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As a society you can make it illegal to discriminate on factors that a person has no control over.
by QasimK 8y ago
As a society you can make it illegal to discriminate on factors that a person has no control over.
- tudelo 8y agoIs paying different amounts based on measured risk factor really discrimination in the way you intend it?
- oh_sigh 8y agoYes, because the risk factor isn't that you're a young male, it is because you are a dangerous driver, which is correlated with young males. But it also means that there are safe driving young men out there who are subsidizing dangerous female drivers.
- QasimK 8y agoYes it is. Should the cost of car insurance, health insurance, or life insurance vary based on the measured risk from your skin colour, or height for example? A “lucky” individual has reduced premiums, while an “unlucky” individual has increased premiums, and neither has any control over it! Comparatively, someone benefits and someone suffers (both are undeserved). After thinking about it, I want to hear from someone who thinks the opposite to me - that it is perfectly fair for someone to pay more and, thus, someone else to pay less, due to a factor that neither has any choice about.
- qwertycrackers 8y agoThe reason someone would say it is fair is because insurance isn't designed to just be free healthcare our car repairs or whatever. Insurance is a scene designed to deal with the problem that some unlikely events are too expensive to pay for oneself. We pool our money into insurance policies to allow anyone holding the policy to weather such events by the virtue of having guaranteed support from the other policy-holders. However, for this system to work, each person does need to pay in approximately enough to cover the risk they create to the policy. So yes, more risky people do need to pay more, because they are creating more costs to the policy. Basically, insurance isn't free healthcare, and we shouldn't be treating it that way.
- candu 8y agoYes: see redlining, racial profiling, etc. All of these can be "justified" by appealing to measured risk, but we consider them very discriminatory from both an ethical and a legal perspective. Think about it, though - what is really being measured? Maybe there's a small subset of super high-risk male drivers who the rest of us are subsidizing. If they were to base my insurance rates on measurable individual characteristics, that would be much less suspect IMO.
- oh_sigh 8y agoPer the article the EU already banned gender discrimination for insurance rates in 2011. Catch up Canada! I wonder why it is that car insurance charges higher rates to young males(who on average cost more than young females), but medical insurance as far as I can tell is equally priced for young men and young women, even though young women generally have higher health care costs than young men(primarily through childbirth and greater use of health services). I don't want to be cynical but I imagine if a health care company in the US or Canada actually did start charging more for some class of young women vs young men, it would make international news and lead to new anti-discrimination laws for health insurance
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rich-and-poor 8y agoCatch up Canada! No thanks. We understand that men are more reckless than women and we refuse to needlessly harm our insurance companies.
- oh_sigh 8y agoOh, good point. Let's also recognize that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes and have violent crimes committed upon them, so we should be charging them extra for health insurance relative to whites.
- GhostVII 8y agoSpeak for yourself, I'm Canadian and would love to eliminate gender discrimination from auto insurance
- fcbrooklyn 8y agoIt won't harm the insurance companies, as it'll be a level playing field, and they'll all have to simply quote new rates that work out for them given the new data they're allowed to consider. The parties harmed will be, on average, women, whose rates will go up, and the beneficiaries will be, on average, men, especially young men, whose rates will come down.
- rich-and-poor 8y agoBRB, making it illegal to discriminate between dates based on physical appearance.
- tomp 8y agoSo, like, salary? After all, you can't control your intelligence...
- QasimK 8y agoYou raise a thought-provoking point. For example, a company that basis your salary on aptitude tests (or genetic tests - hello Gattica!). It isn’t fair if you didn’t have control over your “intelligence genes” so to say. But, this is very fuzzy right? Your intelligence and aptitude for a job is determined by so many factors, and any tests would struggle to capture the information properly, I think. By comparison, the car insurance test of gender was straightforward (just look at the letter on the document!). I would hesitate to apply my original statement to such a fuzzy situation.
- tomp 8y agoYeah I don't have a good answer either. I tend to take a more pragmatic approach, as opposed to a moral one, asking myself, what behaviour do we want to encourage? "Discriminating" based on intelligence => meritocracy => probably good. Young men subsidising pregnant women => possibly good (for Western nations at least). What does discriminating of car insurance do - no idea, possibly discourages men from driving and driving recklessly, but the effect is probably minimal and might not even be there, so...
- occamrazor 8y agoBTW in the EU it’s illegal, since a EU court sentence of 2012, to use sex or gender as a rating factor in insurance.
- devtul 8y agoLet's turn this around, people have characteristics that they don't choose and can't change, but those characteristics have an impact, on average, on some real-life aspects. Would ignoring that be a net gain over whatever would be gained by not ignoring it?