Arguments for Affirmative Action

Past posts on Affirmative Action:

• Is Affirmative Action Systemic Racism?

• The Supreme Court on Affirmative Action

• Who Cares About Diversity?

To continue my series of posts on Affirmative Action: Here, I address the most popular arguments for it.

1. Countering Current Bias

Argument: People today are still biased (if only implicitly) against blacks. E.g., resumes with black-sounding names on them are evaluated as worse than resumes with the same information but with white-sounding names. So we should compensate for our implicit biases by adopting explicit biases in the opposite direction; hopefully, these will cancel out, leaving things fair.

Reply: This is a very poor solution. There is no reason to think the two biases would happen to cancel out. The rational solution would be to anonymize applications, i.e., have the names and other race-identifying information removed before review.

2. Reparations to the Race

Argument: The White Race committed injustices against the Black Race in the past. Therefore, the White Race owes compensation to the Black Race.

Reply: This is a classic example of racist thinking. There is no such person as the White Race, nor are individuals beholden to their race, nor are they responsible for the actions of other people with the same race.

Btw, even though this is a ridiculously bad argument, I think it is one of the main motivations, perhaps the main motivation, for affirmative action and reparations. This is why people have “white guilt”, why many are angry at “white people”, etc.

3. Reparations to Individuals

Argument: Actually, black individuals today are still being harmed by the racism of the past. It’s partly responsible for their having worse economic prospects, higher incarceration rates, more drug abuse problems, etc., compared to white people. Also, the U.S. government was partly responsible for the racism in the past. The same government persists, even though the individuals in it are different. So the government owes compensation to black individuals today.

Replies: See https://fakenous.substack.com/p/reparations. Brief summary:

(a) If there hadn’t been racism in the past, the entire course of history would have been different, and thus a completely different set of people would be here today. So the people who are here now wouldn’t have been better off if there hadn’t been racism; they wouldn’t exist. So they aren’t owed compensation for the racism from generations ago.

(b) Even if you suffer an injustice, you can only claim compensation for the amount of harm you would have suffered if you acted reasonably to mitigate the harm. Plausibly, contemporary blacks could reasonably act to reduce or eliminate the harms from past racism, e.g., by finishing school, avoiding criminal activity, avoiding teenage pregnancy, etc. Those who decline to do so are not owed compensation for the harms resulting from that decision.

(c) When people commit a wrongful act, they are only responsible for the reasonably foreseeable harms. When the government supported slavery 200 years ago, it could not reasonably anticipate black people today, e.g., having higher rates of drug abuse. So it doesn’t owe compensation for that.

4. The Benefits of Diversity

Argument: People learn most when exposed to a diversity of viewpoints and experiences. We need AA to promote that diversity.

Reply:

(a) This doesn’t support anything like the actual AA regime we have. See https://fakenous.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-diversity. Summary: If we actually cared about diversity, we would have the strongest AA for people from different countries and with substantively different beliefs from most people in the university, e.g., conservatives. Instead, AA mostly benefits wealthy and middle class blacks from America, and there is no support for viewpoint diversity; quite the contrary, in fact. There is also no reason why we would be attending closely to the proportions of each race in the general population.

(b) There is evidence for diversity producing better problem-solving and other decision-making. But this evidence is not about mere skin-color diversity. It’s more about people who have a diverse array of skills and training. Skin color has almost nothing to do with it.

5. Role Models

Argument: To make the most of everyone’s talents, we need an array of role models in different positions and occupations in society, so that people of a particular group don’t think that some position is closed to members of their group.

Replies:

(a) I think this is mostly just speculation; we’re assuming that this stuff is true, but there is very little evidence for it. I’m not sure widespread racial discrimination across society is justified by such speculative arguments.

(What evidence is there? E.g., a study found that kids with role models tend to get better grades, and also that most kids tend to have race-matched role models, if any. This is very weak evidence for claiming that having more race-matched role models available will cause grades to go up.)

(b) The argument supports that there should be some people of each race in a given occupation or position in society, but this can be achieved without AA. The argument doesn’t support that they should be proportional to the numbers of that group in the general population, which is what AA proponents are after.

6. Equalizing Opportunity

Argument: Blacks have lesser opportunities than whites. To equalize opportunity, we need to give them advantages in college admissions, hiring for some jobs, etc.

Reply: Of course people are born with different life prospects. If you’re raised well in a prosperous family, your life will probably go better than if you’re raised in a poor and abusive family. However,

(a) Admitting more disadvantaged people to college probably has minimal impact, given these much deeper differences between people. Once you get to be an adult, it’s pretty much too late to try to equalize opportunities.

(b) If this is the concern, there’s no reason why we should be focusing so obsessively on race. One would think the focus would be on poverty, having a bad upbringing, etc. Race is an poor proxy for that; there are plenty of white people with crappy upbringings in poor neighborhoods.

(c) Race-based affirmative action mainly helps middle- and upper-class blacks get into better colleges than they otherwise would have. It doesn’t help the really disadvantaged blacks, who generally don’t go to college.

7. Fighting Stereotypes

Argument: We need affirmative action to help fight stereotypes. E.g., we need to have more black Harvard graduates, to fight the stereotype that black people aren’t smart.

Reply: Affirmative action probably has the opposite effect. It has the effect that, e.g., the black students in a given college are, on average, less good than the white or Asian students at that college. They will have had lower SAT’s, lower grades, etc., and they will thus perform worse in college. The Asians, by contrast, will perform better than the average student at the school. The students will notice this, regardless of how much you tell them that they’re not supposed to notice it. (And calling them “racist” won’t make them not notice it.) I’d be really surprised if this didn’t have the effect of strengthening stereotypes.

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.

A similar point applies to the post-college world.

Conclusion

I haven’t found a good argument for affirmative action thus far. What’s your favorite argument?