Is discrimination (in hiring) morally wrong?

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Not sure I buy that. That would imply that some share of your future business profits (potential wages) already belong to someone who has never had any prior association with your business.

The lines could be blurred too. If I were to hire a not-particularly-well-qualified friend (or little brother) for my small 6-person startup, simply because I liked working with the guy, would that imply that I’m stealing from an indeterminate number of other people that hypothetically could have had the position? Undeniably the friend lucked out, simply because he happened to know me, but I’m not sure you can argue that I wronged anyone else.

Which brings up another question. To what extent is hiring for “culture”, as in business culture, or a certain environment, acceptable? Yes, having a cohesive culture can often lead to improved business results. But I’m not sure it always does. Sometimes it could just make work more enjoyable, but leave the bottom-line as before. But is that an illegitimate aim?
 
Ok, interesting. At first blush, it just seems like a wishy-washy legal/political tool to make discrimination mean anything the lawyers and their clients want it to mean, but maybe there’s more substance to it? I’ll read up on it.
 
What about only interviewing female engineers and not male engineers just because they’re male? Is that morally wrong? Companies do that through affirmative action hiring quotas.
 
That’s to ensure both males and females are hired in equal proportion, it doesn’t mean only hiring females
 
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There’s legal and illegal discrimination. What’s legal in some areas is illegal in others.

For example, source-of-income is illegal to discriminate against in some areas. So if someone’s check comes from social security, or welfare, or stripping, or being a policeman, whatever— if someone doesn’t like where their money comes from, in areas where “source-of-income” isn’t a protected class, you can say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t rent to attorneys” and in areas where “source-of-income” is a protected class, you have no choice.

A lot of landlords discriminate against felons. There’s a movement to make “criminal history” a protected class, so that if someone has something like “assault family violence” or “manufactured meth” or “armed robbery” lurking in their past, they have to find some other reason to turn them down— but it can’t be because they have felonies in their past.
 
Lara said:
The landlord is going to pick either the one with more income or the one who seems to be the most “popular” and able to engage him in conversation well. Also the one who happened to have the most money to buy the best clothing. Nothing about this is fair. Plus, even without these advantages, I could have been picked by bribing the landlord with higher than market value rent. Life isn’t fair. And no, I wouldn’t be caught if I were a landlord or an employer.
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Ok, but the question was about morality, not about what happens, or about what is fair. (Why does "fairness keep coming up? Is unfairness considered immoral or something?)
 
Yes, there are all sorts of laws, either with or without rhyme or reason about discrimination. But what about the intrinsic morality of discrimination itself? (Apart from whatever laws exist - we could get into a separate discussion about obedience to the laws of the land, and what constitutes proper authority/where the state exceeds their proper authority)
 
If you are in the position of employer, morality would not be a big deal for the simple reason that you can only pick one person anyhow. You will always leave a whole bunch of people without the job. And they’ll all be wondering if they were discriminated against.

I don’t believe discrimination is wrong. I saw a job advert in which you had to be Cree or Native to get the job at a museum. You would be a hostess/interpreter. I thought it was unfair that most people couldn’t get the job. In a sense, it’s even immoral making those conditions. But on the other hand, it’s perfectly great for the Cree and Native people. So, I have to let it go. It’s just another form of acceptable discrimination.

Say I wanted to be a cab driver in this city. It would really help if I was male and Muslim. That’s just life. They are not acting immorally by discriminating against a Catholic woman like me. They just want to work with their buddies.
 
In a scenario in which the male portion has already been filled (which is a common situation in male-predominant professions such as engineering), yes it does. In a perfectly non-discriminatory situation, the number of men or women already hired would be irrelevant to whether you hired a given applicate. You would hire purely on quals - if this resulted in 95% male, 5% female, and failing to meet some arbitrary ratio, then so be it.
 
I tend to think along these lines too. The flipside being that customers are perfectly free to boycott or hit the media if they don’t like the discriminatory culture of a business. In choosing to discriminate, or not (however the heck you’d prove that), the business takes ownership of the results. I tend to think it should be left at that, and labour boards should not get involved.
 
