Euan Allison
University College London
How are stigmatized subjects wronged in virtue of failures to treat them as individuals?
The Dignity View claims that stigma, because of its connection to stereotypes, violates an instance of the general requirement to respect our dignity as autonomous beings. The Self-Presentation View claims that stigma inhibits the functioning of our capacity to construct a public persona. This is because stigma wrests away from us a significant amount of control over the terms in which we are understood by others. The Self-Presentation View thus centres the harms to agential capacities which stigma threatens. It does not need to assume, like the Dignity View, that autonomy confers a special moral status on us. It is simply bad for us when people fail to treat us as individuals.
The Dignity View is insufficient as an interpretation of the wrong that stigma instantiates in virtue of failures to treat us as individuals. The distinctive wrong of stigma cannot be explained in terms of the mere repetition of failures to respect the dignity of the stigmatized person (on the part of individual members of her community). This wrong, unlike the wrongs involved in non-stigmatic shaming practices, is distinctively structural. To explain this, we need the Self-Presentation View.
I use this account to address a worry. The concern with being treated as an individual is not tethered to a concern with being recognized in either positively or negatively valanced terms – only with being recognized as an individual. There is no reason to assume that treating as superior poses less risk to such recognition than treating as inferior. Yet common-sense baulks at this result. The Dignity View has no good reply. But the Self-Presentation View can deflate the worry. Some cases of stigma and some cases of treating as superior are morally symmetrical – but we can provide a nuanced account of the circumstances in which either phenomenon is detrimental to our capacity to self-present.
Chair: Damiano Ranzenigo
Time: September 8th, 16:00-16:30
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 