A theory of discrimination [1]

Discrimination is often associated with words such as sexism, racism which typically think to be quite negative. On a basic level, we might think of discrimination to be the differential treatment of an individual or group on the basis of some characteristic. Whilst many would take discrimination to only refer to negative treatment, I think this only leads to confusion. It might be thought that treatment is relative - if we provide preferential treatment to a given group (e.g. ethnic minorities) this indirectly counts as negative differential treatment to those who do not satisfy this group.

Now, perhaps the most interesting question is why we think discrimination to be bad. Or to to be more precise, why do we think that racism, or sexism or discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or class to be morally wrong. Our immediate intuition I think is based around some notion of equality. We think that it is morally wrong for someone to take into account someone elses gender or race when deciding how to treat them, on the basis of equality.

There are two main issues with this type of claim. The first is that it fails to capture the whole picture. We might think it is permissible to treat men and women differently in terms of having gender specific toilets or changing rooms. Or we might agree with the UK law that allows restaurant owners to make hiring decisions based on perceived race, in the case of themed restaurants. Whilst some might think that you should never take into account these characteristics, I think this is an extreme position.

The second issue is how we ought to think about equality. I think most would agree that equality defined on the basis of purely equal treatment is ineffective and perhaps even immoral. If I have $5$ pieces of medicine, $5$ ill people and $5$ healthy people it is stupid to think that on the basis of equality I ought to give each person half a piece, regardless of whether they need it or not. Instead, I think that we should only consider equal treatment as our 'initial equilibrium', call it $\Delta_0$. For someone to use a certain factor to discriminate against another, the onus is on them to provide justification of why such a factor is relevant. 

Consider the case of university that has to select which students to admit into their universities. We start at $\Delta_0$ where all students are admitted with the same chance, regardless of any characteristics. Now, we argue that academic achievement ought to be a relevant factor. That is, the university ought to be justified in using academic achievement as a means of discriminating between candidates. If we accept this claim, then we move on $\Delta_1$. We could in theory add new factors leaving us with a sequence of different states. The key importance is that one must justify why they are using such a factor. No factor is taken from granted.

This serves as a good point to conclude this post. This is intended to be part of a series of posts since this topic is quite complicated. In my next post I am going to discuss the type of justification required in order for us to justifiably discriminate.