When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you?
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)