Session: Reconsidering Standard Concepts: Insight, Conscientious Objection, and Race
Solving the racial health disparities problem
Thursday, October 12, 2023
4:00 PM – 5:15 PM ET
Location: Chasseur (Third Floor)
Previous work in bioethics on how best to solve the racial health disparities (RHD) problem has presupposed race to be a non-biological and real social construct, and racism to be an inherently structural and hierarchical phenomenon that’s always the chief determinant of RHDs. However, in this paper, we aim to show that these received views on race and racism are deeply mistaken if one’s aim is to solve the RHD problem. In contrast, we will argue that the theories of race and racism that best enable us to solve the RHD problem is a pluralist race theory (PRT) and a virtue-based theory of racism (VTR). Through case studies, we motivate the problem by showing how standard views of race and racism are inadequate to solve the RHD problem. Next, we argue that PRT and VTR are the most relevantly accurate, sufficiently comprehensive, and sufficiently practical theories of race and racism for the task at hand. Finally, we return to the motivating case studies to show how PRT and VTR enable us to adequately address the racial health disparities that traditional approaches to race and racism failed to adequately address.
Quayshawn Spencer, Ph.D., Philosophy; M.S., Biology – Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania