Relevant Courses:
● Ethics
● Social and Political Philosophy
● Philosophy of Law
● Philosophy of Race and Gender
Introduction:
In the fall of 2022, the United States Supreme Court heard two cases, one which was filed against Harvard University and the other against the University of North Carolina, citing unjust racial preferencing in their admissions processes. The practice in question is commonly referred to as affirmative action, roughly the practice of granting preferential status to members of historically oppressed or underrepresented communities who are seeking admission or employment. Despite past Supreme Court rulings, the legal debate over the morality of the practice has continued, serving as a divisive political and cultural issue.
While affirmative action poses a number of challenging questions for lawyers and constitutional scholars, this entry will focus on questions the practice raises for moral philosophers. The debate over the moral status of affirmative action boils down to the following question: Which features of a person is it ethically permissible to take into consideration when it comes to the granting of certain privileges or opportunities? In what follows, I will give a brief overview of ways in which people tend to defend the view that race and gender can be morally relevant features in cases of employment and institutional admission.
The term discrimination generally carries with it a negative moral connotation, but cases of morally neutral or even morally desirable forms of discrimination are ubiquitous. For instance, no one will fault a hospital for discriminating amongst job applicants on the basis of their medical competency or knowledge of physiology. Similarly, few will decry a college admissions board as unethical for discriminating based on features such as an applicant’s GPA or the quality of her admissions essay. However, many people do share the intuition that a hospital that hires an employee on the basis of her perceived physical attractiveness, or a college admission board’s acceptance of a student on the basis of his family’s wealth, is morally suspect. In the context of the affirmative action debate, those who endorse the morality of the practice argue that it is more akin to cases of selecting for applicants with the relevant credentials or traits, while those who reject the practice as immoral see it as more akin to discrimination on the basis of contextually irrelevant features such as attractiveness or class background.
I will highlight three distinct arguments commonly given in defense of affirmative action. One such pro-affirmative action argument pertains to compensating for past injustices. Historically, women and racial/ethnic minorities have been subjected to hiring discrimination and have been unfairly shut out of societal institutions. Thus, many argue that they must be given preferential treatment for a period of time so that they can be allowed to “catch up” with the advantages afforded to their more privileged fellow citizens. According to this argument, the moral status of affirmative action is at least partially determined by the outcomes such policies produce. As long as affirmative action policies are effective at closing the opportunity gap between more and less privileged groups, the policies are morally permissible or perhaps even morally required. However, once this gap has been sufficiently closed, preferential treatment along the lines of race and gender may no longer be morally permissible. On this picture, affirmative action policies are morally permissible if they are instrumentally valuable in remedying unjust conditions, but if these unjust conditions are largely resolved, the moral status of the policies changes. If affirmative action measures sufficiently reverse the downstream consequences of past injustices, such policies will no longer have a place in an ideally just society. The default stance of a just society is to consider race and gender morally irrelevant in matters of institutional admission and employment, barring extenuating circumstances.
A second kind of argument in favor of affirmative action is to argue that it is morally permitted or even required regardless of the effects the practice has in society. This is similar to the previous argument, with the difference that the outcomes of affirmative action policies do not determine their moral status. On this picture, the moral reasons we have to engage in affirmative action exist regardless of any positive, practical outcomes such policies might reap. Since our society has historically discriminated against and subsequently disadvantaged certain groups, those groups are now owed a type of reparation in the form of current employment and educational opportunities. It is simply what our society must do in order to be morally in the right and maximally just. A feature of this kind of argument is that there is not necessarily a theoretical expiration date to the moral permissibility of affirmative action policies. Insofar as affirmative action policies are considered a type of reparation, there might be a cap to the amount of reparation owed to the offended party. However, this is not necessarily the case, as one can contend that no amount of affirmative action measures can sufficiently make up for the degree of past injustices. Given the moral status of affirmative action is determined by the existence of past injustices and not the outcomes of the policies, there is no theoretically ensured conclusion to the practices.
