UC Berkeley

Implicit biases operating under the radar of conscious awareness and outside the bounds of what most people would endorse seem to undermine our ordinary understanding of human agency. I argue for a particular take on why these biases’ influence is so sinister—they “hijack” control of not only our actions but our very processes of practical reasoning and deliberation away from our selves and what we care about and value. I also argue that some implicit attitudes themselves count as values and forms of caring, such that our selves are partly implicit, or unconscious. This take on implicit attitudes is informed by how they work within particular social and geographic environments—that is, by their “moral ecology.” For example, implicit attitudes are central components in the mechanisms that sustain cycles of endemic poverty in U.S. inner cities. Somewhat counterintuitively, I conclude that the best way to combat the hijacking of reason is often precisely more hijacking, guided by research on the nature of implicit bias and the moral ecology of the environments in which it operates.