Affirmative Action is Wrong

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Recommended: The importance of affirmative action

Premises to prove that Affirmative Action is Wrong:

1. It is wrong to hire anyone other than the person who will do the best job.

2. Whenever one takes race or sex into account in hiring, one will hire someone

other than the person who will do the best job.

3. Therefore, it is wrong to take race or sex into account in hiring.

4. Affirmative Action programs require employers to take race and sex into

account in hiring.

5. Therefore, affirmative action programs require employers to do something

wrong.

The above argument for Affirmative Action being morally impermissible is a valid argument. Each of the premises follows the previous one correctly and the conclusions that the argument makes are deducible from the premises stated before them.

The premises may follow each other and the conclusions may be deducible by them, but that does not mean that the premises themselves are correct. For instance, premise 1 is not valid, or we can at least provide an argument to prove it invalid. Premise 1 states that it is wrong to higher anyone other than the person who will do the best job. However, in many cases, there will be more than one person who can perform the tasks of the job just as well as the other applicants. In most cases there is a "tie" between people that have the same ability to do a job. Say Joe, Ted, Mary and Muhammad all applied for the same job along with 50 other less qualified people. Joe, Mary, Ted and Muhammad are all just as qualified as the other for the job and at this point are all the person who will do the job best. With this, the one in charge of hiring a person for the job has to rely on some other factor to choose one of these four people (Joe, Ted, Mary and Muhammad) to hire. Not one of them is better than the other for the job, but only one can be hired for the one open position. We can try to fix this premise by making it say, " It is wrong to hire anyone other than the person who will do the job best, and if there is more than one applicant who will do the job equally best, then the new employee must be chosen through a random procedure, such as a blind drawing or a lottery." This little "amendment" to the first premise will fix the problem of multiple "best" applicants.

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...ployer may not violate certain rights that the applicants have during the hiring process. Which right takes priority over the other is a whole different argument in itself. Another objection to the employer having the right to hire an employee on whatever basis they want because it is their property is that jobs are a public resource and should be used for the public benefit. Public benefit could be looked at economically or socially. Economically, a business may do better by hiring all beautiful females because they have a high heterosexual male clientele, and a town's economical stature may rise because this business does well. Socially, on the other hand, discrimination could hurt the public by suppressing certain races or sexes.

With all of these objections and counter objections in mind, I still believe that the revised argument stated above reflects a good argument about the permissibility of Affirmative Action. It is possible to believe that the program is permissible under certain circumstances, and the circumstances that I believe Affirmative Action is permissible under were made clear through my arguments.

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