Wrongful discrimination as biased discrimination

People working on the ethics of discrimination have struggled with accounting for a kind of moral wrongdoing that is thought to be present in all instances of wrongful discrimination. So far, any moral wrong claimed to be characteristic of wrongful discrimination in this way has failed to generalize to all cases of wrongful discrimination, moving many to abandon the idea that wrongful discrimination is normatively distinct at all. Motivated by this situation, we propose to abandon the assumption that the common moral wrong of wrongful discrimination must be a first-order moral wrong. Instead, we argue that the common wrong of discrimination is a normative mistake in a more general sense, namely the flaw of being biased. Drawing on Thomas Kelly’s (2022) recent work on bias, we show that this account provides a unified and plausible answer to the question of what makes wrongful discrimination characteristically morally wrong, while being able to accommodate the plurality of moral considerations at play in wrongful discrimination.