I think you're trying to make the concept of "demeaning" do way too much work, that it's not suited for. If I'm a victim of discrimination, I don't give a damn whether it's demeaning, I care that it harms me.

The "men only" sign on the courtroom door isn't objectionable because it insults women, it's objectionable because it seriously constrains their options.

I hate to say it, but this is sounding an awful lot like those absurd definitions of "racism" in terms of power relations, which are transparently intended to deny the possibility of designated "victim" groups themselves being racist.

Are you focusing on this "demeaning" business because there are forms of discrimination you want to permit, even though the people on the losing end of them find them objectionable?
 

Are you focusing on this "demeaning" business because there are forms of discrimination you want to permit, even though the people on the losing end of them find them objectionable?

Short answer: Yes. Especially when it comes to sex.

She already has suggested above that, in her view, the practice of refusing to hire nursing home aides of a particular sex is not "demeaning," despite acknowledging parenthetically that this practice obviously may be bound up with "sexist views about care-giving being a woman’s role" (and not just among men, by the way; "privacy" concerns are often inseparable from such sexist views).

I predict that this theory of when discrimination is wrong is going to give us lots of examples in which Professor Hellman thinks the discrimination at issue isn't wrong, because it isn't "demeaning" in her view, even if some of the members of the group being discriminated against (or the group ostensibly benefiting from the discrimination) sure do find it demeaning.

This is one of many reasons that "demeaning" seems to me not the best principle to use to judge when discrimination is wrong. But we'll see what the rest of the posts in the series (and/or the book) have to offer.
 

I hate to say it, but this is sounding an awful lot like those absurd definitions of "racism" in terms of power relations, which are transparently intended to deny the possibility of designated "victim" groups themselves being racist.

Brett, I scream when I hear somebody say that black people can't be racist. Of course they can (e.g., Louis Farrakhan).

But at the same time, I think this argument is often taken too far in the other direction. Power does matter with respect to racism, because there's a difference between some black guy who thinks that whites are the devil but has no power to do much harm to whites and Bull Connor with the firehoses or a personnel director at a corporation who uses his power to hire only whites.

Minorities can be racist, and women can be sexist, but the dominant and most virulent forms of these afflications have historically been perpetrated by whites against minorities and men against women.
 

"The first calls up notions of racial superiority and inferiority and ideas about contamination. The second, by contrast, sounds largely in norms of privacy."

I want to go with the social context part of this. I gave a speech on Marshall a couple of weeks back and the thing that always struck me about the plaintiffs in the cases is they had something they wanted to do - a dream if you will - that was completely incongruous with the social context. Someone wanted to go to law school, or someone wanted to live in a house in an area, or someone wanted to sit where they wanted on the bus, or someone wanted to vote in an election, or someone wanted to have a fair trial.

In each case, there was some associated social context and this person with their crazy dream comes along and upsets the cart of someone who thought the way it was was acceptable.

I think that is a very difficult part of trying to decide what discrimination is OK. The "nursing home washing preferences are to be accommodated" example uses privacy as a trump. Yet, privacy trump risks invidious discrimination. For example, the choice to adopt where the state adoption agency respects racial or sexual hostility of the potential adopting parents. Now we might say that this is such a private decision - but what about the state's interest in the child and how this should be played out. Again, I do not have the answer on this, but I am not as concerned about the weight bearing capacity of the "demeaning" word as others are. My sense is more that the idea of being demeaned may change in an instant when someone sees outside of what is expected to be their role.

Best,
Ben
 

What a bunch of PC nonsense this is. Wrongful discrimination isn't wrong because it "demeans". In most cases it's wrong because it's drawing incorrect conclusions about people based on stereotypes, or unfairly disadvantaging some subset of the public. It has nothing to do with the intent of policy, or who thinks who was what "moral worth". Discrimination is wrong when it's effects are wrong. Wrongful discrimination wouldn't be right if it were enacted with good intentions. Example: a Christian theocracy wrongfully discriminates against its non-Christian citizens. The discrimination is not based on "demeaning" of non-Christians, or the idea that they are inherently less worthy than Christians. It's purpose is to convert them to the True Faith and save their souls. It's for their own good, or at least that's what the government that enacts the discriminatory policies thinks. It's still wrong.
 

I see where you're trying to go (rule affirmative action in), but I don't think this even gets you there because a white could always say he finds racial preferences demeaning, and who is anyone to disagree? Of course, you'll say that, based on history and whatever, a judge can step in and say that a certain practice isn't demeaning in the main, but in the first place I don't see why that matters if the plaintiff is demeaned, and in the second, that's bound to be such a subjective assessment that gets entirely wrapped up with how the judge feels about whatever program he's judging.
 

