in which the law doesn’t impose an obligation to treat everyone as equals. And most importantly, there are no discrimination laws that apply in the private sector that affect the family or relationships between friends. I argue that we may want to rethink some of this, because the family and the home can be sites of oppression for many people.
RR: Could you speak to how you see your work applying to the racial justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd over the summer and how you see it applying to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada?
SM: I think we’re at a crucial moment in our understanding of discrimination. I feel like we really have an obligation to everyone in society, and particularly to historically underprivileged groups, to understand and remedy the discrimination that they have faced for years and to understand what white privilege involves.
There’s a section of the book about white privilege. I feel like this is an infelicitous term. It somehow suggests that white privilege is just “a bit extra” over and above what everyone else has when, of course, white privilege is a whole way of structuring social relationships in such a way where certain people get noticed and others don’t. Certain people’s actions are painted in a certain light and others’ are not. It’s not about what you have, it’s very deeply about who you are seen as and who you are able to become.
I try to address this problem in a couple of ways. I try to emphasize the structural and systemic effects of discrimination. It’s a big mistake to think that what’s wrong with discrimination just lies in prejudice and the mental state of the discriminator. The problem is, in part, the stereotypes perpetuated by certain policies. The ways of thinking that are inherent in what we pay attention to and what we don’t pay attention to really sustain these relations of subordination.
It’s really important to think about discrimination from the perspective of the discriminatee. Especially in the early years of our analysis of discrimination, a lot of our emphasis was placed on the discriminator — their prejudices and their motives. I feel like this is focusing the lens in the wrong place. We need to think about the impact of discriminatory policies and acts on those who they influence and affect — the discriminatee.
The Indigenous water crisis is a good example of that. If you looked at the crisis from the standpoint of an outsider, you might just say, “Oh, what are Indigenous people lacking? The basic good they’re lacking is clean water. Why do they need it? Well, for reasons of sanitation.” Only when you understand more about particular Indigenous cultures and the role that water plays symbolically and culturally will you be able to draw a real picture of what lacking access to this basic good really means and how it impacts these particular people. In many of these cases, it’s only then that you’ll see how it truly prevents groups from being seen as equals.
RR: How do you see inequality and discrimination arising in COVID-19, surrounding the health, economic, and social upheaval in which we find ourselves?
SM: I wrote some blog entries about this for the Pea Soup Blog — a philosophical blog. It has become even clearer that lockdown policies protect privileged people. I feel like our governments have done relatively little to help those who are already disadvantaged and vulnerable — those who have no choice but to go out to work every day, those who live in crowded housing situations and have no viable alternatives. I would have liked to see us as a society ameliorate these massive disparities. I just don’t think we’re doing nearly enough.
Another group that doesn’t have enough of a voice in this situation are people with disabilities who are being denied necessary surgeries, because again, not enough funds are being directed towards medical resources. I feel that there are lots of issues surrounding the pandemic’s unequal impact on social groups.
RR: How do you envision states and institutions changing to better acknowledge and address the wrongfulness of discrimination, and do you envision individuals upholding the duty to treat others as equals?
SM: I don’t have any magic answer, but I have a few thoughts.
In my discussion of group-based subordination, I talk a lot about what I call “structural accommodations.” The idea is that a part of what makes one group socially subordinated to another is the existence of a whole set of different policies in different social contexts that privilege the needs of certain groups and render underprivileged groups and their needs invisible. Part of the solution lies in making their needs visible and wanting to see the impact of our policies on everyone. In many cases, we won’t be able to prioritize everyone’s interests. But I feel like if the underprivileged groups’ needs were rendered visible, we would then have a more meaningful discussion.
I do feel like our awareness of the political impact of policies on different marginalized groups is far more than it was even 20 years ago. We are slowly making progress in that direction. A lot of my colleagues working on discrimination theory, like Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, have done a lot of work on what they call “prioritarian” views. There’s also a wonderful political theorist at Oxford, Shreya Atrey, doing work on “prioritarianism.” These philosophers have argued that we need to identify all the groups that are affected by a particular policy and amend the policy [to] raise the level of those who are worst off. Again, to do that, we need to make visible all of the groups that are disadvantageously affected by particular policies.
RR: For any reader or listener of Rights Review who’s interested in learning more and reading your book, where can they look?
SM: You can find it at OUP online on the library system on your own computer. My book is now also available online. There will also be an article on my book applying this theory specifically to gender discrimination, to discrimination against women, in a new anthology that Rebecca Cook is editing called Frontiers of Gender Equality.
RR: Do you have any final notes?
SM: There are a number of different books in recent years that have written about wrongful discrimination. Deborah Hellman from the University of Virginia has a terrific book called When is Discrimination Wrong? She argued that it’s wrong when it demeans people, although she has changed her view subsequently, and now thinks we need to think about systemic discrimination. Tarunabh Khaitan, a scholar at Oxford, has a terrific book focusing more on denying people the conditions for autonomy. His book is called A Theory of Discrimination Law. Joseph Fishkin has a terrific book called Bottlenecks. He’s thinking more about systemic discrimination and the way in which it creates bottlenecks in opportunities, and certain social groups get stuck in the bottleneck.