Beyond Selidor

I guess I'm just the kind of person who tends to err on the side of writing 3 page philosophy essays.

James' comment does get to the heart of much of why I think it is likely I disagree with your statement. It is incredibly broad; for such a broad statement to still be true, I think you need to be using the word "discriminate" in quite a narrow sense. The meaning of the word has become quite muddled because of the trend towards using it in this way; people often seem to have their own, subtly different definitions in mind.

Given the presence of "ability" as one of the criteria you don't think should lead to people facing (any?) discrimination, I think your definition has to look quite different from the one must people would use in making broad statements along the lines of "we should not discriminate on the basis of gender".

Should sports teams be able to discriminate between the athletes they employ, on the basis of gender - or should non-mixed sports be illegal?

Should we discriminate between people when choosing whether to socialise with them on the basis of whether they are friendly, or any other aspect of their personalities?

Should we discriminate in offering employment/education/societal approval/etc to murderers, or to Nazis?

What do you mean by "discrimination"; what do you mean that people "should not face it"; and how are you determining what qualities go on the list alongside age, gender identity, ability, etc?

These are the kinds of issues I think merit an essay length response to the statement. Certainly, I don't think your statement, without clarifying very carefully what it means, is something so obviously right that everyone should believe it - unless you mean to convey something actually circular. If by "discrimination" you mean "unfair/unjust/arbitrary discrimination", and you think it is morally wrong that people face such unfair discrimination, sure, I'd agree with that, well of course that's true. But under this reading its very confusing that you feel the need to list certain qualities for which unfair discrimination is unfair (since unfair discrimination is, of course, always unfair); you could have equally said

"I believe no one should face discrimination on the basis of criminal history, the number of letters in their surname, hair colour, dietary preference, height, arrogance, sanity, etc" and it'd still make perfect sense.

If you picked gender, race etc because in the real world a lot of unfair discrimination happens to be on the basis of these things, again, I wonder how ability ended up on that list.