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Non- Discrimination and Affirmative Action
by Professor Jan Narveson
Non-Discrimination and Affirmative Action
by
Professor, Jan Narveson
12th Chapter from his book "Moral Matters"
("Moral Matters" is available from: Broadview Press,
Peterborough, Ontario PO Box 1243, K9J 7H5 $20.00)
(reprinted with permission)
These subjects are among the most conspicuous areas for legislation
at present, and are closely linked. Both raise serious questions,
and are, I think, subject to major objections. Nondiscrimination is
the more basic one, since affirmative action is usually invoked as a
kind of antidote for what has claimed to be discrimination in the
past. Hence we will discuss it first.
We must begin by asking a question about discrimination that is not
asked often enough: what is it? There is, by now, a satisfactory
short definition: Discrimination is treating some people less
favourably than others for morally irrelevant reasons. (The word
arbitrary can be used equivalently to irrelevant.) The notion thus
defined calls for considerable comment.
To begin with, the phrase 'less favourably' must be taken very
literally. You cannot substitute 'worse', for example, without being
dangerously misleading. For once we start talking about treating
people badly, strictly speaking, then we are no longer talking about
discrimination, but instead about simple evil or injustice. For
example, we may not torture, beat, or kill people; but the supposed
evil of discrimination is not like that. Discrimination in hiring,
for example, consists, simply, in not hiring people, though for
putatively arbitrary or irrelevant reasons. It involves treating one
person less well than another, but not treating the latter badly. To
harm someone is to make him or her worse off than if you had done
nothing to them. But when you don't hire someone, you are,
precisely, doing nothing to them: discrimination in hiring consists
in passing people over for a certain kind of exceptionally good
treatment - giving them a desired job. Thus it consists in not doing
a good, rather than doing a harm. Those you don't hire may have
expected you to, and be disappointed when you did not. But that
doesn't mean you have actually harmed them, unless they had a right
that you not disappoint them in that respect. Yet the normal case is
that they have no such right. Giving people a job is not ordinarily
something we are required to do; and not giving them a job is
absolutely normal. Just now, for instance, I have failed to give you
a job. I have also failed to give you two thirds of my current
salary, just as I have not done any number of other nice things I
conceivably could have done for you. Perhaps you deserve some of
those, and the reasons I have failed to give it to you are probably
quite irrelevant, morally speaking. Still, as I am sure you will
agree, I have done you no harm, no wrong, in all these non-doings.
If discrimination is claimed to be wrong, then, it will have to be
shown why it is basically different from any of these things. But no
one has shown this.
The term 'treat' in our definition brings up the question in what
respects considerations of discrimination become applicable. Here
again there are major pitfalls to avoid. What if I am literally
"treating"? If I walk along the bar, offering a drink at my expense
to this person or that one, picking at random from the dozen
present, or perhaps picking them on the basis of the color of their
ties, am I now to be accused of "discrimination"? Surely not. Again,
we see the need for a good explanation of which types of "treatment"
could merit the term "discrimination", as opposed to the types that
do not. In countries like Canada, the law identifies housing,
education, health, and employment as areas in which discrimination
is prohibited or limited. Why those and not others, though?
Evidently we need to know how such things differ from the example
about the bar. Let us take an arguably more important context than
drinks at a bar - marriage. Do we have duties of nondiscrimination
here? Should the state require us to randomize over potential
marital partners, in the interests of "equal opportunity"? After
all, almost everyone discriminates uninhibitedly in that context.
They marry whom they like, and they like people for remarkably
morally irrelevant reasons, such as the color of their eyes or their
taste in movies.
