> A sound, centuries-old concept that pre-dates the modern justice system. Kinda. Yes, intent is an element of some crimes, but they also look for indicators

> A sound, centuries-old concept that pre-dates the modern justice system. Kinda. Yes, intent is an element of some crimes, but they also look for indicators of it in your actions if you go back to the better common law rules. Take a common definition of 'shoplifting': it requires concealment & removal. That is, you have to both hide the thing and take it away. It's the concealment of the object that shows you have some bad intent. The problem with an intent standard here is that almost anything can incidentally affect one race more than another. Say I have a job like 'firefighter' and I set certain physical requirements. I've just accidentally discriminated in favor of black males, despite lacking intent to do that. Or say that I have a test to see how well people can do the job and the test consists of mental tasks. That discriminates in favor of Asians and it gets worse the pickier I get despite there being almost no difference between average people. There are reasonable people who argue both for and against these standards because of the discriminatory effects they have vs. the fact that they may strongly relate to ability to do the job. I'd be curious to see a study linking attitudes on these to one's self-interest bias. I have my suspicions about how that works, but I don't trust my intuition not to be biased.