The strongest argument is a permutation of #3, which goes like:
Black people experience racism, and as a result, a black applicant with a 1400 SAT score actually has more innate talent than a white applicant with the same score, and could therefore contribute more to society if those talents were fully supported.
A related case is if an impoverished and rich student both have a 1400 SAT. It's pretty obvious that the same accomplishment took more innate talent for the poor kid, and therefore I'd let that one in.
I suspect that empirically, disadvantage in society due to race is pretty minor today (could even be negative) but certainly 50 years ago one would expect it to be positive, maybe strongly so. But it's worth people studying what it is.
Even if that's true, why would the SAT underpredict the black student's performance at other tasks? In other words: suppose that the black student had disadvantages that lowered his SAT score relative to what it would otherwise have been. Why wouldn't we expect that those same disadvantages will also lower his performance in the rest of life, just as much as it did on the SAT? Why would they only operate on SAT scores?
I think the idea is that the black student with a 1400 SAT would, if placed in a better environment (such as an elite college), no longer have those disadvantages -- or at least, have them to a lesser extent than they did during high school and before. I'm not saying I agree with this position, but I'm pretty sure it's what the AA advocates believe.
If the disadvantages that are reducing the score are specifically racism -- then, although that might also lower performance in other areas of life, we'd want to try to end that reduction from a meritocratic perspective, because it is currently limiting the use of that human talent.
I think the poor-vs-rich example is easier to talk about because the empirics are clearer there. If we have a poor student and a rich student who both score 1400, it seems obvious that the innate intelligence of the poor student is higher than that of the rich one. That suggests that further education could be more productively devoted to that student.
You note that all others areas of life are likely to be similarly impacted, just like the SAT score -- I agree that would reduce the increase in effectiveness of allocating education to the poorer student. But on the other side of the ledger, there are also positive intergenerational effects of allocating education to the most innately intelligent individuals.
Richard Hanania has a post arguing that actually you should let the rich kid in, instead of the poor kid with the same score -- because the rich kid has connections that will let him contribute more. But it misses that in the long run, it's also important to match connections with those who have raw talent. So Richard would be taking a short term gain for a long term loss.
I like your arguments against reparations, but I’m not sure how much is due to their virtues and how much is due to the fact that they confirm my biases.
“When people commit a wrongful act, they are only responsible for the reasonably foreseeable harms”
That seems awkwardly worded to me. If the act is definitely wrongful, it doesn’t matter whether the harm is foreseeable or not. If it’s wrong, no one should do it.
On the other hand, in a very practical legal system, I imagine that wrongful acts would not be prosecuted if no plaintiff came forward complaining of harm. Instead of having the state prosecute crimes as the plaintiff, plaintiffs would need to be actual victims of harm in order to have standing in court.
The complication here is that the acts we are discussing mostly happened 100 years or more ago, were not considered wrongful at the time, and the persons who actually committed the acts are all dead. We now consider society as a whole to have made a mistake, but it’s not clear how we should compensate victims of such social mistakes, who should pay the compensation, or how to determine who is owed compensation.
Questions regarding determining who should pay compensation or how the funds should be raised, at least, are vaguely analogous to existing public debt. In both cases, later generations are held liable for debts incurred by previous generations.
But even that nice precedent is not obviously just. One could argue that the government would be justified in incurring debt when making investment expenditures that will generate benefits far into the future, on a rough pay as you go basis. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that this argument is really applicable to existing public debt. And there is very little justification for incurring debt for benefits that are purely a matter of present consumption.
By definition, no one should perform a wrongful act. That isn't the question. The question is: If someone *did* perform one, then how much compensation do they owe?
The answer is: They only owe compensation for the reasonably foreseeable harms. Suppose I wrongly steal a paperclip from the philosophy department office. A year later, someone sees that paperclip on one of my papers (which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't stolen it), and this somehow triggers a bizarre, fluke reaction in their brain, which leads to their becoming a serial killer.
Suppose that after the fact, we somehow verify that all this is what happened. I would owe the philosophy department the cost of a paperclip. I would not owe compensation for the deaths of all the victims of the serial killer.
