The Place Of Prejudice

We associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. Can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions is misguided.

Today we associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. So how can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? In this ambitious work, Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an unfortunate obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions, he argues, is misguided. Ranging across philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger and Gadamer, Sandel demonstrates that we inherit our "prejudice against prejudice" from the Enlightenment. By detaching reason from habit and common opinion, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant invented prejudice--as we understand it today--as an obstacle to freedom and a failure to think for oneself. The Place of Prejudice presents a powerful challenge to this picture. The attempt to purge understanding of culture and history leads not to truth, Sandel warns, but to shallowness and confusion. A purely detached notion of reason deprives judgment of all perspective, disparages political rhetoric as mere pandering, and denies us the background knowledge we need to interpret literature, law, and the past. In a clear, eloquent voice, Sandel presents instead a compelling case for reasoning within the world.

This book offers a critical synthesis of social psychology’s contribution to the study of contemporary racism, and proposes a critical reframing of our understanding of prejudice in European society today. Chapters place a special emphasis on the diversity and intensity of prejudices against Romani people in a liberal, progressive, decent, enlarged Europe. Chapters ask how we can reconcile the European creed of law, justice and freedom for all, with social and political practices that exclude and degrade Romani people. This volume addresses the need for a deeper recognition of societal foundations of ideologies of moral exclusion, and calls for a closer and more thorough investigation of prejudices that stem from the societal transformation, diminution or denial of moral worth of human beings (and the various conditions and contexts that create and promote it). By opening new intellectual dialogues, the book reinvigorates a renewed social psychology of racism, and creates a broader foundation for the exploration of the various, active paradoxes at the heart of the social expression of prejudice in liberal democracies. The Nature of Prejudice is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in both the quantitative and qualitative study of discrimination, inequality and social exclusion.

This second edition presents a significantly updated overview the social, developmental, evolutionary, and personality roots of prejudice, along with contemporary examples of prejudicial attitudes and strategies for combating them.

Prejudiced beliefs may certainly seem like defective beliefs. But in what sense are they defective? Many will be false and harmful, but philosophers have further argued that prejudiced belief is defective also in the sense that it could only arise from distinctive kinds of epistemic irrationality: we could acquire or retain our prejudiced beliefs only by violating our epistemic responsibilities. It is also assumed that we are only morally responsible for the harms that prejudiced beliefs cause because, in forming these beliefs in the first place, we are violating our epistemic responsibilities. In Prejudice, Endre Begby argues that these common convictions are misguided. His discussion shows in detail that there are many epistemically justified pathways to prejudiced belief, and that it is a mistake to lean on the concept of epistemic responsibility to articulate our ethical responsibilities. Doing so unreasonably burdens victims of prejudice with having to show that their victimizers were in a position to know better. Accordingly, Begby provides an account of moral responsibility for harm which does not depend on finding grounds for epistemic blame. This view is supported by a number of examples and case studies at individual, collective, and institutional levels of decision making. Additionally, Begby develops a systematic platform for "non-ideal epistemology" which would apply to a wide range of other social and epistemic phenomena of current concern, such as fake news, conspiracy theories, science scepticism, and more.