In her evocative article “Meeting the Moment: Bioethics in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” Camisha Russell comprehensively illustrates why racism should be considered an important bioethica...

An inordinate number of low wage workers in essential industries are Black, Hispanic, or Latino, immigrants or refugees — groups beset by centuries of discrimination and burdened with disproportionate but preventable harms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since Opuz v. Turkey (2009), the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) delivered over a dozen judgments in which it examined domestic violence through the prism of gender-based discrimination. Apart from the individual circumstances of the cases, the Court considered the general approach to domestic violence in the defendant states, searching for a large-scale structural gender bias. Hence, although the Court has not directly referred to the notion of “structural discrimination” in relation to domestic violence, it (...) engaged in unveiling this problem within the state parties. Building on the case law of the Court, the article presents and systemizes information that may prove structural gender discrimination in domestic violence cases. It navigates potential applicants through the Court’s interpretation and indicates arguments and sources that may support their claims. In particular, it discusses what kind of data and information may demonstrate the general, discriminatory attitude of the authorities towards domestic violence and what sources the applicants may use while seeking the evidence. (shrink)

We report a series of experiments in which subjects were required to make spatial discriminations about naturally obtained images, as follows. Subjects were shown two natural images on a computer screen, side by side and for a period of 500 ms. Subjects were then shown, on a separate part of the computer screen, a small patch of one of the images selected at random. Subjects were required to decide which of the two full images the patch comes from, and whereabouts (...) in that image it is taken from. They indicated their response by clicking the mouse cursor at the appropriate point on the screen. -/- The proportion of trials on which the subjects selected the correct image and the accuracy of the spatial position of their correct responses were calculated. These two measures independently indicate the general discriminability of the two image sets, and the extent to which the spatial layout of the image has been perceived. By comparing response accuracy for images that are from different sets (such as mountain or town scenes) with response accuracy when the two images are from the same set it is possible to establish the image properties that underlie coarse scene apprehension. By using sets of images that are perhaps best described as being natural textures (such as patterns of foliage or rock surface) it is possible to measure the extent to which texture is processed spatially. Our results are interpreted in the light of statistical differences between the image sets that we have used. (shrink)

Across the country, legal and health care professionals who understand that health outcomes are most influenced by social and environmental conditions have improved patient health by adopting the interdisciplinary MLP health care delivery model. However, the MLP field cannot advance population health, let alone long-term health equity, until it addresses the structural determinants of health inequity that are rooted in discrimination, segregation, and other forms of racial and ethnic subordination.

Over the years, phenomenology has provided illuminating descriptions of discrimination, with its mechanisms and effects being thematised at the most basic levels of embodiment, (dis)orientation, selfhood, and belonging. What remains somewhat understudied is the lived experience of the discriminator. In this paper I draw on Husserl's phenomenological account of normality to reflect on the ways in which we discriminate at the prereflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. By critically reflecting on the intentional structures undergirding discriminatory practices, I (...) argue that discrimination is characteristic of a naïve normalising attitude which is habitually interested in securing a familiar experience of a static normality. I first demonstrate how this attitude problematically tends to reproduce, enforce, and further sediment discriminatory and exclusionary norms. Further, I provide an internal critique which problematises discrimination—without recourse to external normative standards—on three fronts: as epistemically unproductive, experientially obscuring, and normatively non-instantiating. In discriminatory acts we see an abnormal refusal to enrich, revise, and genetically establish new normative commitments, new ways of seeing, and a new normality. (shrink)

In Born Free and Equal: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen defends the harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, which explains the wrongness of discrimination with reference to the harmfulness of discriminatory acts. Against this view, we offer two objections. The conditions objection states that the harm-based account implausibly fails to recognize that harmless discrimination can be wrong. The explanation objection states that the harm-based account fails adequately to identify all of (...) the wrong-making properties of discriminatory acts. We argue that the structure of a satisfactory view cannot be outcome-focused. A more promising family of views focuses on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action. (shrink)

It is usually accepted that whether or not indirect discrimination is a form of immoral discrimination, it appears to be structurally different from direct discrimination. First, it seems that either one involves the agent focusing on different things while making a decision. Second, it seems that the victim’s group membership is relevant to the outcomes of either sort of action in different ways. In virtue of these two facts, it is usually concluded that indirect discrimination is (...) structurally different from direct discrimination. I argue against the notion that indirect discrimination and direct discrimination have significantly different structures. I first argue that both kinds of discrimination involve similar decision-making processes. Second, I analyze how being in a social group affects personal identity, and from there argue that indirect discrimination and direct discrimination are about group membership similarly. In virtue of these two arguments, I conclude that direct and indirect discrimination are structurally similar. (shrink)

