Discrimination, or the lack thereof

Is it "discrimination" to find tattoos repellent, especially on young women? At the gym I go to, I encounter female bodies with tattoos spread over the shoulders and back and even down the legs. My reaction: why do you want to disfigure what is otherwise a beautiful body? -- for some of the young women are very attractive. It is not a question I am going to find an answer to. I did a lot of stupid things in my twenties and even thirties. Thank God that tattoos were not "popular." I am sure that some of these young women will wonder one day what possessed them to spend so much money -- the same goes for smoking -- on these unsightly scribbles. After searching the internet for a tattoo image to include in this post, I found many disturbing ones and purposely selected a moderate one.

My initial question, however, comes down to the issue of "discrimination." Discrimination suggests making a judgment -- in my case, finding something repellent. What I am really saying, however, is that tattoos are not simply ugly but also a sign of downward social mobility. I am making a moral judgment -- and it is bad these days to make such judgments. Thus, in a public place like the gym, no one says out loud anything about the ugliness of tattoos. Like a lot of contemporary tendencies, the tattoo regime is ignored. It's as if people don't see it.

This issue of seeing is important. If we did not see, we would not be able to discriminate. Discrimination is regarded as bad, as in sexual or racial discrimination that considers certain humans as less than human. But the women in my gym with tattoos are not less than human; they are fully human. But IMHO they have made bad decisions. And what people don't want to admit publicly today is that some people have made bad decisions. Again, I have made bad decisions in my life, so one must resist thinking that others are "bad" people for doing what I might have done in the same circumstances.

The ability to discriminate, however, is at the core of aesthetic judgments and of judgments of taste, both of which concerned 18th-century philosophers, including Hume and Kant. We make distinctions between the works of Leonardo and Jeff Koons. It strikes me that the contemporary aversion to making judgments has affected our sense of beauty, to the detriment of our public spaces. Something like that must has been at the core of the objections several decades ago to the unsightly (to my eyes) structure of Richard Serra in downtown Manhattan. Most of the time we are forced to turn our eyes away from what we find repellent, to keep our judgments to ourselves, but there comes a time, as with Serra's "work," when something is so repellent that the objections overcome the argument that ugliness is something we must put up with.