Discrimination

Discrimination is the treatment of similarly situated individuals differently, for either an arbitrary or non-arbitrary reason.

Check our privilege
Social justice
Not ALL of our articles
v - t - e

Good discrimination

Many people believe discrimination is good, when done for relevant and non-arbitrary reasons. For example, employing someone with better hand-eye co-ordination to operate machinery or accepting more mathematically able students into maths based university courses. The mentality of "the best man man or woman person thing self defining as a human sentient-being-of-any-and/or-every-persuasion for the job" is considered acceptable because the criteria for discrimination is relevant and justifiable.

Bad discrimination

However, discrimination has become a loaded term as its primary use is as a negative and generally refers to unjustified discrimination.

Race, gender, religious/philosophical views and sexual orientation are often discriminated against. People are often rejected from job placements or other perks due to what Sir Joseph Porter KCB[1] would refer to as "an accident of birth". In the case of affirmative action or "positive discrimination", these traits are discriminated for in the hope of balancing out old, often ancient prejudices and previous discrimination.

gollark: You could do something like Malbolge's "cryptography" where it's *technically* possible to write things.
gollark: Then cryptography is just the obvious way to make it work.
gollark: Or they do, but you would then lose points.
gollark: Oh wait, the rules don't really let that work anyway.
gollark: Well, it's less obvious than just writing an interpreter with one "do the thing" command, but still a fairly natural way to constrain your thing.

See also

References
  1. Look it up you uncultured philistines!
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.