1. Your standard for whether sexyism or any other form of discrimination is permissible begs the question. You say we need to ask whether the discrimination has a “degrading effect” on humanity, but that’s the very question of the topic: is sexyism degrading and therefore immoral? I have attempted a standard, albeit one that is not rigorously proven, for when employment discrimination is okay, while you have simply restated the question in different terms.

2. While I concede that I have not deductively proven the two essential elements of pernicious discrimination, I think the burden is really on you to disprove it rather than for me to prove it. Clearly we have an intuition that racism and sexism are immoral but that discrimination on the basis of actual talent is valid. What features, then, seem to distinguish the two? I submit that irrelevance and immutability constitute the difference, and I am yet to be convinced otherwise.

And no, that’s not “intellectual gymnastics”–it’s a transcendental argument. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_arguments.

Any criteria which has no relation to the job at hand and is subjective is immoral.

A) I offered examples of the myriad ways it could apply to the job at hand.

B) Who defines what “has no relation with the job at hand”?

C) When did “arbitrary” or “subjective” become synonymous with “immoral.” I prefer not to work with gassy people? Am I guilty of IBSism? I find myself creeping closer to Halpin’s line of thinking.

I have noticed that rich people are old and unattractive. This, I suspect, is attributable to a historically commendable lack of sexyism in America.

Sexyism is hiring based on finding someone physically attractive.

As I – and you – mention, the modelling and acting industries cannot afford to practice sexyism, because in those industries the physical body has an important relation to the job.

This is really the heart of my critique: that sexyism is an unreasonable standard in the workplace because it 1) has no relation to a job and 2) hiring based on a personal notion of beauty constitutes an unfair and unattainable standard to the applicant.

I do not judge sexyism a problem based on the consequences of a bimbo-filled workplace – just as I would not judge an all black or all woman workplace to always be inherently unfavorable. To me the sexyist moment is unjust discrimination because it has no relation with the job at hand and relies on an uncontrollable standard – the eye of the beholder.

The free market has no place in such a debate. In fact the free market easily tolerates a firm rife with immoral practices as long as people by their product.

It doesn’t mean that all other things being equal, the beautiful person won’t win out. I just don’t have a problem with that. I do think that companies/firms that favor beauty to the detriment of qualities that give them a comparative advantage will lose marketshare or create an opportunity for a competitor.

Of course, all of this assumes a reasonably functional free market, which is increasingly less the case in the United States.

It seems that the legitimacy of an -ism grievance, at least insofar as it deserves to be bandied about by legal scholars, depends soley upon its being asserted by a fellow human being. This in turn suggests that any assertion by any person has an equal legitimacy, again in the attenuated sense that it deserves valuable time spent in its consideration. This would seem to make my own Wendy’s-ism, the fanboy’s sexy-ism, and Rosa Park’s claim of racism to be initially equally legitimate. Only rationalism run amuck, completely unmoored from any metaphysical/moral foundation would end up in such a place. Can’t we just say that sexyism is retarded and move on?

Intellectual courage, however, is not the same thing as intellectual coherence. My question, then: What is the analytical basis for saying discrimination based on immutable/irrelevant traits is *disjunctively* palatable but *conjunctivley* intolerable? York simply fiats that it is: there is no reason given other than “common sense norms of fairness.”

In fact, aging seems to be another mitigating factor, since any benefits to be reaped through sexyism are purely transient.