The complex history of pandemics has created a diversified array of anti-epidemic responses, which have allowed structures of authority to express their power in multiple ways. In this paper, by considering theories applicable to cases ranging from Europe to Asia, from the 11th to the 18th century, we conduct a comparative analysis capable of identifying common traits and radical differences, aiming to show how such deployment of power was not always commensurate with the medical theories of the age, and with (...) the gravity of the epidemiological situation. Specifically, we analyse how Western European States, in their process of formation, employed the concept of ‘public health’ to create the grounds for an unprecedented exercise of power over the private sphere. Furthermore, we compare this attitude with the discrimination of the minority known as burakumin in Japan, which was destined to undertake any ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ occupation, to preserve the immunity of the community. In other words, we examine how structures of power have exploited states of exception to implement control measures beyond the needs of the situation through an increasingly hypertrophic apparatus of security; and ways in which political authorities have not aligned with medical or philosophical authorities of their times, for opportunistic reasons that benefited their own social, religious, or racial group. (shrink)

Research on gender inequality has posited the importance of gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work. Previous studies have suggested that gender stereotyping and organizational factors may contribute to discrimination. Yet it is not well understood how these elements connect to foster gender discrimination in everyday workplaces. This work contributes to our understanding of these relationships by analyzing 219 discrimination narratives constructed from sex discrimination cases brought before the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. By looking across (...) a variety of actual work settings, the analysis sheds light on the cultural underpinnings and structural contexts in which discriminatory actions occur. The analyses reveal how gender stereotyping combines in predictable ways with sex composition of workplaces and organizational policies, often through interactional dynamics of discretionary policy usage, to result in discrimination. The findings suggest the importance of cultural, structural, and interactional influences on gender discrimination. (shrink)

This paper contributes to debates over algorithmic discrimination with particular attention to structural theories of racism and the problem of “proxy discrimination”—discriminatory effects that arise even when an algorithm has no information about socially sensitive characteristics such as race. Structural theories emphasize the ways that unequal power structures contribute to the subordination of marginalized groups: these theories thus understand racism in ways that go beyond individual choices and bad intentions. Our question is, how should a (...) class='Hi'>structural understanding of racism and oppression inform our understanding of algorithmic discrimination and its associated norms? Some responses to the problem of proxy discrimination focus on fairness as a form of “parity,” aiming to equalize metrics between individuals or groups—looking, for example, for equal rates of accurate and inaccurate predictions between one group and another. We argue that from the perspective of structural theories, fairness-as-parity is inapt in the algorithmic context; instead, we should be considering social impact—whether a use of an algorithm perpetuates or mitigates existing social stratification. Our contribution thus offers a new understanding of what algorithmic racial discrimination is. (shrink)

There are many circumstances in which vegans are treated or considered worse than nonvegans, both in the private and the public sphere, either due to the presence of a bias against them or for structural reasons. For instance, vegans sometimes suffer harassment, have issues at their workplace, or find little vegan food available. In many cases they are forced to contribute to, or to participate in, animal exploitation against their will when states render it illegitimate to oppose or refuse (...) to support some uses of animals. For the most part this remains socially invisible. Vegans, however, often recognize this as a form of discrimination against them. But they seldom campaign against it, as they regard it as a consequence of another and more important discrimination, i.e. speciesist discrimination against nonhuman animals. If this is correct, discrimination against vegans can be characterized as a form of second-order discrimination, that is, discrimination against those who oppose another form of discrimination. If speciesism really is unjustified and discriminatory, then discrimination against vegans will always be discriminatory and unjustified too. But even if our current attitudes towards animals were justified there would be strong reasons to claim that vegans do suffer several forms of private and public discrimination that are unjustified. (shrink)

There are several relations which may fall short of genuine identity, but which behave like identity in important respects. Such grades of discrimination have recently been the subject of much philosophical and technical discussion. This paper aims to complete their technical investigation. Grades of indiscernibility are defined in terms of satisfaction of certain first-order formulas. Grades of symmetry are defined in terms of symmetries on a structure. Both of these families of grades of discrimination have been studied in (...) some detail. However, this paper also introduces grades of relativity, defined in terms of relativeness correspondences. This paper explores the relationships between all the grades of discrimination, exhaustively answering several natural questions that have so far received only partial answers. It also establishes which grades can be captured in terms of satisfaction of object-language formulas and draws connections with definability theory. (shrink)

A modified version of the mere exposure effect paradigm was utilized in an implicit artificial grammar learning task in an attempt to develop a procedure that would be more sensitive in assesing nonconscious learning processes than the methods currently utilized within the field of implicit learning. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state artificial grammar and then had to either decide if novel items conformed to the rule structure of the grammar or rate the degree to which they (...) liked novel items. Because the latter of the task was more indirect of the two procedures, subjects′ availability to discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed items on this liking task was taken as a more sensitive piece of evidence of implicit learning, compared to performance on the rule conformity task. A subsequent test of subjects′ explicit knowledge of the rules of the grammar showed that subjects do have some conscious knowledge of the artificial grammar, but subjects making liking decisions exhibited significantly less conscious rule knowledge than subjects initially making rule-conformity judgements. The findings are discussed in relation to synergistic relationships among implicit perception, implicit memory, and implicit learning proceses. (shrink)

