Title: Race, Reasons, and Acting on the Basis of Race (As a Reason)
Abstract: When an agent is moved by a consideration of a person’s race to act a certain way, what exactly is she moved by? When an agent takes race as a reason for action, what exactly is she taking as normative? Phrasing the questions thusly shows how we might remain in the dark about what it is to act on the basis of race, even when an agent’s action is explained by appeal to a consideration of race. An agent who takes a person’s race as a reason for action is taking some fact about the person to count in favor of acting. But what fact is this exactly? And how does or how can a fact of this kind be normative or rationalize action?
I call these complexities of figuring what it is to act on the basis of race the “race as a reason” problem. The race as a reason framing brings out a double ambiguity in acting on the basis of race that occludes much analysis of racial discrimination. As I will show, not only are there different notions of practical reason that may be implicated in the stricture not to act on race or take race as a reason, there are also different conceptions of the concept of race that are relevant to these different notions of reasons for acting. This untidy picture challenges interpretation of what precisely the content of the duty not to act on the basis of race is and shows how the dictate not to discriminate can easily be taken to be a rather morally paltry order. I close by showing why shifting from a framing based on practical reasons and training our eye instead to the social-scientific explanatory question of what it is to act on the basis of race makes headway in figuring racial discrimination as a distinctively social problem with thus distinctive political and not just moral significance.