RECENT GRANTS
RESEARCH GRANTS
Topic: Appearance Discrimination
Type: Academic Purposes Fund Awards
Starting date: October 2008
Funding institution: The Society of Legal Scholars
Should a person’s appearance affect their chances of employment, salary and promotion? Should discrimination on the basis of appearance be illegal? In the wake of the furore created by the ‘Sarkozettes’ in France and of Carla Bruni’s trip to Britain, such questions are timely. They are especially pressing once we consider that controversy over ‘appearance discrimination’, as Americans call it, is not limited to the consequences of being beautiful or ugly, but concerns our assumptions about what it is to look professional, intellectual, artistic and entrepreneurial as well. As religious and political ideals have implications for the way people dress and groom themselves, as can ethnic and racial ties, it looks as though appearance discrimination – or discrimination based on a person’s physique, grooming and dress - can reflect, and even reinforce, more familiar forms of discrimination. It seems natural, therefore, to suppose that some forms of appearance discrimination should be illegal. But, according to Professor Post, recent efforts to render appearance discrimination illegal are the reductio ad absurdum of American antidiscrimination law and illuminate its deficiencies. This project critically examines Post’s arguments, using internal critique as well as a comparison of American and European law. It shows that privacy is essential to protect workers from appearance discrimination, as well as from other forms of subordination and inequality; and argues that Americans have much to learn from European perspectives on privacy and equality in the workplace. Finally, it considers what role appearance discrimination legislation might play in the legal resolution of disputes over religious symbols in dress and grooming.
Topic: Accountability and Fair Representation: How should we Evaluate Different Forms of Proportional Representation?
Co-PI: Luc Bovens, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE
Type: Seed Funding
Starting date: June 2008
Funding institution: The London School of Economics and Political Science
Dissatisfaction with the British system, whose distribution of legislative seats and power consistently underrepresents, and even ignores, more than half of those who cast ballots in national elections, underpins the contemporary debate on electoral reform in Britain. However, it is a striking feature of this debate that while experts are nearly unanimous that First Past the Post (FPTP) must be modified or abandoned, there is little agreement on what form of electoral representation should replace it, or on the best way to understand democratic ideals of fair representation, in light of the particularities of British experience and needs. The aim of this project is to examine the formal and normative properties of the main alternatives to FPTP in the British context in order to see whether this might aid consensus amongst those pressing for electoral reform. How we understand the nature and justification of electoral representation, and its relationship to other democratic ends and values, is likely to affect our evaluation of the alternatives to FPTP. Likewise, the importance we attach to the formal properties of electoral systems – their flexibility, predictability, stability and resilience, for instance – can matter a great deal to the way we hink about the merits of plurality rather than proportional forms of representation, as well as the merits of different forms of each. Hence this project combines formal and normative analysis in order to evaluate the main alternatives
to FPTP in the British context.
CONFERENCE ORGANISATION GRANTS
Conference: Conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property
Type: Conference Grant
Sponsor: The Aristotelian Society
Date: October 2008
Conference: Conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property
Type: Conference Grant
Sponsor: The Society for Applied Philosophy
Date: September 2008
Conference: Conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property
Type: Major Conference Grant
Sponsor: The Mind Association
Date: July 2008