Should we judge people on the color of their skin?

Thoughts on statistical discrimination

Should we judge people by the color of their skin or the content of their character? There is a deep sense that it is wrong to judge someone on something they have no control over. Some Classical liberals think it is so wrong that we maybe ought to throw away statistics in most cases.

“Liberals don’t want to think about people statistically. We are ethically opposed to this and these are very sound ethics generally! - Helen Pluckrose

“I don’t think base rates ought to be applied when judging individuals.” - Steven Pinker

I think the solution to this quandary is to be precise about what it means to “judge.”

Here are three situations:

A. You are walking at night and you see a person following you. The person is a tall black man. It is wise to cross the street. Maybe go toward an area with more people if one is nearby.

B. You are walking at night and you see a person following you. The person is a short Asian woman. There is almost certainly no threat.

C. A tall black man is following you, but as he gets closer you see it is your friend Jacob. There is almost certainly no threat.

Racial Profiling.

Should Middle Eastern people be put through greater scrutiny at the airport because of their race? I think the answer is yes. A young Middle-Eastern man is a vastly greater security interest than an elderly Asian woman. It is a huge waste of police resources and an exercise in performative stupidity for the security guards to exercise the same amount attention on the elderly Asian grandmother as the bearded young Middle Eastern man.

A murder committed in your neighborhood. You are a 23 year old man. Your neighbor is an elderly Japanese grandmother. Should the police be just as interested in her as in you? Obviously not. Men in general are more likely to be suspected of violent crimes because everyone knows that men are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. No reasonable man complains about this.

The reason why some people object to racial profiling at the airport is because our society has a cult of statistics denial.

Restricting immigration by country based on the widely held views in that country.

Classical Liberals think that it is somehow unjust to restrict immigration from a certain country based on the fact that large numbers of people in that country have abhorrent views. They think that it is an injustice against the individuals in that country who do not share the abhorrent views of their countrymen.

But that view makes no sense. Businesses use statistical discrimination when they decide who to hire. When a business says that a college degree is a requirement to be hired for such and such job, they are excluding many smart and capable people who don’t have college degrees. But there are many jobs for which the proportion of qualified people among college degree holders is much higher than the proportion of qualified people among non college degree holders, so this kind of statistical discrimination makes sense, and Classical Liberals do not object to it.

Classical liberals don’t have a principled objection to statistical discrimination, they make a special exception for race.

The Bottom Line

I think the answer is that we ought to use statistical discrimination for people we don’t know and we should not use statistical discrimination for people we do know. Once you get to know someone, you learn so much about them that the base rates become irrelevant. When a black male stranger approaches you at night, you use the base rate for black males. But once you see that the black person approaching you is actually Jacob, you don’t use the base rate, you use the facts about Jacob. If you know that Jacob is not prone to violent outbursts, there is no threat to you. (On the other hand, if you were prone to making friends with violent criminals, you might run away from Jacob even faster once you recognize that it’s him.)

The word “judging” is imprecise. Asking someone at the airport to go through extra security measures because of their race is totally fine. Blanket bans on Muslim immigration are fine.

It would not be ok to send someone to prison merely because of the fact that they came from a demographic with a high rate of crime. If you’re going to send someone to prison, you have an obligation to look at all the facts of the case - all the facts about that person as an individual - and once you know about person individually, your knowledge about them overwhelms the base rate. Similarly, it’s insulting to use a racial or gender base rate when interacting with someone you know well, because the fact that you’re using a base rate suggests that you don’t know much about them as an individual.