ExcerptOne of the great achievements of American history has been the development of a broad consensus that racial discrimination has no place in our society, to the point that there is virtually no one who would openly espouse racist views. Even the divisions concerning affirmative action presume an underlying consensus that racial discrimination needs to be opposed and eliminated. The primary dispute is about the means of achieving a society without racism. Thus, in their differing reactions to the (...) Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times still agreed on the basic goal of eliminating racial discrimination.1 The disagreements are about the means to this end. In fact, there are good reasons to conclude that the end of affirmative action will help Blacks and Hispanics. (shrink)

This paper proposes an application of Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation to an issue of crucial importance to US minorities: the debate on affirmative action. Over the past fifty years, this debate has been framed in terms of the opposition between advocates of affirmative action who claim that it is needed in order to achieve the integration and participation of traditionally oppressed groups to society without which there is no equality of rights, and critics who argue (...) that affirmative action violates equality by enforcing a double standard that undermines the ideal of a color-blind society. In this paper, I show how the basic principles of Dussel’s ethical theory (which are best expounded in his book Ethics of Liberation) allow us to address what I take to be the main demands of both advocates and critics of affirmative action in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

Affirmative action is often implemented as a way of making redress to victims of past injustices. But critics of this practice have launched a three-pronged assault against it. Firstly, they point out that beneficiaries of preferential policies tend not to benefit to the same extent as they were harmed by past injustices. Secondly, when its defenders point to the wider benefits of affirmative action , critics maintain that such ends could never be sufficiently weighty to permit (...) violating equal treatment. And, thirdly, critics dispute whether the alleged benefits of affirmative action really ensue. I argue this three-pronged assault is flawed at the conceptual level. Firstly, it operates with an impoverished conception of redress. When X wrongs Y, X does not make exhaustive redress to Y by compensating Y for the harm Y suffered due to X’s wrong action. Redress also requires rectification of the wrong: X must put right the wrong done to Y by making adequate amends. While the means of compensation are determined by the extent of the harm for which compensation is due, the adequacy of amends for a wrong is less tightly controlled by the nature of the wrong. So, secondly, it is perfectly right that the choice of amends be informed by the prospect of wider benefits. Whether, thirdly, these benefits are in fact in prospect in the case of affirmative action is an empirical question which philosophy cannot answer. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Forward‐looking Arguments Backward‐looking Arguments.

In this paper I respond to Robert Taylor's argument that a Rawlsian framework does not support strong affirmative action programs. The paper makes three main arguments. The first disputes Taylor's claim that strong AA would not be needed in ideal conditions. Private racial discrimination, I suggest, might still exist in such conditions, so strong AA might be needed there. The second challenges Taylor's claims that pure procedural justice constrains Rawlsian nonideal theory. I argue that this rests on a (...) fetishizing of pure procedural justice that is absent from Rawls's work. I also show that a revised formulation of Taylor's concern here also fails. My third argument makes a positive Rawlsian case for strong AA in nonideal conditions that builds on a Taylor concession. Taylor suggests that the goal of nonideal theory is to create a world in which ideal theory can be applied. My argument begins by showing that another permissible goal of Rawlsian nonideal theory is to ameliorate injustice. I then argue that Rawls's contractualist framework supports the strongest forms of AA when category 3 interventions are blocked. (shrink)

Debates over affirmative action are often frustratingly uninformative and inconclusive. In this work Capaldi goes beyond criticizing that policy to clarify why the debaters miss each other's points. He begins by attacking affirmative action and establishes the need to explore the theory supporting it. Following this exploration he concludes that this policy involves dangerous fundamental changes in the structure of society and outlines a response. The timing of the publication of the book was such that it (...) was unable to take into account the Grove City decision. Its analysis of the kinds of thought characteristic of both sides of the debate, however, is very useful when examining the current debate over the appropriate response to that decision. (shrink)

If there is life elsewhere in the universe and its level of development is as backward as its terrestrial counterpart, they will probably have sociologists and political scientists constructing and deconstructing social reality. If and when they finally make contact with earth, these pundits will have great difficulty making sense of American race relations, no matter how many studies the Federation will commission to make sense out of the subject. The earth's most developed country, whose success is largely due to (...) its heterogeneity, pragmatism and common sense, does not seem able to deal with differences in skin pigmentation, to the point that its best intellectuals systematically make fools of themselves in explaining it. (shrink)

