Bernell DorroughAffirmative action (AA) policies are not merely desirable or beneficial. They are just. People sometimes defend AA because they value diversity. This puts AA on shaky grounds, because this defense only holds if you indeed value diversity. A Klansman, then, has a strong rebuttal to AA. I want to put AA on much firmer grounds than personal preference. Although I focus on racial concerns for brevity, this argument can and should be generalized to other minorities, including sexual minorities. I am indebted to Andrew Ross for reminding me that justice does not only apply to race.
I borrow a concept from John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice: hypothetical consent. Basically, ask yourself the question: what social policies would I consent to if I had no knowledge of the particulars of my life?
Just decisions are made from impartial viewpoints. In life, we are clearly not impartial. For example, as far as AA goes, it seems fair to say that more minorities support the policy than whites do. What we have to do to make just choices, therefore, is abstract away from our particular situation and characteristics in life. Only the social preferences we express from an impartial perspective are just.
Since I’m focusing on racial AA, the only traits you’ll have to discount in your decision-making are your race and social class. Imagine that you were to be reincarnated into a world exactly like ours, with the same natural talents. You do not know what race or ethnicity you’ll belong to, or what childhood environment you’ll have.
Now, the question you have to consider: what kind of society would I like to be reincarnated into? Clearly, you would not like a society that has any sort of racism, much less so if the racism is allowed to translate into policy decisions. Racism in hiring practices, for example, would not be desirable. Slavery based on race is out.
But this is not so controversial. Of course racism and slavery are unjust. Of course the ideal society would be color-blind. And this is exactly why AA is unjust: it is essentially racism, opponents say.
I remind you of one guarantee my thought-experiment provides: the society you’ll be reincarnated in will have informal and institutionalized racism. It will be officially denied and usually kept covert, of course. But it is clear that one race will be far more powerful and wealthy than other races, and will use racist decision-making to perpetuate that advantage. Of course, you have no way of knowing what the odds are of belonging to this powerful race.
Given this society, it is only rational to demand AA policies. I take it that most people agree that success should be based on your personal merits. Skin color is clearly not a merit. AA eliminates racist decision-making, or at least limits it.
One objection is that race is linked to some innate mental capacity or natural talent. Discrimination against one race is not against its skin color per se, but against their likelihood of being less qualified than a member of another, genetically better, race. Science has refuted claims that personal talent has anything to do with the genes that determine skin color. For example, Murray and Hernstein’s The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks had lower IQs than whites and Asians, received scathing peer-reviews, including from Stephen J. Gould.
We have agreed that success should depend on merit, and I have shown that race has nothing to do with merit. Therefore, a just society, which does not take race into account in decisions, would have proportional representation from all races/ethnicities in all jobs and offices. If one race makes up 50 percent of the population, they should make up 50 percent of medical students, judges, and janitors. If there are other factors, such as education or social circumstance that would change this, they must be corrected so that proportionality is restored. Otherwise education (or whatever factor) becomes the rationale for unjust racism. In any case, you cannot rationally want your success to depend on the random chance of being born into a wealthy environment. Proportional representation across the board, for all jobs and offices in a society, is the only demonstration that the society is racially just.
I am not necessarily advocating quotas, rather any program that promotes proportional racial representation. If you were to be reincarnated, wouldn’t you demand strong protections against discrimination based solely on your race or ethnicity? It would be irrational to allow others who are equally talented to be more successful than you solely because they have the right skin color or were born into a rich family. This is why, from an impartial view, all of us would agree to strong AA. And this is why strong AA is just.