Racial Justice Without Character: Business Ethics, Diversity Training, and Distributed Cognition

Abraham Singer ()
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Abraham Singer: Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago

Journal of Business Ethics, 2025, vol. 199, issue 4, No 3, 715-729

Abstract: Abstract This paper challenges the “characterological” theory of racial injustice. This theory, widely held in corporate efforts to address race, simultaneously endorses a “structural” account of racism while advocating deeply individualistic remedies: challenging systemic racism, on this view, requires directing our energies inward toward our most ingrained habits and self-conceptions. I begin by reconstructing the characterological theory and its appeal. I then argue that it rests on questionable, if not untenable, cognitive assumptions. Instead of seeing racism as carried forth by agents’ deeply internal characters, I argue that a structural account of racial domination is better served by understanding cognitive processes as externalized and conducted through our environments. Drawing on theories of the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, I offer an account of both structural racism’s persistence and individual racist actions, which is anchored in the environmental (and not characterological) manifestations of racial hierarchy. I conclude with the normative potential of business ethicists adopting the distributed cognition framework.

Keywords: Racial injustice; Extended mind and distributed cognition; Diversity training (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05827-4

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