A tension appears in contemporary social-scientific studies of the causal effects of race. Race is understood by most scholars today as a deeply social phenomenon—a category that not only explains distinctive patterns of social inequality but is defined by these myriad social differences. But this fact about race, on the one hand, sits uneasily with a core tenet of the concept of cause, on the other. On the leading philosophical and scientific-methodological accounts of causation, a cause is something that makes a difference in conditions that are, broadly speaking, “otherwise equal.” But if race marks social difference, then what is it for two persons or groups that are differently racialized to be “otherwise equal” in the sense required by good causal inquiry into the effects of race? Those different in racial status are defined by a host of social differences. And yet the background conditions that must be installed for causal inquiry to get off the ground require leveling those inequalities. It would thus appear that the very differences that define racial statuses both form the basis of causal inquiry about race and also nullify the conditions of its possibility. The aim of this talk is to draw out this internal tension and to see how it might be resolved—without giving up on the scientific project of causal inquiry about race.

About the Speaker

Lily Hu is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Her current projects broadly concern causal theorizing about the social world, with a particular focus on causal inference methods in the social sciences, how these various statistical frameworks treat and measure the “causal effect” of social categories such as race, and ultimately, how such methods are seen to back normative claims about racial discrimination and inequalities broadly. Previously, she worked on topics in machine learning theory and algorithmic fairness. She is currently writing a book on race, causation, and social-scientific methodology.