Tapsearch Com EditorWhy discrimination isn't incriminating
September 17th 2007 22:00
I've been defending the concept of discrimination for a long time, and a new Reason article says it well:
To say that someone was discriminating was once a compliment. It meant he was a man of taste, the sort of person who could see fine gradations in value and parse the good from the bad.
In later years, discrimination became a dirty word -- inverted from it its original sense to mean someone who separated people into unfair and irrelevant categories and the treated some of them badly for no good reason at all.
In later years, discrimination became a dirty word -- inverted from it its original sense to mean someone who separated people into unfair and irrelevant categories and the treated some of them badly for no good reason at all.
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Comment by Damo
I have no idea who reason online are nor whether they have an agenda or not.
However the words used to make the point are using two completely seperate contexts to justify one argument.
Disciminating has serveral meaning from the innocent to the oppressive. In essence the word is neutral but the context is not.
Discrimination has the same problem but the overwhelming useage to describe policies of prejudice.
I suspect th author may have been trying to blur the meaning between the two words.
Comment by Robert V
You're right, of course, that one can discriminate for good as well as bad reasons. The whole point is that "discrimination" used to automatically evoke good decisionmaking. Now it calls up thoughts of knee-jerk, racist reactions. Discrimination as a concept has suffered because some people misuse it and others define it too narrowly.
Comment by Damo
The propaganda was considered a neutral word before WW1 but after it was tarnished.
Thus you cannot use the word today without it triggering emotion in many quaters.
Discrimination has similar bagage due to historical events creating the negative association with the word.
That is all I wanted say really.
Not a very big point but a point all the same.