Discrimination and the Philosophy of Science

General Note: Everything on syllabus is subject to change. The official readings for each class will be determined by Tuesday Evening at 20:00 the week before the relevant class. 

Introduction

[1]

 16 Oct

No Required reading

supplemental:

Ted Chiang: Liking What you See: A Documentary 

Bill D'Alessandro: Is it bad to prefer attractive partners?

Andrew Altman: Discrimination

Martha Nussbaum: Objectification

SOCIAL STRUCTURAL EXPLANATION

[2]  

23 Oct

Fred Pincus: From Individual to Structural Discrimination

Sally Haslanger: What is a (social) structural explanation?

Lauren Ross: What is social structural explanation?: a causal account 

Supplemental:

Doug Massey (1998): America's Apartheid and the urban underclass

Atoosa Kasirzadeh: Algorithmic fairness and structural injustice: Insights from feminist political philosophy

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

 [3] 

 30 Oct 

Michael Root: How we divide the world

Ron Mallon: Passing, traveling, and reality: Social constructivism and the metaphysics of race

Supplemental:

Ian Hacking: The Social Construction of What? (Chapter 1)

Ron Mallon: Naturalistic Approaches to social construction

Sally Haslanger: Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?

Further Reading:

Ian Hacking: Madness: Biological or Constructed

Quayshawn Spencer: A radical solution to the race problem

Bonus:
Occam's Razor: A This American Life segment relevant to the experiential account of race

[4]  

6 Nov

Kareem Khalifa and Richard Lauer: Do the social sciences vindicate race's reality? 

Maya Sen and Omar Wasow: Race as a bundle of sticks 

Supplemental: 

Ron Mallon and Dan Kelly: Making race out of nothing: psychologically constrained social roles

Bonus: 

Ned Block: Race, genes and IQ

THE CAUSAL STATUS OF RACE

[5] 

 13 Nov

Issa Kohler-Hausmann: Eddie Murphy and the dangers of counterfactual causal thinking

[6]  

20 Nov

Judea Pearl: Direct and indirect effects (Read sections 1 and 2 and as much as you can of the rest)

Lily Hu: Direct effects 

Naftali Weinberger: Signal Manipulation and the causal analysis of racial discrimination 

Supplemental: 

Bertrand and Mullainathan: ARE EMILY AND GREG MORE EMPLOYABLE THAN LAKISHA AND JAMAL?

Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Robin Dembroff: Supreme Confusion About Causality at the Supreme Court

Dembroff, Kohler-Hausmann, and Sugarman: What Taylor Swift and Beyonce Teach us About Sex and Causes

Idealization

[7]  

27 Nov

Robert Sugden: Credible worlds: the status of theoretical models in economics

Zeynep Pamuk: Rationalizing Discrimination (access to course members only)

Supplemental:

Doug Massey (1998): America's Apartheid and the urban underclass

Anna Alexandrova and Robert Northcott: It's just a feeling: Why economic models do not explain

EMPIRICAL METHODS

 [8] 

 4 Dec

Barocas et al.: Fair ML Book "Causality"

Liam Bright, Dan Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson: Causally interpreting intersectionality theory

Supplemental: 

[9]  

11 Dec

Neil and Chris Winship: Methodological challenges and opportunities in testing for racial discrimination in policing 

Naftali Weinberger: The insufficiency of statistics for testing discrimination by police

Supplemental: 

Mummolo and Dean Knox: Toward a general causal framework for the study of racial bias in policing 

Mummolo, Will Lowe, and Dean Knox: Administrative Record Mask Racially Biased Policing

Sprenger and Weinberger: Simpson's Paradox

Ross et al: Resolution of apparent paradoxes in the race-specific frequency of use-of-force by police

[10]  

18 Dec [Cancelled due to illness]

Barocas and Selbst: Big data's disparate impact

Supplemental: 

DISCRIMINATION IN THE LAW

[11]  

8 Jan

Barocas and Selbst: Big data's disparate impact

Supplemental:

Kate Crawford: Anatomy of AI (video)

[12] 

15 Jan

Noah Zatz: Disparate impact and the unity of equality law

Supplemental: 

Greiner and Rubin: Causal effects of perceived immutable characteristics 

[13]  

22 Jan

Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Robin Dembroff: Supreme Confusion About Causality at the Supreme Court (pp. 57-68)

Ben Eidelson: Dimensional disparate treatment (pp. 785-819)

Supplemental: 

Deborah Hellman: Defining disparate treatment

Berman and Krishnamurthi: Bostock was Bogus: Textualism, Pluralism, and Title VII

ALGORITHMIC FAIRNESS

[14] 

 29 Jan

Grimmelmann and Westreich: "Incomprehensible Discrimination"

Katie Creel and Deborah Hellman: The Algorithmic Leviathan: Arbitrariness, Fairness, and Opportunity in Algorithmic Decision-Making Systems

Supplemental:
Barocas et al.: "Testing discrimination in practice" 

Prince and Schwarcz: Proxy Discrimination in the age of artificial intelligence and big data 

Kasper Lippert-Rasumussen: "We are all different": Statistical discrimination and the right to be treated as an individual"

[15]

5 Feb