Thanks for presenting a thoughtful account, but I think the account you've presented so far is still lacking in several important respects. Here are some subjects I'd be interested in seeing you address in your remaining six posts:

1) I'd like to see some elaboration on what it means to be "demeaning." I don't find "to deny the equal moral worth (the equal humanity, if you will) of others and to do so in a way that has the ability to put others down" to be a terribly clear standard, and I'm sure there are lots of others who agree with me.

2) It seems pretty clear that you want to move from "discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning" to "discrimination is not wrong when it is not demeaning," but that's a big step. Why couldn't we say, e.g., that discrimination is wrong when it's demeaning ans also when it involves the allocation of benefits or burdens based on irrelevant characteristics? The latter is an obvious conservative account of why affirmative action is wrong, and your account doesn't seem to exclude it. Or: is a corrupt cop who discriminates between those who pay bribes to avoid DUI citations and those who don't pay treating the non-bribers as of lower moral worth? My inclination is 'no', but surely this kind of discrimination is wrong. Cf. question 1 above.

3) I'd like to see an account of why we should treat others as having equal moral worth. Is it your contention that it would be wrong to demean Josef Stalin or to treat him as having lower moral worth than Mother Teresa? Does your argument have anything to say to those of us who believe there's no problem with treating Stalin as less worthy than Mother Teresa?

4) From what you've posted so far, I see an account of what your position is, but not anything by way of argument in its favor.

I'm sure you discuss these issues in your book, but those are the obvious things that come to mind and that I'd appreciate seeing addressed here.
 

"because there's a difference between some black guy who thinks that whites are the devil but has no power to do much harm to whites and Bull Connor with the firehoses or a personnel director at a corporation who uses his power to hire only whites."

Not on a one to one basis, there isn't. And I'd say the inter-racial crime rates reflect that.
 

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You're pretending there's a right answer when there isn't. There's no universal definition of what actions can be described as "demeaning." But there are ways to argue it:
"Rather the point is this: the a ban on head covering, or religious symbols more generally, in public schools carries different meanings in some cultures as compared to others."

That's a cop out. The ban is grotesque if we define a country as modern according to the common understanding of the term. Are you aware of the politics of contemporary Turkey? The secularists are more reactionary than the Islamists, and more corrupt. From the NYT: Tension About Religion and Class in Turkey
You're trying to create a logical system to do the work for you. That's what liberals like to do. It removes them and the rest of us from responsibility. You should be arguing cases and values, and not only rules but principles and morality. That's the best you can do in a crisis. Rules will follow. Try this one. Read the last sentence.
You cheapen the debate in Turkey and France as others have cheapened it for the US over FISA.

Blacks can be racist of course. But when you grow up with the effects of racism -as its victim- what else do you expect? Jews -Israelis- are allowed their paranoia. Why aren't blacks? Why of course aren't Iranians?

But then the question becomes one of "special cases," and that's a problematic category. But Israel is a "special case" right? This country is based on it's own nationalist exceptionalism. America itself is a "special case."
This is how you argue against people who call you "PC."
What do you say about the de facto affirmative action for white people?: "I got my cousin Jimmy a job at the plant." So it becomes "I couldn't get my cousin Jimmie a job at the plant. They're only hiring blacks." Not the best fix, but maybe the only one, for a time.

Rules are blunt instruments. They're no replacement for understanding complexity. And no I'm not defending Brett, who's an idiot and an ass. Complex bureaucracies are never absolutely fair, so stop pretending you can build one that is.

The public debate of values and principles over time. This is how blunt instruments are come to be and this is how they're changed. The argument itself is more constitutive of democracy than whatever those instruments may be at any point.
 

Consider another example. Imagine that a school principal asked students with last names beginning A-M to sit on the left side of the auditorium and students with names beginning with N-Z to sit on the right side of the auditorium.

The above example ignores that splitting children up alphabetically is demeaning. If a meeting is held late in the afternoon and kids may leave once their name is called, the kids with surnames that start earlier in the alphabet get out earlier. The kids with names earlier in the alphabet are selected first for everything. Being called on last for everything from attendance to early release on a half day is frustrating, and the other kids will lampoon you for it. But I imagine Professor Helleman grew up blind to this reality.

In assessing whether this practice constitutes wrongful discrimination, the view I am putting forward would ask: does the residents’ preference for same-sex aides (which the nursing home accommodated) demean male job seekers? A good argument can be made that it does not. Rather, it expresses (for the most part) norms about privacy and intimacy. (I say “for the most part” because a predominantly male nursing home population might not prefer male aids because same-sex privacy norms may be bound up with sexist views about care-giving being a woman’s role).

