Discrimination: a Christian proposal
The first question we have to ask to begin to address this issue is: what, after all, is discrimination? We begin by answering this question in order to define our terms, and so that as we treat the subject, what is understood by the one who reads, is as much as possible what the writer wants to convey.
The word discrimination has a morally neutral meaning: it can be nothing but to differentiate, specify, discern, or make a distinction (for example, to discriminate the values in a grocery bill). Obviously this sense is not what we intend to explore here.
What is intended here in this article is to reflect upon the morally negative meaning of the word discrimination: to discriminate in the sense of segregating someone based on a characteristic that serves to diminish the person before others.
At bottom, in this sense, discrimination always has as its cause and consequence a diminishing of other people — one discriminates and segregates because he or she sees less value in the other, and this, in turn, generates more sense of inferiority.
Socially, there are visible consequences of this type of discrimination: racism, discrimination based on ethnicity, is an example of this: on the basis of racism is the conception of people of different race as inferior, and the social consequences of racism were very evident in countless places throughout history (as in the apartheid regime in South Africa).
But these days — and before we try to identify and explore the roots of this problem — it is also very important to establish what discrimination is not.
The accusation of discrimination is increasingly common, for example, when someone points out differences without any implied diminishing of others, in a morally neutral sense: for example, to say that men and women are different, in many circles (more and more circles) is seen as tantamount to discrimination. Or at least there is the fear that, if differences are admitted, this necessarily leads to diminishing the more vulnerable part.
But to see the differences where they exist is not in itself a morally negative discrimination, nor does it presuppose necessarily an attribution of inferiority. The key words here are “where they exist”; if we say that women are less intelligent than men, that is a false difference. But if we say that women and men have different brains that give them different innate characteristics, this difference is true, and has nothing in it that necessarily implies seeing women as inferior (women’s brains than men’s in some areas and men’s brains are more efficient than women’s brains in other areas).
When discrimination occurs because of some characteristic, condition, or personal choice — such as sex, social class, sexual orientation, religion, color, ethnicity, profession —it may cause, as we have said, social problems, and someone who feels repeatedly discriminated can develop psychological problems that are sometimes very serious.
In fact, studies show that “when people are chronically treated differently, unfairly or poorly, this can result in effects ranging from low self-esteem to a higher risk of developing stress-related disorders such as anxiety and depression “(UCLA Newsroom).
But this can pose a problem: discrimination causes psychological problems because it’s felt — and even when it is morally neutral, it can be felt as morally negatively charged. People often feel discriminated against, and accuse others of discrimination, when there is nothing discriminatory about the one being accused of discrimination.
In a society that’s hypersensitive towards discrimination, people may be too quick to label behavior as discriminatory, or they may even use the accusation of discrimination as a weapon to harm those who want to accuse. And it can be extremely difficult to perceive what kind of discrimination is involved in each case: the same thing, spoken with a different intonation, may represent a morally neutral discrimination or a morally negative discrimination.
For example, I can say “person X is homosexual” with a respectful intonation, but I can say the same thing with an offensive and disrespectful tone. This and other examples are hints that discrimination should be identified and measured in concrete acts, not in the perception of the person who feels discriminated against.
Because someone feeling discriminated against does not necessarily constitute a real act of discrimination, and even if there is verbal discrimination effectively, it is risky and dangerous to consider speech to be illegal. There are too many subtleties and nuances in verbal discourse, and history shows us that criminalizing discourse — however non nuanced and blatantly detestable — is to undermine freedom of expression and open the door to totalitarianism and censorship.
