ABSTRACT
The concept of discrimination has been at the center of some of the most intense political and ethical debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from affirmative action and disability rights across police profiling and labor market inequality to multicultural accommodation and the limits of hate speech. The most paradigmatic and uncontroversial cases tend to be those of so-called direct discrimination. This chapter presents a definition of what one can call the generic or basic sense of direct discrimination, as an agent treating two groups differently because of the property that defines one of the groups as a group, in a way that is worse for that group. It considers two different arguments to the effect that the three conditions are not jointly sufficient for something to be direct discrimination, in that an act must target one among a particular set of groups to constitute discrimination, and that an act must be in some sense morally wrong to constitute discrimination.
