In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, directing that “all Government contracting agencies . . . take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed . . . without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Two years later the order was amended to prohibit discrimination in employment because of sex.

The original order authorized the secretary of labor to “adopt such rules and regulations . . . as he deems necessary and appropriate” pursuant to the order’s purposes. In response to this mandate, the Department of Labor required all contractors to develop “an acceptable affirmative...

After more than twenty-five years of affirmative action law in the United States, college and university faculties remain largely white and male. Nearly 90 percent of full-time faculty are white, 4 percent are Asian, 3 percent are African American, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 1 percent are Native American.¹ Just over 25 percent of faculty positions in higher education are held by women. Within these aggregate data are some significant variations by type of institution and by field. There are lower percentages of Hispanics at public Ph. D. granting institutions, and lower percentages of Asian Americans at public junior colleges....

“Each person to count for one; no one to count for more than one.” This formula has long been regarded as expressing the heart of egalitarianism. But while many may agree superficially on the words of the abstract formula, they often disagree vehemently about how it is best to be applied. One such disagreement, a disagreement which cuts to the heart of our society’s commitment to equality and social justice, is raised by the cluster of policies commonly grouped together under the heading of “affirmative action.”

Affirmative action, in its many forms, is in large part a response to the...

This essay may be more the product of exasperation than of conviction. At any rate, it is based on a set of assumptions that reflect how little hope I have of being able to say anything both useful and philosophically interesting about affirmative action. My assumptions are these: (1) The philosophical debate about affirmative action is essentially stalled. Over the last fifteen years or so the content, range, clarity, rigor, and soundness of the arguments have remained virtually unchanged. (2) Intellectuals are deadlocked about the justifiability of result-oriented affirmative action programs—especially those involving preferential treatment. (3) Existing empirical evidence...

What good am I as a black professor? The raging debate over affirmative action surely invites me to ask this searching question of myself, just as it must invite those belonging to other so-called suspect categories to ask it of themselves. If knowledge is color blind, why should it matter whether the face in front of the classroom is a European white, a Hispanic, an Asian, and so on? Why should it matter whether the person is female or male?

One of the most well-known arguments for affirmative action is the role-model argument. It is also the argument that I...

The need for “diversity” is the only specifically academic argument for affirmative action in faculty appointments. According to this view, education is an enterprise in which the student learns by being exposed to different perspectives on the world, or at least on the human world. The educationally valuable perspectives, we are told, are those of gender, race, and ethnic background.

There is an underlying supposition about human rationality that is expressed in this view of what education should be. The supposition is that each of us is born into a certain limited perspective on the human world. Each sex, race,...

The reflections in this essay can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. The special racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious makeup of the American population requires for a number of reasons that this diversity find an appropriate counterpart in those academic institutions most responsible for the cultural, scientific, and reflective life of the nation, namely, the colleges and universities.

2. There is no legitimate reason for our colleges and universities to recruit and encourage any but competent persons in their several fields of teaching, research, and service.

3. The appropriate determiners of competence for the purpose of employment and promotion of...

The context of affirmative action is the selection of people for prized, scarce, and competitive jobs, opportunities, or honors. It is customary to distinguish between two forms such a policy may take. The aim of the weak form is to ensure both open access to the initial pool from which people are selected and selection in accordance with fair procedural rules that apply to everyone equally. The aim of the strong form is to go beyond the weak one by altering the procedural rules so as to favor some people in order to increase the likelihood that they rather than...

Controversy persists in the United States over whether affirmative action hiring policies are an effective means of achieving legitimate social goals. Some query the moral legitimacy of any of the goals that affirmative action might be thought to serve; others believe that if there are any such legitimate goals, affirmative action will not help to achieve them. These controversies are important, but I intend to focus on a different issue in this chapter.

Consider the norm that, other things being equal, it is morally undesirable if some persons are worse off in life prospects than others through no fault or...

Should faculty appointments at colleges and universities be based, at least in part, on considerations of affirmative action for such targeted groups as women and members of racial minorities? Many, particularly those who favor such affirmative action, see this question as one of distributive justice—as an attempt to make sure that certain benefits (in this case, the benefits of holding a university position) are spread throughout society in such a way that they conform to a pattern thought to be appropriate. On this model, affirmative action is not discussed simply as a matter of policy—that is, in terms...

The three lead essays in this volume display an admirable commitment to uncovering common ground between opposing sides of the affirmative action debate. Each essay is attentive to the theoretical and practical issues of individual and social justice generally at stake in the controversy and to the particular inflections of those issues when the institution whose policies are in question is one with reasonable claims, or aspirations, to being meritocratic. I share the authors’ sense that the broad outlines, and many of the details, of the arguments for and against various forms of affirmative action are by now fairly familiar...

Affirmative action is one of those disturbing issues of our time, like that of abortion, about which reasonable people can disagree. The issue never is resolved, partly because what look to some like brute facts turn out to be highly interpreted; and the interpretations can be called into question. Part of the reason also for the stubbornness of disagreement is that essentially contestable terms, such as “right” or “justice,” are part of what is being contested. The struggle is philosophical as well as political and ideological.

Nevertheless, progress of a sort can be made simply by becoming clear about the...

A premise with which I and most supporters of affirmative action almost certainly agree is that groups that previously have been mistreated and excluded ought to be well represented on a university’s faculty. They ought to be represented in such numbers and proportions that reasonable members of these groups do not complain. It is easy, especially if one thinks that active discrimination in university hiring is largely a thing of the past, not to appreciate the importance, to women and African Americans, of just seeing black or women professors, or just knowing they are there, and of having them voting...

I suppose there is widespread agreement that faculty positions over the past couple of decades have been both much sought after and in short supply. And I think it would be hard to deny that members of the groups currently protected by affirmative action law have in the past, along with members of certain other groups, been unfairly excluded from such positions. It seems to me that the use of affirmative action to respond to this situation is morally problematic because it sets two intuitions at odds with one another. On the one hand, there is the intuition that it...

The real issue in all of these essays is whether there is any adequate justification for a conception of “affirmative action” as compensation or redistribution rather than as an intensified requirement of fairness in the assessment of individual merit. As far as I can see, the arguments advanced by Robert Simon show, even more conclusively than he himself apparently thinks, how weak and sometimes incoherent the case for the former really is; and the endorsement offered by Leslie Francis for redistributive policies in certain circumstances is more a statement of personal inclination—itself not further explained or justified—than it...

We have struggled with problems of justice and social utility in combating discrimination at least since President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order announcing toughened federal requirements. My views on what have become the mainstream problems of affirmative action conform closely to the approach and the substantive moral views presented in this volume by Leslie Francis, who notes that I defended a version of one part of her strategy in the early 1970s. My convictions have not substantially changed since, and I cannot now improve on her arguments for these views. My intractability is typical of writers on the subject in...

Of the many kinds of policies that have been devised to combat discrimination, quotas are the most despised. Almost no one has a good word to say about them. Even those who defend other varieties of preferential treatment are eager, more often than not, to make it known that they do not approve of quotas. In an area in which there is little agreement about anything else, there is a remarkable consensus about this.

Why are quotas thought to be so objectionable? The key idea seems to be that justice is blind, or at least that it should be blind...

I begin by asking a question, an affirmative answer to which seems presupposed by the current debate on affirmative action¹: Is there necessarily something wrong if there is a low percentage of African Americans or women or Hispanics, et cetera, in the field of college teaching relative to their proportion in the population at large? Why is this a goal we should aim at? I do not mean to deny that women and racial and ethnic minorities have been victims of discrimination in academia (although this is by no means limited to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans—consider, for...

In his contribution to this volume, Lawrence Becker expresses exasperation about what he sees as a deadlock among intellectuals. He suggests that there is grave difficulty in arguing for anything beyond procedural and regulatory forms of affirmative action and, since thirty years of debate over affirmative action and twenty years of experience with it have given us no agreement in either principle or action as to how we can compensate for this country’s brutal history of racism or even correct present racist ideas and practices, it is time to force a compromise. I question whether we have spent such a...

Lawrence Becker is right about at least one thing when he expresses exasperation about the “normative literature” on affirmative action being stuck in a rut with the familiar arguments “repeated nearly verbatim year by year.” The debate raged in the philosophical literature in the mid- to late 1970s, then exhausted itself for a decade, only to reemerge in the last few years. The old arguments have been resuscitated by a new generation of philosophers with a few new wrinkles added, such as the “diversity” rationale and the “counter-factual justice” criterion of selection. These second-wave justifications of affirmative action have involved...

What is most remarkable about the articles by Leslie Francis and Robert Simon is the uniform level of abstract generality at which their arguments move. Both articles could have been written by people who had heard and read about universities and colleges but had never actually been in one. And both authors share certain large assumptions that need to be put in question. Here I can raise sceptical doubts about only a few of them.

A first assumption seems to be that in academia we already possess an adequate and generally agreed conception of what it is to be either...

Three years ago my department had its first tenure track opening in fifteen years. We were a department of thirteen members—all white males. The university’s affirmative action office told us we had a target of 2.4 women and 1 minority member. Although we disliked being told what our target is, the members of the department agreed it would be desirable, all things considered, to have women and minority members on our faculty, and we agreed with the aims of affirmative action. We were also unanimous in rejecting any notion of quotas and agreed not to hire anyone the...

The three main essays in this collection concentrate on affirmative action in the appointment of university faculty; I shall concentrate on a closely related but separate topic: affirmative action in the awarding of tenure. After I make some initial distinctions to organize my discussion, I shall argue that, at least in the awarding of tenure, one particular kind of affirmative action—what I call the primary form of preferential treatment—is unethical. My argument has important implications for the related case of affirmative action in faculty promotions, but I shall not draw them out here.

A university can practice affirmative...

In their interesting and thoughtful contributions to this volume, Lawrence Becker, Leslie Francis, and Robert Simon all favor the use of affirmative action programs by institutions of higher education. Affirmative action for them encompasses various procedural and regulatory policies designed to remove forms of discrimination and prejudice that keep women and minority candidates, when they are most qualified, from being selected, appointed, or retained within institutions of higher education. However, none of the three favor preferential treatment, that is, the policy of preferring women or minority candidates who have been disadvantaged by discrimination or prejudice over equally or more qualified...

A quarter-century of affirmative action law (AAL) has been accompanied by as many years of moral scrutiny. By now Lawrence Becker’s conclusion that the philosophical debate over AAL has for some time been stalled seems uncontestable. Philosophers on either side of the issue appear to have found no common ground from which to form decisive arguments to convince the opposition. But that may be due to an insistence on a standard of proof that is not appropriate to the subject. In any event discussion has become more muted. Articles on affirmative action are now more valedictory than ground-breaking, more reflective...

The authors of the three main essays in this volume all advocate a similar methodological approach to the issue of affirmative action at this point in the history of the debate on the policy. After so many years of philosophical and political argument, after so many interested parties have made up their minds on the issue, after so much flip-flopping by judges, members of Congress, and executive administrations, it is time, they suggest, to seek intelligent compromises that might be acceptable to all sides. Unfortunately, their well-intentioned and well-argued essays only illustrate again just how difficult compromise is to accept...