This article examines the legal arguments that may lead the Supreme Court to overrule precedent and strike down affirmative action in university admissions. Given the critical importance of a diverse physician workforce for our Nation’s health care system, the potential reversal of affirmative action admission programs in medical schools may have severe negative consequences. This article discusses the implications for health care should the Court issue an opinion restricting or eliminating affirmative action in higher (...) education. (shrink)

Barbara Bergmann's defense of Affirmative Action (hereafter, AA) is replete with relevant analogies, parables and examples. Accordingly, AA is a matter of conscience, “planning and acting to end the absence of certain kinds of people … from certain jobs and schools” (7). The purposes of AA are to eliminate discrimination, promote integration, and reduce poverty of minority groups (9). “The heart of an AA plan is its numerical hiring goals, based on an assessment of the availability of qualified (...) minority people and women for each kind of job” (12). Bergmann acknowledges that A A programs “do have quota like aspects” (13), but she claims this is the only method to get women and minorities into jobs for which they are qualified and without which they would be rejected. (shrink)

In this paper, I endorse the decision of the Supreme Court of the U.S. in Bollinger v. Grutter (2003). I argue that the educational benefits of diversity are an important enough state interest to justify the use of racial preferences and that, especially due to the absence of race-neutral alternatives, this use of racial preferences is narrowly tailored to that state interest. However, I also indicate that I am willing to give up my support for diversity affirmative action (...) in the U.S. for a $25 billion a year education program to put in place a quality educational system K through 12 for every child in the country. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any critics of affirmative action who are also willing to support such a program. (shrink)

The thesis of "Freedom of Communicative Action" is that Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action illuminated the deep structure of the First Amendment freedom of speech. Haberams's theory takes speech act theory as its point of departure. Communicative action coordinates indivudal behavior through rational understanding. Communicative action is distinguished from strategic action--the use of communication to manipulate, deceive, or coerce. Part I offers an introduction. Part II outlines a hermeneutic approach to interpretation of the First (...) Amendent. Part III explores and criticizes existing theories of the freedom of speech. Part IV explicates Habermas's theory of communicative action. Part V developes a theory of the freedom of expression based on Habermas's theory of communication. Part VI applies that theory to particular problems in free speech doctrine. Part VII draws some conclusions about the implications of this exercise for the development of doctrine and the theory of communicative action. "Freedom of Communicative Action" was published in 1989, and some of the views expressed in the article are no longer affirmed by the author. (shrink)

In this book Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen address the complexities of his question "Is affirmative action morally justifiable?" by analyzing the prevailing contemporary arguments both for and against affirmative action. The book applies current political philosophy to demonstrate that arguments on both sides justify different conclusions given different specific cases, though it ultimately does argue in favor of affirmative action based on the relative strength and significance of the anti-discrimination- and equality of opportunity-based positions.

Affirmative action refers to positive steps taken to hire persons from groups previously and presently discriminated against. Considerable evidence indicates that this discrimination is intractable and cannot be eliminated by the enforcement of laws. Numerical goals and quotas are justified if and only if they are necessary to overcome the discriminatory effects that could not otherwise be eliminated with reasonable efficiency. Many past as well as present policies are justified in this way.

In this paper, I attempt to show in clear terms what I believe to be the inconsistencies inherent in adopting affirmative action as a proper philosophy for remedying the gender imbalance in contemporary African societies. I have also gestured towards the fact that apart from the issues involved in adopting affirmative action as a principle, the concept quite ironically further widens the gap it is meant to seal. In the spirit of the conversational tradition of African (...) philosophy, I excavate and interrogate a theory of equality that speaks to an indigenous Efik concept of equality. Thus, as a conversational response to the inadequacies of Affirmative Action, I have in this paper adopted ukém philosophy along with its principles of ówó and ikíkè, as an alternative model or tool for combating the ills of gender inequality. Keywords: Affirmative Action, African Philosophy, Discrimination, Gender, Ikíkè, Ukém. (shrink)

