Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies
Danielle Allen and Rohini Somanathan
Abstract
This book seeks to understand the relations among social diversity, justice, and democracy and to clarify how social diversity should inform our thinking about both justice and democracy. Among kinds of social diversity discussed in this volume, race has special prominence. Contemporary political philosophy has populated the landscape of scholarship with a handful of alternative conceptions of justice. This volume launches from an embrace of an ideal of justice that rests on the principle of nondomination. The ideal of nondomination is also closely linked to a concept of dignity. These ideals— ... More
This book seeks to understand the relations among social diversity, justice, and democracy and to clarify how social diversity should inform our thinking about both justice and democracy. Among kinds of social diversity discussed in this volume, race has special prominence. Contemporary political philosophy has populated the landscape of scholarship with a handful of alternative conceptions of justice. This volume launches from an embrace of an ideal of justice that rests on the principle of nondomination. The ideal of nondomination is also closely linked to a concept of dignity. These ideals—nondomination and dignity—provide the normative foundation for this volume’s work. The book then links a normative framework to the empirical and quantitative analyses of positive social science—exploring stereotypes, implicit bias, the limitations of representation understood via statistical mirroring, and affirmative action policies. The chapters deliver key conceptual shifts—in the ideas of justice, statistical mirroring, identity, and the meaning of social groups—that amount to a paradigm change for thinking about the relations among diversity, justice, and democracy.
Keywords:
diversity,
justice,
democracy,
race,
nondomination,
dignity,
statistical mirroring,
identity,
social groups,
implicit bias
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226681191 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2021 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226681368.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Danielle Allen, editor
Harvard University
Rohini Somanathan, editor
Delhi School of Economics
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