ABSTRACT
Here we explore 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. Nowadays some draw on consequentialist accounts of moral justification such as utilitarianism to explain discrimination’s moral status in terms of its deleterious effects, while others turn to the Kantian or contractualist stress on respect, rationality, reasonableness, and equality for the same purpose (cf. Chapters 6–13). 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.