A third way of developing an argument in favor of affirmative action is to say that there are certain benefits to creating diverse work or educational cultures, which more homogenous environments lack. According to this kind of argument, it is not necessarily morally required that societal institutions give preferential admission to minority candidates, but such practices are often instrumentally valuable in pursuit of cultivating a healthy community. Diverse perspectives promote increased ingenuity, interpersonal understanding, and cultural competency, and thus we have strong reason on these grounds to promote the institutional access of minority groups. According to this line of argument, there is not necessarily a point at which affirmative action policies are no longer morally permissible. So long as such policies are meaningfully contributing to the diversity goals of the educational institution or workplace, there is no moral reason (or at least, not a very strong moral reason) to eliminate them.
The topic of affirmative action is ripe for philosophical discussion, as discussing it well requires careful consideration of issues that span many philosophical topics and sub-disciplines. For this reason, a unit on affirmative action is particularly well-suited to the task of exposing students to central philosophical questions while also demonstrating the practical relevance these questions have for daily life and political decision-making.
Key Terms:
Group rights: While rights are more commonly talked about in regards to individuals, group rights are possessed by collections of individuals. While the coherence of the idea is debated, those who defend the existence of group rights take one of the paradigmatic examples to be cultural rights.
Cultures plausibly possess a right to self-preservation or to a certain degree of self-governance. Importantly, in order for these to be examples of group rights and not merely rights that individual members of a culture possess, it must be the case that the cultural rights in question are not possessed by any individual member of the group, but rather the group as a whole.
Equity: In contrast with equality, equity is the notion that past injustices and circumstantial
considerations might permit differential treatment between certain groups or individuals. For
instance, an admissions policy based on equality would seek to apply the same criteria to all
applicants, while a policy based on concerns of equity might apply different criteria to applicants of a historically disadvantaged identity or background.
Desert: Desert is a normative concept pertaining to what one is morally owed. Desert is a notion central to the debate over affirmative action, as it is often unclear what applicants to societal institutions are owed. Advocates of affirmative action often claim minority applicants deserve different standards of evaluation than what is applied to other applicants. Critics of affirmative action claim that all applicants deserve to have identical standards applied to them.
Communal harmony: This is a concept central to Confucianism, which deals with members of society standing in right relationship with one another. Confucianism takes communal harmony to consist in individuals pursuing their own character cultivation and individual flourishing. Thus, communal harmony is achieved by members of a society playing their part to achieve moral excellence in a way that benefits the whole of society.
Key Texts:
● Should Race Matter: Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions by David Boonin: Chapters 4-5
● “The Case Against Affirmative Action” by Louis P. Pojman in International Journal of Applied
Philosophy
● “In Defense of Affirmative Action” by Tom L. Beauchamp in The Journal of Ethics
● “‘Group Rights’ and Racial Affirmative Action” by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Journal of
Ethics
● “Community Without Harmony?: A Confucian Critique of Michael Sandel” by Chenyang Li
in Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy
● The Affirmative Action Debate edited by Steven M. Cahn
● “Affirmative Action” entry edited by Robert Fullinwider in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
Texts for Introductory Level Classes:
● The Atlantic article: “The End of Affirmative Action Would Be a Disaster” by Lee C.
Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone
● Stanford Magazine article: “The Case Against Affirmative Action” by David Sacks and Peter
Thiel
● The Prindle Post article: “To Slay Affirmative Action: Justice Alito Discovers Racial
Skepticism” by Benjamin Rossi
● 1,000 Word Philosophy article: “The Ontology of Race: What are Races?” by Abiral
Chitrakar Phnuyal
Additional Teaching Resources:
● [Podcast] Radiolab’s More Perfect podcast, Season 2 Episode 7: “The Architect”
● [Short documentary] “The Diversity Dilemma” by CBS Reports
● [Vox video] “What We Get Wrong About Affirmative Action”
Authorship:
Laura Emily Siscoe, University of Southern California (PhD student), gurskey@usc.edu, laurasiscoe.com