My argument in favor of Affirmative Action sidesteps both the legal and moral aspects. It is simply this: universities should be allowed to make foolish decisions. I may even extend this to public institutions as long as their decisions are independent from state government mandates. By preventing them from making bad decisions, we prolong their institutional powers over rising competitors. It also disincentivizes existing players from innovation and trying to differentiate themselves from each other. If students are the clients and a subset of them are unhappy with the way things are, they would create a demand for a different structure. The counter argument is that the current supply of elite universities is more or less fixed and it would take a very long time before anything of similar stature can enter the field. But this ignores two potential outcomes: 1) existing top-tier universities cannot maintain this type of collusion for a very long time, or 2) potential new entrants can provide options that may alter or replace existing demand, i.e., demand can be substituted. If either is true and desirable, then allowing Affirmative Action (allowing actors to make bad decisions) can hasten the realization of one of them. In general, I think it is superior to find new ways (or remove blocks) for creative forces than attempting to eliminate bad ones.
Of course, the above argument assumes that AA is not only bad for some students, but also bad for the universities that do it. That is, universities would be better off without it. But if the assumption is that AA is actually good for the universities, then those against AA would have to make a rather strange argument that institutions shouldn't do what's good for themselves. While I am of the opinion that AA is not good for the universities, the question about why they do it is still an interesting one. Since universities are not traditional economic actors, we'd have to look at their institutional structures to see how they derive their perceived benefits. My first guess is that the preservation of individual interests is not always commensurable or compatible with the interest of the institution. But it could be much more complex than that.
In response to your points in 3, reparations to individuals:
(a) If slavery and Jim Crow laws had ended earlier, people as a whole would probably be better off now (due to decreasing marginal value of wealth, less economic inequality, less lead exposure), and that matters, like climate change matters for future generations and buying meat from farmed animals who had good lives (a small minority) harms animals in expectation. I think we can still say that poverty or growing up in a house with lead is a harm to someone, even if they wouldn't have existed otherwise. Planting bombs that will kill future people, even if the people killed wouldn't exist otherwise because of butterfly effects on identities, still seems bad.
Also, if reparations had been paid to the direct victims, or the slaves were freed earlier or Black people in the US were otherwise wrongfully discriminated against less, the victims would have passed on more wealth to their descendants. The descendants might then have a rightful claim to that wealth. I recognize this gets messy, impractical and increasingly implausible the further back you go, and maybe especially if the wrongful inheritors did nothing wrong to the rightful inheritors, possibly other than inherit the wealth. However, rather than defeating the argument, this could just mean inheritance rights weaken the more generations away. The Jim Crow era was not that long ago, and there are people still alive today who lived through it or were born under it, and many children of those people alive today.
If I steal something from you, give it to my kids, and we both die, do my kids owe what I stole back to your family?
(b) Black people getting into universities with the help of affirmative action are generally "finishing school, avoiding criminal activity, avoiding teenage pregnancy, etc", or, at least enough to make it into university in the first place. This doesn't seem that relevant for affirmative action specifically.
(c) The governments and supporters of slavery could have foreseen higher rates of poverty in the descendants of slaves. The governments and supporters of Jim Crow laws could also have foreseen higher rates of poverty from those laws, which lasted until 1968.
“Without affirmative action, you’d see fewer blacks in your classes, but they’d all be performing at the same level as everyone else. That would probably do more to undermine stereotypes.” . Bingo!
I taught Logic at a major state university in the Southeast for four years in all (late '80s early '90s). During the first three years, I averaged three black students per section. On average, they did as well as the white students. Then, late in that third year, a federal judge stepped in, called the university a "racist institution" because the percentage of black students did not reflect the percentage of blacks in the local population (a familiar argument).
The university doubled its percentage of black students for the following fall (They advertised, and I think they let in every black kid who applied). The average number of black students in my Logic sections went from three to six or seven. As before three did as well as the white students. The other three or four floundered helplessly. Generally the best grade they could make was a D, and that was being generous. One black guy had turned in a near-blank test and was in my office crying his eyes out in frustration about how lost he was (he'd not been skipping class or otherwise slacking off).
Someone tell me again how affirmative action that admits students to achieve politically acceptable representations helps these kids.
(I was a vocal critic of affirmative action in the 1990s. It basically cost me my academic career.)
No? What I know is that in the '90s, no one wanted to talk frankly about affirmative action. No one wanted to find out inconvenient truths (i.e., that its main beneficiaries were upper middle class white women with hard-left ideologies).
Then, in early fall '95, drawing unemployment, I woke up one morning and suddenly wondered, regarding the preference for a dogma over finding out what is true (and blacklisting those who tried to tell it): What if this one issue wasn't the exception in academia? What if it is the rule?
personally think affirmative action is bad and counterproductive: i were for it in the past, not sure what made me change my mind exactly aside from generally more optimistic and realistic understanding of reality and history, and moving away from collectevism and feeling responsible for everyone else.
I dont really understand some of the arguments here: altough i agree with them factually, the way you describe or get to them felt odd to me
I can confirm that i when i was younger and much more leftist, i felt a collective responsibility around being swedish and around whiteness. It wasnt quite that i FELT like my whiteness had caused black people harm, and so, but more a matter of historical debt, and that i hadnt personally have good reasons for having earned the benefits i had from being white, and that it was unfair how black people had a worse hand
And thus, similar to how a natural disaster happens and it was random where it happened, he people un affected by it had a moral responsibility to help the people afflicted by it
This isnt really the way people who support AA see themself in reason #2, but its how i saw it
I remember finding the “veil of ignorance” argument extremely compelling, and still find it very compelling. I just dont think its very useful anymore
I remember feeling a sense of having won a lottery that i had no part of, and seeing/reading about unfortunate people; facts or arguments about how those unfortunate people made bad choices didnt feel very relevant, as i was concerned about the lottery part, and my image was generally that people generally try their best, and that in every group of people there are fuckups and such.
So the argument about personal choice mostly felt like a way to shift the conversation from ‘systemic’ things to personal things, and stop change
I have a vague memory of the book progress from johan norberg changing my opinions in general a ton, by shaking up my world view and making it focus on progress and developement, and less on redistribution and relationships
One argument for affirmative action that was not addressed in the article is the idea of comfortable spaces. It might go something like this (I think it works better for gender than race):
(1) It is reasonable for people to be uncomfortable in their school or workplace if there are zero or few people of their same gender or race.
(2) Admitting minorities on the basis of gender or race provides extra value to the school or workplace by alleviating the discomfort of the existing minorities
(3) Therefore Affirmative Action programs that admit minority genders/races up until a comfort threshold X are justified.
Corollary: Affirmative Action programs are not racist because the criterion of discrimination is not race but ability to provide comfort to minorities.
I don't like this argument because it seems to give special privileges to minorities. Why should we go out of our way to make minorities more comfortable, at the expense of screwing over the majority? And in practice, these concessions to "comfort" seem to only ever go in one direction. I doubt you will ever see anyone calling for affirmative action for whites to make them more comfortable in black-dominated settings (e.g. the NBA).
Working backward, the argument raised in 3c is always interesting because it glosses over compensation for segregation. If you take segregation as formally ending with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, then that was just under 60 years ago with many people who suffered under segregation still alive today. The harms flowing from that are much more proximate.
Even if you adjust for what you call harm mitigation strategies, it seems there is still a gap in outcomes.
As for 3a, I have never found non-identity arguments compelling. The argument here tries to soften what I feel are some absurd conclusions by framing the harms as ones that occurred generations ago, which makes it really a proximate cause objection, not a non-identity objection. Without really going into a full argument, the following scenario seems intuitively implausible, in the sense of the action of being morally correct: A child of two Holocaust survivors, two survivors who met in a concentration camp, tried to ask the German government for reparations when they came of age, say within 20 years of the war, and the German government denies their claim simplify by saying, "We did not harm you, in fact, the Holocaust was good for you since your parents met in a concentration camp".
This is not to say there are no objections or tricky moral issues to address on reparations, but it does not seem like 3a-c are knock-down arguments against reparations, at least as presented here.
I think the strongest argument is a purely consequentialist one: that if we have some group of people many of whom are poor and have some sort of bad life outcome, if we help some of them get into the best universities they will then return to their communities and improve them more than if some person not from this minority group got into this university.
Also, the person not from this minority group who didn't get the spot at the university because of AA will probably still have a good life and will find opportunities elsewhere. While the person who got a spot because of AA might not have had many opportunities elsewhere.
Michael, how do you see mental hospitals, and the ways thag goverments have historically treated disabled and neurodivergent people?
I have autism and ADHD, and as far as i can see, paternalism and conformity requirements have cause many atrocities and rights violations for both groups
"Because in the vast majority of cases, children do not select their own names, the relationship between Black names and poor outcomes is attributable to the parents. Parents who give their children more Black names may provide them with worse environments or have worse genes that they transmit to their children. It’s probable that both are involved. Either way, individuals with Blacker names may be less intelligent, but not because they have a Black name."
"To put the minuteness of the difference into quantitative terms, consider Figure A2 from their paper. The 30-day callback probability for for Whites seemed to be 0.251 versus 0.230 for Blacks. This amounts to an odds ratio of (0.230/(1 - 0.230))/(0.251/(1-0.251)) = 1.122. That’s really not much! That’s like a Cohen’s d of 0.063 or a Pearson’s r of 0.032. It’s small. The best explanation for why outcomes may turn out equal at the same ability levels despite discrimination not affecting ability level and discrimination nevertheless existing may just be that the effect is so small that it’s easy to overcome. But we also don’t know whether this is statistical or taste-based, and if either of those is easier to overcome or more or less impactful."
