There’s a peculiar phenomenon I keep encountering. When discussing how sociocultural diversity can be epistemically beneficial to groups, some dismissively respond with something like: “so, you’re making the business case for diversity” & then proceed to ignore the entire point.

I find this peculiar for a number of reasons: (1) the epistemic case for diversity is not only much broader than just a “business case” (as it pertains to diversity's benefit for science, design and policy), in many cases, it can also come apart from the business case.

For example, in some cases, diversity enhances the reliability of group consensus by promoting mechanisms that support critical and contestable collective inquiry. These tend to delay convergence & may very well be in conflict with business aims involving speed & efficiency.

Assuming that the epistemic case simply maps onto the business case is like thinking good practices in research (learning, explanation, argumentation, etc.), innovation & deliberation are something that all and only businesses care about.

Side note: this assumption is also widespread in responsible AI/fair ML, where in the context of discussing “accuracy-fairness” tradeoffs, it is often assumed that the accuracy side maps onto business interests and the fairness side is the cost of ethical design for businesses.

Again, this assumes that epistemic practices in design & development, including practices in problem formulation that ground the value of accuracy by connecting target variables to real-world outcomes of interest, are somehow inherently linked to business interests & nothing else

Based on my experience, many of those who dismiss arguments about the epistemic benefits of diversity as “just the business case” are actually not from marginalized groups. But I suspect they take their dismissive attitude to be an act of “allyship” to marginalized groups.

Their motivation seems to be that “we should not make a business case for diversity, because diversity should be valued on ethical (not business) grounds”. But (2) this ignores that what ethical arguments we need to make & how we make them depends partially on empirical facts.

A foundation of many epistemic cases for diversity is that we ought to change our individual-centeric unit of assessment. What matters in many epistemic endeavours is the performance of collectives (design teams, juries, scientific communities), not isolated individuals.

And the norms that would support good collective performance (at least partially) pertain to the properties and characteristics of community-level processes (e.g., openness to criticism, contestation, complementarity, …).

When we broaden our perspective in this way, researchers in philosophy, psychology, organizational research, … have shown precise ways in which diversity can be conducive and integral to better collective epistemic performance, & not just an “ethical cost” on this performance.

Ethical arguments that do not understand this are not only based on a false premise, they also perpetuate the same narrow view of “performance-diversity” trade-off that misconstrues the appropriate units of analysis and evaluation.

Dismissing epistemic cases for diversity as “just a business case” is not a sign of “allyship”. It’s a symptom of ignorance & safety. You preach that we ought to care about diversity for ethical reasons regardless of its costs, in order to feel good about your social position …

… while at the same time perpetuating false views about these costs, a misrepresentation of facts that in practice directly harm members of marginalized communities, but leave you unscathed.

If you think these costs are real, then you ought to engage with actual research (as opposed to trivially mistaken generalities) about epistemic cases for diversity, much, though not all, of which is done by researchers from underrepresented groups in philosophy, sociology, etc.