Here an important potential snag in our deliberations arises from
the fact that in our time and place, there are many services whose
provision is required by law. When it is, then the people who
provide those services have a legal duty to do so. We have seen,
however, that law is not the same thing as morality. We can ask
whether the law creating that legal duty in certain cases is doing
the right things. Nevertheless, once law has been brought into the
act, it is clear that we may not use it for personal advantage, or
to play political favourites. If our government is going to provide
services, then it has a clear duty to provide them impartially. But
that does not prove that morality requires impartiality of us all,
in everything we do. It may be a purely political fact, rather than
a reflection of a moral requirement, that so many services are now
in the "public sector", where impartiality is, one hopes, a sine qua
non. Even in the public sector, we should note, the ambit of
impartiality is strictly limited. For all of the public services in
Canada are offered only to Canadians, and in other countries only to
the citizens of those countries. If nondiscrimination were a human
right, though, they should be offered without regard to nationality
or country of residence. Yet in fact, all governments discriminate
sharply against noncitizens, and insist that their citizens do so
too. If you are a private Canadian employer, you are not allowed to
hire an American or a Hungarian on equal terms with your fellow
Canadians, whether or not being Canadian constitutes any kind of
qualification for it. In all those innumerable cases in which it
does not, how is it relevant to hiring people for my job that the
person in question should be Canadian?
The point here, then, is that if there is a duty stemming from the
employer's professional obligations, for example as a civil servant,
why the service she provides should be rendered impartially, then
that is a reason why she should be impartial in that respect. But
that has no tendency to show that everybody owes everybody a duty of
impartiality. And it also, of course, raises the question whether
that public service is one that people really have the right to
expect from their governments. We now see that the all-important
word in the definition of discrimination is the word irrelevant (or
arbitrary). Nobody questions that we may treat some people more
favourably than others. The question is what restrictions to place
on such differential treatment: which distinctions are such that we
treat people wrongly by treating them less well than others in those
respects?
We act toward others on the basis of our interests, which are of two
kinds: affections - loves and hatreds, likes and dislikes - and
other interests - how useful or the reverse they are to us, as in
business transactions. These are not sharply distinct, of course. We
love children, spouses, friends, and we also derive many benefits
from our interactions with them. Clearly, our affections will prompt
us to treat people we like better than ones we don't; similarly, our
other interests will prompt us to extend more opportunities and
benefits to those who benefit us in turn. One would expect, then,
that a person's bestowal of favours would be roughly proportionate
to his degree of favourable inclination and the amount they benefit
him.
People who think that there is something inherently unjust about
discrimination might think that we shouldn't be dealing with people
on a basis of self-interest at all. Some religions, and most notably
the Christian, have been thought to imply some such thing. That is
certainly a misperception in the case of Christianity, for that
religion teaches people that if they love others, God, at least,
will love them even if no one else does, and will and reward them in
Paradise if not before. That is plainly an appeal to long-range
self-interest. Nor, I think, will examination of other religions
reveal anything markedly different. How could it? Total,
uncompensated self-abnegation is absurd, and we should be extremely
suspicious of the motives of those who claim to teach it;
characteristically, our unselfishness turns out to redound to their
advantage. Be that as it may, the point of view of this book is that
self-interest is wholly legitimate, that curbs on our pursuit of our
interests are curbs on short-sighted, narrow, ill-judged pursuit of
those interests, but nevertheless based on our real, long-run
interests. Morality, in particular, bids us take account of others,
who think much as we do and are similarly self-interested, and to
adjust our actions accordingly.
At some ultimate level, perhaps, fundamentally arbitrary
distinctions in our treatment of others may be irrational. If there
is literally no difference between B and C, how could I treat B and
C differently? But even that has a good answer in many case: I might
deal with B rather than C because I simply can't deal with both, I
must choose, yet have no reason to prefer one to the other. So I
just choose, by chance or whim. Walking along the street in Cairo or
New York, one might impulsively give a dollar to this beggar rather
than that one, for no other reason than that one happens to have one
dollar and not two, and doesn't think it worth bothering to make
change so as to give them each 50=A2. But isn't that perfectly
reasonable? Of course it is, and one does this constantly. The man
you end up marrying, if any, will probably be one whom there is no
more and no less reason to choose than some other; but you choose
him because you want to marry, and he happens to qualify and be
available. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. By contrast,
it would be unreasonable to insist that you marry only the Perfect
Man - by the time he comes into view, you will have been long in the
grave, and endured a lonely existence in the meantime.