You seem to assume here that affirmative action needs some kind of argument to justify its existence. I'm not sure that this is so. If there is nothing defeasibly wrong with affirmative action (i.e. if affirmative action isn't bad in any sort of way which would demand special justification for this bad thing), then it doesn't need any special justification.
1. Is the act of affirmative action inherently wrong by itself?
Well, affirmative action is discrimination based on race and sex, and many people think that this is inherently wrong.
Yet, imagine I am making a movie about Genghis Khan, and so I decide to hire only Asian (or maybe specifically Mongolian) men when finding someone to play Genghis. Since I'm not a very good movie maker, my movie will not contribute anything great to the world. As a result, if hiring only Asian (Mongolian) men is inherently wrong, then the benefits of my movie won't override or justify that wrong.
Basically everyone agrees that it is okay for me to only hire Asian (Mongolian) men to play the role of Genghis Khan. This seems to show that there is nothing inherently wrong with discriminating on the basis of race.
2. Do the motivations behind affirmative action make it defeasibly wrong?
Well, if there is nothing that makes discriminating against people based on their race or sex wrong, why do we all agree that Jim Crow and similarly practices are wrong? Plausibly, because the motivations are wrong. Discriminating for racist or sexist reasons is wrong.
Yet, many justifications for affirmative action are not inherently racist or sexist, or otherwise inherently wrong, in any way. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting to provide role models that people can connect to, wanting to help the disadvantaged, or fight stereotypes.
3. Do the consequences of affirmative action make it defeasibly wrong?
Well, maybe affirmative action is wrong because it has bad consequences. It robs white men of opportunities, and it often reinforces negative stereotypes about minorities and women.
With regard to the cost of opportunities to white men, this doesn't seem inherently wrong. Remember that basically everyone agrees that it's okay to hire Asian (Mongolian) men to play Genghis Khan, even though it discriminates against other races and causes them to lose opportunities in the same way.
With regard to it leading more people to judge their colleagues as less qualified, this doesn't seem inherently wrong, either. Suppose I criticize an African-American coworker, and my true criticisms happen to reinforce negative stereotypes, though I am not relying on those stereotypes or encouraging people to rely on them. That seems morally okay.
It would be wrong to encourage people to accept those stereotypes, but that's not what affirmative action does. Affirmative action might reinforce the stereotypes by inadvertantly stoking resentment or lowering the displayed ability of minorities and women (same with my true criticisms), but it's not encouraging people to think that minorities or women are inferior.
4. Should we have affirmative action?
I'm inclined to think that there is nothing defeasibly wrong with affirmative action itself, so affirmative action itself does not require any special justification. Surely that means we should have it, no? Well, not necessarily. Even if there's nothing wrong with affirmative action itself, it could be that allowing people to discriminate based on race and sex simply gives them too much freedom to be racist and sexist. That's basically my view.
The logic of (1) is wrong because you (the moviemaker) are not discriminating on the basis of race, you are discriminating on the ability to look like Genghis Khan. It just happens to be that Asians are more able to look like Genghis Khan than non-Asians.
Most people do indeed think discriminating on the basis of race is inherently wrong. Often we discriminate on other criteria (such as looking like Genghis Khan or SAT scores) that happen to correlate with race for whatever reason. These correlations have nothing to do with the inherent wrongfulness of discrimination on the basis of race.
Thanks for the reply, but I don't think it hits at the heart of the matter.
Suppose I am instead making a movie about someone moving to LA. Even though the main character does not need to be Asian or a man, and even though no plot points depend on or are enhanced by them being Asian or a man, I decide to only hire Asian men for the role because I want the role to be played by an Asian man.
Again, this seems perfectly fine to most people (film makers do this sort of thing all the time). Yet, since I'm not a very good film maker, this movie won't contribute much to the world, and certainly not enough to justify race-based and sex-based discrimination if that discrimination is inherently wrong.
The strongest argument is a permutation of #3, which goes like:
Black people experience racism, and as a result, a black applicant with a 1400 SAT score actually has more innate talent than a white applicant with the same score, and could therefore contribute more to society if those talents were fully supported.
A related case is if an impoverished and rich student both have a 1400 SAT. It's pretty obvious that the same accomplishment took more innate talent for the poor kid, and therefore I'd let that one in.
I suspect that empirically, disadvantage in society due to race is pretty minor today (could even be negative) but certainly 50 years ago one would expect it to be positive, maybe strongly so. But it's worth people studying what it is.
Even if that's true, why would the SAT underpredict the black student's performance at other tasks? In other words: suppose that the black student had disadvantages that lowered his SAT score relative to what it would otherwise have been. Why wouldn't we expect that those same disadvantages will also lower his performance in the rest of life, just as much as it did on the SAT? Why would they only operate on SAT scores?
I think the idea is that the black student with a 1400 SAT would, if placed in a better environment (such as an elite college), no longer have those disadvantages -- or at least, have them to a lesser extent than they did during high school and before. I'm not saying I agree with this position, but I'm pretty sure it's what the AA advocates believe.
If the disadvantages that are reducing the score are specifically racism -- then, although that might also lower performance in other areas of life, we'd want to try to end that reduction from a meritocratic perspective, because it is currently limiting the use of that human talent.
I think the poor-vs-rich example is easier to talk about because the empirics are clearer there. If we have a poor student and a rich student who both score 1400, it seems obvious that the innate intelligence of the poor student is higher than that of the rich one. That suggests that further education could be more productively devoted to that student.
You note that all others areas of life are likely to be similarly impacted, just like the SAT score -- I agree that would reduce the increase in effectiveness of allocating education to the poorer student. But on the other side of the ledger, there are also positive intergenerational effects of allocating education to the most innately intelligent individuals.
Richard Hanania has a post arguing that actually you should let the rich kid in, instead of the poor kid with the same score -- because the rich kid has connections that will let him contribute more. But it misses that in the long run, it's also important to match connections with those who have raw talent. So Richard would be taking a short term gain for a long term loss.
I like your arguments against reparations, but I’m not sure how much is due to their virtues and how much is due to the fact that they confirm my biases.
“When people commit a wrongful act, they are only responsible for the reasonably foreseeable harms”
That seems awkwardly worded to me. If the act is definitely wrongful, it doesn’t matter whether the harm is foreseeable or not. If it’s wrong, no one should do it.
On the other hand, in a very practical legal system, I imagine that wrongful acts would not be prosecuted if no plaintiff came forward complaining of harm. Instead of having the state prosecute crimes as the plaintiff, plaintiffs would need to be actual victims of harm in order to have standing in court.
The complication here is that the acts we are discussing mostly happened 100 years or more ago, were not considered wrongful at the time, and the persons who actually committed the acts are all dead. We now consider society as a whole to have made a mistake, but it’s not clear how we should compensate victims of such social mistakes, who should pay the compensation, or how to determine who is owed compensation.
Questions regarding determining who should pay compensation or how the funds should be raised, at least, are vaguely analogous to existing public debt. In both cases, later generations are held liable for debts incurred by previous generations.
But even that nice precedent is not obviously just. One could argue that the government would be justified in incurring debt when making investment expenditures that will generate benefits far into the future, on a rough pay as you go basis. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that this argument is really applicable to existing public debt. And there is very little justification for incurring debt for benefits that are purely a matter of present consumption.
By definition, no one should perform a wrongful act. That isn't the question. The question is: If someone *did* perform one, then how much compensation do they owe?
The answer is: They only owe compensation for the reasonably foreseeable harms. Suppose I wrongly steal a paperclip from the philosophy department office. A year later, someone sees that paperclip on one of my papers (which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't stolen it), and this somehow triggers a bizarre, fluke reaction in their brain, which leads to their becoming a serial killer.
Suppose that after the fact, we somehow verify that all this is what happened. I would owe the philosophy department the cost of a paperclip. I would not owe compensation for the deaths of all the victims of the serial killer.
That makes sense.
My argument in favor of Affirmative Action sidesteps both the legal and moral aspects. It is simply this: universities should be allowed to make foolish decisions. I may even extend this to public institutions as long as their decisions are independent from state government mandates. By preventing them from making bad decisions, we prolong their institutional powers over rising competitors. It also disincentivizes existing players from innovation and trying to differentiate themselves from each other. If students are the clients and a subset of them are unhappy with the way things are, they would create a demand for a different structure. The counter argument is that the current supply of elite universities is more or less fixed and it would take a very long time before anything of similar stature can enter the field. But this ignores two potential outcomes: 1) existing top-tier universities cannot maintain this type of collusion for a very long time, or 2) potential new entrants can provide options that may alter or replace existing demand, i.e., demand can be substituted. If either is true and desirable, then allowing Affirmative Action (allowing actors to make bad decisions) can hasten the realization of one of them. In general, I think it is superior to find new ways (or remove blocks) for creative forces than attempting to eliminate bad ones.
Of course, the above argument assumes that AA is not only bad for some students, but also bad for the universities that do it. That is, universities would be better off without it. But if the assumption is that AA is actually good for the universities, then those against AA would have to make a rather strange argument that institutions shouldn't do what's good for themselves. While I am of the opinion that AA is not good for the universities, the question about why they do it is still an interesting one. Since universities are not traditional economic actors, we'd have to look at their institutional structures to see how they derive their perceived benefits. My first guess is that the preservation of individual interests is not always commensurable or compatible with the interest of the institution. But it could be much more complex than that.
In response to your points in 3, reparations to individuals:
(a) If slavery and Jim Crow laws had ended earlier, people as a whole would probably be better off now (due to decreasing marginal value of wealth, less economic inequality, less lead exposure), and that matters, like climate change matters for future generations and buying meat from farmed animals who had good lives (a small minority) harms animals in expectation. I think we can still say that poverty or growing up in a house with lead is a harm to someone, even if they wouldn't have existed otherwise. Planting bombs that will kill future people, even if the people killed wouldn't exist otherwise because of butterfly effects on identities, still seems bad.
Also, if reparations had been paid to the direct victims, or the slaves were freed earlier or Black people in the US were otherwise wrongfully discriminated against less, the victims would have passed on more wealth to their descendants. The descendants might then have a rightful claim to that wealth. I recognize this gets messy, impractical and increasingly implausible the further back you go, and maybe especially if the wrongful inheritors did nothing wrong to the rightful inheritors, possibly other than inherit the wealth. However, rather than defeating the argument, this could just mean inheritance rights weaken the more generations away. The Jim Crow era was not that long ago, and there are people still alive today who lived through it or were born under it, and many children of those people alive today.
If I steal something from you, give it to my kids, and we both die, do my kids owe what I stole back to your family?
(b) Black people getting into universities with the help of affirmative action are generally "finishing school, avoiding criminal activity, avoiding teenage pregnancy, etc", or, at least enough to make it into university in the first place. This doesn't seem that relevant for affirmative action specifically.
(c) The governments and supporters of slavery could have foreseen higher rates of poverty in the descendants of slaves. The governments and supporters of Jim Crow laws could also have foreseen higher rates of poverty from those laws, which lasted until 1968.
“Without affirmative action, you’d see fewer blacks in your classes, but they’d all be performing at the same level as everyone else. That would probably do more to undermine stereotypes.” . Bingo!
I taught Logic at a major state university in the Southeast for four years in all (late '80s early '90s). During the first three years, I averaged three black students per section. On average, they did as well as the white students. Then, late in that third year, a federal judge stepped in, called the university a "racist institution" because the percentage of black students did not reflect the percentage of blacks in the local population (a familiar argument).
The university doubled its percentage of black students for the following fall (They advertised, and I think they let in every black kid who applied). The average number of black students in my Logic sections went from three to six or seven. As before three did as well as the white students. The other three or four floundered helplessly. Generally the best grade they could make was a D, and that was being generous. One black guy had turned in a near-blank test and was in my office crying his eyes out in frustration about how lost he was (he'd not been skipping class or otherwise slacking off).
Someone tell me again how affirmative action that admits students to achieve politically acceptable representations helps these kids.
(I was a vocal critic of affirmative action in the 1990s. It basically cost me my academic career.)
Sorry your career suffered. We are not an intelligent species.
No? What I know is that in the '90s, no one wanted to talk frankly about affirmative action. No one wanted to find out inconvenient truths (i.e., that its main beneficiaries were upper middle class white women with hard-left ideologies).
Then, in early fall '95, drawing unemployment, I woke up one morning and suddenly wondered, regarding the preference for a dogma over finding out what is true (and blacklisting those who tried to tell it): What if this one issue wasn't the exception in academia? What if it is the rule?
Im swedish, cis guy and gay
personally think affirmative action is bad and counterproductive: i were for it in the past, not sure what made me change my mind exactly aside from generally more optimistic and realistic understanding of reality and history, and moving away from collectevism and feeling responsible for everyone else.
I dont really understand some of the arguments here: altough i agree with them factually, the way you describe or get to them felt odd to me
I can confirm that i when i was younger and much more leftist, i felt a collective responsibility around being swedish and around whiteness. It wasnt quite that i FELT like my whiteness had caused black people harm, and so, but more a matter of historical debt, and that i hadnt personally have good reasons for having earned the benefits i had from being white, and that it was unfair how black people had a worse hand
And thus, similar to how a natural disaster happens and it was random where it happened, he people un affected by it had a moral responsibility to help the people afflicted by it
This isnt really the way people who support AA see themself in reason #2, but its how i saw it
I remember finding the “veil of ignorance” argument extremely compelling, and still find it very compelling. I just dont think its very useful anymore
I remember feeling a sense of having won a lottery that i had no part of, and seeing/reading about unfortunate people; facts or arguments about how those unfortunate people made bad choices didnt feel very relevant, as i was concerned about the lottery part, and my image was generally that people generally try their best, and that in every group of people there are fuckups and such.
So the argument about personal choice mostly felt like a way to shift the conversation from ‘systemic’ things to personal things, and stop change
I have a vague memory of the book progress from johan norberg changing my opinions in general a ton, by shaking up my world view and making it focus on progress and developement, and less on redistribution and relationships
One argument for affirmative action that was not addressed in the article is the idea of comfortable spaces. It might go something like this (I think it works better for gender than race):
(1) It is reasonable for people to be uncomfortable in their school or workplace if there are zero or few people of their same gender or race.
(2) Admitting minorities on the basis of gender or race provides extra value to the school or workplace by alleviating the discomfort of the existing minorities
(3) Therefore Affirmative Action programs that admit minority genders/races up until a comfort threshold X are justified.
Corollary: Affirmative Action programs are not racist because the criterion of discrimination is not race but ability to provide comfort to minorities.
I don't like this argument because it seems to give special privileges to minorities. Why should we go out of our way to make minorities more comfortable, at the expense of screwing over the majority? And in practice, these concessions to "comfort" seem to only ever go in one direction. I doubt you will ever see anyone calling for affirmative action for whites to make them more comfortable in black-dominated settings (e.g. the NBA).
Working backward, the argument raised in 3c is always interesting because it glosses over compensation for segregation. If you take segregation as formally ending with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, then that was just under 60 years ago with many people who suffered under segregation still alive today. The harms flowing from that are much more proximate.
3b is also not an argument against reparations as such. It's only an argument against the amount. Without time for a detailed examination of the literature, results like this are not too uncommon. https://defendernetwork.com/news/national/black-two-parent-families-half-wealth-white-single-parents/
Even if you adjust for what you call harm mitigation strategies, it seems there is still a gap in outcomes.
As for 3a, I have never found non-identity arguments compelling. The argument here tries to soften what I feel are some absurd conclusions by framing the harms as ones that occurred generations ago, which makes it really a proximate cause objection, not a non-identity objection. Without really going into a full argument, the following scenario seems intuitively implausible, in the sense of the action of being morally correct: A child of two Holocaust survivors, two survivors who met in a concentration camp, tried to ask the German government for reparations when they came of age, say within 20 years of the war, and the German government denies their claim simplify by saying, "We did not harm you, in fact, the Holocaust was good for you since your parents met in a concentration camp".
This is not to say there are no objections or tricky moral issues to address on reparations, but it does not seem like 3a-c are knock-down arguments against reparations, at least as presented here.
I think the strongest argument is a purely consequentialist one: that if we have some group of people many of whom are poor and have some sort of bad life outcome, if we help some of them get into the best universities they will then return to their communities and improve them more than if some person not from this minority group got into this university.
Also, the person not from this minority group who didn't get the spot at the university because of AA will probably still have a good life and will find opportunities elsewhere. While the person who got a spot because of AA might not have had many opportunities elsewhere.
Michael, how do you see mental hospitals, and the ways thag goverments have historically treated disabled and neurodivergent people?
I have autism and ADHD, and as far as i can see, paternalism and conformity requirements have cause many atrocities and rights violations for both groups
Great post. With respect to the black names and implicit bias you may find this post helpful which analyzes a recent large well-done study on this:
https://cremieux.substack.com/p/whats-in-a-black-name
Some main takeaways:
"Because in the vast majority of cases, children do not select their own names, the relationship between Black names and poor outcomes is attributable to the parents. Parents who give their children more Black names may provide them with worse environments or have worse genes that they transmit to their children. It’s probable that both are involved. Either way, individuals with Blacker names may be less intelligent, but not because they have a Black name."
