These seem like arguments that could conceivably be used to defend any kind of discrimination in the workplace. I suppose the justifications for making some groups protected and others not are meta and involve things like the Veil of Ignorance so we won’t go into them. But this makes discussing workplace discrimination on the object level seem pretty boring to me since the criteria for when discrimination is acceptable appear almost totally subjective.
I am bothered by how “discrimination” has become an inherently offensive word. Choosing an employee among many is by definition an act of discrimination; what matters is what you base your discrimination on—whether it’s something relevant to their role or not.
Mere lexical conservatism? Not quite. Policy discussions should revolve around which type of discriminations are permissible and which are sufficiently harmful that they should be banned; but the “discrimination = bad” has made this step all but impossible.
Hence you get people honestly, and correctly, arguing that to favour younger, or older, people is a form of discrimination. But then, rather than asking “did this employer have a legitimate reason for preferring a particular age group for the job?” (hopefully followed by “is it going to be harmful if people keep doing it?” and “do we have the means to stop it?”), they just slap the label “ageism” on it and are convinced that they have just proved that it’s a Bad Thing®.
This is getting cartoonish since it is extremely unlikely that the most qualified candidate for a given position maintains membership in an avowedly racist organization.
These seem like arguments that could conceivably be used to defend any kind of discrimination in the workplace. I suppose the justifications for making some groups protected and others not are meta and involve things like the Veil of Ignorance so we won’t go into them. But this makes discussing workplace discrimination on the object level seem pretty boring to me since the criteria for when discrimination is acceptable appear almost totally subjective.
I am bothered by how “discrimination” has become an inherently offensive word. Choosing an employee among many is by definition an act of discrimination; what matters is what you base your discrimination on—whether it’s something relevant to their role or not.
Mere lexical conservatism? Not quite. Policy discussions should revolve around which type of discriminations are permissible and which are sufficiently harmful that they should be banned; but the “discrimination = bad” has made this step all but impossible.
Hence you get people honestly, and correctly, arguing that to favour younger, or older, people is a form of discrimination. But then, rather than asking “did this employer have a legitimate reason for preferring a particular age group for the job?” (hopefully followed by “is it going to be harmful if people keep doing it?” and “do we have the means to stop it?”), they just slap the label “ageism” on it and are convinced that they have just proved that it’s a Bad Thing®.
Worst possible worlds do tend to be cartoonish.