This coming term I will be teaching a new course for the general public on some overlapping issues relating to justice that I thought would work well together.
The online course Equality of Opportunity and the Ethics of Discrimination covers some lingering issues of controversy about how society should respond to unequal opportunity. There is even disagreement about what 'equality of opportunity' actually means, and whether it is really an important goal.
You can read more about the course on the webpage.
However, I thought I would share some useful background materials for those who might want to explore further, either in advance of taking the course or if you miss the course and want to investigate the topic.
Online lectures
A good place to start with political philosophy is Michael
Sandel’s Justice Course. Several lectures are directly relevant to this course topic, such as:
Lecture 14: A
Deal Is A Deal (You
Tube direct link) and Lecture 15:
What’s A Fair Start? – Harvard Justice (You Tube link).
Tommie Shelby "Justice and Race" Blavatnik School of Government (2020)
Charles W. Mills "Theorizing Racial Justice" Tanner Lecture on Human Values (2020), or a video of his talk "Racial Equality" UCT (2014)
More advanced are Tim Scanlon's Uehiro Lectures, Oxford (2013). The third is “When Does Equality Matter?
(lecture 3 – equality of opportunity)” but lectures one
and two are useful and relevant as well.
Janet Radcliffe Richards' Uehiro Lectures, Oxford (2012) are also relevant. Again, the third is particularly relevant, but references arguments introduced in the previous two.
“When Does Equality Matter? (lecture 3 – equality of opportunity)” but lectures one and two are useful and relevant as well.
Scanlon builds on the work of his teacher John Rawls, and there are lots of lectures and podcasts about the work of Rawls, such as this Bryan Magee
Interview with Ronald Dworkin “Rawls vs Nozick” (1978).
For podcasts, there is the
Podcasts
The BBC Reith Lecture series by Kwame Anthony Appiah (2016) is worth a listen.
“Discrimination is Expensive”
The Pie (2021)
Policy Matters “Discrimination
in the labour market and what policymakers can do about it” University
of Bath (2021)
Interview with Tarun Khaitan "Indirect Discrimination" Philosophy 247
"Episode 9 - Understanding indirect discrimination" Mills & Reeve - Employment law Podcast (2017)
The Libertarian
Podcast “Anti-Discrimination
Laws Vs. Freedom of Association” Hoover Institution (2021)
Course
books
The course does not have a single textbook, and those on the course will be provided with selected readings from several sources.
However, if
you wanted to purchase a book for use alongside the course then you could go
for one of the following, depending which of the three related topics you are
particularly interested in:
- Equality of opportunity,
in which case you could buy Andrew Mason’s book “Levelling the playing
field”
- Discrimination, in which
case you could buy Deborah Hellman’s “When is discrimination wrong?”
- Affirmative action, in
which case you could get either Cahn’s “The Affirmative Action Debate” or
Cohen and Sterba’s “Affirmative Action and Racial Preferences: A Debate
(Point/Counterpoint)” or Elizabeth Anderson's "The Imperative of Integration" (2011)
Meritocracy
The course does not focus on the issue of meritocracy, but it is certainly a relevant approach, and one that has been much discussed in recent times.
Sandel, mentioned above, has recently published a book The Tyranny of Merit and.
A few other recent books are available free to download:
Happy reading, watching and listening and I hope to see you on the course!