I think there’s a couple of different arguments.

(1) We shouldn’t prejudge individuals, nor base our decisions on other’s prejudgments. So for example, if I believe that black people are all lazy and won’t work as hard as white people, or that women can’t be good at mathematical thinking, that’s bad because I’m making an unfair judgment.

(2) We have some obligation to make sure people aren’t unfairly denied a chance to earn their own livelihood. Fair or not, we’re in a society where people depend on being able to find an employer that pays a certain wage in order to get ahead. That’s actually the origin of many antidiscrimination laws - that discrimination was meaning certain people were stuck being poor or even dependent on others because their race or sex meant they couldn’t get a decent job.

(3) Some antidiscrimination laws are meant to prevent trying to do an end run around the employer’s obligations. For example, much of age discrimination laws are meant to prevent employers who have retirement benefits from firing employees right before they get those benefits. There are also laws preventing firing employees who raise concerns about illegal practices.

That aside, I don’t think that as a business owner you necessarily have a moral right to be free from other labor laws either. It can be acceptable for a government to restrict certain behavior that might otherwise be moral, but that has a deleterious effect on society if widely practiced.
 
DarkLight said:
So for example, if I believe that black people are all lazy
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(1) That would be silly to frame it in that absolutist manner. It wouldn’t necessarily be unfair to state that statistically black people are more lazy than white people, or Asian people are more intelligent than white people, and for an employer to recognize that he assumes the statistical risk by hiring a certain group. (This doesn’t go to say that he shouldn’t assume that risk - I’m just acknowledging that cultural and genetic differences with real consequences exist)

(2) I agree. I don’t necessarily that enabling people to “get ahead” is a moral imperative, but “getting by” certainly. The question arises who, specifically, is responsible for helping whom, and how much? Should the government be involved at all? This question is both moral and pragmatic.
  • First, is this within the proper authority of the gov’t to govern this type of thing?
  • Second, are there any negative side effects that result from such laws?
  • Third, given the socioeconomic side effects resulting, should gov’t still legislate?
    I personally tend to think that the requirement to help one’s fellow man falls within the personal dictates of charity, as opposed to justice (which is something which implies legislation). I get that the lines can be blurred. A certain amount of charity can be required in justice, but this is pretty situationally dependent in my view. I don’t owe someone a shot ahead in the same sense as I owe someone $2000 if I borrowed it from him. The second is a clear-cut case of justice and my given circumstances mostly don’t affect my obligation to repay. The first is more dependent on my capabilities. (Which is another reason I don’t think gov’t should get involved. They can’t really assess all the variables)
(3) Yes, that is the intent. Personally I think retirement benefits (and many others) are a silly invention, and that people should invest for their own retirement rather than giving their employer an incentive to act like an insurance company, but that’s another topic. Aren’t the second variety better classified as whistle-blower legislation than anti-discrimination?

Well, as a subscriber to Catholic teaching on just authority, I have to agree with your last point. Yes, employers are morally bound by most laws of the land, despite the fact that most labour laws of the land are horribly misinformed and damaging.
 
Socrates92 said:
Which brings up another question. To what extent is hiring for “culture”, as in business culture, or a certain environment, acceptable? Yes, having a cohesive culture can often lead to improved business results. But I’m not sure it always does. Sometimes it could just make work more enjoyable, but leave the bottom-line as before. But is that an illegitimate aim?
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Well, I’ve worked in a place where one whole corridor was young blonde women. That’s all the guy would hire. I also went for an interview once at a fairly large (50?) trade association (gov. regulations, hardly a place where you needed to be a certain gender) and all the employees were women. I also worked in a place (90+ employees) where, when you turned 50, you began to count the days until they fired you.

And we all know about hiring friends and family (Trump on down). Sometimes that works, but I suspect most of the time it doesn’t, simply because the odds of a friend or family member having the best possible qualifications are almost nil. The issue of “culture” is reasonable, but only up to a point. Can’t your “culture” be improved? Or are you saying it’s perfect?

As for “stealing,” I’ll stand by that. If I have the best qualifications, I deserve the job. If you take it away from me, you might be causing me irreparable damage (you never know).
 
