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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Employers are legally prohibited from making hiring decisions based on statistical generalizations about protected groups, even when those generalizations are statistically sound.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Statistical discrimination can be epistemically rational: Phelps (1972) shows group data is legitimate evidence when individual signals are noisy or costly.
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    • 2.A prohibition on epistemically rational inference violates the employer's liberty to act on best available evidence, not merely on animus or prejudice.
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    • 3.Laws that forbid accurate statistical reasoning conflate discriminatory intent with actuarially sound decision-making, undermining the moral coherence of anti-discrimination doctrine.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Dworkin's distinction between personal and external preferences implies anti-discrimination law should target malicious disregard for persons, not neutral probabilistic reasoning.
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    • 2.If the statistical generalization is causally traceable to prior structural injustice, the wrong lies in the structural conditions, not the employer's inference from them—Lippert-Rasmussen's causal argument.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Disparate treatment doctrine in U.S. employment law forbids statistical discrimination against members of protected groups.
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    • 2.An employer using group-level statistical evidence (e.g., that women or blacks are more prone to absenteeism) to restrict hiring to other groups constitutes statistical discrimination.
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    • 3.The law requires hiring decisions to be based on particular evidence about individual candidates, not statistical generalizations.
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