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Notes -
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.
Everything. Next question please.
To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass. There's no magic threshold where Bayesian reasoning and statistics becomes applicable, just that there's a time and a place where it's worth the effort over the default course of action.
For many properties relevant to us, it's just blindingly obvious, such as if a person is male or female for the purposes of how concerned you should be when seeing them jogging towards you in a deserted alley.
I would be perfectly OK with this, because even slightly rational employers wouldn't fire someone on that basis, and a world where that happens is one that looks nothing like ours. Should they end up fired, then they'll likely end up hired by someone else for 99.99% of their previous wages.
For example, I'm against employers being unable to discriminate on the basis of disability, despite having my own mental health issues, such as ADHD. I'm still functional, if it was so bad that I, say, forgot what medicines I'd prescribed my patient or wandered off in the midst of work, then I would have no expectations of further employment. I wouldn't want that person as an employee, colleague or even my own physician, yet that counts as a protected characteristic.
That's for when we're actually post-scarcity, at least in terms of deserving subsistence if not a job, and we're not there yet.
I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer. Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line. I can imagine that the math works out pretty easily that if, say, Starbucks knew of a positive test for the gene or a family history of certain diseases, it would actually be an actuarial loss to hire certain candidates and provide health insurance.
The US prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of genetic information, and I'm not sure I disagree with the idea that we should do so.
Is this how it works?
I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.
I guess if they told the health insurance company they were genetically screening employees they could ask for a lower rate, but I sort of wouldn't expect the health insurance companies to go along with it, when they can refer to it being bad optics in order to not give a discount.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something.
If you doubt it, you could literally just hit your favorite search engine up for an explanation of self-insuring companies.
No, the whole point of health insurance is to pool risk. Companies offer it as a perk, now, but the typical American association between employment and insurance is exceedingly contingent. Insurance companies collect premiums to finance the pool, as well as to finance the administration of the pool and also to distribute profits to shareholders and do all the other things companies do. Large insurance companies have larger pools, distributing risk more widely and collecting more money to the pool. If you're a large enough corporation, however, collecting the premiums yourself (and perhaps paying a small administrative fee to an insurance company) may save you and/or your employees a lot of money, for example if your employees tend to be some combination of young, healthy, unmarried, and/or childless.
Strictly speaking, you can self-insure as an individual, too. If you forgo insurance and simply put your "premiums" into a high yield savings account every month, then over the course of your lifetime you should on average actually come out ahead of people who buy insurance, since the whole point of insurance companies employing armies of actuaries is to be sure that they don't go bankrupt--that is, to insure that more money is coming into the pool, than going out of it. So if you believe the mathematicians, you should self-insure! Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky; since insurance companies also have enormous negotiating power, even when self-insuring accurately duplicates the risk pool it doesn't duplicate stuff like "in network" discounts, negotiated rates, "maximum out-of-pocket," and other such perks. To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.
You have an inverse of Pascal's Wager going on as an individual. If MegaCorp runs its health insurance in house it at least in theory turns a profit from 99 mostly healthy employees paying for the 1 unlucky guy that gets into a terrible car accident or gets cancer. If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.
Right, that's why I said:
For that matter, self-insurance sometimes goes very badly even for whole corporations--though, as with insurance companies, the larger they get the less this is likely to be a problem. Small and mid-size firms do self-insure sometimes, and sometimes this goes badly for them. Two or three million-dollar medical events in a single year would be terribly bad luck for a company of, say, 500 employees, but it's well within the realm of the possible. This is why a company that self-insures should typically also have some kind of stop-loss policy backing up its self-insurance pool (and indeed many insurance companies themselves have stop-loss coverage). This is a fascinating area of the law that unfortunately falls outside my expertise, but I find it fascinating even so. Insurance and, essentially, meta-insurance form the basis of all sorts of interesting economic gambits. But some of the greatest profits of all have been won by persuading whole nations that participation in such gambits is wise, or even obligatory.
Which is to say: while I acknowledge that the equilibrium I live in requires that I bet, pragmatically, against the actuaries who think they'll take more of my money than they'll have to give back, I remain suspicious that insurance is in fact a deeply parasitic economic entity, of a kind that should probably be much more regulated than it is (even though I am, in almost all cases, reflexively anti-regulation).
Maybe I'm just being autistic here, but I was thinking that most of these self-insuring fools actually make it out OK or even come out ahead, a few break even, and some get hauled to the cleaners and back.
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