On the other hand, you of course choose the best man from among
those available. If you think that Jones would make a better husband
than Smith, you of course will marry Jones, in the absence of very
special reasons to the contrary. The same goes for employing
someone. Choosing genuinely arbitrarily, with absolutely no reason
to do so, is virtually unintelligible. So if the point of denouncing
"discrimination" were to be sure that we don't engage in such
activity, then we would be wasting our time. People always have some
reasons for what they do, even if only that they must do something
and lack time, inclination, or resources to make fine distinctions.
And if they act for ill-considered reasons, then they act unwisely -
but no charge of injustice applies just on that account; we cannot
be free without being free to make mistakes. There is, then, no
foundation for principles of nondiscrimination in the structure of
practical reason, just as such.
Comparative Advantage
However, we do need to pay attention to an interesting and
treacherous set of motives: jealousy and envy. People are often
sensitive not only to how well they themselves are doing, in various
respects, but also to how they stack up against others. The man who
sets out to be the "fastest human alive" is not interested merely in
how fast he himself runs, but in whether he is faster than others.
If we are dealing with a number of people who are motivated to a
significant degree by these comparative interests, then if we do not
treat one person "the same" as that person's associates in the
respects they are interested in, we are likely to be in for trouble.
There will be complaints, bad tempers, whisperings, and the like.
Suppose you have a business and must decide how much you should pay
your various employees. What principle will you use? Well, first,
you will surely want to pay your good workers enough to keep them
from moving somewhere else. It would be silly not to, for if they
leave, you will have to find new employees who may be less capable,
and in any case it may be quite awhile before they can perform as
well as the veteran you have let go. Secondly, you will want to pay
more to those who are worth more, as measured by their contribution
to the success of your business. Obviously this interacts with the
first factor, for if you offer less to someone who does more, then
he or she will be motivated to go elsewhere; but if you overpay
someone, you are losing money - you could have hired some equally
productive person for less money, and pocketed the difference. Since
the point of the enterprise is to make money, such practices are
self-defeating.
So far, so good. But suppose that some employees insist on getting
just as much as others, even though, in your judgment, they don't do
as much for you. Do you pay them more, thus making your operation
less efficient? Or do you pay them less, thus risking their
disaffection? The latter might lead to poor performance, even
sabatoge, on their part; the former might lead to ruin. So you have
a problem. There is no simple solution to it. But there is a
relatively simple abstract principle to invoke: you solve the
problem by finding the compromise between the two contrary forces
that will make your firm maximally profitable over the longer run.
You will likely pay some people a little more than you really think
they're worth, for the sake of keeping harmonious relations among
your employees and thus sustaining morale, and consequently output.
Now, there may also be some among your employees whom you would like
to pay more because you simply like them more, and not because they
are worth more. This, too, will cost you profits - but perhaps you
are willing to spend the money anyway. Is this something to be
prohibited? If it is, could anything but envy or jealousy be the
reason for the prohibition? The question about discrimination comes
into sharper focus when we consider such examples.
The Puzzle about Nondiscrimination
We don't owe people jobs - they aren't among the things we have a
basic duty to provide for others. Those who are in a position to
distribute jobs are, mostly, in business, and their companies create
the jobs in question; jobs don't grow on trees, for the picking.
Those companies were established in order to make money, by selling
goods or services. Nobody may require anyone to do that: whether we
want to go into any sort of business or offer anyone a valuable
service is up to us, not anyone else.
But if it is up to us, then how are we are supposed to have a duty
to offer jobs in our business to A only on equal terms with B?
Again, consider our earier comparison with marriage. Do we have a
duty to treat candidates for spousehood "equally"? Am I supposed to
give Agatha and Belinda equal chances, an "equal opportunity", for
my hand in marriage? Surely not. Similarly, if I am inviting people
over for dinner, or getting a bunch of people together to play ball,
or to help me build my summer cottage, I plainly have no moral duty
to invite the general public, randomizing over friends and total
strangers alike.
Well, if I had no duty to go into business, and it's my business,
then why must I randomize over women and men, whites and blacks, or
whatever, when it comes to handing out jobs? Why can't I hire
whomever I please? It is useless to respond by saying, "because you
have a duty to treat people equally", for whether that is so is
exactly what's in question here. Moreover, the examples of hands in
marriage, handouts to arbitrarily chosen beggars, and any number of
others one could readily produce, strongly suggest that it is false.
We do not have to treat people equally. We may and should treat
people we like and people who do more for us, better than others.
Perhaps it will be said that the fact that person B is my friend is
what makes it relevant to treat him better than some unknown. But
why is it relevant? Those many people who think we have a duty not
to discriminate against others think that the fact that B is a
friend of mine is not a good reason why I should be able to hire B
instead of C: that, they insist, is "irrelevant". And in fact, what
is called discrimination, generally speaking, consists in preferring
some groups of people over other groups just because you like them
better. But why should we think that wrong? What's wrong with it?
The fact that the ones you have preferred will end up slightly
better off than those you haven't is perfectly true - indeed, that
was the point of your treating them better. But then, did the
unpreferred ones have any right over you, to end up equally well off
from your choices? There is no obvious reason to suppose that there
is any such right. Indeed, there seem very clear and compelling
reasons to suppose that they there is not.
Competence
Most people who talk about discrimination in hiring think that what
is relevant to hiring is competence, the ability to do the job. And
indeed, they go on to insist that people from the groups allegedly
"discriminated against" are just as good at the task in question as
people in the group allegedly favoured: black people just as
competent as whites, and women as men, for instance. There is an
oddity, indeed a basic paradox, about this claim, taken as a reason
why we have a duty to refrain from discrimination. Duties normally
curtail action from motives of self-interest. If you have a
business, then it is in your interest to hire competent people, or
more precisely, to hire the most competent person you can get at a
given wage. If B is better than C at the job, and you can get B for
the same wages as C, then it's in your interest to hire B, and as a
good business person, that's exactly what you will do. For if you
don't - if, for instance, you insist on hiring your incompetent
friends instead - then your costs of doing business will be higher
than they need be. If you do enough of that, you'll be uncompetitive
against your more rational rival businesspeople who don't care about
the race, sex, national origin, religion, of other characteristics
of the people they hire, so long as they get the best worker at the
lowest cost.
Discrimination is therefore inefficient. It costs money. If your
sole motive is to make money, you will not discriminate. Yet
letters to the editor, political speeches, and any number of laws
passed by legislatures are designed to get people, and in the latter
case to force people, not to discriminate. But why would all the
pressure, and the use of force, be necessary if the aim was to get
them to do what makes them more money -- that is, precisely what
they want to do anyway? It doesn't make sense! On the other hand,
suppose that their aim wasn't to make money? Suppose the
organization you are hiring for is devoted to something else, such
as the welfare of some particular group - your school, say, or a
church or club? Would we still have to hire the "most competent",
even if those competent people weren't interested in the purposes of
the club or the church in question? Does the Presbyterian Church
down the street have to consider Catholic and Presbyterian
applicants for the position of janitor on equal terms? Why? What the
manager of a club, church, or other nonbusiness group wants is to
promote the purposes of the club, and from that point of view also,
the enforcement of so-called "nondiscrimination" is arbitrary and
wrong. It is interesting, and ironic, that the very thing
discrimination was supposed to consist essentially in -- namely
arbitrary treatment -- is precisely what an antidiscrimination
principle seems to entail.
To tell an interest group that they must ignore their interest when
it comes to hiring would be to do what governments have no business
in doing: namely, to tell people how to live their lives, rather
than letting them live the life that they choose. If the interest is
in making money, then to tell a business whom to hire and whom not,
is either to tell it to do what is most efficient and hence makes it
the most money, which is absurd because redundant, or it is to force
it to engage in inefficient practices, thus denying it the right to
do what it exists to do. Either way, the intervention is wrong.
People do not have a duty to make money; we have no business forcing
people to maximize their incomes or profits. And on the other hand,
so long as the business or other activity they are engaged in is
inherently legitimate, providing people with goods and services that
do not, of themselves, involve the doing of evil to anyone, then we
also have no right to curtail their pursuit of this in the interests
of some other cause.
In recent years, nondiscrimination has changed course. Instead of
merely insisting that people not discriminate on the basis of
supposedly irrelevant characteristics, enthusiasts for equality now
insist that workers in employment X must be half male and half
female, and that the fraction of those employees who are of one race
or ethnic group, or whatever is the currently fashionable alleged
discriminandum, be equal to that group's fraction in the whole
surrounding population. But plainly, this is entirely arbitrary from
the point of view of those who create and sustain those businesses.
