Abstract
Management faces complex race related issues in which groups arguing entitlement appear to claim benefits historically enjoyed by others. Thus many affirmative action issues provoke animosity because they are framed as zero sum problems. To some extent they are zero sum. Therefore, rationales for corporate policy must address that forthrightly. Up to now the corporate justification has been weak. The article describes a social debt owed interracially resulting from the accumulation of current class benefits from past discrimination, and asserts that affirmative action policies have a firm ethical basis inasmuch as they are affectively redistributing benefits to pay the social debt.
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Richard F. America is a program manager at the U.S. Small Business Administration and Research Associate at the Howard University, Institute for Urban Affairs. He has taught at the business schools at the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford University, and was a consultant at Stanford Research Institute. He is coauthor (with Bernard E. Anderson) of Moving Ahead: Black Managers in American Business,McGraw Hill, New York, NY, 1978.
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America, R.F. Affirmative action and redistributive ethics. J Bus Ethics 5, 73–77 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02116147
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02116147