ABSTRACT
There has been a longstanding debate in Anglo-American political philosophy about the relationship between freedom and equality. Isaiah Berlin argued that these two values are always potentially in conflict: full social and political equality can only be achieved by taking certain freedoms away from some people, and even though we may be justified in doing this, we must, according to Berlin, acknowledge the very real loss that this involves and not pretend that it can ever be fully compensated by a gain in equality. The relevance of freedom and the inadequacy of a purely status-based account of the injustice of discrimination is even clearer in cases of indirect discrimination or disparate impact, in which a policy is not intentionally implemented so as to exclude a certain group, but rather has unforeseen but disproportionately negative effects upon them relative to other groups. There are at least four kinds of freedom that philosophers have identified as relevant to the injustice of discrimination.
