The Applied Ethics Institute at Utica University - Ryan Muldoon

October 26, 2017

Professor Ryan Muldoon

"The Paradox of Diversity"

   

At 6:00 pm on Thursday, October 26, 2017, Professor Ryan Muldoon gave a public lecture titled "The Paradox of Diversity". The talk was hosted in Carbone  Auditorium on Utica College's campus at 1600 Burrstone Rd., Utica, NY.

Professor Muldoon argued that the empirical literature on diversity in groups points in two opposite directions. First, diversity makes us notably better off and improves group performance in a number of contexts. Second, we don't like being in diverse groups, and we think we do worse in them. He suggested that the core tension is that part of what makes diversity good for us is that friction that it creates. We have an apparent trade-off between social welfare and individual well-being. He argues that this can be mitigated by greater investment in Millian autonomy, but that we still face the issue of how we can make people pay that upfront cost for something they don't like in the first place, with only a promise of benefits later.

 

Media:

---

Public lectures delivered at The Applied Ethics Institute at Utica College can be accessed at: