Gradated Racism: Between “Ends in Themselves” and “Mere Means”

In this talk, I reveal a pervasive though often unobtrusive form of racism which merits its own discussion. Gradated racism, as I call it, can co-exist with sophisticated moral views. To elucidate this, I make use of Kant's race and moral theories, considered as equally important. I borrow his dichotomy of "end in itself" and "mere means" and re-conceptualize it. I argue that it helps us to analyze the normative nature of gradated racism properly. I then argue for reading the terms of the dichotomy as correlational with one another and as two termini of an "open interval continuum". Those who are racialized against in this way, whom I call, taking inspiration from Charles Mills, "sub-persons", are treated along that continuum: they are useful to the "superior" race in specific ways, are never respected unconditionally, nor seen as non-persons.

Reza Mosayebi
https://www.pe.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophie/i/politik_recht/team/mitarbeiter/mosayebi.html.en
Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research
Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)

About the Speaker:

Reza Mosayebi is a lecturer and senior academic counselor at the Institute for Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. His research focuses on philosophy of law, politics and morals; Kantian philosophy and critical race philosophy. He is the author of “Das Minimum der reinen praktischen Vernunft” [“The Minimum of Pure Practical Reason”] (2013), editor of “Kant und Menschenrechte” [“Kant and Human Rights”] (2018) and co-editor of the first comprehensive commentary of “John Rawls: ‘Das Recht der Völker’” [“John Rawls: ‘The Law of Peoples”’] (2019). One of his most recent essays is “Kant’s Metaphysics of Race, its Distinctiveness, and its Normativity”, which was published in the Journal of Social Philosophy (2025).

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided at the event. Sometimes we look for each other after the talk for further discussion about the topic. Unfortunately this event will not be streamed online.

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai