Responsibility for Implicit Bias

Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3):274-306 (2012)
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Abstract

Philosophers who have written about implicit bias have claimed or implied that individuals are not responsible, and therefore not blameworthy, for their implicit biases, and that this is a function of the nature of implicit bias as implicit: below the radar of conscious reflection, out of the control of the deliberating agent, and not rationally revisable in the way many of our reflective beliefs are. I argue that close attention to the findings of empirical psychology, and to the conditions for blameworthiness, does not support these claims. I suggest that the arguments for the claim that individuals are not liable for blame are invalid, and that there is some reason to suppose that individuals are, at least sometimes, liable to blame for the extent to which they are influenced in behaviour and judgment by implicit biases. I also argue against the claim that it is counter-productive to see bias as something for which individuals are blameworthy; rather, understanding implicit bias as something for which we are liable to blame could be constructive

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Author's Profile

Jules Holroyd
University of Sheffield

Citations of this work

Responsibility for implicit bias.Jules Holroyd - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (3).
Rape Culture and Epistemology.Bianca Crewe & Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2021 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Applied Epistemology. Oxford University Press. pp. 253–282.
Responsibility for Implicit Bias.Jules Holroyd - 2012 - Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3):274-306.
The Heterogeneity of Implicit Bias.Jules Holroyd & Joseph Sweetman - forthcoming - In Michael Brownstein & Jennifer Saul (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.

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