New term

An institution may respond to historical inequality by treating an individual less favourably because he belongs to a historically advantaged demographic category.

That individual then bears the cost for something he personally may neither have caused nor benefited from.

It’s like a person who recently migrates to Australia benefitting from living in a society based on earlier dispossession and then being held responsible for what happened to the aborigines at the hands of the English.

Apparently the recent immigrants object, for obvious reasons. It’s like taking on a liability you didn’t agree to ahead of time.

New term for the day – Asymmetrical retrospective discrimination: negative treatment of individuals based on their presumed membership of an historically advantaged group, where this is justified as corrective.

My view is that individuals should not be assigned rights or obligations based on the characteristics of groups to which they presumably belong. Either we have gender (and the rest) or we don’t: you can’t just cherry pick when it suits you.

In any case, if you reduce my rights then I’ll naturally reduce my sense of obligations accordingly.