Privilege structures: from posets to generalised metric spaces

Sheraton Boston, Republic A

I will use posets to illuminate privilege structures in society and the divisive arguments surrounding them, including straw person arguments about what privilege means, and where antagonism arises from functions between posets that are not order-preserving. I will then use Lawvere’s generalised metric spaces to add more nuance to this analysis so that we can consider different weightings for different types of privilege. Lawvere’s generalised metric spaces can be expressed as categories enriched in with as the monoidal structure. Crucially, the distance function is then not required to be symmetric, and this is critical in an analysis of privilege as it is not just the difference in privilege that we seek to measure, but whether it’s a loss or gain.