Affirmative Action

[Matt Faunce]

I think it’s important to address historical and collective injustices, and
the question of how justice should be served. Joseph Margolis, in his
lecture, A Second-Best Morality, spoke on the blind-spots of a morality
that’s strictly based on classical liberalism.

“The argument against affirmative action takes a classic liberal form: race
and ethnicity, it is said, are not relevant at all to the objective
assessment of professional promise; every would-be candidate must count for
one, and racial considerations must be unconditionally refused, in spite of
the fact that those same considerations have already played a very large
role in the history of racial injustice.

“You see the paradox: liberalism insists that every claim of fundamental
right must confine itself to what is formally universalizable in terms only
of the liberal conception of human reason or autonomy; hence, that the
natural rights doctrine applies strictly, in ahistorical terms, to all
historical situations. But justice itself—construed democratically, not in
the liberal sense—cannot be discerned apart from local histories of
injustice. Strict liberalism, which ignores (which must ignore) history,
since to consider history is to depart from the formal neutrality of
species-specific equality—must preclude all reference to collective
(afortiori, historical) injustice. But, of course, ‘affirmative action’
explicitly addresses lapses of justice in the democratic sense. It is not a
‘liberal’ notion at all!”

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/12411/A%20Second-Best%20Morality-1998.pdf%3Bsequence=1
(Pg. 23 (pg. 27 of the PDF))

I know that there are many good, moral conservatives who want to right the
wrongs of colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and the lingering racial
prejudices that these embedded in our culture. Some of them believe that it
(the righting) should be done by individuals’ and private companies’
charitable acts rather than by collective legal measures. Others of them
believe that merely evening the legal playing field is enough.

While I assume in this post that there are lingering effects of historical
crimes, I’ve said nothing of how much there are. That’s an important,
relevant question. I think that those who advocate for collective legal
solutions to historical and collective wrongs believe that the lingering
effects are more prevalent than what the classical liberalists believe.

--
Matt

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Affirmative action was a pretty sensible policy at the time, really." #manyormostfamiliarwiththetopicsay