Concept
Discrimination
Overview
Discrimination is the process of making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong, usually in a way that deprives them of their legal or human rights. The group may be identified by a feature such as race, gender, height, age, class, religion, disability or sexual orientation. Discrimination typically leads to groups being unfairly treated on the basis of perceived statuses of characteristics, for example ethnic, racial, gender or religious categories. It involves depriving members of one group of opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group.
Discriminatory traditions, policies, ideas, practices and laws exist in many countries and institutions in all parts of the world, including those where such discrimination is generally decried. In some places, countervailing measures such as quotas have been used to redress the balance in favor of those who are believed to be current or past victims of discrimination. These attempts have often been met with controversy, and sometimes been called reverse discrimination.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Discrimination is discussed.
No one can help singling out a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrast between a bass note and a high one sounded immediately after it. Discrimination is here _involuntary_. But where the objective difference is less, discrimination need not so inevitably occur, and may even require considerable effort of attention to be performed at all. Another condition which then favors it is that the sensations…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea
No one can help singling out a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrast between a bass note and a high one sounded immediately after it. Discrimination is here _involuntary_. But where the objective difference is less, discrimination may require considerable effort of attention to be performed at all.
William James, Psychology
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea
_And to virtue, discrimination._ Discrimination or knowledge is, in the first place, that one should manifest an outward conduct, and the virtue of faith, in accordance with reason. For we should so far bridle and check the body, that we may be sober, vigorous, and fitted for good works; not that we should torture and mortify ourselves as some famous saints have done.
Martin Luther, The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
But after excluding all questions on which metaphysicians differ, it remains true, that for most purposes the discrimination we are called upon practically to exercise is that between sensations or other feelings, of our own or of other people, and inferences drawn from them. And on the theory of Observation this is all which seems necessary to be said for the purposes of the present work.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
The process of discrimination in sense-awareness has two distinct sides. There is the discrimination of fact into parts, and the discrimination of any part of fact as exhibiting relations to entities which are not parts of fact though they are ingredients in it. Namely the immediate fact for awareness is the whole occurrence of nature. It is nature as an event present for sense-awareness, and essentially passing…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Discrimination
Related ideas
- Egalitarianism
- Ethnicity
- French language
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- Japan
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- Latin
- Southern United States
- Spanish Civil War
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
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- Mecca
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Place in the tradition
Part of Agnosticism.