Q&A: On Moral Discrimination
On Moral Discrimination
Question
Hi Rabbi Michi, I wanted to ask what you think about a short piece I wrote:
Moral discrimination
I got into a discussion last week regarding a claim about a certain kind of discrimination, and there I argued, to my own surprise, that this concept does not exist. That is, there is no category of immoral actions called discrimination. There are indeed cases in which discrimination is immoral, but the discrimination is only the manner in which the action is carried out, not the reason for the moral condemnation.
I will try to show this by dividing discrimination into three cases:
The discriminator has no reason or rationale at all for discriminating — in that case, what he is doing may perhaps be considered puzzling, and we should indeed act against senseless actions that may cause harm, but that is certainly not what we mean when we accuse him of discrimination. Immoral discrimination does not mean an action done randomly and arbitrarily that may cause harm. There is another category for such actions, although I believe they are too rare to be given one.
The discriminator does have a reason or rationale for discriminating, but they are unrelated to the division into groups — for example, an official in charge of a certain study scholarship who decides to distribute it only to poor Black people so that he can conceal the transfer of money to his relatives and friends. Here too, I think this action is not what we call discrimination. In this case the category is embezzlement of public funds; the discrimination is only the way it is done, not the cause of the moral condemnation.
He has a reason or rationale that is connected to the division into groups — in such a case, if the reason or rationale is justified, then there is no immoral action here at all. Therefore we are forced to say that this person has a reason or rationale, but he is mistaken. But if that is the case, the action belongs to a different category of immoral acts: committing an injustice because of an error, which also includes, for example, convicting a person because a judge made a mistake in judgment. That is not the category we mean when we talk about discrimination.
Take, for example, the enslavement of Black people in the United States, and I will show that the manner of the immoral action is discrimination, but the action itself belongs to a different category. The white person believed that the African person was inferior, and therefore stripped of rights, and that one could treat him however the white person wished. This belief is no different from the belief of the people of Sodom, who believed that charity to the poor was a sin and therefore killed a woman who acted that way. It is also no different from the belief of the Aztec idol worshippers who sacrificed people to their gods. The difference is only in content; in each of these cases, at the root of the immoral action stood a mistaken belief. The reason slavery ceased is the same reason the Aztecs stopped sacrificing people to their gods. Humanity simply abandoned those beliefs.
So where did the social norm really come from that there is a category of immoral actions called discrimination, and that we can condemn certain actions as discriminatory? It seems to me that this stems from a postmodern assumption that dividing people into groups is inherently wrong, and that we must always judge each person individually, regardless of religion, race, or sex. That is also the meaning of the English expression prejudice, which translates as “pre-judgment.” pre, meaning before, prior to, and judice, from the language of judgment. I judge a person before the time is really ripe for it. The postmodern assumption is that every division of people into groups is necessarily judging too early, and therefore discrimination gets a category all to itself. I think there is indeed a category of immoral acts of the type “prejudice,” but it is not connected to discrimination. Just as there can be prejudices (that is, judgment made too early) about an individual, so too there can be prejudices about a group. And just as I judge a person in the present based on his actions in the past, and justifiably fear that he will act that way in the future (that is, a justified judgment, not one made too early), so too I judge a person based on the actions of his people, and justifiably fear that he will behave similarly. Because of the postmodern assumption that dividing into groups is inherently wrong, the injustices done to certain groups in human history have been interpreted as racism, religious intolerance, and chauvinism. Or, under one general heading: discrimination.
Answer
There is something to this argument, but it seems to me that discrimination is usually a case where a person arrives at an error through problematic considerations. For example, when someone determines that a Black person is inferior and therefore deprived of rights, this usually is not an innocent mistake. There are problematic prior assumptions behind it, and the claim against you is because of them. Beyond that, even if it is an innocent mistake, the fact that you do not grapple with them and do not bother to check whether you are mistaken is itself the discrimination. You simply do not care about a certain population. Alternatively, when you act in a discriminatory way because you hate or look down on some group (even if the hatred/contempt is justified but your behavior does not follow from it), that is discrimination.
You are right that there is inflation in the use of the terms discrimination and racism because of postmodernism. But I still think the term has content.
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Questioner:
I thought about it, and indeed the argument was not precise at all. I managed to formulate something much more precise, in my opinion:
There are various categories in the law and in the Torah for immoral acts. For example, murder falls under capital law, whereas theft falls under monetary law. We understand well that there is an essential difference between murder and theft, and it is proper not to include them both in a general category of unjustified acts.
Discrimination is defined on Wikipedia as “unjustified distinction.” That is, if murder is unjustified taking of life, and what distinguishes it from other immoral acts is the taking of life, then what distinguishes discrimination is the distinction itself. And the question is: why? The importance of the value of life or the value of ownership of property is clear enough that an action directed against them should get a category of its own, but why is it specifically the distinction in acts defined as discriminatory, such as racism, that justifies separating these acts into a category of their own?
I think that behind this distinction lies the assumption that unjustified distinction is an action that harms the value of equality. The examples that appear on Wikipedia are, for instance, racism and giving benefits to associates. The interpretive assumption embedded in the concept of “discrimination” assumes that the value harmed in racism is equality among human beings; likewise in giving benefits to associates.
In my opinion, equality is not a value. It is a default mode of action. When I have no reason or rationale to distinguish between people with regard to some matter, the default is to treat everyone equally. Equality is not a value in itself. A practical implication of this is that when I do have a reason to treat people differently, I can implement it without concern, for it does not conflict with any value. A default disappears when there is another option.
I think that the cultural phenomenon of treating equality as a value is a postmodern tendency to turn the defaults created by postmodern emptiness into a positive value with independent content. There is a human tendency to fill a moral vacuum with values, even when that is less rational.
Does racism nevertheless deserve a category of its own? I believe so, but it is not connected to equality and its violation. I believe racism is “unjustified removal of the status of a human being from a member of the human species.” The main crime of racism is the claim that Blacks are closer to animals, or Jews to parasites, and therefore human rights are denied them.
True, “distinction” is indeed essentially woven into racism. It is hard for me to think of an example of denying the status of a human being to a member of the human race without somehow claiming that he belongs to a different species, that is, making a distinction. But the distinction is only the manner in which the unjustified act is carried out, and it is not what justifies a separate category for racism. Rather, as I argued, what justifies it is denying human status to someone who deserves it.
Unlike racism, I do not think that giving benefits to associates deserves a category of its own. It is no different from theft, or embezzlement if you want to use the modern sense. Likewise, “discrimination” against the disabled in certain places belongs to the category of lack of kindness and failure to help the weak. It has absolutely nothing to do with racism, and the similarity between them is merely external. That would be like claiming that charging money is discrimination against the poor (socialism?).
But as stated, the concept of discrimination unites all these different concepts under the assumption that in all of them the value harmed is the value of equality, which postmodernism invented.
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Rabbi:
1. In my opinion, equality definitely does have value. It is not just a default.
2. Even so, even according to my approach, when you have a reason to treat differently, there really is no dilemma, as you wrote. The reason is that here there is no equality, and therefore equal treatment is not required (here the value of equality does not exist from the outset). This is “permitted,” not “overridden.”
3. Beyond that, even if there is no value in equality, there may still be a negative value in inequality. Take for example the value of ownership of money. There is no ethical value in owning money, but it is ethically forbidden to steal from or damage another person’s property. By the way, this is the mistake of those who see freedom as a value, apparently because its deprivation (when unjustified) is forbidden. In my opinion there is no value of freedom, because freedom is an asset, like money, not a value. And still, depriving a person of it is a negative value (the correct value is liberty, but I have elaborated on this elsewhere).
4. I do not think you will always succeed in mapping unequal treatment onto theft or some other value. Just a random example I thought of now: when you appoint an Ashkenazi to a public role without checking whether he is more suitable, that is not necessarily theft. In practice he may indeed be suitable, and there is still discrimination here.