Race, Racism, and Human Persons: Toward a Convergence of Condemning Racism and Affirming Universal Moral Worth and Human Equality

Condemnations of racism, both in its individual and structural expressions, are legion in contemporary Western society, no doubt because many intuitively sense its moral reprehensibility. Prevailing attitudes toward racism notwithstanding, there is little consensus over the ground of racism's moral opprobrium. This dissertation examines attempts to condemn racism by shedding light on contemporary approaches to defending the universal moral worth and equality of human persons. I argue that most attempts fail to ground, and make sense of, the notion that human persons are intrinsically valuable and morally equal to one another, and that much of this failure is rooted in theoretical shortcomings of secular understandings of human persons. Such understandings mistakenly reduce personhood to functional capacities or define human persons in solely physical terms. May own theory draws a conceptual connection between metaphysical facts about human persons and their worth and, that moral worth and equality are best understood as emerging from an underlying property shared universally by human persons. I conclude by applying this theory to the notions of race and racism, demonstrating that metaphysical notions of human persons are significant in justifying a condemnation of individual and structural forms of racism.