Political correctness in a global age: The ethical implications of a hegemonic discourse

While concern with political correctness has ebbed and flowed, there is little doubt that in the last decade it has again become a critical concept in the rightist lexicon. Universities continue to be seen as posing a central threat in the US and, with the expansion of higher education in recent decades, universities in the UK also have received renewed attention, increasingly being characterized, along with their American counterparts, as controlled by a liberal elite and pervaded by political correctness. Public shaming can be based on slip-ups or errors that in a predigital age would probably have been forgotten over time, but ‘today, people may be followed by their doppelganger wherever they go in the world’. The anti-PC discourse comprises an ideology which delegitimizes a social justice agenda and gives people permission to remain locked in their prejudices. As such it is inherently unethical.