Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

We often reason about what our lives would have been like if we had belonged to different social groups: “If I had been African-American, being pulled over by police would have been more frightening,” or “If I had not been a woman, I would have had an easier time in that meeting.” This talk makes sense of such countersocial counterfactuals, conditionals whose antecedents run contrary to social facts. Based on the non-trivial truth of countersocials, I suggest that social categories are literally causal: they are causes, effects, and intermediaries.