Published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 86 (1985 - 1986), pp. 307-324 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545049 Discrimination Janet Radcliffe Richards A few years ago, when the EEC was as usual sinking beneath lakes of this and mountains of that, someone had the bright idea that if we removed the duty from wine we should be able to mop up that particular surplus in no time at all. However, the plan ran into problems straight away. Any such policy, it was claimed, would discriminate against the working man, who drank beer. At about the same time, when VAT was about to be imposed on sweets, irate parents appeared on radio programmes protesting about 'discrimination against the kiddies'. If taxes are spread evenly, that apparently discriminates against the poor (or perhaps more commonly, the family man); if they are slanted to the higher incomes, they discriminate against the rich. When duty on petrol or tobacco goes up, the government is discriminating against the motorist or the smoker. And in general, the word tends to be invoked the moment any group finds that some policy or action is making it worse off than it would like to be. It is easy to see why this happens. 'Discrimination', in its recent, political sense, comes trailing connotations of arbitrariness and injustice, so that to label disadvantage 'discrimination' is implicitly to claim that it is unjustified, and should be eliminated on grounds of justice to the disadvantaged group. To this extent the meaning of the word seems fixed: anyone who disagrees that some disadvantage is unjust is more likely to express this by saying that the case is not one of discrimination, rather than that it really is discrimination but nevertheless justified. The rest of the meaning, on the other hand, is very far from clear, and there are no well-entrenched criteria for distinguishing disadvantages which are cases of discrimination from ones which are not. This means, in turn, that if a group does call its disadvantage discrimination - thereby implying that it is unjustly treated - it is not at all obvious how anyone wanting to dispute the label's appropriateness could set about doing so. In practice, therefore, 'discrimination' allows a transition from disadvantage to i11justice which may be far too rapid, and has become an invaluable tool for the fudger of political arguments. My intention in this paper is to embark on the process of making such conjuring tricks more difficult, by trying to sort out not so much the meaning of the word (although a definition will be suggested) as the terrain which tends to be its habitat. The paper is in two parts. The first deals with the question of when a social rule or convention which differentiates between two groups actually discriminates between them, and argues that discrimination is quite distinct from other things which may reasonably be objected to in such rules. The second part turns to the subject of discrimination in the actions of individuals, and argues that what is normally seen as discrimination by individuals is really either dependent on discriminatory rules, or something so different in kind that it should probably not be called discrimination at all. If dis- crimination does reside essentially in rules rather than malevolent or misguided individuals