Recent philosophical accounts of discrimination face challenges in accommodating robust intuitions about the particular way in which it is wrongful—most prominently, the intuition that discriminatory actions intrinsically violate equality irrespective of their contingent consequences. The paper suggests that we understand the normative structure of discrimination in a way that is different from the one implicitly assumed by these accounts. It argues that core discriminatory wrongs—such as segregation in Apartheid South Africa—divide into two types, corresponding to violations of relational (...) and distributive equality; and that a pluralistic view of the internal structure of each type should be adopted. This normative structure serves to appropriately vindicate the mentioned intuitions; it also contributes to clarifying the normative underpinnings of legal concepts associated with discrimination (including the distinctions between direct and indirect, or ‘disparate treatment/impact’ discrimination, and intentional vs. unintentional discrimination), and developing a more productive public discourse around allegations of discrimination. (shrink)

The renewed interest in the issue of black reparations, both in the public sphere and among scholars, is a welcome development because the racial injustices of the past continue to shape American society by disadvantaging African Americans in a variety of ways. Attention to the past and how it has shaped present-day inequality seems essential both to understanding our predicament and to justifying policies that would address and undermine racial inequality. Given this, any argument for policies designed to pursue racial (...) justice must be, at least in part, backward-looking, justifi ed partly as compensation for the effects of the wrongs of the past. However, some arguments about black reparations, both pro and con, are focused too far in the past. An unspoken assumption of much of the debate about black reparations is that these would be reparations for slavery. This, we argue, is a mistake. Racial inequality in the United States today may, ultimately, be based on slavery, but it is also based on the failure of the country to take effective steps since slavery to undermine the structural racial inequality that slavery put in place. From the latter part of the nineteenth century through the fi rst half of the twentieth century, the Jim Crow system continued to keep Blacks “in their place,” and even during and after the civil rights era no policies were adopted to dismantle the racial hierarchy that already existed. An important part of the story of racial inequality today is the history of housing and lending discrimination in the second half of the twentieth century (McCarthy 2002; 2004). Home equity, for many Americans, is a very important source of wealth, and the decades after World War II were ones of rapid home equity growth. They were the decades that saw the creation of a large, mostly suburban, middle class. But the middle class that was created was also mostly White, and this was due largely to government policies that (in many cases intentionally) excluded Blacks from the opportunities to get into the home market and benefi t from home equity growth. In this paper we argue that recent housing and lending discrimination constitutes an important basis for black reparations.. (shrink)

Against the background of a deeply uneven package of work–family reconciliation measures and an increasing focus on engaging men in unpaid care work, in this article I discuss the extension of the Irish discrimination law framework to provide protection against family status discrimination to workers who are engaged in certain care relationships. While this development of the law to recognize a relational understanding of inequality is welcome, its confined definition of family status fails to capture the range of (...) workers’ caring relationships and networks. Adopting a contextualized assessment of 12 years of litigation generated under the ‘family status’ ground, with reference to complainants’ gender and work status, the study considers the types of experiences being litigated as ‘family status’ discrimination. The study show how much of the nature and forms of inequality presented before the tribunals are beyond the conceptual boundaries of the principle of equal treatment that depends upon a sameness of treatment model with the ‘care-less’ comparator. Despite its potential to question the neutrality of workplace structures predicated upon the division between paid work and unpaid care, the principle of indirect family status discrimination has been under utilised as a litigation strategy. The most successful dimension of family status discrimination protection has been in respect of its ability to capture the negative stereotyping of worker–carers who continue to perform as ideal workers. I suggest that this extension of a limited negative rights framework, when considered alongside the state’s extremely poor support for workcare reconciliation more broadly, places negligible obligations on employers, and that the gender neutrality implicit in its provisions have yet to impact on gender equality as regards work–care reconciliation. (shrink)

On 24 July 2022, the landmark decision Roe v. Wade (1973), that secured a right to abortion for decades, was overruled by the US Supreme Court. The Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation severely restricts access to legal abortion care in the USA, since it will give the states the power to ban abortion. It has been claimed that overruling Roe will have disproportionate impacts on women of color and that restricting access to abortion contributes to or (...) amounts to structural racism. In this paper, we consider whether restricting abortion access as a consequence of overruling Roe could be understood as discrimination against women of color (and women in general). We argue that banning abortion is indirectly discriminatory against women of color and directly (but neither indirectly, nor structurally) discriminatory against women in general. (shrink)

Indirect discrimination (or disparate impact) concerns the application of the same rule to everyone, even though that rule significantly disadvantages one particular group in society. Ever since its recognition by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1971, liberal democracies around the world have grappled with the puzzle that it can sometimes be unfair and wrong to treat everyone equally. The law's regulation of private acts that unintentionally (but disproportionately) harm vulnerable groups has remained extremely controversial, especially in (...) the United States and the United Kingdom. In original essays in this volume, leading scholars of discrimination law from North America and Europe explore the various facets of the law on indirect discrimination, interrogating its foundations, history, legitimacy, purpose, structure, and relationship with other legal concepts. The collection provides the first international work devoted to this vital area of the law that seeks both to prevent unfair treatment and to transform societies. (shrink)

