IB Philosophy 8.2 Equality and Discrimination Key Definitions

Civil disobedience is the deliberate, public, and non-violent refusal to obey a law or policy that one considers unjust, undertaken to bring about a change in government policy. Theorised by Thoreau and practised by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it was defended by Rawls as a legitimate act within a nearly just society.

In Antonio Gramsci's political thought, hegemony describes how dominant groups maintain power through cultural and intellectual leadership rather than force alone, making existing power structures appear natural and inevitable to those who are disadvantaged by them.

Intersectionality is a framework developed by Kimberle Crenshaw showing that forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and classism overlap and interact, producing distinct experiences of disadvantage that cannot be understood by examining each category in isolation.

Marginalization refers to the systematic exclusion or disadvantage of certain groups from full participation in the economic, political, and social life of their community, typically along lines of race, gender, class, or disability. The concept highlights how structural inequalities, rather than individual prejudice alone, can entrench disadvantage across generations, limiting access to education, employment, healthcare, and political representation.

Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance argues that unlimited tolerance necessarily leads to the disappearance of tolerance, because tolerating intolerant movements allows them to gain power and destroy the conditions that make tolerance possible.

Drawing on Rawls, Nussbaum's framework of political liberalism seeks principles acceptable to citizens holding diverse comprehensive doctrines about the good life, remaining neutral between competing religious, moral, and philosophical worldviews. The capabilities list is designed to be endorsed from within many different comprehensive doctrines, making it a genuinely public basis for political justification.

Social discontent refers to widespread dissatisfaction among members of a society with existing institutions, power structures, or conditions of life, experienced as a gap between how things are and how they ought to be.

Structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung, refers to systemic and institutionalised forms of harm embedded in social, economic, and political structures that prevent people from meeting their basic needs, even in the absence of direct physical aggression. Examples include poverty, discrimination, and unequal access to healthcare, all of which shorten lives and diminish human potential as effectively as overt violence.

Charles W. Mills's thesis of the racial contract argues that the social contract tradition conceals a prior agreement among white people to establish and maintain a system of racial domination, exploitation, and privilege, sustained through an epistemology of ignorance that systematically prevents recognition of racial injustice.

the willingness to allow beliefs, practices, or identities one finds objectionable without using power to suppress them. Tolerance presupposes both disagreement and the capacity to interfere. Without disagreement there is nothing to tolerate, and without power there is merely endurance.