What the businessperson wants is to hire the people who will make
the most money for the business, be those people male or female,
black or white, or whatever. If those who can contribute the most
should happen to be of one color, sex, or ethnic background rather
than another, then employees in that business will tend to be
predominantly of that kind. Here again, to require that people pay
heed to such structural characteristics of their work force is
arbitrary and invasive.
Forced Affirmative Action
There is a problem, then, about giving any very good reasons why
what is called "discrimination" should be considered evil or immoral
at all. But now let's suppose, for the sake of argument, thatere is
such a duty to treat people "equally". Let's also assume that in
the past some people have not been "treated equally" in those
respects. Should we now try to help matters out by actively
promoting the prospects of the formerly discriminated-against group,
by requiring employers to employ some larger proportion of that
group than they would otherwise do, or have done in the past?
Notice that the question before us is not whether any such programs,
by anyone, are ever allowable. In fact, what makes it obvious that
they can be is the very argument we have just been constructing
regarding discrimination. Affirmative action discriminates; but if
discrimination is morally permissible anyway, then that would not be
a fatal objection to it. However, the question is not whether it's
inherently all right to practice it. Rather, our question is whether
it's all right to impose such a program, by the coercive powers of
government. The question, in other words, is whether justice ever
requires such a program.
A Fallacious Argument for Affirmative Action
Those who think that affirmative action is required by justice often
use fallacious arguments. One especially popular one is that
affirmative action will help to correct the past injustices that
allegedly occasion it. But that is not so. The only way to do that
would be to find the particular people who lost whatever they didn't
get by virtue of discrimination and then see to it that they get it
after all, or some suitable compensation. A lot of those victims are
dead and beyond compensation, while in many other cases, other
difficulties would stand in the way. In any case, the problem with
expecting a program of "affirmative action" to help out is that it
doesn't do that. Instead it rewards new people, people who in most
cases have never been discriminated against. And it rewards them
excessively. For if the problem was that they weren't treated
equally, then the right thing to do by way of "compensation" would
simply be to treat them equally. But affirmative action treats them
unequally. Instead of ensuring that they get the same chance as
others, it gives them a greater chance than those others. If in the
past men got the jobs instead of deserving women, clearly the cure
would be to open the doors so that the deserving women now may get
them as well - rather than shutting the door on the men, deserving
or not, thereby giving women greater chances than men for such
employmnt .
Moreover, a program of forced affirmative action penalizes
employers who have never discriminated against anybody, by forcing
them to consider more favourably people they might not otherwise
have hired. This is often obscured by claiming that the program only
requires employers to hire the "equally best qualified", rather than
to lower their standard. But what if the nondiscriminating employer
hires more women than men? Suppose that he has done so because more
of the best candidates were women? But no program of affirmative
action is going to rest content with that. It's going to insist that
the employer is "subtly" discriminating after all. It may, and
probably will, impose a quota, regardless of any evidence about the
proportions of males and females among the most-competent
individuals. If the reason for the program was a belief that
competence is equally distributed between the group favoured by the
affirmative action program and the other groups not so favoured,
then the basis of that belief is no longer the experience of
employers but an a priori belief by the government that it is so
distributed. It will end up forcing employers to take people whom
they didn't believe were as desirable as the ones they would
otherwise have hired if they'd had their choice. And there will be
no market test imposed on the government to see whether their wisdom
on this matter has proven correct. That test will be imposed
exclusively on the employer, and since it is the test he faces daily
in business, the imposition of an a priori criterion of this kind is
highly likely to be wrong from the start. The businessman will be
forced to pay the cost. Or his customers. And, in the end, his other
employees, who will share in diminished income or bear the brunt of
plant closures and contractions if the result is disastrous.
