To “Discriminate”

This deceptively simple argument, of course, trades on an ambiguity. In one sense, to “discriminate” means to “make a distinction,” to pay attention to a differ- ence. In this evaluatively neutral sense, of course, affirmative action programs do discriminate. But public institutions must, and justifiably do, “discriminate” in this sense, for example, between citizens and noncitizens, freshmen and seniors, the tal- ented and the retarded, and those who pay their bills and those who do not. Whether it is unjust to note and make use of a certain distinction in a given context depends upon many factors: the nature of the institution, the relevant rights of the parties involved, the purposes and effects of making that distinction, and so on.

All this would be obvious except for the fact that the word “discrimination” is also used in a pejorative sense, meaning (roughly) “making use of a distinction in an unjust or illegitimate way.” To discriminate in this sense is obviously wrong, but now it remains an open question whether the use of gender and race distinc- tions in affirmative action programs is really “discrimination” in this sense. The simplistic argument uses the evaluatively neutral sense of “discrimination” to show that affirmative action discriminates; it then shifts to the pejorative sense

when it asserts that discrimination is always wrong. Although one may, in the end, conclude that all public use of racial and gender distinctions is unjust, to do so re- quires more of an argument than the simple one (just given) that merely exploits an ambiguity of the word “discrimination.”2

Many people argue that homosexuality is immoral because it is unnatural. In the following reading,3 Burton Leiser criticizes this argument for equiv- ocating on five meanings of the term “natural.” Does the argument really equivocate? Why or why not?