No smoke without flamewar

[j4]

You may recall a bit of a debate recently about whether Christians should be forced to let gay people stay in their bed-and-breakfasts, in which people invented various analogous situations (as people are wont to do) as aids to debate. Here's one we didn't need to invent, from The Times' News in Brief on Monday:

Smoker put out

A smoker was denied cigarettes at a store because the assistant, a Muslim, said it was against her religion to sell tobacco. The woman smoker, 31, had tried to buy cigarettes at W. H. Smith in Cambridge. The company said that the customer should have realised the assistant was Muslim and would not sell tobacco.

How did the Times know that the woman was a smoker? She might have just been buying cigarettes for a friend. ... No, wait. Should smokers be allowed to refuse to be served by a Muslim? ... No, that's not it either. Hang on, I've got it: How can you tell if the checkout assistant is a Muslim? There isn't a punchline, but there probably would be if you started making assumptions like that based on, ooh, I don't know, the c*l**r of someone's sk*n, or their h**dg**r.

I would say "it's not just me, is it?" but a friend recently said (in an entirely other context) "I too spend a lot of time in culture shock at what's supposed to be my own culture." I think that sums it up, really.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

"You should not discriminate" between A and B.

Ah! Ha! This is the point. It should be okay to discriminate between A and B without discriminating against A or B. It's okay -- at least, it bloody well should be in any sane society -- to say "X is not Y" without implying or being supposed to be implying that X is better/worse than Y. That's not to say that all discrimination-between is value-free, but it can be, and I think that's being lost sight of. Of which. Yes.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I think that's extremely hard; once there exist two or more categories A or B, it is possible (and quite likely) that some people will prefer B to A and some people will prefer A to B. If you are B when most people prefer A, you're likely to feel discriminated against.

Describing someone as "discriminating" used to be a complement in the last century.

On self-discrimination, http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/11/24/2522258.html

[j4.livejournal.com]

Describing someone as "discriminating" used to be a complement in the last century.

I'd still regard it as a compliment. I wonder if a new word will come into use for being (intransitively) discriminating? For being able to choose sensibly between options, for being able to assess whether one thing is better (for purpose) than another, for having taken the time to form an opinion on things which affect you? Or have we just lost the entire concept, the sense that it might be a good idea to know a hawk from a handsaw?

Also, "feeling discriminated against" isn't the same as being discriminated against. I'm not convinced that it's possible to legislate effectively against the possibility that someone will feel that they are being discriminated against.

extremely hard

Difficult, or ruthless?

I'm not saying that the distinction between "discriminating between" and "discriminating against" makes it easy to draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in every case. But I do think it's useful to remember that observing differences need not be a quality judgement.

I believe that some things are better for given purposes than others, that some things are morally better than others, that some people are better at certain things than others, and that it is sometimes possible to make not-entirely-useless predictions about how people will look/think/behave based on their demographic. It's very hard to express specifics along those lines without being seen to be "discriminating against" something.