Affirmative action programs also require administration. If we're
going to force people in businesses X, Y, and Z to be egalitarian in
their hiring, then overseers will have to be appointed to see to it
that they do so. The people sent out for that purpose will not, of
course, know as much about the business as its managers and owners -
after all, they've never been in that business. Nevertheless they
will presume to instruct the actual managers and owners, deciding
who is and who is not "equally qualified"! Inevitably, this will
have adverse effects on efficiency. The numerous administrators
required to superintend the program have to be paid by somebody, and
the less-efficient employees hired because the employer was forced
to hire them will produce less. Both of these factors conspire to
reduce the amount of goods and services available for people who
would have liked to have them, and to raise the price of the ones
that are produced.
Equal Pay for Equal Work
A similar idea to affirmative action is the enforcing of a principle
of "equal pay for equal work". There is, again, an oddity about the
whole idea, for paying equal amounts to people who are equally
profitable is precisely what the market situation of a business
induces it to do anyway. It already is paying "equal pay for equal
work", as far as it is concerned. But the business firm uses the
right criterion, marginal effect on profitability, rather than the
irrelevant criterion imposed by the rule: hiring, for example, on
the basis of who expends the most calories rather than on the basis
of who makes the greatest overall contribution to output per unit of
wages. But the administrator, or the lobbyist, or the member of the
group that is supporting the allegedly discriminated-against people,
doesn't think that marginal profitability is the appropriate
criterion. He or she will come along with some new ideas about who
is better than whom at that job - ideas engendered in the political
climate of the time, not by any rational assessment of the needs of
the business. This, despite the fact that they by hypothes know much
less about the job than the people who now own and manage the firm.
So again, what will happen is that the business will become less
efficient. It will either have to pay the costs of the
administrators, in which case its customers will pay, or else the
taxpayer will. But if the taxpayer does, then that will leave him
with less money to buy the products of this company, or of any
other. The effect is the same: higher prices, and thus a lower
standard of living, for the people served by those businesses. In
addition, the people who have now lost out on jobs they otherwise
would have gotten will hardly be very happy with the new state of
affairs. They will resent the beneficiaries. And meanwhile, the
people now hired, who are perceived as having been hired for reasons
of affirmative action rather than because they are the most able
people available, are likely to be looked upon with suspicion or
condescension by their new colleagues. In general, everyone loses,
except perhaps the special group that it is the aim of the
legislation to benefit - for awhile.
footnote: "See the sobering study by Thomas Sowell, Preferential
Policies (New York: William Morrow, Quill book, 1990, especially
pp. 76-87 concerning the war in Sri Lanka."
Why should the government have the right to do any such thing? Why
should it benefit one group in the population at the expense of the
rest? These are not trivial or merely "academic" questions. Wars
have been caused by just such measures. When you draw a line
dividing a group into two, and force people to treat one of those
groups more favourably than the other, the losers become resentful,
and the winners self-righteous and protective. Both resort to
politics and coercion instead of peaceful production. None of this
makes for smooth human relations.
Determining The Distribution of Competences
To make any assessment of discrimination on a group basis, one has
to know two things: first, the proportion of those in the allegedly
discriminated-against group who were in fact hired (or whatever the
relevant mode of treatment is - hiring is our subject here), and
second, the proportion who should have been hired. How are we to
know the latter?
Sometimes one can have "anecdotal evidence": first-hand observation
by someone of a case in which an allegedly less competent individual
was preferred over another individual who was presumably superior.
Anecdotal evidence has two major disadvantages. First, it is
necessarily far too limited to afford any secure generalizations
about the large classes affected by any affirmative action program.
Second, those who tell the anecdotes are very likely to have their
own axes to grind. How does the teller of the anecdote "know" that
the successful applicant wasn't better than the rejected one? And if
it is disputable, why should we believe the relator of the anecdote
rather than the employer, who, after all, hias an interest in hiring
the person who will produce the most profit?
