All our operational decisions in life are based on discrimination, on shortcuts, on heuristics. If it were not so, we simply could not just move, we could not live .
Given that there is an enormous amount of information around us and processing it would require more time than we have in our own existence, we allow ourselves to be carried away by hunch, by prejudice, by emotional inertia.
It is not necessarily bad (allows to live), what is worrying is that we use the wrong or too superficial shortcuts .
Discrimination due to excess information
Discrimination should not have any pejorative connotations. Strictly speaking, discriminating only means that, given too great a quantity of information or options, we opt for a limited set of them.
It is the reasons why we behave because of this discrimination that, eventually, can be evaluated on a moral, epistemological or even pragmatic level .
For example, racism is an absurd discrimination because it is based on skin color, but skin color does not tell us anything, for example, about a person’s genome (we are only informed of their phenotype, that is, of the external characteristics that are the result of the environment).
But each of the discriminations must be subjected to continuous scrutiny and continually reevaluated based on new data.
Inequalities such as height (there is a correlation between salary and height of workers, and also between attractiveness and salary), age (ageism is beginning to be talked about), strabismus , stuttering, ugliness (in some courts they are already offered to more handsome actors to represent clients with scars on their faces because they receive higher percentage of penalties ), the extra kilos (already talk about gordofobia), the character (the kind, hypocrites and balls receive more gifts than the rest) …
Perhaps we should be guided by an algorithm that continuously calculates the discrimination traits of the person in front of us, as if we could carry an energy calculating device like in Dragon Ball . Or maybe that would sound too much like a Black Mirror chapter. It is something that we must debate, meditate, reflect, debate again … and avoid the broad brush slogans of the type "do not discriminate" or "you are a racist".
You can go further in this dissertation in this coffee talk that is Baker Cafe :