3 thoughts on “Discrimination, no more

  1. As the only people who have any influence on the election list of a party is the party itself, positive discrimination in this situation only “helps” against the discrimination from exactly the people who make up the list. Ironic, isn’t it.

    That having been said, the election list is not by definition sorted by political competence. It’s the party’s choice, thus the party’s arguments. If they thus sort it in favour of foreigners to get an elective advantage, I consider that a valid tactic, although – in my opinion and your words – deplorable.

  2. That being said: I intended to stretch the scope of my post to the entire society, although it didn’t work out to look like that in the post itself btw.
    So, here is my revised question, posed without changing the post itself:

    How do you stand on positive discrimination in general?

  3. That depends on what you consider positive discrimination.

    There’s positive discrimination where characteristics such as sex and ethnicity have no influence on performance whatsoever and are used to decide, and there’s positive discrimination where these characteristics dó have influence on performance. For example, it could well be that female sales representatives are better performers. Or, as in the above example, ethnicity could make for a “better” or rather more succesfull politician. While in both of these examples selection isn’t done on any ordinary characteristic and rather on controversial arguments, I dó think this should be allowed as selection ís basically done on performance-enhancing characteristics and thus in the best interest of the company.

    As soon as sex and ethnicity (or other such characteristics, such as sexual preference or even haircolour) have a minimal or zero influence on the expected performance in any way, I oppose ‘positive’ discrimination.

    The hard part is, of course, accepting that ethnicity can, for example, cause an effect because others perceive it to be of influence. For example, a Moroccan sales person who sells less because others don’t trust him or her. This is morally hard to accept because it’s unjust and based on ancient imagery. However, I don’t think it’s correct to ‘punish’ the hiring company by forcing onto them an employee who will perform worse than a different candidate in practice, even though qualifications might be equal. It’s not corporate responsibility to deal with discrimination. Which is not to say that we can’t, somehow, applaud those who do. As long as it’s not financially – that’d be positive discrimination 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.