ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways in which virtues are relevant to discrimination's nature, morality, and forms, concentrating on racial discrimination as the most notorious, discussed, and illustrative type. In the last several decades, virtue ethics (or virtues-based moral theories) have been recognized as a third broad option beyond Kantian/contractualist and consequentialist approaches to moral theory. The literature on discrimination, however, has thus far neither caught up with nor reflected this alternative approach. Lippert-Rasmussen influentially divides accounts of wrongful discrimination into those that ground its immorality in harms, those that ground its immorality in various mental states, and those that ground its immorality in the 'objective meaning' of discriminatory actions. A virtues-based approach to discrimination's immorality can accommodate the importance of both harms and mental states. Hellman thinks that invidious discrimination wrongs victims by demeaning them, as Ely earlier identified its psychological origin in prejudice as the key to immoral discrimination.