The 3rd Pan-African Ethics Human Rights and Medical Law (3rd EHRML) conference was held in Johannesburg on July 7, 2013, as part of the Africa Health Congress. The conference brought together bioethicists, researchers and scholars from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria working in the field of bioethics as well as students and healthcare workers interested in learning about ethical issues confronting the African continent. The conference which ran with a theme of "Bioethical and legal perspectives in biomedical research and (...) medical practice in Africa with a focus on: Informed consent, HIV-AIDS & Tuberculosis, leadership & organizational ethics, patients and healthcare workers rights," was designed to expand the dialogue on African bioethics beyond the traditional focus on research ethics and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the conduct of biomedical research in developing countries. This introductory article highlights some of areas of focus at the conference including issues of leadership, organizational ethics and patients and healthcare workers rights in Africa. We analyze the importance of free speech, public debate of issues, argumentation and the need to introduce the teaching and learning of ethics to students in Africa in accordance with UNESCO guidelines. This article also focuses on other challenges confronting Africa today from an ethical standpoint, including the issues of poor leadership and organizational ethics which are main contributors to the problems prevalent in African countries, such as poverty, poor education and healthcare delivery systems, terrorism, social inequities, infrastructural deficits and other forms of 'structural violence' confronting vulnerable African communities. We believe that each of the eight articles included in this supplement, which have been rigorously peer-reviewed are a good example of current research on bioethics in Africa, and explore some new directions towards broadening the African bioethics agenda as we move forward to a new dawn for Africa in the 21st century. (shrink)

A classic experiment by Henri Tajfel provides evidence for the conclusion that the division of a group into subgroups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior, even if there is no reason for such behavior in terms of the individual’s own interest. I don’t challenge that conclusion; but I question an implicit assumption which is suggested by the experimental setup and by the language used by Tajfel in describing the experiment. The assumption is that an initially coherent group will typically experience (...) division as a result of outside influence. A totally different picture of the situation and totally different social policy recommendations will follow if we believe instead that groups are evolving structures, and specifically structures that constantly and autonomously come into conflict with themselves. (shrink)

People may be subjected to discrimination from a variety of sources in the workplace. In this study of mental health workers, we contrast four potential perpetrators of discrimination (managers, co-workers, patients, and visitors) to investigate whether the negative impact of discrimination on victims’ well-being will vary in strength depending on the relative power of the perpetrator. We further explore whether the negative impact of discrimination is at least partly explained by its effects on people’s sense of (...) organizational justice, and whether the strength of mediation varies according to the source of discrimination. Using survey data from 1,733 UK mental health workers, a structural equation model was designed to test these hypotheses following a bootstrap approach. Discrimination from all sources was related to well-being, with that from managers having the strongest effects. The results support an explanation of the effect of discrimination on well-being in terms of organizational justice perceptions for discrimination from managers and from visitors, but less so for discrimination from co-workers or from patients. The study highlights the importance of differentiating amongst sources of discrimination at work and the salience of organizational justice perceptions in explaining the effects of discrimination from some sources. (shrink)

This review article analyses Tarunabh Khaitan’s attempt in his recent book, A Theory of Discrimination Law, to identify the central purpose and justification of discrimination law. Khaitan sets out to determine the key features of discrimination law through rigorous comparative analysis, and to locate a solid normative foundation for its provisions. He concludes that discrimination law is structured around an ‘obsession’ with combating group disadvantage, ie relative forms of disadvantage between different groups whose membership is defined (...) by morally irrelevant or valuable personal characteristics such as gender, race and disability. He goes on to make a strongly argued liberal case as to why discrimination law is justified in seeking to minimise the negative impact on individual liberty of group disadvantage. Certain aspects of his analysis fail to capture the full complexity of discrimination law and the moral concerns which underpin its functioning. However, in general, Khaitan’s arguments make an invaluable contribution to the diffuse theoretical literature on discrimination law, and are bound to become a major point of reference in conceptual debates about this highly significant area of law. (shrink)

How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism’s core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states’ basic moral obligation to treat their citizens with equal respect. It then identifies ways in which the group biases produced (...) by immigration policy violate that principle, when states either deprive their citizens of fundamental rights or stigmatize them through hierarchical constructions of citizenship. Three mechanisms are presented—structural bias, profiling, and positive selection—by which seemingly liberal admissions policies produce illiberal outcomes. The empirical analysis explores the resulting discriminatory group biases in the context of language and income conditionalities on family migration, excessive demand restrictions against economic migrants, and visa waivers for international travelers. We conclude that immigration reforms that mitigate, if not erase, these morally problematic patterns are within the reach of liberal states. (shrink)

