The Ethics of Stigma

ongoing

Stigma is a familiar feature of human life – and, often, a clearly objectionable one. Opposition to stigmas that reinforce oppressive norms (for example, racist, sexist, or ableist norms) should be amongst the few uncontroversial starting points for a liberal egalitarian politics. But intuitions are significantly more divided in other cases: is it sometimes permissible to stigmatize unjust behaviour (e.g., employers who pay poverty wages) or to use stigma to help secure important social goods (e.g., a stigma against smoking that promotes public health)? My project will develop an account of the moral risks of stigma that helps to answer these questions. Stigma is undertheorized in philosophy. The literature that does presently exist on the topic largely focuses on the objection that stigmatizers treat others as their inferior – and it typically understands stigma in terms of this complaint. Stigma is theorized as a way of (objectionably) treating someone as less than one’s equal. This project aims to fill the large gaps left by the narrow focus of the current literature. In a word, not all stigmas are wrong to the same degree – and the reasons why they are wrong can vary from context to context. We cannot make progress with the large disagreements that exist about the morality of stigma if we theorize stigma in terms of a single kind of wrong. Instead, we need a broader and disaggregative account of its moral risks. This is what my project will offer. This project builds on my recently published work which has started to correct the lack of attention given to stigma within philosophy – thus demonstrating the substantial potential for the growth of this research programme. Stigma is an issue of vast public concern, as well as the subject of large literatures in the social sciences and psychology. The findings of this project will thus be of great interest to an interdisciplinary and general audience, in addition to a philosophical one.