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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.
One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.
See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.
Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.
When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.
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