The increasing implementation of and reliance on machine-learning (ML) algorithms to perform tasks, deliver services and make decisions in health and healthcare have made the need for fairness in ML, and more specifically in healthcare ML algorithms (HMLA), a very important and urgent task. However, while the debate on fairness in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and in HMLA has grown significantly over the last decade, the very concept of fairness as an ethical value has not yet been sufficiently (...) explored. Our paper aims to fill this gap and address the AI ethics principle of fairness from a conceptual standpoint, drawing insights from accounts of fairness elaborated in moral philosophy and using them to conceptualise fairness as an ethical value and to redefine fairness in HMLA accordingly. To achieve our goal, following a first section aimed at clarifying the background, methodology and structure of the paper, in the second section, we provide an overview of the discussion of the AI ethics principle of fairness in HMLA and show that the concept of fairness underlying this debate is framed in purely distributive terms and overlaps with non-discrimination, which is defined in turn as the absence of biases. After showing that this framing is inadequate, in the third section, we pursue an ethical inquiry into the concept of fairness and argue that fairness ought to be conceived of as an ethical value. Following a clarification of the relationship between fairness and non-discrimination, we show that the two do not overlap and that fairness requires much more than just non-discrimination. Moreover, we highlight that fairness not only has a distributive but also a socio-relational dimension. Finally, we pinpoint the constitutive components of fairness. In doing so, we base our arguments on a renewed reflection on the concept of respect, which goes beyond the idea of equal respect to include respect for individual persons. In the fourth section, we analyse the implications of our conceptual redefinition of fairness as an ethical value in the discussion of fairness in HMLA. Here, we claim that fairness requires more than non-discrimination and the absence of biases as well as more than just distribution; it needs to ensure that HMLA respects persons both as persons and as particular individuals. Finally, in the fifth section, we sketch some broader implications and show how our inquiry can contribute to making HMLA and, more generally, AI promote the social good and a fairer society. (shrink)

This article compares the experiences of U.S.-born white women, Asian men, and Asian women immigrant engineers in Silicon Valley. It focuses on two particular characteristics of the region’s economic structure: the norm of job-hopping and the centrality of networks to high-skilled workers’ career livelihoods. While these characteristics might be assumed to exacerbate ethnic and gender inequality, the specific history of these groups’ entrance into Silicon Valley’s hi-tech industry enabled them to use these characteristics to their advantage in circumventing bias. The (...) comparison of white women’s strategies to Asian immigrant men’s and women’s strategies highlights the interaction between the structure of opportunities, group histories, and network resources. (shrink)

In a co-authored piece with Adam Slavny, I argued that any promising account of the wrongness of discrimination must focus not only on the harmful outcomes of discriminatory acts but also on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action. In this brief paper, I defend this conclusion against an objection that has recently been pressed against our view by Richard Arneson. This task is important not only because (...) Arneson’s objection is an intriguing one, but also -- and more importantly -- because my response sheds further light on the content and structure of an attractive theory of wrongful discrimination, as well as on more fundamental ideas in moral philosophy. (shrink)

The prevalence in Chinese of grammatical structures that translate into English in different word orders is an important cause of translation difficulty. While previous work has used phrase-structure parses to deal with such ordering problems, we introduce a richer set of Chinese grammatical relations that describes more semantically abstract relations between words. Using these Chinese grammatical relations, we improve a phrase orientation classifier (introduced by Zens and Ney (2006)) that decides the ordering of two phrases when translated into English by (...) adding path features designed over the Chinese typed dependencies. We then apply the log probability of the phrase orientation classifier as an extra feature in a phrase-based MT system, and get significant BLEU point gains on three test sets: MT02 (+0.59), MT03 (+1.00) and MT05 (+0.77). Our Chinese grammatical relations are also likely to be useful for other NLP tasks. (shrink)

BackgroundDiscrimination in health care is an international challenge and a serious obstacle to justice and equality in health.Research objectiveThe purpose of this study was to design a grounded theory of discrimination in health care based on the experiences and perceptions of Iranian healthcare providers and patients.Research designThis qualitative study was conducted using by the grounded theory method.Participants and research contextData were collected through semi-structured interviews with 18 healthcare providers including 11 nurses, two physicians, two nurse’s assistants, and three patients (...) in two general hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Participants were selected through purposeful sampling and analyzed simultaneously using the Corbin and Strauss (2015) approach.Ethical considerationsThe study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences (Ethics code: IR.USWR.REC.1398.023). Also, after explaining the objectives of the study, all the participants completed and signed the written consent form.FindingsThe “culture of discrimination” was the study’s core category, reflecting the nature of discrimination in health care. The theory of “culture of discrimination in health care” is the result of five main categories: “individual social stimuli,” “culture of discrimination,” “unintentional discrimination,” “conflict with discrimination,” and “dissatisfaction with discriminatory behavior.” These categories cover the underlying factors, strategies, and outcomes of the discrimination process in health care.DiscussionThe results of the study showed that nurses and other health care providers experience unintentional discrimination. Unintentional discrimination refers to discriminatory behaviors and practices of health care providers.ConclusionThe theory of culture of discrimination in health care can be used as a practical guide to describe and understand the role of health care providers, especially nurses. Further studies with a quantitative approach to applying this theory in medical settings are recommended. (shrink)

Why does social injustice exist? What role, if any, do implicit biases play in the perpetuation of social inequalities? Individualistic approaches to these questions explain social injustice as the result of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and choices. For example, they explain racial injustice as the result of individuals acting on racial stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, structural approaches explain social injustice in terms of beyond-the-individual features, including laws, institutions, city layouts, and social norms. Often these two approaches are seen as (...) competitors. Framing them as competitors suggests that only one approach can win and that the loser offers worse explanations of injustice. In this essay, we explore each approach and compare them. Using implicit bias as an example, we argue that the relationship between individualistic and structural approaches is more complicated than it may first seem. Moreover, we contend that each approach has its place in analyses of injustice and raise the possibility that they can work together—synergistically—to produce deeper explanations of social injustice. If so, the approaches may be complementary, rather than competing. (shrink)

