But Is It Really Important?
Gender-based three percent salary differential may be important in theory, but activists should make tough decisions about where to fight. When the sources are limited, there is no need to take into account the relatively small diameter losses immediately. But this popular philosophy is wrong and dangerous. It is an ethical mistake to ignore small-scale damages and unexpectedly great consequences of neglect. Due to ecological damage, social gender pay differentials, and irregularity-based injustice, the major problems of small-scale damage accumulation are immune when we think that any harm that damages it is not disgusting.
Consider an example of such "small" losses. The boss is looking for an employee's office. "Drug test is positive". The employee has never used any medication until today and knows that the result is wrong. Moreover, this suspicious drug test identifies a greater black percentage than whites. Black workers who test positive for cocaine are one percent more.
This story reflects a situation in which an employee's hair cord was taken, a drug test that recently came to court and (i) the use of drugs and (ii) a drug test that can not distinguish drug-related environmental effects. Employees can be considered "drug addicts" for a simple reason; for example, being a party or a concert where your hair is exposed to drug abuse by other people.
A group of employees resorted to legal remedies, arguing that hair testing was a discriminatory effect based on racist makeup. A more accurate drug test would not have been such a racial effect. Case workers won, but there is a broad legal debate based on similar "small" losses. Some US courts regard minor damages as "unimportant" in the direction of anti-discrimination legislation: they are too small to fall on a percentage loss.
A similar logic emerges in other contexts. The salary gap based on social sex is not taken seriously because it is usually on a small scale. Some may be worth twenty percent salary difference, but only in the interpretation of what will make a salary difference of three percent.
This logic contains a classical "error" in "ethical mathematics". The late philosopher Derek Parfit makes such mistakes explicit in his ethical reasoning. One of the ethical fallacies Parfit is trying to ignore is small effects. The damage caused by a discriminatory drug test may be small. Parfit, however, argued that there was no good reason to come from ignoring a consequence or end result of smallness.
Parfit invited us to imagine the same number of people with access to the water and to imagine the relatives of thirsty people, who were a few miles away from us, to explain this vision. Another person who takes half a liter of water from a water tank will reduce the amount of water that every thirsty person can drink. However, if such minor effects are insignificant, they should not be objected to the watering of all others. Parfit thought it was a clear mistake. Such small effects are not trivial.
But perhaps some people may claim that some of these social problems do not cause minor damage. These problems have more or less small possibilities. Dismissal can harm some employees, but it is unlikely that the drug test will unfairly affect any employee. But their lack of seriousness about their effectiveness, as they ask, is one of Parfit's other mistakes. It's easy to understand: The risk of stealing Russian roulette is unlikely, but it's not a problem.
Neither the smallness nor the possibility of harmlessness can be shown as a reason to ignore it altogether. But minor damage (inevitably limited) is worth a large part of our interest? Surprisingly yes. Multiple minor damage in one person's life or in a group can cause cumulative major effects. It is a social structure, it includes nets reinforced with small, relatively small losses. If many small-scale activities are considered insignificant and not worth considering, the cumulative final situation will have a large total effect.
It is clear how the cumulative large-scale effects of small-scale damages that reinforce each other will be. Consider small-scale environmental impacts. Some individual actions are harmful to the environment, others are ineffective or useful. If these effects were distributed randomly, we could have less worry. The events that happen every day cause more damage to the neighborhood. The cumulative effect of these small-scale losses is obvious.
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