4 ms·

You are making decisions based on arbitrary labels and demographics, not on the person. It is the definition of descrimination. Not only that, but it's blatan

You are making decisions based on arbitrary labels and demographics, not on the person. It is the definition of descrimination. Not only that, but it's blatantly hypocritical since you don't spend your money based on the demographics of a company, you spend it based on performance.

joshuamorton 7y ago
It's discrimination, yes, but in what sense is a quota bigotry?
- tomp 7y ago
  It can result in hiring of person B instead of more capable person A, just because person B satisfies some arbitrary immutable characteristics (skin color, sex, etc.) and person A does not. Texbook discrimination.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    GP has since edited their post, it originally used the word "bigotry" where it now says "discrimination". Edit: This leads to a much more interesting line of discussion that can be summed up as "discrimination (and similarly bias) isn't always bad". They're useful tools and we should be careful about practicing them, but the idea that because discrimination is sometimes bad it is always bad doesn't follow. (or an alternative way of looking at this is that discrimination often includes the qualifier "unjust". Bias in favor of some group in the pursuit of greater justice therefore isn't discrimination).
    - missosoup 7y ago
      Discrimination is discrimination. Whether it's 'good' or 'bad' depends entirely on who you ask. I think most people making a case for 'good' discrimination don't realize that the existing 'bad' discrimination originated exactly the same way. We need to strive to eliminate discrimination, not perpetuate the swing of the pendulum that's been going back and forth for hundreds of years. Pushing down on some demographics to uplift others is not going to solve anything, it's just a no-op perpetuation of what's already going on.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        That's not at all true. The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry. Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination. You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.
        missosoup 7y ago
        You're conflating hiring discrimination with a broad and nebulous notion of inequality. Everyone agrees that equality is a good idea, but it doesn't map to your notion of how to address hiring discrimination, if such a thing exists. You're proposing deliberate and harmful inequality in the name of fixing some perceived other inequality. It doesn't work. The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that individuals can control, e.g. taxation brackets, education incentives, government investment into particular industries. Passing up the best candidate for a job because they didn't have some inherent unchangeable attributes that you're arbitrarily favouring is the opposite of creating equality.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        This assumes that there is always a clearly best candidate. Fwiw actual quotas are illegal for this reason, but are you saying that all else equal, hire the less well represented person is discriminatory in a negative fashion?
    - tomp 7y ago
      What kind of moral / logical principle do you base the conclusion “discrimination is not always bad”, on? Genuinely asking. My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” (with the possible exception for family, bwcause that’s just cruel), from which I cannot conclude for example that discrimination is bad if it’s agains blacks but good if it’s against whites. I fear that by dropping this principle, while allowing for “positive discrimination” (e.g. preferential hiring / admissions of blacks/women), you also allow e.g. White Nationalists to argue that it’s OK to discriminate for whites. How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        I'll get to the meat of your question, but two sidebars first: > My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” As a bit of an aside, are you saying that this is your base moral precept from which all other decisions about what is or is not ethical follow? This would be a very strange ethical framework (for example, it follows that murder is ethical). Usually moral and ethical frameworks follow from very high level principles "optimize happiness/utility" (utilitarianism), "do good things" (deontology), etc. It seems like you might be coming from a rights based ethical framework, but it's not clear. > How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine? I don't generally waste my time arguing with people who are engaging in bad faith[1]. In this day and age, I don't generally believe that a white nationalist is going to be convinced by facts and logic, or really