because there exist some characteristic axes that are not protected,
that it is therefore impossible that the reason that some classes are protected cannot, by definition be in order to mitigate hare and provide equitable treatment?
That is like saying: 'in 1875, because women didn't yet have the right to vote, the purpose of banning slavery could not have been to reduce harm to the slaves and give them equality, because women are still being harmed and are unequal'.
I'd like to know, if you think that the purpose of the EOE laws is not to reduce harm and promote equitable treatment, what do you think IS the purpose of these laws?
I find it frustrating that rather than engaging with the question I asked, you rush to turn it around and say that I’m supposed to answer my own question, very obviously so you can take whatever my answer is (which you seem to have made up your mind to ridicule and disagree with prior to even knowing what it is) and put it down or gainsay it.
But at the risk of such unthinking ridicule I’ll say that personally my theory is something along the lines of homo hypocritus of economist Robin Hanson, similar in spirit to what is discussed (about wealth inequality) here:
I think we arrived at the particular protected classes we have now because people saw opportunities where someone could be shown to be harming a certain class and some other people (who couldn’t care less about the harm being caused) saw the opportunity to create a new way to take wealth from those people.
It turns out this was to society’s benefit mostly, and over time we use social norms and legal structure to increase its use as a humanitarian tool, but it almost surely was not invented for that reason.
I’d speculate that other characteristics like introversion never received this treatment because there weren’t preexisting social norms or religious cultural attachments to the class of introverted people, so in a mob justice sense you’d have a hard time taking wealth away from those in power over claimed mistreatment of this class. But for classes like gender identity or religious creed, there were preexisting big scale cultural norms / civic principles / etc. that allowed making the wealth-grab arguments catch on in the public eye.
because there exist some characteristic axes that are not protected,
that it is therefore impossible that the reason that some classes are protected cannot, by definition be in order to mitigate hare and provide equitable treatment?
That is like saying: 'in 1875, because women didn't yet have the right to vote, the purpose of banning slavery could not have been to reduce harm to the slaves and give them equality, because women are still being harmed and are unequal'.
I'd like to know, if you think that the purpose of the EOE laws is not to reduce harm and promote equitable treatment, what do you think IS the purpose of these laws?