Gender discrimination and sexual harassment of female police officers by their male counterparts remain areas of liability where police departments appeared to have failed to effectively confront the nagging issues. However, the appreciable level of research conducted on these issues in the global North has not been matched by the South, where issues bordering on sexual violence have cultural underpinnings. Drawing from the case of the Nigeria Police Force, feminist analysis was used to explore the lived reality of 43 (...) female officers in a qualitative study. Participants expressed distress in abiding by structural discriminatory regulations against female officers which include non-admittance of married women into the force, forbidding unmarried officers from getting pregnant, and a stipulated minimum of three-year work period before a female officer can marry. Findings also indicated that participants suffer a variety of sexual harassment, intimidation, and, violence from their male colleagues, while they feel constrained in reporting their victimization. Important policy and practical implications requiring the Nigerian police to address hegemonic masculinity and promote gender equality were provided. (shrink)

The changes created by platform-facilitated labor are considered fundamental challenges to the future of work. As more data accumulates on gender discrimination in online platforms, this Article explores how inequality is cultivated by platforms in the gig economy. Looking at technological architecture as organizational structure, this essay bridges a gap between three bodies of scholarship that have not yet been in conversation but considering them together is necessary if we are to think about gender equality in platform-facilitated labor. The (...) first concerns data driven discrimination, the second concerns the role of platform affordances and the third concerns organizational policies. These point to the gender inequality regime that platforms may enact. Thus, the Article theoretically contributes to unpacking platforms’ role in perpetuating and institutionalizing gender inequality. Finally, it offers some suggestions on the ways in which law, policy and technology can disrupt the institutionalization of gender inequality in platform-facilitated labor. (shrink)

RésuméSophia Moreau, dans son livre important, offre un compte rendu instructif de l'un des aspects de la discrimination répréhensible, soit celui basé sur le fléau de la subordination. Ma contribution au symposium vise à clarifier la structure de la présentation de Moreau sur la subordination et son statut normatif et axiologique. La première interprétation plausible veut que la subordination soit fondamentalement mauvaise ou immorale. La seconde est à l'effet que la subordination est un phénomène social distinctif, qui n'est mauvais (...) ou immoral que de manière dérivée. Je décrirai chaque point de vue et examinerai les implications de chacun pour certaines questions au cœur de l'ouvrage de Moreau. (shrink)

The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition patterns, (...) that people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning. (shrink)

Zero-shot learning is dedicated to solving the classification problem of unseen categories, while generalized zero-shot learning aims to classify the samples selected from both seen classes and unseen classes, in which “seen” and “unseen” classes indicate whether they can be used in the training process, and if so, they indicate seen classes, and vice versa. Nowadays, with the promotion of deep learning technology, the performance of zero-shot learning has been greatly improved. Generalized zero-shot learning is a challenging topic that has (...) promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Although the zero-shot learning task has made gratifying progress, there is still a strong deviation between seen classes and unseen classes in the existing methods. Recent methods focus on learning a unified semantic-aligned visual representation to transfer knowledge between two domains, while ignoring the intrinsic characteristics of visual features which are discriminative enough to be classified by itself. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel model that uses the discriminative information of visual features to optimize the generative module, in which the generative module is a dual generation network framework composed of conditional VAE and improved WGAN. Specifically, the model uses the discrimination information of visual features, according to the relevant semantic embedding, synthesizes the visual features of unseen categories by using the learned generator, and then trains the final softmax classifier by using the generated visual features, thus realizing the recognition of unseen categories. In addition, this paper also analyzes the effect of the additional classifiers with different structures on the transmission of discriminative information. We have conducted a lot of experiments on six commonly used benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for both traditional as well as generalized zero-shot learning. (shrink)

