What's Wrong with Stereotyping?

by Erin Beeghly

What's Wrong with Stereotyping? offers a refreshing and accessibly written philosophical take on the ethics of stereotyping. Stereotyping is woven into every aspect of human conversation, psychology, algorithmic systems, and culture. It relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. But when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype? This book tackles this deep and enduring puzzle. To solve it, Erin Beeghly delves into the relationship between stereotyping and another phenomenon, discrimination. Not only does stereotyping cause discriminatory treatment, she argues, stereotyping can itself be discriminatory. This insight-that to stereotype is to discriminate-enables a novel philosophical methodology, which builds towards a theory of wrongful stereotyping by analyzing the lived experiences of marginalized groups and existing theories of wrongful discrimination.

Core chapters evaluate important ethical the failure to treat persons as individuals, disrespect, harm, prejudice, threats to freedoms, and the failure to treat persons as equals. One finds that there is no "essence" of wrongful stereotyping, a single property or set of properties that all problematic cases share in common. Nor are the wrongs of stereotyping reducible to an elegant number, two or three. Instead, wrongful stereotyping is a messy normative kind characterized by clusters of wrong-making properties, including all the ones noted here (and perhaps more). Readers will come away with a radically pluralistic, open-ended theory of wrongful stereotyping that they can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their own lives and our contemporary world. Filled with thought-provoking examples and models for social change, this book emphasizes the messiness of moral reality and the importance of looking to the past in order to understand the ethical perils of stereotyping.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published June 9, 2025

About the author

Professor Beeghly received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2014, where she worked with Véronique Munoz-Dardé, R.Jay Wallace, and Victoria Plaut. Before that, she earned two BAs, one in History from UC Berkeley in 2004 and one in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University in 2006, her primary research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology.

Reviews

[Alex Madva · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in years. Rich and thought-provoking. Accessible to a wider audience, a fact I appreciate tremendously after my 10+ years teaching at a big state school with students from wide-ranging backgrounds. Tons of killer argumentative moves and theoretical innovations to pair with engaging real-world case studies drawn from a broad swath of human social experiences. Exhaustively researched and yet a seamless pleasure to read (despite how intense the subject matter can be). People will be reading and re-reading this book for a long time.

[Michael Plotkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

very scholarly and well researched. some unique examples of stereotyping that i did not know about, like certain risk factors for AIDS in heterosexual females circa the early 1980s. Am keeping a dictionary nearby so i can try to keep up.