ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a grip on the role, usefulness and challenges of invoking 'irrelevance' as a deciding factor in an account of what discrimination is, and with what is wrong with it. Say that members of a racialized minority group is taxed to a higher percentage of their income than the majority population and that this has nothing to do with their level of income; if anything, the minority group is poorer than the majority population. Grasping the moral intuition at play here is not difficult. Pursuant to European Union (EU) directives, anti-discrimination law, at least in Europe, also follows this logic, even though the explicit language can be different. The chapter discusses the assessment of irrelevance in particular cases of differential treatment. Genetic information about a person can be used in all sorts of arbitrary, irrelevant ways, for instance in employment decisions, but a vexed matter is the use of genetic discrimination in decisions regarding health insurance policies.