For several decades, the international community has criticized Turkey for failing to uphold the human rights and freedoms of its citizens and for not realizing the principles of non-discrimination and equality within its borders. As Turkey’s European Union candidacy proceeds, religious groups such as the Alevis claim to face discrimination and violations of their human rights and freedoms by the Turkish state. The Justice and Development Party debated the Alevis’ problems and structured the Alevi Initiative, which conducted relevant (...) workshops and discussions. Alevi arguments regarding their places of worship and the state’s religious education policy were identified as their main challenges. Alevis argued that the state’s policies on religious education and places of worship discriminated against them and violated their human rights. Through several human rights law cases before domestic and international tribunals, Alevis requested fulfillment, protection, and assurance of their human rights and freedoms. Several court decisions agreed that Alevis’ human rights and freedoms were being violated. However, the challenges and demands of Alevis still persist, as they contend that they have not succeeded in gaining the human rights and freedoms as required in contemporary Turkey under the JDP government. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to develop a phenomenological understanding of discrimination from the perspective of the discriminator. Since early existential phenomenology, the phenomenon of discrimination has received a great deal of attention. While much of this work has focused on the experience of the discriminatee, recent scholarship has begun to reflect on the intentional structures on the side of the discriminator. In a contribution to this trend, I argue that our sense of what is (ab)normal plays (...) a constitutively significant role in the reiteration and reinforcement of harmful discriminatory practices. More specifically, I argue that Husserl's distinction between two forms of normality, namely, concordance-normality [Einstimmigkeit] and optimal-normality [Optimalität], is an important tool for illuminating otherwise overlooked aspects of the discriminator's experience. I achieve this by demonstrating how these two notions of normality play distinct constitutive roles when comparing deliberate acts of discrimination committed with malintent, compared with more primordial, habitual, and prereflective expectations which are already discriminatory in nucleo. I argue that at the heart of discriminatory practices there is a naïve, normalizing attempt to stabilize concordance at the expense of critical self-reflection, normative revisions, and enriched horizons of expectation. In doing so, this paper provides a novel and important contribution to philosophical discussions surrounding discrimination. (shrink)

The current approaches to equality law in South Africa and Canada place these jurisdictions at the forefront of serious and comprehensive judicial at tempts to give effect to substantive equality. These attempts to overcome formalism are processes, judicially acknowledged as such, and as yet far from complete. At the conceptual center of the development of substantive equality is the legal realization of human dignity: not an abstract, individualistic notion, but a concept about the relation between the individual and state, and (...) individual and group, which is circumscribed by concern, respect and consideration.But substantive equality is not possible only through the case law. The current issues surrounding intersectional discrimination and the contextual appreciation of a claimant’s circumstances are urgent reminders that the methods and remedies afforded by the structure of litigation of equality rights claims simply cannot accommodate many instances which call for relief. The fact that these inadequacies of court enforced claims are beginning to be laid bare by some of the problems being faced by the Courts in equality claims is perhaps not a failing of equality law and the concept of dignity, but its strength. The methodology of human rights litigation in countries like Canada and South Africa supports a dialogue between court and legislature. As substantive equality develops in these jurisdictions, the limits of judicial development will be challenged. That is ultimately to be welcomed, if the legislatures are responsive to the definition of human dignity and substantive equality in development judicially, and respond with efforts to support and promote these developments. (shrink)

Objective: Tangent Space Mapping using the geometric structure of the covariance matrices is an effective method to recognize multiclass motor imagery. Compared with the traditional CSP method, the Riemann geometric method based on TSM takes into account the nonlinear information contained in the covariance matrix, and can extract more abundant and effective features. Moreover, the method is an unsupervised operation, which can reduce the time of feature extraction. However, EEG features induced by MI mental activities of different subjects are not (...) the same, so selection of subject-specific discriminative EEG frequency components play a vital role in the recognition of multiclass MI. In order to solve the problem, a discriminative and multi-scale filter bank tangent space mapping algorithm is proposed in this article to design the subject-specific Filter Bank so as to effectively recognize multiclass MI tasks. Methods: On the 4-class BCI competition IV-2a dataset, first, a non-parametric method of multivariate analysis of variance based on the sum of squared distances is used to select discriminative frequency bands for a subject; next, a multi-scale FB is generated according to the range of these frequency bands, and then decompose multi-channel EEG of the subject into multiple sub-bands combined with several time windows. Then TSM algorithm is used to estimate Riemannian tangent space features in each sub-band and finally a liner Support Vector Machines is used for classification. Main Results: The analysis results show that the proposed discriminative FB enhances the multi-scale TSM algorithm, improves the classification accuracy and reduces the execution time during training and testing. On the 4-class BCI competition IV-2a dataset, the average session to session classification accuracy of nine subjects reached 77.33 ± 12.3%. When the training time and the test time are similar, the average classification accuracy is 2.56% higher than the latest TSM method based on multi-scale filter bank analysis technology. When the classification accuracy is similar, the training speed is increased by more than three times, and the test speed is increased two times more. Compared with Supervised Fisher Geodesic Minimum Distance to the Mean, another new variant based on Riemann geometry classifier, the average accuracy is 3.36% higher, we also compared with the latest Deep Learning method, and the average accuracy of 10-fold cross validation improved by 2.58%. Conclusion: Research shows that the proposed DMFBTSM algorithm can improve the classification accuracy of MI tasks. Significance: Compared with the MFBTSM algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this article is expected to select frequency bands with good separability for specific subject to improve the classification accuracy of multiclass MI tasks and reduce the feature dimension to reduce training time and testing time. (shrink)

Evaluative neutralization implies rephrasing items such that it is less clear to the respondent what would be a desirable response in the given population. The current research introduces evaluatively neutralized scales measuring the FFM model and compares them with standard counterparts. Study 1 reveals that evaluatively neutralized scales are less influenced by social desirability. Study 2 estimates higher-order factor models for neutralized vs. standard five-factor scales. In contrast to standard inventories, there was little support for higher-order factors for neutralized scales. (...) Study 3 demonstrates the convergent and discriminant validity for the neutralized scales, e.g. by less inflated correlations to external measures. It is argued that evaluatively neutralized inventories help researchers come to grips with social desirability in personality measurement, and are particularly useful when the factor structure is central to the research question and there is a focus on discriminant validity. (shrink)

