Is it tautological to call an action “wrongful discrimination?” Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term “discrimination” is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that “discrimination” usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. According to such a view, the negative evaluation is only pragmatically, not lexically conveyed. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of “discriminatory” is a thing of the past.

Authors:

Pascale Willemsen: University of Zurich; Simone Sommer Degn: Aalborg University; Jan García Olier: University of Zurich; Kevin Reuter: University of Zurich