How, if at all, does this affect your ideas of equality? Is it now okay to discriminate against them? Treat them differently legally? Not invite them to dinner?
We are actually as a society ok with discriminating against the vast majority of possible social groups. If this was not the case life as we know it would simply become impossible because we would have to treat everyone equally. That would be a completely crazy civilization to live in. Especially if it considered the personal to be political.
You couldn’t like Alice because she is smart, since that would be cognitivist. You couldn’t hang out with Alice because she has a positive outlook on life, because that would discriminate against the mentally ill (those who are currently experiencing depression for starters). You couldn’t invite Alice out for lunch because you think she’s cute, because that would be lookist. ect. ect.
Without the ability to discriminate between the people who have traits we find desirable or useful and those we don’t, without a bad conscience, most people would be pretty miserable and perpetually repressed. Indeed considering humans are social creatures I’d say the repression and psychological damage would dwarf anything ever caused by even the most puritanical sexual norms.
See faul_sname’s comment below; “discrimination” should really be tabooed with “prejudice based on weak prior evidence without any personal contact” in this discussion.
We are actually as a society ok with discriminating against the vast majority of possible social groups. If this was not the case life as we know it would simply become impossible because we would have to treat everyone equally. That would be a completely crazy civilization to live in. Especially if it considered the personal to be political.
You couldn’t like Alice because she is smart, since that would be cognitivist. You couldn’t hang out with Alice because she has a positive outlook on life, because that would discriminate against the mentally ill (those who are currently experiencing depression for starters). You couldn’t invite Alice out for lunch because you think she’s cute, because that would be lookist. ect. ect.
Without the ability to discriminate between the people who have traits we find desirable or useful and those we don’t, without a bad conscience, most people would be pretty miserable and perpetually repressed. Indeed considering humans are social creatures I’d say the repression and psychological damage would dwarf anything ever caused by even the most puritanical sexual norms.
See faul_sname’s comment below; “discrimination” should really be tabooed with “prejudice based on weak prior evidence without any personal contact” in this discussion.