The concepts of molecular structure and molecular shape are ubiquitous in the chemical literature, where they are often taken as synonyms, with unavoidable drawbacks in chemistry teaching. A third concept, molecular topology, is less frequent but it is a reference term in molecular research domains such as Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationships. The present paper proposes an epistemological analysis of these three notions, aimed at clarifying the nature of their relationship, as well as the contiguities and differences between them. At first, we (...) discuss the various acceptations of the terms molecular structure and molecular shape. Then, we examine some crucial milestones in the history of these concepts and we analyse the relationship between structure, shape and topology from an epistemological viewpoint. We point out the distinguishing features of each concept and we show that their semantic openness, that may be fruitful in a specialized context, turns into a source of incoherence and inaccuracy in the teaching context, fostered by the misleading use of these terms made by textbooks. Eventually, we propose a criterion fit to discriminate between the conceptual domains of molecular shape, molecular structure and molecular topology. (shrink)

It has become commonplace in the theory of concepts to distinguish between questions about the structure and questions about the ontology of concepts. Structural questions concern the way concepts are composed of, or otherwise related to, other concepts (or non-conceptual constituents), while ontological questions concern the metaphysical nature of concepts: how concepts exist (if they exist); what kind of entities they are. A tacit assumption in discussions about the structure and ontology of concepts seems to be that structural (...) and ontological questions can be treated more or less independently of each other. Correspondingly, it might be assumed that one can rather arbitrarily combine structural analyses of concepts with any hypothesis about their ontological make-up. In this paper, we would like to question this assumption with regard to a particular recent development in the structural analysis of concepts, the so-called frame theory. As a matter of fact, most frame theorists adopt a subjectivist theory of concepts. Yet, subjectivism attracts philosophical criticisms, which originate mainly in the writings of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. While Wittgenstein appreciated the cognitive dimension of concepts, he came to reject the subjectivist’s causal analysis of mental explanation and their ensuing reification of concepts as causally operative mental particulars. Instead, Wittgenstein suggested that concepts are socially imparted norms of classification and inference – i. e., abstractions from collective word-usages and other practices associated with categorizing and higher-order thinking, which may serve as instructions for individual agents on how to discriminate and interact with things of different kinds. Applying the Wittgensteinian critique of subjectivism to the frame analysis, the we not only find that the frame approach quite nicely dovetails with what the pragmatist has to say about concepts and categorization, insofar as frames seem particularly well-suited to depict the defeasible and context-dependent default character of our usual criteria for semantical understanding. Indeed, pragmatism, with its emphasis on the holistic, indeterminate and normative nature of our conceptual activities, seems able to explain why concepts are frames. This shows that there exist at least some interconnections between structural and ontological analyses, which must not be ignored, especially in interdisciplinary investigations on concepts. Even if frame theory is not strictly incompatible with a subjectivist ontology, it does license an abductive inference to a pragmatist ontology of concepts, as frames precisely formalize the insights into our actual conceptual practice that led Wittgenstein to develop his pragmatist view. (shrink)

This paper examines caregiving for sick older family members in the context of socio‐economic transformations in rural China, combining empirical investigation with normative inquiry. The empirical part of this paper is based on a case study, taken from fieldwork in a rural Chinese hospital, of a son who took care of his hospitalized mother. This empirical study highlighted family members’ weiqu (sense of unfairness)—a mental status from experiencing mistreatment and oppression in family care, yet with constrained power to explicitly protest (...) or make care‐related choices. Underpinning people’s weiqu and constrained choice, as informed by the conception of structural injustice, is the impact of unjust social structures, organized by unfavourable norms, discriminatory social policies and institutions targeting rural populations. By restraining individual choices and capacities in supporting health care for aging populations, these unjust structures create additional difficulties for and discriminations against rural families and their older members. Some policy recommendations are proposed to mitigate structural injustice so as to empower families and promote care for older people in rural settings. (shrink)

With increasing attention on the role of parenting stress on family functioning and children’s development, one area that has been neglected is how such relations differ across cultures. Although sometimes viewed as homogeneous, Asian countries often have markedly different belief systems. Cross-cultural studies require instruments that have been validated in different socio-cultural contexts. The widely used parenting stress index-short form has been used in several locations. However, results regarding its factorial structure have been mixed. Furthermore, there are only a few (...) cross-cultural comparison studies. This study examined the factorial structure of an abridged version of the PSI-SF with data from Hong Kong and Thailand. The results from confirmatory factor analyses indicated that, in both cultures, a three-factorial structure provides the best model fit. Furthermore, we found evidence for partial metric invariance, suggesting that the test scores can be compared directly. Tests for convergent and discriminant validity revealed that the three factors were correlated with parent general distress, authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting behaviors, in both cultures. These findings suggest that the abridged PSI-SF can provide a meaningful comparison of parenting stress between Hong Kong and Thailand. (shrink)