[handedness]

But individuals and businesses aren't the justice system. (Something in which both sides can take comfort.)

I know firsthand that some retail businesses have found much better ROI by just presuming fraud (guilt, if you want to call it that) about certain countries (Nigeria and Romania frequently wind up on that list), and working to establish bona fides if someone from one of the banned locales contacts them directly to try to work out a purchase.

Which in one sense does sound horrible, but I'd imagine most personal eBay sellers would seek similar bona fides if the iPhone they're selling is purchased by someone reportedly from, say, Nigeria. It's hard to fault the risk mitigation instincts that humans have practiced for their entire history.

The reason these retailers developed the policies they did is because they were manually reviewing orders and very, very few–if any–were legitimate. Visits to the street markets in said countries turned up table after table full of highly discounted, almost certainly stolen goods. That's hard to ignore when setting corporate policy.

I'm not sure what the answer is, as one quickly gets into things like societal contracts, because we all pay some collective cost for the bad actors in our society, and at some point bear a non-zero degree of responsibility for not being either willing or capable of constraining those bad actors.

[badminton1]

Banks historically have also profited from racial profiling, and insurance companies have also profited by discriminating against women, especially in countries with paid maternity leave.

Country of origin discrimination is no worse than that. I do not think those are ethical business practices, and is morally no better than scamming via e-mail.

[handedness]

And auto insurance companies currently profit by discriminating against males, the young, etc., all based on statistical realities. Health insurance companies charge a 20-year-old less than a 70-year-old. Nobody seems to take real ethical issue with that.

If someone owns their company and doesn't want to ship to Romania, is there an ethical way for me to force the owner to do so? There isn't one that I've heard. Many just won't sell internationally, partly because of the hassle, partly because of the lack of reasonable recourse systems. Does this kind of discrimination which bothers you become OK provided it's mass discrimination? Because that, to me, breaks down really quickly in the face of scrutiny.

Regardless, I take issue with your characterization of it. Deliberately trying to defraud someone is ethically the same as a good-faith effort to defend one's self against fraud? That's a moral equivalence that I think one would have a very difficult time building a system of ethics to justify.

[badminton1]

Even car color is discriminated against. Red cars are tied to extroversion and risk taking.

Then... yes. Discrimination can be very harmful. Lack of health insurance for example can have fatal consequences, which can be more severe than scamming someone.

[handedness]

Discrimination can be very harmful, yet all things have opportunity costs. The logical terminus of what you're advocating is that all companies should be required to sell all products (perhaps with some export restrictions respecting natural security) to all countries (again with some restrictions respecting trade embargoes).

Is that correct? Because if so, what you're going to do is increase the cost of doing business, as the costs of both absorbing scamming, and increased anti-scamming efforts, increase. Which will eventually in some form or another impact either the employees of companies, the cost of goods, or both.

Increasing the cost of goods and suppressing wages can also have tragic consequences–somewhere, someone will starve to death. Or be unable to afford health care (the costs of which have been poorly mitigated by our attempts at doing so by way of changing the health care apparatus). Or be unable to afford an experimental procedure that might change their child's life, but isn't covered by insurers. Or lessen charitable contributions to organizations keeping people alive in impoverished places. Reduce taxable income thus reducing federal assistance program budgets. There are countless more similar scenarios.

If you equate increasing health insurance costs based on anything an insurer knows about the ones they're insuring with fatal consequences, then it isn't a stretch to see your idea also has fatal consequences.

One couldn't even discriminate to do more good, in such a system.

Except it would be using American law to improve the lives of Romanians and Nigerians (both the honest and dishonest, tho probably proportionally in favor of the dishonest, since the thing preventing Nigerian access to American exports has less to do with shipping policies and more to do with basic economics, and Romania is part of the Schengen Area, so they're hardly cut off from the world), at the expense of American voters, taxpayers, citizens.

Which strikes me as an awfully difficult thing to justify ethically, and a short slope away from a globalized system that would have to redistribute all benefits to everyone, regardless of whether they wanted them or not, would benefit from them or not, be corrupted by them or not, be weakened by them or not, and it would probably start with transferring wealth from developed nations to developing ones until parity is reached.

Which is a noble sentiment, but going from theory to implementation would be something between a train wreck and a blood bath.

Or, we allow people who make things to decide whether they want to sell things to certain countries.

Incidentally, I have a shipping insurance provider I use that won't allow shipping to certain zip codes in the US. Those zip codes tend to have high levels of theft of packages off doorsteps. Is that ethical for them to stipulate that I can ship to some zip codes, but not others, based on the effects of the behavior of some people in those zip codes? For the record, looking them up I saw no major correlation with race, gender, or poverty. But it's still discrimination.

I think your basic idea is noble and worthy, but I think it ignores the realities present in how policy shapes reality. Great ideas have sometimes resulted in horrifying human tragedy, and with the world improving in most places by most reasonable measures, I'm not inclined to throw out what's been elevating humanity pretty effectively for something that is akin to systems that have been shown to debase humanity pretty effectively, when practiced.