KCL MAP reading group will be meeting 13:00 – 14:00 next Wednesday, 9th October, in Activity room E, KCLSU (Bush House, South East Wing). The reading is ‘Reparations and Racial Inequality’, by Derrick Darby, University of Kansas (see file/abstract below). The reading group is open to all — staff, students, PGTs and PGRs, within and external to the department. All are welcome to attend!
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Abstract: A recent development in philosophical scholarship on reparations for black chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation is reliance upon social science in normative arguments for reparations. Although there are certainly positive things to be said in favor of an empirically informed normative argument for black reparations, given the depth of empirical disagreement about the causes of persistent racial inequalities, and the ethos of ‘post-racial’ America, the strongest normative argument for reparations may be one that goes through irrespective of how we ultimately explain the causes of racial inequalities. By illuminating the interplay between normative political philosophy and social scientific explanations of racial inequality in the prevailing corrective justice argument for black reparations, I shall explain why an alternative normative argument, which is not tethered to a particular empirical explanation of racial inequality, may be more appealing.