Most people nowadays wholeheartedly condemn discrimination based on social class, race, ethnicity, country origin, gender, sexual orientation and so forth, thinking that it is unjust or unfair to treat individuals differently based on these morally arbitrary factors or attributes.

But what counts as discrimination? I find the answer to this question not always clear. For instance, if a woman is only attracted to and always deliberately chooses to date men with handsome faces, muscular bodies and heights above six feet, can we say that this woman is essentially discriminating against a certain group of her opposite sex, namely men who are not good-looking, not muscular and short? After all, she is not indiscriminately attracted to all men and giving every man an equal opportunity to date her. Typically, people don’t see this type of behavior as discriminatory; instead, we think it is just one’s personal preference which has nothing to do with morality.

As we can see here, a distinction has often been made between preference and discrimination, with the implication that discrimination is a moral issue, and is morally bad, whereas preference is a nonmoral issue, or an issue mainly of personal choice that does not have moral significance. The question is, on what grounds is such a distinction justified? Is it really a valid distinction?

It is not clear to me that the distinction between preference and discrimination corresponds to the dinstiction between the nonmoral and the moral. A common criteria that is used to distinguish the moral from the nonmoral is whether or not the relevant act affects the interests or welfare of others. So, one might say that personal preference has no impact (especially negative) on others which discrimination certainly does. Most people would agree that one’s preference for a certain type of music or wine or books has no moral significance. But what about preference about other people? In the case of dating preference mentioned earlier, it seems there will be men who are less preferred and might be rejected and thus emotionally harmed. Do they then have a legitimate claim against being discriminated on the basis of level of sexual attractiveness?

Still, many people would refuse to think this is discrimination. They argue that discrimination is a systemic or a structural-institutional problem of society, while preference is just an individual act, and this makes them qualitatively different two things. It is true that when we talk about discrimination, we do oftentimes refer to it mainly as a malaise of the society or social institutions. This is usually because this level discrimination is of great magnitude and has much bigger influences on people’s lives than individual discriminatory acts. Nevertheless, we do call some individual behaviors and individuals themselves “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc, thinking that they are immoral or morally wrong. This means both individuals and social institutions can be the agent of discriminatory acts.

To be more specific, so, what exactly is the difference (if any) between refusing to befriend people because of their skin color and refusing to befriend people because they are ugly or dumb? It seems to me that almost everyone would agree that the first instance is a clear example of discriminatory acts whereas the second one is not as clear. But why?