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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi
Here in Sweden, yes. The law is very clear that you can not deny service because you disagree with someones political, religious, or world views.
Government nondiscrimination is a US technicality of the first amendment. European Convention on Human Rights is not limiting to government behavior. Everyone has to follow it.
Then Sweden has a unique interpretation of the ECHR. In most EU nations, that isn't the case (nor does it seem to actually be the case in Sweden, given that Sweden's anti discrimination law doesn't protect arbitrary views).
I think you should speak with a lawyer, because you're not correct.
In 2016 the Swedish national cabinet issued a report on the status of the anti-discrimination law (SOU 2016:87). It cites the EU courts cases C-399/11, Melloni and C‑617/10, Åklagaren mot Åkerberg Fransson, and the conclusion that political discrimination is against the human rights convention.
The report also note that current law does not protect children that get discriminated based on their parents political activity, which the FN convention of children rights says they should be protected against.
The report goes on to basically say that the EU convention of human rights extends the Swedish anti-discrimination law to include, among other things, political and other world views, class, and social status. The report then goes on that courts must already follow those extensions.
There were also a specific case a couple years ago where a politician was kicked out of a restaurants based on his political affiliation. A Judge commented on that case noted that while the Swedish anti-discrimination does not make it illegal, there is a case to be made under the EU human rights declaration.
So there. The government report, and a judge, both saying the same conclusion.
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?
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.
> 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.
I'm definitely pro-justice, it's just that I see it principles based (e.g. free speech even for (especially for) speech I don't like), not "utility" based. The flaw of your philosophy, in my view, is that you're just sweeping the tricky parts under the carpet by introducing concepts of "utility" and "right goal" and "society intends". You're even conflicted about that yourself, introducing another concept of "maximizing agency" (sounds like pro-freedom); a good moral system would somehow maximize (or balance) both in some way.
I don't think that's a good view, because those are fundamentally non-reconcilable goals. Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).
> The flaw of your philosophy, in my view, is that you're just sweeping the tricky parts under the carpet by introducing concepts of "utility" and "right goal" and "society intends".
Sure, picking the "right" utility function is one of the hardest parts of utilitarianism. FWIW, I don't think maximizing agency is a different concept so much as a specific utility function that avoids some of the common pitfalls of strict utilitarianism (utility sinks: the person who gets enormous happiness from cannibalism). In other words you could imagine Agency as the "reasonable person" standard applied to the value of a choice. This still has flaws, but, IMO fewer than many other framings.
Some people might also find this to be similar to optimizing for the most "positive rights" across society, but I dislike that framing because the idea of positive vs. negative rights is silly, any right can be framed as positive or negative.
> Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).
Note that giving a poor person money such that they can choose to treat their child's disease also increases agency! If you want to dive deep into this, I think that the marginal value of a dollar is probably logarithmic, or at least inverse quadratic or something, so a tax scheme modeled to tax top brackets in such a way that then improves the situation of those less off (pick your method: national healthcare, UBI, etc.) increases overall agency.
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.
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.
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.
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?