anything else. I'm more concerned about appealing to the majority of people who aren't white nationalists, because ultimately I believe that discriminating against white nationalists is okay[2]. Ok, now back to your actual question: in what cases is it okay to discriminate? I'm approximately utilitarian, so the simple answer is "when the expected value across society is positive." For me, I don't think optimizing for strict utility is the right goal, instead I personally think that we should maximize agency (possibly median, possibly total, unclear exactly), which is something like each individual's ability to make meaningful decisions. This sidesteps issues of de jure rights. It leads to conclusions that we should do things like lift up the least fortunate and provide social safety nets, since a destitute person has less agency than a person capable of getting by. Similarly, it addresses questions of when regulations on personal liberty are ok. If allowing some action has a reasonable possibility of reducing agency of some other group, we should give it less protection than another action which does not. So for example, when you have two groups, racists and some racial minority, it makes sense to provide the racial minority more protection than the racists, since the racists want to reduce the racial minority's rights more than the racial minority wants to reduce the racists rights. That is, the minority would prefer it if the racists weren't allowed to be racist. The racists would prefer it if the racial minority weren't allowed to live in the same area, or use the same water fountains, or what ever. That's an extreme, but illustrative example. So back to the less extreme position: Discrimination is okay when it's done explicitly to counteract a gap between what the law (or more broadly society) intends and where society actually sits. Society intends for hiring to not discriminate based on race. But it did for a really long time. The put (and continues to put) the subjects of discrimination at a disadvantage. If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical. It should be done carefully of course, but it's alright. If you want to see a fun set of examples of this, voting district and gerrymandering law in the US is full of weird examples of trade offs between the need (under the Voting Rights Act) to allow racial minorities to elect representatives of their interests, with the current opinion of the USSC that any districts can't be drawn based on racial lines (except in very specific circumstances)[3]. In other words, States must draw districts to preserve the interests and representation of minority groups, but can't draw districts based on where those minorities live. It's weird. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_and_Jew_(1945) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_a... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance [3]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-and-the-supreme-court-the-most-significant-cases.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-an...
    - belorn 7y ago
      Carl Sagan described it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World. Reducing people down to a few single bits of information is lazy thinking. It shields the stereotyper from contact with the enourmos variety of individuals, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if it discrimination were valid on the average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases. Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        Relatively few countries ban discrimination in general, they ban discrimination based on certain characteristics. For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.
        belorn 7y ago
        If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14. Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected. The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as someone who identifies themselves as a racist. It should also be noted that where I live, Sweden, the right of political association is particularly cemented in our constitution. The same protection that is given union members are given to political members, including racist political groups. People talk about changing the constitution whenever neo-nazists goes around and demonstrate, but that kind of talk usually dies down when people realize that life goes on even if a handful of people believe in something which the rest of the nation consider crazy.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        The right of political association is different from nondiscrimination. Are you suggesting it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi? Because that's the right we're talking about, my right to discriminate against you. It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.

