Is Discrimination About Inequality?
Though “discrimination” is a central theme of our modern world, it is closely connected to many other powerful related concepts. So we might wonder: what is the essential motive or passion driving attitudes and behaviors here?
To explore this, I did 5 sets of 8 Twitter polls (with 7361 total responses) asking folks to rank 16 diverse bases for discrimination regarding 5 different related themes. (Polls asked which of four options is “most”; I then ranked the 16 bases via least-squares fits to a simple proportional response model.)
The following table shows how folks ranked the 16 bases on these five themes: a) how okay they are with it, b) how much they want law/govt to ban it, c) how naturally it would arise via genetic or cultural evolution, d) which is most driven by direct selfish reasons (as opposed to partiality or social pressure), and e) which is most asymmetric where a “down” side is more allowed to punch “up” than vice versa. For each, 100 is max, 0 is min.
Note first that even though we are on average more Okay with bases that we see as more Evolved and more Selfish, we are also on average more eager to Ban such bases. Note also that while the strongest correlation for Okay is with Ban, for all the other themes their strongest correlation is with UpDown. And the strongest correlation for UpDown is with Ban.
This all tentatively suggests that UpDown is the closest among these to the core here. And UpDown seems to me primarily about egalitarianism. Suggesting this thesis:
We dislike inequality where “up” types have more and “down” types have less, and are willing to “tax” ups to advantage downs. Banning ups but not downs from discriminating is one accepted way to “tax” the ups more.
In this view, discrimination isn’t due to a general aversion to treating “like” things differently, to using apparently irrelevant decision criteria, or to social coordination by one group to disadvantage rivals, or due to either an aversion to or sympathy for partialities that result from evolution. Instead, discrimination aversion maybe mainly inequality aversion.
I dislike discrimination to the extent that it interferes with people getting what they deserve.
If people do good things for society (save puppies? build bridges? develop new technology?), they deserve rewards, so as to motivate such behavior. If they do bad things (kill puppies? pollute rivers? mislead consumers?), they deserve punishment. To produce the best incentive for society, these rewards and punishments should ideally depend *only* on how much society would be better off if we encouraged or discouraged particular behaviors. We might call such an ideal system of rewards and punishments "well-calibrated" to benefit society.
Discrimination interferes with reward calibration. If the best engineer for the job is punished for having a certain skin color, or having a certain religion, or a certain political affiliation, or not being friends with an insider, then that's going to lead to worse engineering work and worse outcomes for society. Because then you have worse engineers getting more status and responsibility than better ones. Ideally, an engineer should be evaluated and rewarded only based on the quality of his work, in such a way that it motivates him to produce the best possible work.
Yep 100%
This is what ive noticed from talking with leftists and progressevists about the topic of discrimination, and whether people should have the same playground rules or not
And i also used to hold those opinions, and my conclusion then was that discriminating against a privileged group was fine morally as they could either afford the penalty, and that it was important for people to be equal
Equality is generally a very strong moral node in a lot of people minds, that often require very strong education or training to resist the “equality good over everything else” framework. (or if your leftist, brainwashing from neoliberal economists that make you diverge from whats obviously right in your opinion)
My discussions with some people very much highligt that they see equality as an obvious moral principle that is blatantly disrespected by society frequently, and thus makes a lot of society and rich people low status and undeserving of the status/power/wealth they do have
The rich having that money is only acceptable if those rich people are sufficiently taxed or if they are very high status pr virtuous, either by being better than everyone else, or by bein humble and taxing themself by giving to low members of society