How Actions Affirm: Reflections on the Question of Affirmative Action

Abstract

One of the greatest questions posed by the policy of affirmative action concerns the extent to which it is justified to promote an individual belonging to a minority group, be their personal attributes what they may, over another individual with at least nominally superior qualifications for the advancement in question, but who happens to belong to the majority group, solely on the basis of their group affiliation.

A classic example that has been used to represent this dilemma is the “coal miner’s daughter” scenario. In this scenario, the question arises of how to justify—if it is indeed justified—the preference to admit X, the son of an African-American neurosurgeon from Pittsburgh, into academic studies instead of Y, the white daughter of an Appalachian coal miner. This example characterizes a scenario wherein the racial disparity is not particularly informative as to the individual circumstances of the candidates in question, and challenges the proponent of affirmative action to justify its application in such a case. In this case, the archetypal profile of X, as ought to have been evident from his association with a persecuted minority (in this case, the African-American subgroup, which can be assumed to be a statistically weaker socio-economic population, such as would warrant the correction of said inequality through affirmative action), appears to be obscured by the individual traits associated with X himself.

If we were to concede that affirmative action should be eschewed in such a case, this would give rise to a greater underlying difficulty: If the stated estimated profile of the minority group (i.e., the estimate that they are, as a group, a statistically weaker socio-economic population) is the only basis for their eligibility to trigger a correction in their favor, why should we rely on such a figure at all, when more precise individual figures could be obtained in lieu of statistical generalization?

The exercise brought down above thus gives rise to a more general moral challenge to the concept of affirmative action, and in what circumstances (if any) it can be justified. Can affirmative action be ethically sanctioned in the case of the coal miner’s daughter? It is the position of this author that, in specifically such cases, the answer could indeed be yes. In this article, this author shall attempt to present an unexhaustive yet functional typography of various forms of affirmative action, focusing on their justifications relating to individual rights (hence the unexhaustive nature of the study, as will be clarified below). This article will focus on individual rights in order to avoid the deeper discussion of communal rights, their origins, their legitimacy and their weight as compared to individual rights, and to focus instead on the underlying justifications for corrective discrimination. This author believes that this typography may assist us in the future in identifying and distinguishing cases in which the policy of affirmative action is morally justified.