joshuamorton 7y ago

It's discrimination, yes, but in what sense is a quota bigotry?

tomp 7y ago
It can result in hiring of person B instead of more capable person A, just because person B satisfies some arbitrary immutable characteristics (skin color, sex, etc.) and person A does not. Texbook discrimination.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  GP has since edited their post, it originally used the word "bigotry" where it now says "discrimination". Edit: This leads to a much more interesting line of discussion that can be summed up as "discrimination (and similarly bias) isn't always bad". They're useful tools and we should be careful about practicing them, but the idea that because discrimination is sometimes bad it is always bad doesn't follow. (or an alternative way of looking at this is that discrimination often includes the qualifier "unjust". Bias in favor of some group in the pursuit of greater justice therefore isn't discrimination).
  - missosoup 7y ago
    Discrimination is discrimination. Whether it's 'good' or 'bad' depends entirely on who you ask. I think most people making a case for 'good' discrimination don't realize that the existing 'bad' discrimination originated exactly the same way. We need to strive to eliminate discrimination, not perpetuate the swing of the pendulum that's been going back and forth for hundreds of years. Pushing down on some demographics to uplift others is not going to solve anything, it's just a no-op perpetuation of what's already going on.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      That's not at all true. The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry. Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination. You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.
      - missosoup 7y ago
        You're conflating hiring discrimination with a broad and nebulous notion of inequality. Everyone agrees that equality is a good idea, but it doesn't map to your notion of how to address hiring discrimination, if such a thing exists. You're proposing deliberate and harmful inequality in the name of fixing some perceived other inequality. It doesn't work. The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that individuals can control, e.g. taxation brackets, education incentives, government investment into particular industries. Passing up the best candidate for a job because they didn't have some inherent unchangeable attributes that you're arbitrarily favouring is the opposite of creating equality.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        This assumes that there is always a clearly best candidate. Fwiw actual quotas are illegal for this reason, but are you saying that all else equal, hire the less well represented person is discriminatory in a negative fashion?
  - tomp 7y ago
    What kind of moral / logical principle do you base the conclusion “discrimination is not always bad”, on? Genuinely asking. My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” (with the possible exception for family, bwcause that’s just cruel), from which I cannot conclude for example that discrimination is bad if it’s agains blacks but good if it’s against whites. I fear that by dropping this principle, while allowing for “positive discrimination” (e.g. preferential hiring / admissions of blacks/women), you also allow e.g. White Nationalists to argue that it’s OK to discriminate for whites. How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      I'll get to the meat of your question, but two sidebars first: > My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” As a bit of an aside, are you saying that this is your base moral precept from which all other decisions about what is or is not ethical follow? This would be a very strange ethical framework (for example, it follows that murder is ethical). Usually moral and ethical frameworks follow from very high level principles "optimize happiness/utility" (utilitarianism), "do good things" (deontology), etc. It seems like you might be coming from a rights based ethical framework, but it's not clear. > How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine? I don't generally waste my time arguing with people who are engaging in bad faith[1]. In this day and age, I don't generally believe that a white nationalist is going to be convinced by facts and logic, or really anything else. I'm more concerned about appealing to the majority of people who aren't white nationalists, because ultimately I believe that discriminating against white nationalists is okay[2]. Ok, now back to your actual question: in what cases is it okay to discriminate? I'm approximately utilitarian, so the simple answer is "when the expected value across society is positive." For me, I don't think optimizing for strict utility is the right goal, instead I personally think that we should maximize agency (possibly median, possibly total, unclear exactly), which is something like each individual's ability to make meaningful decisions. This sidesteps issues of de jure rights. It leads to conclusions that we should do things like lift up the least fortunate and provide social safety nets, since a destitute person has less agency than a person capable of getting by. Similarly, it addresses questions of when regulations on personal liberty are ok. If allowing some action has a reasonable possibility of reducing agency of some other group, we should give it less protection than another action which does not. So for example, when you have two groups, racists and some racial minority, it makes sense to provide the racial minority more protection than the racists, since the racists want to reduce the racial minority's rights more than the racial minority wants to reduce the racists rights. That is, the minority would prefer it if the racists weren't allowed to be racist. The racists would prefer it if the racial minority weren't allowed to live in the same area, or use the same water fountains, or what ever. That's an extreme, but illustrative example. So back to the less extreme position: Discrimination is okay when it's done explicitly to counteract a gap between what the law (or more broadly society) intends and where society actually sits. Society intends for hiring to not discriminate based on race. But it did for a really long time. The put (and continues to put) the subjects of discrimination at a disadvantage. If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical. It should be done carefully of course, but it's alright. If you want to see a fun set of examples of this, voting district and gerrymandering law in the US is full of weird examples of trade offs between the need (under the Voting Rights Act) to allow racial minorities to elect representatives of their interests, with the current opinion of the USSC that any districts can't be drawn based on racial lines (except in very specific circumstances)[3]. In other words, States must draw districts to preserve the interests and representation of minority groups, but can't draw districts based on where those minorities live. It's weird. [1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_and_Jew_(1945) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_a... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance [3]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-and-the-supreme-court-the-most-significant-cases.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-an...
  - belorn 7y ago
    Carl Sagan described it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World. Reducing people down to a few single bits of information is lazy thinking. It shields the stereotyper from contact with the enourmos variety of individuals, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if it discrimination were valid on the average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases. Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      Relatively few countries ban discrimination in general, they ban discrimination based on certain characteristics. For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.
      - belorn 7y ago
        If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14. Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected. The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as someone who identifies themselves as a racist. It should also be noted that where I live, Sweden, the right of political association is particularly cemented in our constitution. The same protection that is given union members are given to political members, including racist political groups. People talk about changing the constitution whenever neo-nazists goes around and demonstrate, but that kind of talk usually dies down when people realize that life goes on even if a handful of people believe in something which the rest of the nation consider crazy.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        The right of political association is different from nondiscrimination. Are you suggesting it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi? Because that's the right we're talking about, my right to discriminate against you. It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.