Socrates92 said:
Well, as a subscriber to Catholic teaching on just authority, I have to agree with your last point. Yes, employers are morally bound by most laws of the land, despite the fact that most labour laws of the land are horribly misinformed and damaging.
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There’s a moral question and a pragmatic question here.

The moral question is, is it ok for the government to pass labor regulations outlawing behavior that is morally permissible, and if so under what conditions?

The pragmatic question is, what regulations actually tend to improve society?
 
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Erikaspirit16 said:
As for “stealing,” I’ll stand by that. If I have the best qualifications, I deserve the job. If you take it away from me, you might be causing me irreparable damage (you never know).
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Part of the question is also how we make sure people have access to equal qualifications and that their qualifications are regarded fairly.

To use an example from my own family, my mother and father got roughly the same grade in a class. To the professor, it was proof that my father was good at the subject, and that my mother was probably cheating off a guy.
 
OK, so I’m in charge of hiring at my library. I’ve got one spot to fill: Children’s Librarian, a Librarian II position. (ie, not an entry-level position.)

I have a stack of 50 applications.

Only 10 of those have an MLS (Master of Library Science). So I’ve just discriminated against 40 of them based on education level.

Of those 10, 6 of them have at least three years’ experience working with children in a school or library setting. I’ve just discriminated against 4 of them based on job history.

Of those 6, I start weighing different things. Was the size of their former libraries comparable with the size of mine? Were they with younger kids (kindergarten, pre-k) or were they with older kids (ie, high school)? What were their duties, and how did their duties overlap with the duties expected of the position we were advertising? How about their salaries-- were they taking a giant pay cut to come work for us? (Which is okay-- I took a $7k pay cut when I joined! 😛 But it’s also nice to ask people, “Can you tell me about your motivation as to why you want to work for us, but earn less money than what you’re currently doing?” etc.) That’s also when we start getting into interviews, seeing their dynamics, see who’s got the personality to click with working with young kids and their parents, who has creative ideas, who has drive and personality and charm, who’s familiar with publishers and books versus who hasn’t look at children’s literature since they were kids, and so on.

It was really eye-opening being on the hiring end of things. And it wasn’t a particularly moral/immoral thing— it was, “We have one position to fill, and these are the people who are interested in filling it, so who is most likely to be the best candidate, so we don’t have to do this again for another 5-10 years?” 😛

How about you? When you hire people to perform a moderately skilled job that requires some amount of education, how do you turn a 2" stack of resumes (or a 5" stack, or a 10" stack) into a final batch of serious contenders?
 
midori said:
A lot of landlords discriminate against felons. There’s a movement to make “criminal history” a protected class, so that if someone has something like “assault family violence” or “manufactured meth” or “armed robbery” lurking in their past, they have to find some other reason to turn them down— but it can’t be because they have felonies in their past.
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This is actually an interesting case, because it’s a good example of balancing the individual and society.

Individually, people don’t want to live near felons and landlords don’t want to take the risk of having them. There are obviously good reasons for this.

As a society, the problem we’re having is felons can’t find housing. This causes several problems. One, lack of stable housing (and other forms of reintegration into society) increases recidivism. Two, it means convicted felons are more likely to disappear to where we can’t keep track of people we want to keep track of. Three, it increases dependency on welfare and charitable services among people we would rather have working and paying their own way.
 
Lara said:
For instance, a manager might discriminate against a pretty woman because he knows the guys would never do their work with her walking around there.
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The employer ought to be discriminating against employees who use the presence of someone attractive as an excuse to avoid working.
Lara said:
I don’t do any hiring, but if I did, I wouldn’t hire feminists because I’d hear nothing but bellyaching and complaining. Anything on their resume that suggests they were in a women’s studies course would disqualify them.
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This is an unfair prejudice, but I’m sure it happens. I knew a fellow with a PhD who said he couldn’t get a job on any work crew that did manual labor because the people hiring didn’t think he’d fit in with “normal” coworkers. He’d done that kind of work to get through school, but once he was “over-educated” he became suspect.
 
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