Quote Originally Posted by Looper View Post
Racial profiling is a utilitarian tactic deployed for practical reasons to minimise terrorist attacks. It obviously causes friction since it has overtones of racism. The interesting issue is how you measure and weigh the cost to our society's moral integrity of engaging in activity that has apparent parallels with racism against the practical benefits of reducing the impact of terrorist attacks.

Of course the easy way to wriggle out of the debate is to claim that targeting individuals based on racial profile is simply not effective so lets sidestep the discussion entirely. But to make things interesting, for arguments sake, lets say it was statistically proven to be effective - would you then agree with racial profiling when it came to airport security or do you think the cost in lives is worth the preserved integrity of race related moral values and cultural sensitivities of society?

i.e. you agree in principle with racial profiling but only as long as it is measurably effective?

The essence of the argument is not even terrorism related it is whether or not it is morally acceptable to focus additional attention on crime-prevention measures towards a racial group if that group is statistically shown to engage in a disproportionate level of a given crime.

I am not saying there is an easy yes/no answer to this but I am saying it is an interesting discussion.
Start a new thread in Speakers, Looper. This is a News thread.