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In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?
I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.
Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.
Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.
When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).
So for the most part our variables are:
-Group membership voluntariness
-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation
-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)
-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy
-Causality of X to Y
Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)
But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.
I do think we've discussed this topic to death, as has 'the discourse' generally. And ethics depends on context. Consequentialist or not, so long as your values look more like "economic productivity" or "more happy people" or "national greatness" than "racism bad", it makes sense to think about the ethics of discrimination based on how they impact those. And while in the far past, 'statistical discrimination' probably could cause significant harm, I think today it causes essentially no harm.
In most cases of potential discrimination with political relevance, modern science, technology, and political organization would allow a competent corporation or state to directly measure each individual's traits or capacities, bypassing the ethical dilemma. Intelligence / job skills? IQ tests. Criminality? Properly enforce even minor laws, and have a public database of offenses employers can consult. Various right-wingers lament the low IQ of immigrants, but no need to statistically discriminate here, just give potential applicants IQ tests. Not politically viable, but so are immigration restrictions on all colored people. This alone makes 'statistical discrimination' a mostly moot issue in practice, IMO, and any marginal statistical discrimination has no systemic impact as a result. This is the point at which critics of pervasive racism or sexism fall back to 'structural racism that disadvantages poor/nonwhite/nonmale people even by objective standards', although they never draw the conclusion that they should pay less attention to explicit discrimination.
The terms I'll use are statistical discrimination - most centrally, making a decision with goals unrelated to race/sex/the group in question, but using the group as a proxy for the goal - versus taste-based discrimination, making a decision that's not really rationally justified on any goal other than 'exclude group'. Which category you place something into depends on your values - a white nationalist probably thinks a white-only company is a rational choice to maximize productivity, and a committed anti-racist would in their heart consider any discrimination taste-based because black people aren't any less capable than white people. But there's a big difference between giving black people .3 percentage points higher interest rates than white people or not hiring a hispanic house-cleaner because the last one stole from you, and not hiring any female doctors in the entire medical system because you incorrectly think they're much less capable than men. Even if it was applied universally, statistical discrimination in modern life is just not that impactful. Even if the cars of black people are stopped 3x as much as those of white people, the cumulative harm this does to black non-criminals is just low, the rate of police physically harming innocent and cooperative people is low. If there was a latent supply of skilled black programmers somewhere, Big Tech would love to tap it no matter the average black IQ (alas, immigration laws). And to whatever extent statistical discrimination, by assumption justified excluding second-order effects, harms black people who are on the good end of the distribution in question (IQ, criminality), that harm is (by assumption) compensated for in aggregate by the higher skill, lower criminality, or whatever of the worker that replaced them. If it was absolutely morally necessary to alleviate this, itd still be better to do so so via e.g. taxes and transfers, a pareto improvement, than by banning statistical discrimination. And again, this should be moot because one can just measure individuals.
I don't think your voluntary vs involuntary group membership distinction is important. Being born with a low IQ is exactly as involuntary as being born with median IQ into a group with a high rate of having low IQ, but it's perfectly reasonable to give lower-paying jobs to people with lower IQ, so in low information environments (that aren't modern environments), I don't think giving lower-paying jobs to group members is different.
Then there's taste-based discrimination. Those committing it incorrectly (by assumption) believe it's statistical discrimination, and given how pervasive that mistake is it's worth considering. I think nobody can deny that this can be terrible in economic and moral senses. Take untouchables, a recurrent cultural phenomena, whether in india, europe, or elsewhere. These groups are prohibited, for absurd reasons, from engaging in most productive occupations and many social relations. (Although I'm curious if anyone has a defense of untouchable classes, the only study I found put dalit IQ at 5 points less than brahmin, which is low, but I don't think that estimate means much) It's a waste of surplus, and terrible for those affected. The categorical exclusion from many occupations of women and individuals of various races in the recent past seem similarly misguided, as confirmed by the low remaining wage gaps. But when people condemn taste-based discrimination today, the moral weight they put fits untouchables more than it does us. Most people in America are apolitical, centrist or progressive, and believe either in race-blind merit or explicit affirmative action, and hiring practices reflect this. And while nobody hiring women obviously depresses female wages, if even half of firms openly treat women equally, they'll suck up all the women and reduce the wage gap, adjusted for hours worked and skill, to a minimum. While taste-based discrimination is still dumb, and thus bad in the same way that firing someone for having brown hair is bad, in areas like hiring, interpersonal relationships, and criminal justice, it's not a significant moral issue in the US, in the same way that religious persecution was a massive issue 300 years ago but isn't anymore.
So to go into your example:
I think this is a misleading example - there are many people currently teaching who have demographic attributes that make them, statistically, more than 10% likely to be pedophiles than other groups of teachers. E.g. men vs women. But even taking it literally, I don't think it's an issue, because it's limited to the small percentage of occupations that involve childcare, so people with that strain can just get other jobs. It's equal in impact to the many other idiosyncratic and irrational preferences employers have.
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