"To put the minuteness of the difference into quantitative terms, consider Figure A2 from their paper. The 30-day callback probability for for Whites seemed to be 0.251 versus 0.230 for Blacks. This amounts to an odds ratio of (0.230/(1 - 0.230))/(0.251/(1-0.251)) = 1.122. That’s really not much! That’s like a Cohen’s d of 0.063 or a Pearson’s r of 0.032. It’s small. The best explanation for why outcomes may turn out equal at the same ability levels despite discrimination not affecting ability level and discrimination nevertheless existing may just be that the effect is so small that it’s easy to overcome. But we also don’t know whether this is statistical or taste-based, and if either of those is easier to overcome or more or less impactful."
You seem to assume here that affirmative action needs some kind of argument to justify its existence. I'm not sure that this is so. If there is nothing defeasibly wrong with affirmative action (i.e. if affirmative action isn't bad in any sort of way which would demand special justification for this bad thing), then it doesn't need any special justification.
1. Is the act of affirmative action inherently wrong by itself?
Well, affirmative action is discrimination based on race and sex, and many people think that this is inherently wrong.
Yet, imagine I am making a movie about Genghis Khan, and so I decide to hire only Asian (or maybe specifically Mongolian) men when finding someone to play Genghis. Since I'm not a very good movie maker, my movie will not contribute anything great to the world. As a result, if hiring only Asian (Mongolian) men is inherently wrong, then the benefits of my movie won't override or justify that wrong.
Basically everyone agrees that it is okay for me to only hire Asian (Mongolian) men to play the role of Genghis Khan. This seems to show that there is nothing inherently wrong with discriminating on the basis of race.
2. Do the motivations behind affirmative action make it defeasibly wrong?
Well, if there is nothing that makes discriminating against people based on their race or sex wrong, why do we all agree that Jim Crow and similarly practices are wrong? Plausibly, because the motivations are wrong. Discriminating for racist or sexist reasons is wrong.
Yet, many justifications for affirmative action are not inherently racist or sexist, or otherwise inherently wrong, in any way. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting to provide role models that people can connect to, wanting to help the disadvantaged, or fight stereotypes.
3. Do the consequences of affirmative action make it defeasibly wrong?
Well, maybe affirmative action is wrong because it has bad consequences. It robs white men of opportunities, and it often reinforces negative stereotypes about minorities and women.
With regard to the cost of opportunities to white men, this doesn't seem inherently wrong. Remember that basically everyone agrees that it's okay to hire Asian (Mongolian) men to play Genghis Khan, even though it discriminates against other races and causes them to lose opportunities in the same way.
With regard to it leading more people to judge their colleagues as less qualified, this doesn't seem inherently wrong, either. Suppose I criticize an African-American coworker, and my true criticisms happen to reinforce negative stereotypes, though I am not relying on those stereotypes or encouraging people to rely on them. That seems morally okay.
It would be wrong to encourage people to accept those stereotypes, but that's not what affirmative action does. Affirmative action might reinforce the stereotypes by inadvertantly stoking resentment or lowering the displayed ability of minorities and women (same with my true criticisms), but it's not encouraging people to think that minorities or women are inferior.
4. Should we have affirmative action?
I'm inclined to think that there is nothing defeasibly wrong with affirmative action itself, so affirmative action itself does not require any special justification. Surely that means we should have it, no? Well, not necessarily. Even if there's nothing wrong with affirmative action itself, it could be that allowing people to discriminate based on race and sex simply gives them too much freedom to be racist and sexist. That's basically my view.
The logic of (1) is wrong because you (the moviemaker) are not discriminating on the basis of race, you are discriminating on the ability to look like Genghis Khan. It just happens to be that Asians are more able to look like Genghis Khan than non-Asians.
Most people do indeed think discriminating on the basis of race is inherently wrong. Often we discriminate on other criteria (such as looking like Genghis Khan or SAT scores) that happen to correlate with race for whatever reason. These correlations have nothing to do with the inherent wrongfulness of discrimination on the basis of race.
Thanks for the reply, but I don't think it hits at the heart of the matter.
Suppose I am instead making a movie about someone moving to LA. Even though the main character does not need to be Asian or a man, and even though no plot points depend on or are enhanced by them being Asian or a man, I decide to only hire Asian men for the role because I want the role to be played by an Asian man.
Again, this seems perfectly fine to most people (film makers do this sort of thing all the time). Yet, since I'm not a very good film maker, this movie won't contribute much to the world, and certainly not enough to justify race-based and sex-based discrimination if that discrimination is inherently wrong.
The movie is a private venture. If taxes paid for it, I think most taxpayers would care.
Taxes pay for public universities.