In today’s post, Lydia Tsiakiri, Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, explores whether judgments of wrongful discrimination are sensitive to personal responsibility, drawing on her research into responsibility, discrimination, healthcare, and public policy.
Imagine two patients who both need a lung transplant. One developed severe lung disease after decades of smoking. The other has the same condition because of a rare genetic mutation. If the hospital gives priority to the second patient, is that an instance of wrongful discrimination?
Most of us agree that wrongful discrimination is morally objectionable. Yet cases like this raise a more difficult question. Does it matter whether the characteristic on which people are treated differently is something they are responsible for? If two individuals are treated differently because one is responsible for the relevant characteristic and the other is not, are we less likely to regard that differential treatment as wrongfully discriminatory?
These questions lie at the intersection of two philosophical debates that have largely developed independently. On the one hand, philosophers have extensively debated whether personal responsibility should influence the distribution of benefits and burdens, particularly in healthcare and other public policy contexts. On the other, a substantial literature has examined what makes discrimination wrongful. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between these discussions. My recent paper asks whether ordinary judgments of wrongful discrimination are sensitive to personal responsibility for the targeted feature.
To investigate this question, I conducted a preregistered survey experiment with more than 4,000 participants from the United Kingdom and Denmark. Participants evaluated a series of healthcare and welfare scenarios involving differential treatment. Across the scenarios, the key manipulation was whether the individual affected by the decision was portrayed as responsible for the characteristic that triggered the differential treatment.
Across both countries and policy domains, participants were consistently less likely to judge differential treatment as wrongfully discriminatory when the individual was described as responsible for the targeted characteristic. Conversely, when responsibility was absent, the same decisions were judged as (more) wrongfully discriminatory. These patterns appeared across healthcare and welfare scenarios, suggesting that the relationship between personal responsibility and wrongful discrimination is not confined to a single policy context.
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| Lydia Tsiakiri |
Imagine two patients who both need a lung transplant. One developed severe lung disease after decades of smoking. The other has the same condition because of a rare genetic mutation. If the hospital gives priority to the second patient, is that an instance of wrongful discrimination?
Most of us agree that wrongful discrimination is morally objectionable. Yet cases like this raise a more difficult question. Does it matter whether the characteristic on which people are treated differently is something they are responsible for? If two individuals are treated differently because one is responsible for the relevant characteristic and the other is not, are we less likely to regard that differential treatment as wrongfully discriminatory?
These questions lie at the intersection of two philosophical debates that have largely developed independently. On the one hand, philosophers have extensively debated whether personal responsibility should influence the distribution of benefits and burdens, particularly in healthcare and other public policy contexts. On the other, a substantial literature has examined what makes discrimination wrongful. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between these discussions. My recent paper asks whether ordinary judgments of wrongful discrimination are sensitive to personal responsibility for the targeted feature.
To investigate this question, I conducted a preregistered survey experiment with more than 4,000 participants from the United Kingdom and Denmark. Participants evaluated a series of healthcare and welfare scenarios involving differential treatment. Across the scenarios, the key manipulation was whether the individual affected by the decision was portrayed as responsible for the characteristic that triggered the differential treatment.
Across both countries and policy domains, participants were consistently less likely to judge differential treatment as wrongfully discriminatory when the individual was described as responsible for the targeted characteristic. Conversely, when responsibility was absent, the same decisions were judged as (more) wrongfully discriminatory. These patterns appeared across healthcare and welfare scenarios, suggesting that the relationship between personal responsibility and wrongful discrimination is not confined to a single policy context.
Yet, the size of this effect varied. British participants were slightly more willing than Danish participants to see responsibility-based exclusion as non-discriminatory, and healthcare seemed more resistant to responsibility-based reasoning than welfare, reflecting probably the special moral weight people attach to health.
The study also explored whether participants' own experiences influenced these judgments. For example, people who had themselves been regular smokers were somewhat less responsive to the experimental manipulation than non-smokers, and a similar pattern emerged among participants with recent experience of unemployment. However, even though personal experience did appear to shape the strength of the effect, responsibility continued to influence judgments across these groups.
Overall, the study was not designed to answer the normative question of whether personal responsibility should influence judgments of wrongful discrimination. Empirical evidence cannot resolve that question alone. Instead, it examined whether ordinary judgments of wrongful discrimination are responsibility-sensitive. Understanding these judgments does not determine what is morally justified, but it provides a clearer picture of how ordinary people conceptualise wrongful discrimination and offers a new empirical perspective on longstanding philosophical debates about responsibility and discrimination.
The study also explored whether participants' own experiences influenced these judgments. For example, people who had themselves been regular smokers were somewhat less responsive to the experimental manipulation than non-smokers, and a similar pattern emerged among participants with recent experience of unemployment. However, even though personal experience did appear to shape the strength of the effect, responsibility continued to influence judgments across these groups.
Overall, the study was not designed to answer the normative question of whether personal responsibility should influence judgments of wrongful discrimination. Empirical evidence cannot resolve that question alone. Instead, it examined whether ordinary judgments of wrongful discrimination are responsibility-sensitive. Understanding these judgments does not determine what is morally justified, but it provides a clearer picture of how ordinary people conceptualise wrongful discrimination and offers a new empirical perspective on longstanding philosophical debates about responsibility and discrimination.