The above example features another blind spot and a demeaning attitude toward men. Perhaps a predominantly male nursing home population might not prefer male aids because old men are vulnerable and they rightly fear violence or abuse from male more than from females. Male-on-male violence is more commonplace than female-on-male violence, not to mention male-on-male sexual abuse is more commonplace than female-on-male sexual abuse in restricted environments, like prison. Furthermore, a better exemplar of same-sex privacy norms that are bound up with sexist views are the sexist attitudes of women who prefer not to have male aids because of the belief that any male nurse who seeks to care intimately for women in a vulnerable position is a sexual deviant in search of sick jollies, rather than a professional who adheres to professional norms. One need only read mainstream feminist theory to encounter the commonplace notion that men who decide to become gynecologists are latent misogynists with aberrant fetishes for sick women.
 

I can't help but to think that we struggle over discrimination and the law because everyone is looking for clearly defined standards rather than pragmatic trade-offs. The difference between splitting an auditorium by alphabetical arrangement versus by race is that (1) we might carry a fear either that there are reasoned objections to dividing a classroom by race in way such that those reasoned objections may not be heard due to the objectors being factional minority, or even worse, (2) part of a permanent factional minority to the extent that there is constant suspicion that rules are continuously made to disadvantage their group as frequently as possible by the other groups.

As neither the promulgation of dominating or isolating rules or the constant suspicion of dominating or isolating rules are good for the public interest as a whole, it makes sense to use a form of arbitration that is at least somewhat insulated from majoritarian dominating impulses to settle such questions. By contrast, belonging to a particular alphabet grouping based on the first letter of my last name, is still "discriminatory," and, as others above have noted, may confer some minor advantages to some over others. Yet, there is not enough demographic information in my last name starting with the letter "M" to reveal what other factional allegiances I am likely to have or what amount of power I may be capable of wielding as a member of the community to resist rules that privilege others more than myself. The fact of the matter is that the costs of suffering alphabetical discrimination do not rate as a public interest issue, they likely rate only as a mild irritant as a private issue, and they are not subject to generate enough investiture in factional warfare to escalate into some larger scale system over dominating factional relationships.

In short, it is "plus value" to use law and courts to combat gender, racial, sexual orientation, etc. discrimination due to the potential scale of the problem, and for the breadth of possible efficiency lags on public values such discrimination creates. So, where does one draw the line? Somewhere carefully, and with much consideration.
 

Or: what about discriminating between those who are skilled boot-lickers and those who aren't in civil and military service promotions? I'd say that's wrong, since those sorts of promotions should be based on merit, not on brown-nosing. But does that deny the equal humanity of the meritorious? I don't see how it does.
 

Like Brett, I think Prof. Hellman tries to make "demeaning" do too much work, and yet it still leaves gaps. Consider a realistic classroom example: ability-grouping. That might well be "demeaning" to those at the bottom, but that doesn't make it unjustified.

Moreover, the whole "demeaning" criterion doesn't really help us answer the question: why are some forms of discrimination demeaning and others, not? The definition of "demeaning" proposed by Prof. Hellman doesn't fully satisfactorily answer that. For instance, suppose I am looking for a roommate to share an apartment. You would look askance at me if I said, "I only want a white roommate like myself," but not if I said, "I only want a male roommate like myself," and probably not if I said, "I only want a fellow Jewish roommate," (This is not very different than the nursing home argument, come to think of it. Prof. Hellman's only response to that is "cultural context," but that begs the question.)
 

I agree with Brett (#1) entirely. To be harmed has a quantitative and qualitative measure, whereas demeaning, degrading, demoralizing, get us into descriptive ambiguity.

We applaud those with discriminating tastes, but we reject those who discriminate against, for the lack of a better phrase, "accidents of birth." In other words, those habits, characteristics, and features we are capable to molding, changing, adapting, are subject to our own and others' discriminating scrutiny.

But those characteristics and features by "accidents of birth," such as sex, disability, retardation, ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, are not respectable or legitimate characteristics to discriminate for or against.

Notice, the deliberate omission of "religion." Religion is not an "accident of birth," but entirely an environmental acquisition, and should never have been made into a protective class for civil rights. Yet, religious expression is a civil right, including the genital mutilation of children, the withholding medical care in preference for prayer, and drinking Kool-Aid (spiked or not). Religious expression is within the realm of discrimination, and should become more prominent in legitimate criticism. The 2000 year old Roman Catholic Church does not excuse its pedophilia, which, is not to the best of my knowledge, a "congenital disposition."

So two terms: (1) harm done (2) solely on the basis of "accidents of birth" are legitimately prohibited forms of discrimination. And religion can and has done (1) but does not fit the criteria of (2).