In Portugal, the law of discrimination is quite reasonable, focusing on behavior rather than discourse or other subjective forms of discrimination (perhaps because of the countries history of dictatorship and censorship). Thus, discriminatory behavior may constitute a crime or an offense:
“The crime of discrimination occurs whenever organizations are formed, or materials are disclosed and made public, that incite discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or group of people because of their race, color, origin ethnic or national origin, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. On the other hand, discrimination as an offense occurs when a person is prevented from exercising his or her rights related to access to goods and services, employment and professional training, education and the public and private health system, among others. “ (APAV, Discrimination)
In other countries, just verbally saying for example that someone should not have the same rights because they belong to a particular group may be considered “hate speech”, and can lead to serious legal problems. The most popular cases occur in North America and the UK, although there are other countries that have been banishing some types of discourse, and many others where the debate is intense (and also others where decision makers can not even reach a legal definition of hate speech).
Of course, there are different levels of responsibility between social agents: social media and public office should be called upon to account for messages that may incite hatred — but even here, clear definitions of exactly what constitutes incitement to hatred are needed. The move to totalitarian regulators and witch hunts is too small.
Not to mention the so-called “micro-aggressions”, which is to take the whole issue one step further, towards a complete subjectivization of discrimination. A simple intonation of discourse, according to the proponents of this concept, can constitute a violence that causes psychological suffering, and may lead to problems with authorities (mostly non-judicial so far— but controversy is on the rise in universities in the USA, for example) — if the alleged victim feels offended in some way.
Not to imply that there isn’t such a thing as inappropriate interactions and admitting that they should be considered in a cultural analysis in order to develop some kinds of actions aiming to promote greater inclusion. But to call something so ordinary as an intonation of discourse “aggression”, albeit “micro”, is at least dangerous, and the potential for serious accusations because of subjective actions that are extremely difficult to interpret is enormous.
We have already seen that the problem is complex, and that the measure of discrimination must be above all focused on concrete actions and not mainly on discourse or other subtleties. What about rights? Is it discrimination not to assign the same rights to everyone?
For example, in the United States, the Obama administration issued a directive to schools instructing them to give people of a given sex (but who identified as being of the other sex), the right to use the bathroom of the sex with which they identified, independently of their biological sex. But should men who identify as women or women who identify as men have the right to use the bathroom of the sex they identify with and which is not their own? Trump revoked that directive.
We will not spend time discussing this particular example, but it seems obvious that not everyone should have the same rights. For example, in the case of euthanasia: should someone with a terminal illness have the right to end their life? Even if you think so, do you think that anyone should be able to end their life? What if you are a depressed and confused teenager? Should a suicidal teenager have that right? Does giving some people the right to terminate their life and not giving the same right to others constitute a crime of discrimination?
What about marriage? Today, in many countries, it is legal for two homossexual men or two lesbian women to marry. We will not enter into the discussion about whether homosexual marriage is legitimate in the eyes of God, but what if 3 or 4 people want to marry, should they have that right? What if a person wants to marry an animal? Should he or she have that right? What if one child wants to marry another? Should children have the right to marry? Does giving some people the right to marry and not giving the same right to others constitute a crime of discrimination?
What if my religion tells me that I should not allow my child to be subject to a blood transfusion? Should I be required to allow it? Is it not discrimination that I be forbidden to freely exercise the prescriptions of my religion?
What about age? Why do I, who am 38 years old, have no right to retire and only those over 65 enjoy that right? Is this not discrimination based on age?
It seems clear when we are confronted with these examples that not everyone should have the same rights, and that denying some people some rights because of belonging to a particular group does not in itself constitute discrimination. So what constitutes discrimination?
I propose the following definition: it constitutes discrimination for someone to be segregated or diminished on the basis of their personal characteristics and choices, while being stripped away of their dignity as human beings. This seems like a good definition because it doesn’t imply that everyone should enjoy all the rights that other groups enjoy.
This attribution of rights must result from an exercise of social and political discussion, an exercise in which all groups and social agents must have a voice, even those who advocate for what is apparently discrimination. This is the only way to guarantee dignity to all, even to those who seem to want to strip others of their dignity.
