As I understand it, there are two kinds of affirmative action: affirmative action in government actions about government employees/admission to public educational institutions/etc. and affirmative action taken by private institutions, companies, etc. I want to consider both.
First, a point that needs to be made is that affirmative action is bias toward particular groups based on race, color, etc. (things we generally consider characteristics that should not be held *against* someone in the hiring process, even though many people are okay with 'valuing diversity' and giving the job to someone in an 'underrepresented group'). My point is that equality before the laws implies equality NOW. Although those underrepresented may be disadvantaged compared to their situation had their parents not been discriminated against, the inequality was not directly against them. Even if affirmative action for an individual who was directly discriminated against could be justified, giving an advantage based on race, religion, etc. cannot be neither politically justified for governments nor morally justified for private individuals (except for positions like Black Americans Group President or Methodist minister).
Second, one cannot give preference to one group of people without disadvantaging others. It seems nicer to talk about giving preference to the children of those who have been discriminated against in the past--and whose discrimination has adversely affected the children's situations (not all discrimination does this in every case)--than to disadvantage someone who has worked hard whose parents have not been historically discriminated against for being White, Protestant, or heterosexual, doesn't it? Yet, it is intuitive that giving preference to one group discriminates against another.
Government Affirmative Action
Some people think equality before the law meshes with affirmative action. The government is trying to bring about equality between the various social groups, right? However, I think some people who realize that preferring one social group disadvantages another would see that equality before the law cannot coincide with a purposeful disadvantaging of any social group, especially in the name of equality. Therefore, affirmative action is improper for a government of the people.
Private Affirmative Action
Affirmative action by private institutions and individual is something quite different. Private institutions are not institutions 'of the people'. We do not have the right to be equal before Hannaford, McDonald's, Steckle and Smith Law Firm, or Boston Medical Center (assuming these are privately run). They can choose whom they desire, valuing to the extent they wish or not valuing the social groups from which they applicants and employees hail. Whether it is morally right for private individuals to value 'diversity' or not is not my concern here. A company inflicts no harm on individuals by not hiring them, not giving them a 401k, or not giving them vacation time. If they don't want the job with the pay and benefits, they don't have to do it.
Hey Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteSharp looking blog! I am teaching a class in business ethics in the fall and have been thinking about affirmative action a bit myself lately. It's a really tough topic. A few considerations came to mind as a read your post. First, I don't quite understand your equality now stance. On the one hand we could talk about equality before the law, and on the other we could talk about the actual state of equality in terms of relative accessibility to jobs, services, buying power and other services. The equality now stance does not seem to apply to the latter, since the access that groups have to various goods is contingent (in varying degrees) upon historical circumstances. So for example, groups that have been historically forced into lower income areas have less access to education and thus less access to jobs etc. However, I think that perhaps you point about equality now is that individuals that are members of historically disadvantaged groups may now have a comparable degree of access to goods. So, perhaps your point is that affirmative action should be a more particularized consideration ("if one is a member of a disadvanted group, but not themselves disadvantaged then why should affirmative action be a considerations?" or so the intuition goes).
I take it as a brute fact that certain groups ARE disadvantaged due to historical circumstances. However, I think that implicit in your considerations is the question: is affirmative action the correct manner of equalizing opportunities? I think that we could rightly be skeptical about an affirmative answer to this question. Numerous studies have suggested that affirmative action practices may actually do more harm than good to thos that it is intended to help.
One final consideration. One may argue that when it comes down to it we want the best person for the job, especially in life crucial positions like surgeons etc. and that therefore affirmative action should not be a consideration. However, one should reply that greater qualification in one group than in another is itself a product of historically unequal access to opportunities. Therefore, hiring on the basis of current qualification would only serve to perpetuate the disadvantage of certain groups relative to others. This, seems reason to think that affirmative action is a necessary policty if we really value equality.
Lastly, your public private distinction is good, but it seems to rest on some sort of libertarian conception of rights to bestow jobs (i.e. a business owner has a right to the jobs that she is giving out, and therefore he can choose to hire whomever she likes). So in the end, perhaps what we think about affirmative actions depends upon antecedent commitments to economic/political models. And, if this is the case then the debate should shift to this more general level. I hope that these considerations will help you develop your thoughts and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. (PS Robert Audi, a great contemporary philosopher, has a book on business ethics in which he discusses many of these issues in an incredibly clear and penetrating way; worth checking out).
-Patrick Ryan
PSS (congrats on your grad school enrollment! and stay in touch)
Hey, Patrick! Thanks for reading. Cool news about the business ethics class!
ReplyDeleteYou're right to see the distinction between equality before the law and equality of circumstances. I dealt with that in June 9th post. I think the important thing is that government treat each individual using the same rules. Equality before the law is the responsibility of the government, and it does not include affirmative action. (In my next blog posts, I want to say why I think government should only see individuals, not people as groups and also why seeing them as individuals instead of members of groups encourage equality, as opposed to racism, sexism, religionism, etc.)
Your charitable trying-to-make-sense-of-what-I-wanted-to-say was wrong. :) I don't want to say that historically disadvantaged groups now have equal access to goods and services, i.e., that affirmative action has now done its job and it's time to stop. I am thinking that making a big deal out of being a disadvantaged 'X' rather than just a disadvantaged individual is a racist, sexist, etc. thought. (White Protestants are sometimes disadvantaged as well. What we should, as individuals, dislike is that individuals are disadvantaged, not that particular groups are disadvantaged. Johnny's being disadvantaged at a level 7 on a 1 to 10 should seem as bad to us as Loquisha being disadvantaged at a level 7 on the same scale.)
