Racism without Prejudice

The Differences Between Moral and Epistemic Wrong

The death of George Floyd, and other behavior that indicates black lives do not matter enough to our police force, is partly caused by an assumption that is obviously racist, but is arguably not prejudiced. i.e. that any given young black or Hispanic man has a significantly higher chance of being a dangerous criminal than his white counterpart. I don’t believe this assumption is true, for reasons I will state below. But even if it were true, it would not morally justify the behavior that arises from that assumption. Some say that a hard look at the statistics epistemically justifies this assumption to some degree. A common response to this assertion is more outrage, mixed with a demand to suppress these statistics. The inadequacy of this response produces a moral stalemate which satisfies no one. I believe that this stalemate can be broken by recognizing that racism and prejudice, although closely related concepts, are importantly different when considering this issue. Prejudice is an epistemic wrong — a sin against knowledge — because it produces, and is produced by, ignorance and confusion. Racism is a moral wrong, because it produces injustice and suffering.

Throughout history, racism and prejudice have usually gone hand in hand. Hitler’s muddled transplantation of the Code of Manu which erroneously labeled Germans as “Aryans”, arguments that Africans are more closely related to lower primates, or are “the sons of Ham” described in the Bible — these and…