But leaving aside legal issues and fracturing social issues, and exploring the roots of discrimination: if discrimination is a cause and/or consequence of diminishing people, leading to a view of people as having a lower value, the center of our reflection must be not the discrimination itself — the symptom on the surface — but the question of the value of human beings — the real root of the problem.
And a reflection on the value of the human beings obviously begins with the question “how much is a human being worth”?
What is the value of a person?
Maybe we can start by thinking about the value we have as human beings by comparison. What is more valuable? A human being or an elephant? And there’s no reason to stop on mammals; why not ask the same question about the value of a human being and an ant? Or a human being and a bacterium?
For Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher at Princeton University in the USA, it is not so clear that being human has more value than animals. On the contrary, he argues that “the notion that human life is sacred only because it is human life is medieval.”
For this philosopher, what defines the rights of a living being is not its intrinsic status, but its capacity to suffer or to feel pleasure. This means that if we have a human being who can not suffer or feel pleasure — like a person in vegetative state or a child born with severe brain damage — and we have an animal, such as a dolphin, which retains its capacity to suffer or to feel pleasure, the animal capable of feeling has more rights than the human being who can not feel. And if one loses his ability to suffer or has pleasure, it may be lawful to do away with that person’s life. It is not more valuable than a vegetable.
And, of course, Peter Singer, according to his worldview, is right and is consistent in saying and arguing for that. From a naturalistic point of view, if God does not exist and the universe is an accident, if life on earth arose by chance and the human being and other animal species are only the fruit of an unguided evolutionary process; if there is no objective foundation that gives humans a special status, there is no intrinsic difference between human and non-human animals.
In this scenario, if we prefer one species over another, we are making a moral mistake: speciesism (which is the moral equivalent of racism or sexism, but referring to inter-species discrimination).
But why should it be the ability to suffer or pleasure to measure the status of a being as worthy or unworthy of having rights? Why can’t it be, for example, the simple fact of being alive? If there is no one, no authority above human beings to tell us that one species is more worthy than the other, every member of every species should been seen as having the same dignity.
But, of course, Singer knows just how far he can go. Conveniently, he is a utilitarian, which means (simplistically put) that he considers moral what results in happiness and immoral what results in unhappiness. From this utilitarian philosophy comes this idea about the capacity to suffer or feel pleasure that establishes the dignity of a living being.
If a being has the capacity to feel pain or pleasure, happiness or unhappiness, it has value, and it is immoral to harm it; if he does not have that capacity, he has no value, and there is no reason why it is immoral to harm him.
This philosophy leads to all sorts of interesting thoughts: an elderly person with Alzheimer’s disease, for example. If you are causing pain and suffering to your family, would not it be better to take your life? For Singer, this person still has value if he can be autonomous, suffer or feel pleasure; but if we are serious in our utilitarianism, we should think about the rights of the social group and of society as a whole, and not just for a specific individual.
Thus, what is moral must be what maximizes the pleasure and well-being of a whole group and not just an individual. Is not an old man with Alzheimer’s a source of pain for many people? And, of course, if we are not utilitarian — and we are not obliged to be — our criterium does not have to be the ability to suffer or pleasure.
Perhaps we are all hopelessly immoral for killing thousands of species of animals and plants every day. Maybe all human beings should die, because they can not live and have a moral philosophy that respects their animal and vegetable brethren of other species.
Or we can build our own philosophy with different measures of value: we can listen to our culture, which tells us for example that what sets our value is extraordinary achievements, such as entering our name in the Guinness Book of Records. Of course for many people this is worth absolutely nothing.
We can also try to value ourselves in our own eyes by investing in our self-esteem. Clinical psychology works, and psychological techniques can help people to accept and value themselves as they are. Our acceptance of ourselves can then serve as a measure of our value to ourselves.
In giving these examples of what we can use as a measure of our value, what we are trying to demonstrate, is that any of these approaches is equally valid — and equally weak and subjective — if there is no authority above human beings that assures us that human beings are especially and objectively more valuable than living beings of any other kind.
