http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html

David Brin is a pretty established science fiction writer, having won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In this essay he writes about the relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, using Lord of The Rings as context. It is an interesting topic - the appeal of themes drives our behaviour as thinking beings in a way that is on the fringes of free will, neither controlled nor uncontrollable. Brin describes Romanticism as both aiding and rebelling against the industrial modernity brought by the Enlightenment. The two are neither clearly ally nor adversary, which makes the whole thing pretty interesting.

The ethical question of fairness, of whether to treat people equally, does not depend on whether or not people are in fact equal. I get irate at how people confuse these two. To treat unequal people equally is an ethical decision, not an expression of belief in pre-existing equality. The expense of this moral choice, however, IS proportional to the extent to which equality is truly there.

Discrimination laws restrict the data which can be used to make certain decisions.

Fuzzy points: how is it that women getting cheaper car insurance than men is not sexual discrimination? To collect data on race for that same purpose would clearly be illegal. What about lower insurance for high GPA students?

In health insurance, the improvement of predictive diagnostics forces this ethical confrontation, where newly unequal individuals are to be treated equally.

---

Personally, the lack of discrimination is a question of consistency. The bigger the groups which one treats uniformly are, the more one is able to develop and expose rules of reward and retaliation.

From City Slickers, as seen at Coding Horror:

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

Curly: This. [holds up one finger]

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit.

Mitch: But what is the "one thing?"

Curly: [smiles] That's what you have to find out.