As a rejection and continuous reframing of theoretical humanism, critical posthumanism questions and imagines the human condition in the current context, aligning it with nonhuman and more than human entities, past and future. While this philosophical approach has been referenced in many academic disciplines since the 1990s, it has been gradually garnering interest among nursing scholars, leading to questions such as what it means to be human and what it means to be a nurse in the here and now. As (...) a deeply ethical and political project, posthumanism, which we associate with poststructuralist concepts of power and resistance, questions the formation of posthuman subjects who more accurately reflect complex times, characterized by capitalistic commodification of life—human and nonhuman. In this article, we aim to explore how the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical posthumanism, specifically through Rosi Braidotti's works, can be useful to understand a posthuman subjectivity that favors affirmative actions aimed at actualizing our world in becoming. Through examples in nursing practice, education, and research, we will explore not only how critical posthumanism allows us to frame transformations in the current situation that we are embedded in as nurses and more generally as beings but also how these examples allow us to move beyond critique to the actualization of affirmative actions that correspond to the creation of new worlds. (shrink)

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION This study is in the form of Policy Research in the area of Foundations in Higher Education. The issue of affirmative action is both ...

Social Catholic criticisms of Frédéric Bastiat’s thinking, notably Charles Périn’s, clarify the link between the labour theory of value and the demands for social justice. Claiming that Bastiat’s theory of value rests on a sophism, Périn rejects his view that competition is the solution to the social question. Contrary to Bastiat, indeed, he accepts the labor theory of value and apparently makes it a standard of justice: according to him, rents sanction an injustice. Social Catholics, particularly René de La (...) Tour du Pin, follow in his tracks, insisting that a specific course must be taken so as to set right the injustice of rents — the course of what will be called furtherly ‘social justice’.Les critiques portées par les catholiques sociaux à la doctrine de Frédéric Bastiat, notamment celles de Charles Périn, permettent de comprendre le lien qui unit la théorie de la valeur travail et l’exigence de justice sociale. Périn affirme que la théorie de la valeur de Bastiat repose sur un sophisme et repousse donc sa réponse à la question sociale, la concurrence. Il a adopté en effet, au contraire de Bastiat, la théorie de la valeur travail et l’a érigée, semble-t-il, en critère de justice : la rente consacre, à ses yeux, une injustice. A sa suite, les catholiques sociaux, exemplairement, René de La tour du Pin, affirmeront qu’il faut mener une action spécifique pour corriger l’injustice de la rente et l’appelleront justice sociale. (shrink)

Affirmative action programs remain controversial, I suspect, partly because the familiar arguments for and against them start from significantly different moral perspectives. Thus I want to step back for a while from the details of debate about particular programs and give attention to the moral viewpoints presupposed in differenttypesof argument. My aim, more specifically, is to compare the “messages” expressed when affirmative action is defended from different moral perspectives. Exclusively forward-looking (for example, utilitarian) arguments, I suggest, (...) tend to express the wrong message, but this is also true of exclusively backward-looking (for example, reparation-based) arguments. However, a moral outlook that focuses on cross-temporal narrative values (such as mutually respectful social relations) suggests a more appropriate account of what affirmative action should try to express. Assessment of the message, admittedly, is only one aspect of a complex issue, but it is a relatively neglected one. My discussion takes for granted some common-sense ideas about the communicative function of action, and so I begin with these.Actions, as the saying goes, oftenspeaklouder than words. There are times, too, when only actions can effectively communicate the message we want to convey and times when giving a message is a central part of the purpose of action. What our actions say to others depends largely, though not entirely, upon our avowed reasons for acting; and this is a matter for reflective decision, not something we discover later by looking back at what we did and its effects. The decision is important because “the same act” can have very different consequences, depending upon how we choose to justify it. (shrink)

I defend impact-based accounts of institutional racism against the criticism that they are over-inclusive. If having a negative impact on non-whites suffices to make an institution racist, too many institutions (including institutions whose affirmative action policies inadvertently harm its intended beneficiaries) would count as racist. To address this challenge, I consider a further necessary condition for these institutions to count as racist—they must stand in a particular relation to racist ideology. I argue that, on the impact-based model, institutions (...) are racist if they have a negative racial impact AND this impact is legitimized by racist ideology. Racist ideologies limit social criticism of and collective action against institutions that have a negative racial impact, and in so doing, lend stability to systems of racial domination. (shrink)

Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination (...) of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action. (shrink)

We address the question of the effectiveness of affirmative action agreements concluded by a regulatory body with employers in order to achieve greater equality in employment. We analyse the pattern of affirmative action agreements concluded by the Fair Employment Commission with employers in Northern Ireland between 1990 and 2000. We examine the association between these agreements and changes occurring in the religio-political composition of these employer's workforces during that period, based on a statistical analysis of monitoring (...) data collected by the Commission from employers, compared with employers that did not enter into such agreements. We find that firms reaching agreements with the Commission demonstrated significant evidence of change over the decade. We conclude that such agreements were likely to have been an integral part of the processes driving change in the Northern Ireland labour market in the 1990s. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Malebranche claims that God always, or nearly always, acts by general volitions. However, two possible interpretations of this claim have led to competing understandings of Malebranche's occasionalism. The General Content interpretation (GC) holds that God forms as few volitions as possible, and that aside from a limited number of particular volitions, God's normal mode of action consists simply in willing the general laws themselves. The Particular Content interpretation (PC) affirms that God forms a distinct volition for each event or (...) state of affairs, but that those volitions count as general when they are issued "in accordance with" some general law. This essay examines five lines of evidence that purport to reveal Malebranche's commitment to PC and explains why they all fail. As a result, GC emerges unscathed as a consistent and viable interpretation, and, at the same time, much of the case for PC is undermined. (shrink)

One popular criticism of affirmative action is that it discriminates against those who would otherwise have been offered jobs without it. This objection must rely on the non- consequentialist distinction between what we do and what we merely allow to claim that doing nothing merely allows people to be harmed by the discrimination of others, while preferential programs actively harm those left out. It fails since the present effects of past discrimination result from social arrangements which result from (...) actions of ours. We can be responsible for the effects of past discrimination, even without having discriminated, if we are responsible for that discrimination having those effects. (shrink)

It has been one decade since the affirmative actions were implemented in Brazil, and the State University of Southwestern Bahia has been promoting them since 2009. Over these first 10 years, dozens of indigenous persons entered and graduated from this institution. Our goal is to reflect on such context based on institutional data by establishing comparisons with other segments that also access the university, as well as data from other higher education institutions. Despite the policy and good academic performance, (...) the number of indigenous persons who benefit from it still remains below the offer and is particularly concentrated in some courses in the health field. (shrink)

Though the common sense defense of affirmative action (or employment equity) appeals to principles of restitution, philosophers have tried to defend it in other ways. In contrast, I defend it by appealing to the notion of restitution, arguing (1) that alternative attempts to justify affirmative action fail; and (2) that ordinary affirmative action programs need to be supplemented and amended in keeping with the principles this suggests.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 83-98, February 2021.

Affirmative action as a state policy is one of the powerful ways of empowering the underprivileged in the society. While such a policy is aimed at lifting the economic and social condition of the underprivileged, this comes with acts that are discriminatory and exclusionary. Yet these acts are termed as positive discrimination. Certain sections of the society are excluded from having access to economic resources and opportunities, while these privileges are earmarked for another section of the society considered (...) marginalized and underprivileged. This is being done guided by the principle of distributive justice. While the principle carries sound moral basis, conceptualizing the deprived and mode of empowerment varies with states and society, thus throws up several challenges. Indian experience draws challenges of negotiating the dual presence of individual and collective in the theorizing—idea of empowerment is directed to an individual, but the identity of the individual is based on his/her social identity. The dual challenge of uplifting a caste/community through empowering an individual belonging to the group has raised several questions in terms of achieving the goal of distributive justice. While the principle of distributive justice aims at empowering the least privileged within an underprivileged group/community, this has not been an easy task. After seventy years of reservation policy a lot more initiative is still called for. There is perhaps need for deeper philosophical deliberation on the nature of empowerment, distributive justice, and the underlying moral foundations. Meaningful policy intervention must be built on well thought out theoretical deliberations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For once, (...) Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

Affirmative action is standardly pursued in relation to admissions to prestigious universities, in hiring for prestigious jobs, and when it comes to being elected to parliament. Central to these forms of affirmative action is that they have to do with competitive goods. A good is competitive when, if we improve A’s chances of getting the good, we reduce B’s chances of obtaining the good. I call this Competitive Affirmative Action. I distinguish this from Non-competitive (...) Affirmative Action. The latter has to do with non-competitive goods, e.g., being granted early parole or freedom from arbitrary arrest. I argue that some of the most prominent objections against affirmative action—in particular, the reverse discrimination objection and the merit objection—speak less against Non-competitive Affirmative Action. And that some of the most prominent arguments in favor of affirmative action, insofar as they justify Competitive Affirmative Action, also justify Non-competitive Affirmative Action. (shrink)