If there is no such authority, there is no objective criterion of value attribution, and we can all choose our philosophy — and any choice can be equally legitimate (and equally invalid). For if there is no objective way of measuring our value, there can be at best only a subjective philosophy of value-attribution.
But I personally believe that there is an objective way in which we can know that we have intrinsic value. It goes as follows:
Intimately and intuitively, we know that every human being is of a superior value relatively to other non-human living beings. Dostoievsky, a Russian author of the nineteenth century, tells a story in his novel “Crime and Punishment” about a man, Raskolnikov, who decides to kill an elderly woman.
He was aiming to steal from her, but not only that: his worldview held that human beings whose lives do not result in any benefit to the society in which they live — like the elderly woman— have proportionately less dignity than others whose lives are translate into flowering and common good. So the plan included stealing the old woman but also murdering her.
But even more than that, according to Raskolnikov’s worldview, not only should he not feel guilty for murdering the old woman, but he should feel good about having payed society a good service.
However, the crime leaves Rodion in a state of great confusion. For days, he plunges into delirious fevers, caused by his own act, wandering aimlessly and sometimes even losing the notion of reality, alternately with moments of extreme lucidity.
The novel thus gives us an incursion into a mind as brilliant as disturbed, obsessed by the act committed. Remorse had become unbearable. How to explain this, if this was the philosophy on which Raskolnikov believed dearly?
The only alternative explanation to a relativistic view of human value, and which explains this exacerbated and instinctive guilt for taking the life of a human being, is that there is an authority above human beings that created them with a special status — and that special status attributed to us and our fellow humans, is engraved in the depths of our being.
We call this supreme authority ‘God’, and in the Bible we have a proposal of who this God is, and how he acts in history and interacts with humans ever since the moment they were created by him.
Of course there are other religions and other visions of man beyond that which the Bible compose to us. The views of the other great monotheisms — Islam and Judaism — though very different of Christianity (Islam the most, of course) in many aspects that make up their worldviews and visions of man, are in tune with Christianity in this particular: man was created with an intrinsic value inherent in own existence as God’s creation.
Alternatively, we have the proposals of the Eastern religions — here the abyss is much deeper: neither sees man as special and more valuable creation of God. But this is not material to deepen here.
In the Bible we read that this God created all things and created the human being: man and woman. And the Bible says in its first book, the book of Genesis: “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him.” (Genesis 1:27) This God of the Bible created man not as just another animal, but as a special creation, in his own image and likeness. A being with conscience, with a soul, with a vocation to connect with its creator in a voluntary and intimate, personal, relational way.
The way that God created, it is the subject of debate, even among Christians, and it is not worth it to consider this question: what the author of Genesis intends his readers to withdraw from his anthem or poem of creation, is above everything, the fact that God created — and that man occupies a special place — and a superior one — in that creation.
Yes, this special status raises a number of reservations and objections: one example is that it is from this supposed superior status that great evils result, namely the abuse of nature by man. However, what the author of Genesis also states, is that God does not create man with a special status in order for him to be free to destroy creation; on the contrary, he creates man with a superior status in order to take care of creation and preserve it. And in this sense, all violence and disrespect for creation is something hateful to God. And if man perverts this purpose in his creation government, it is because he has distanced himself from God and is not acting according to God’s expressed will.
What the Bible also teaches is that man, at first, rebelled against this God: man wanted — and still wants — to be God himself; but when he departed from the Creator who gave him dignity, he also lost his dignity, and his inherent sense of worth.
In short, without a supreme authority which absolutely confers upon man an intrinsic value, each man becomes his own authority, giving himself and other human beings only a subjective value, an oscillating value, without a solid foundation. A value that is based on race, age, social status, sex, achievements, his subjective sense of value. Ironically, Peter Singer is with us here. He says in an article of his, compiled with others in the book “Unsanctifying Human Life”:
Although defenders of the doctrine of the sanctity of human life now often try to give their position some secular justification, there can be no possible justification for the measure of the sanctity of life to be our own species, unless we invoke some belief about immortal souls.
