Sep 24, 2026 · 49 min · 10 segments
Send us Fan Mail In some insurance scheme, you might be required to pay more because you are more prone to disability. In another, you may have to…
Harisan Unais NasirGuestSineadHostJamesHostRight.
So you said, well, there might be good reasons, right? Like, we can't expect institutions or insurance companies to spend exorbitant amounts of money to figure out which ones, which kinds of risk factors or which profiles exist for a person.
And I think it's almost, it's possibly impossible.
It might defeat the purpose entirely of insurance if we decided we needed to figure out every person's individualized risk to the most fine-grained thing possible.
So I guess when we use the word discrimination, are we necessarily signaling that something wrong is going on here? Or what are we doing when we use the word discrimination?
Even in the case of insurance, it seems intuitively permissible to charge a base jumper more for life insurance than it is an academic or an accountant.
some bias going on there, maybe.
But more to the case, I think what you're trying to say is that, well, sometimes discrimination can be permissible.
but we still discriminate in terms of who can enter the office and who is not allowed to enter the office.
That's why we have a staff pass to tap in, right? And that's discrimination, right? But then there's a good reason to do that because we don't want our workplace to be disruptive and there's some utility gain from doing all this ethics, of course, for society.
We don't want anyone to be stealing all of our ethics, right? So we keep it locked and secure here.
But, you know, there are good reasons to, like, the safety of our workers or safety of the employees of NUS.
And those reasons are, I think, good reasons to discriminate workers from non-workers from entering this building.
So discrimination... for me at least, just because something is discrimination doesn't make it all things considered impermissible.
Right.
So you said, well, there might be good reasons, right? Like, we can't expect institutions or insurance companies to spend exorbitant amounts of money to figure out which ones, which kinds of risk factors or which profiles exist for a person.
And I think it's almost, it's possibly impossible.
It might defeat the purpose entirely of insurance if we decided we needed to figure out every person's individualized risk to the most fine-grained thing possible.
So I guess when we use the word discrimination, are we necessarily signaling that something wrong is going on here? Or what are we doing when we use the word discrimination?
Even in the case of insurance, it seems intuitively permissible to charge a base jumper more for life insurance than it is an academic or an accountant.
some bias going on there, maybe.
But more to the case, I think what you're trying to say is that, well, sometimes discrimination can be permissible.
but we still discriminate in terms of who can enter the office and who is not allowed to enter the office.
That's why we have a staff pass to tap in, right? And that's discrimination, right? But then there's a good reason to do that because we don't want our workplace to be disruptive and there's some utility gain from doing all this ethics, of course, for society.
We don't want anyone to be stealing all of our ethics, right? So we keep it locked and secure here.
But, you know, there are good reasons to, like, the safety of our workers or safety of the employees of NUS.
And those reasons are, I think, good reasons to discriminate workers from non-workers from entering this building.
So discrimination... for me at least, just because something is discrimination doesn't make it all things considered impermissible.
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