Those who support coercively imposed affirmative action, while of
course influenced by anecdotal evidence, are primarily moved by
their perception of structural disparities. They note, for example,
that more men than women are hired in a certain line of work. Since
the numbers of men and women in the population are about equal, they
infer that something is wrong. But the inference doesn't follow
directly. From "The population is x% F's" and "The percentage of
persons employed in work W is less than x", we cannot infer that F's
were discriminated against unless we have reason to believe that the
percentage of F's in the class of most-desirable candidates for W is
the same as it is in the general population. And there is often
excellent reason for expecting that not to be true. Indeed, in the
special case of men and women, there is one extremely important
reason for expecting it not to be true. For we are not counting
marriage as a case of "hiring" - even though there is really very
good reason for so counting it, in many respects. But if we don't,
then all of those women who marry and have families instead of going
to "work" - that is, joining the paid labor force - reduce the size
of the female hiring pool available for all other occupations. So
long as more women do that then men, the result must be that we
cannot assume that any other given occupation should show an equal
distribution by sex among its employees, absent which we can impute
discrimination.
Nor is that all. What if the F's are typically not very interested
in making their living at that particular job? Suppose that typical
women just don't like to work in coal mines, while typical men just
aren't much interested in secretarial work? Doesn't that matter? It
need have nothing to do with anything as abstract as "native
ability". Whatever the reason for these differences in interest,
they will affect the structure of the available pool for that kind
of work. And whenever this is so, it will be wrong to force
employers, in the supposed interests of "equality", to hire a
similar percentage of males and female for that employment. Of
course, the same holds for any other groups as well: groups of
different ethnic background, race, or any other arbitrarily selected
characteristic can be expected to have different patterns of
preference, as well as different specific skills.
There are innumerable differences betweeen groups besides the
defining differences, and there is no reason why some of those
should not be relevant to occupational choice and suitability. The
number of black males on American professional basketball and
football teams is vastly greater than the proportion of blacks in
the general populace, while the number of Orientals is vastly
smaller. Is this due to discrimination? Certainly not. The
difference in height and other physical attributes alone would
account for it. In hockey, the great majority of professional
players on American teams are Canadians, to the surprise of no-one
who knows anything about the climates in the two countries. On the
other hand, the number of women employed in the hand-assembly
branches of the electronics industry, or in sewing, is vastly
greater than their 50% incidence in the general populace. Is this
due to discrimination? Again, the sheer physical differences of the
two groups is enough to account for it: the smaller and more
delicate hands of typical women are obviously better suited to
manipulating tiny physical objects. Examples could be multiplied
indefinitely. This problem is so enormous as to be, in all
likelihood, insoluble - that is, insoluble in any way that is
favourable to the argument for affirmative action programs. That is
why those who argue for them just assume, without argument, that
certain proportions "obviously" ought to be equal, and let it go at
that. This a priori attitude is hardly appropriate to real life,
where everything depends on the facts. It is absurd to make such
claims in this field; philosophers have long been aware that the
human intellect is simply not the tool to rely on, exclusively, when
what is at issue is how things are out there in the world.
Achieving Other Goals by Affirmative Action
One major source of support for affirmative action, very likely,
consists in employing it as a device for achieving some other social
goals. Someone may support the imposition of a quota of 50% women in
a certain area because he thinks that in the ideal society, that's
how that area would be handled. Never mind that there are not nearly
enough women interested in or available for that kind of job as
things stand to staff 50% of the available positions, or that there
is no reason to expect that there ever will be, so far as our best
current information is concerned: our theorist has the Ideal Society
all figured out, and he's jolly well going to make us all go along
with it if he can. But we shouldn't allow that kind of blackmail or
Utopian planning. We must deal with people as they are, and not with
people as we or any particular group think they ought to be.
Realistically, it makes all the difference that the positions in
question are not popular with women. It's not our business to revise
human nature to suit our theories.
Conclusion
It is, all in all, very difficult to justify either forced
anti-discrimination or forced affirmative action in the sense in
which they are now popular. Our leading principle in this book has
been that people in general should, in the absence of good reason,
have the right to do as they want, work at or produce what they
wish, and associate with their fellows on terms of agreement rather
than by force. Those who don't accept this general account of morals
should be asked on what they propose to base their visions, and why
they should be allowed to impose those visions on ordinary people
trying to make the best lives they can for themselves. We should not
be impressed with any of the arguments typically employed in those
directions, all of which seem to be either riddled with outright
fallacies, vague at crucial points, or just arbitrary, high-flown
pronouncements. The rule of liberty stands, in business contexts as
in the others we have explored.
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