Now, without a notion of its value, and not wanting to connect with God — the only one who gives objective value to human existence — man feels like trash, he treats himself as trash, he becomes trash; he’s nothing more than a cosmic accident, lost in a cold and impersonal universe: as the English poet Alfred Edward Housman said, “For nature, without judgment and without heart, does not care or want to know.”
It brings to mind the famous rating agencies, which, analyzing some indicators, attribute to countries and public debts a rating that at its lowest level may be less than “junk.” And because the agencies attribute this rating, the value of the entity assessed goes down to rubbish also in their own eyes (who did not feel like rubbish in Portugal during the economic crisis?), and in the eyes of those who trust these agencies.
And now, going back to the topic of this article, discrimination: it becomes clear why human beings, not realizing their own value as a divine creation, are so predisposed to discriminate against other human beings. Because if you do not submit yourself to someone who is superior to you, who in an absolute way decrees that all men are equally valuable regardless of their condition (whatever the “rating agency” evaluates), anyone can attribute to themselves a superior status in relation to their fellow man, striving to diminish and dominate him. In this way, man feels valued, he feels superior, he feels he is God.
The desire to downgrade someone comes from an unfulfilled desire to be special.
We realize that discrimination, on the one hand, has its roots deep in the human heart corrupted by its willingness to judge itself superior to its fellow men. On the other hand, and paradoxically, discrimination is something profoundly incompatible with what our Creator and supreme authority, in his sovereignty and in his love, conferred upon humanity: a special status, an intrinsic value, in the image of its Creator.
In this paradox lives mankind, and in this conflict, he suffers and despairs.
What, then, is God’s response to this human condition of disorientation and despair, which causes man to suffer so much and to make his fellows suffer? In order to rescue man from his miserable and disoriented condition, this God came to earth in human form in Jesus Christ, to die on the cross taking upon him all the miseries of man, miseries which also die on the cross with him.
By identifying himself with Christ, by faith in him, man can be free from his miseries, from his despair, even from his own death. The cross, besides implying many other fundamental things about the nature of God, implies one that interests us particularly for this topic: the love of God for all men. No discrimination here.
All people are contemplated in the love of God expressed on the cross. Jesus prayed on the cross for those who crucified him. No one is discriminated against, everyone is the target of his love. Everyone needs salvation because everyone is lost and condemned to be garbage in their eyes and /or in the eyes of their fellow man. And salvation is offered to all.
During his life, Jesus made it clear that no one was garbage to him — even those who at the time were considered less than garbage: the lepers, the sick, the poor, those who were seen as sinners, the lost causes. He also had to call out those who saw themselves as superior and who classified others as garbage: he called them hypocrites and blind. But he did not stop praying for them. Nor were they discriminated against.
If Jesus walked here again today, he would have exactly the same attitude towards those who are considered to be garbage today: the indigents, the weak, the addicted, the prostitutes, even those who would crucify him. He would also have to call out (probably with harsh words) those who feel morally superior.
Without God, not only do we have no basis for not discriminating against our fellowmen, we also have no basis for discriminating between humans and animals or other living things. Discrimination, the diminishing the status of our fellowman or our diminishing by our fellowman, is only overcome and only makes sense when we turn with faith to the one who has the authority to give equal value to all men.
Connected to the only eternal Source of value, we perceive who we are and who our fellow man is; disconnected from the Source, we are left to floating criteria and we are deceived by arbitrary classifications that we attribute to others and that others attribute to us.
In Jesus, every man and woman has a value that is inalienable to him. It is not a subjective value that depends on people’s characteristics, choices or conditions — it is a value that nothing or anyone can remove. Because the creator himself, the supreme authority, decreed it when he created human beings, and then came in the form of a man, to personally remind humanity of their value, and call man back to the Source of life, love, and dignity.