I certainly agree that affirmative action can do more harm than good. No argument from me there. It is racism, and this should be obvious even to those who think it is justified.
Your third paragraph seems to get away from equality before the law. I don't value attempts at forced equality of situation. It won't be accomplished. It can't be accomplished. (We will always be in different places, it seems.)
Your last paragraph is right. If you don't believe in personal property, then my comments make no sense, really. But you do believe in some personal property. I believe in it a lot. So it seems it's up to you to give me the theory of the middle: some personal property and some community property under personal authority.
Thanks for your thoughts! If I ever have time to read for fun again, maybe I'll pick up Audi's book. :)
I think that you and I are in agreement about particularizing considerations about disadvatage. However, I offer this argument for the sake of being thorough: consider the swastika (is that how you spell that!?) The swastika is morally offensive because of its symbolic value. Furthermore, one might argue that affirmative active is a just institution because of its symbolic value. I.e. part of our specific history is institutional racism against specific groups. Affirmative action counteracts the institutions of the past. Thus, it moral worth and warrant is symbolic: it is an institution whose necessity derives from the fact that it separates us from the unjust and racist values of the past, and is an expression of a new value set. Thus, one could see affirmative action as a "jump starter" a way of articulating a new set of cultural values. You will have to read the post charitably since I fear that I have not made the argument for this position as strongly as possible. However, I do think that there is something to be said for this view. I do think that nations need to articulate value sets for themselves above and beyond the equilibrium achieved by considering individual opinions: democratic citizenship involves not only a set of collective practices which cannot be understood by analyzing them in terms of the roles that individuals play in these practices, but also participatino in a collective identity which cannot be understood in terms of a single individual's participation in that collective identity.
ReplyDeleteYou have not really made any use of the mention of the swastika. I don't know where you're going with that.
ReplyDeleteI don't care much for symbolic equality before the law; I'd prefer real equality before the law.
Your last sentence sounds awesome, but you lost me.
The swastika is intended to get you onto the idea of what symbolic justification means. The swastika has a negative connotation for western culture and should be regarded as offensive because of the heinous set of values and history that it invokes. The swastika is a good example because it actually had a quite different and more positive meaning for some indigenous (indigenous to where? I don't remember). But, even if someone intended the sign with its prior meaning, they would still be using it irresponsibly, since the sign has taken on a certain symbolic value in our culture. In a paralell manner, one could say that affirmative action should be embraced because it has the symbolic value of reorienting our value schema. The word "symbolic" here is intended to point out that certain institutions only make sense because they refer to past events or values. Affirmative action arguably has this type of referential meaning as does the swastika.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, you should not be so quick to dismiss this type of meaning. After all, the framework for our legal system and out guiding legal documents have just this type of referential (symbolic) meaning / significance. Unfortunately, I fear that this fact has largely been lost in an era that values litigation more highly than justice (gun rights might be an example...people claim that we have a constitutional right to fire arms of all sorts. However, they dismiss the context within which this right was legislated; namely a context in which local militias were required and it took 10 minutes to load a weapon. The amendement is refential in that its meaning refers back to and marks a symbolic departure from the cultural roles and values that a colonial territory previously inhabited). Another example is the idea of equality in general. You say that you would advocate actual equality before the law. But equality is clearly symbolic. The fact of the matter is that we are not equal: we have different talents and capacities, and more importantly than that we are unequal in respects that are completely out of out control (for example, I am more fortunate than many simply because I was lucky enough to be born in the US; just think of the radical inequality regarding access to legal council. We all have access, but I'm going to lose if the other guy can afford a better lawyer). If we were going for actual equality, then I should have to give up a great deal of advantage that I have not earned. And of course one can shoot back, "but your parents earned it for you and had a right to confer certain benefits upon you" but this seems to be a cop out. It seems that the only real way of justifying such inequalities is to say that equality has a symbolic meaning, in that it refers and is a response to certian historical inequalities that we agree should be rectified.
I don't intend these as definitive objections, more as a problematization and expression of my confusion regarding the idea of "actual equality" which does not require reference to historical conditions. But again, this is a philosophical point as opposed to a substantive disagreement with your position.
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteYou go from saying that the government should not use the swastika because of its negative symbolic value to suggesting that it might be right for the government to use affirmative action because of its positive symbolic value.
Less importantly: the swastika is not an act, it is a reminder or a profession of a belief notably held in the past; affirmative action is an act, or series of actions, and it represents rather than reminds.
More importantly, it is a far jump from saying the government should not use negative symbols to saying that it should act symbolically if the symbolism is positive.
I differentiate 'actual equality (before the law)' from complete equality of situation. I hope you'll read June 9th's post. I talk about it there. It's not about having earned X or having been disadvantaged so one does not have X. It's about having X or not having X. (Legal aid is a difficult one because of the nature of legal aid. A court case is a justifiable act of the government, and it has certain responsibilities to promote some level of fairness in that event.) Giving cars to people without cars is not a justifiable action of government. It is inequality before the law if people without cars are given cars at the expense of those with cars.