Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Preferential Admissions at UW  Daniel Hausman  2/22/12 UP883  cc >> It's my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Daniel Hausman. I'm going to spend a minute or two extolling his virtues. I could spend many more minutes than that but I've been strictly told to be quite brief. So here we go. Dan got his degrees at Harvard, at Cambridge, at Columbia. He's been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Dan is an expert across many areas of philosophy. In fact, although we've got lots of philosophy colleagues here, I don't think I'll offend any of them by denominating Dan as the widest-ranging of the philosophers in the department. He's an expert on metaphysics and philosophy of science, in ethics, political philosophy, bio-ethics, and his special subdiscipline, philosophy of economics in which Dan is most likely the preeminent philosopher in the world. Dan co-founded the Journal of Philosophy of Economics, the premier journal in his field. 

He has continued apace in the philosophy of economics. Dan taught at Maryland and Carnegie Mellon before coming here to UW in 1988. Next year he's owed his gold watch for 25 years of service. Good luck getting that, Dan. [laughter] Dan's served as the department chair. He's served on a wide variety of university committees, including serving as chair of the Bio-ethics Advisory Committee. And outside the university Dan's been a consultant to the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Sciences. His research record is absolutely superlative. Dan's authored six books. He's edited or co-edited two more. 

He's the author of 138 articles, 130 reviews. His works have been translated into ten languages. He's given over 250 talks in the United States and 20 other countries. Dan's won the National Science Foundation award, an NEH award here at UW. He's been the recipient of the Kellett Mid-Career Award, a WARF Named Professor Award. Last year Dan was singled out as the one philosopher across the country to deliver the Phi Beta Kapa Romanell lectures. Dan was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He's a Hilldale Professor. He's the Hermann Simon Professor of Philosophy here. And he's amazing. 

[laughter] Did I basically make the case with the conclusion? He's amazing. You're really going to love this. Dan's asked me-- He'll give a talk for about 50 minutes. He's asked me to ask you to please hold questions until after the talk is done, and we'll have a substantial Q & A session at that point. It gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce my brilliant colleague, Dan Hausman. [applause]  >> It's going to be pretty hard to live up to that introduction, I must say. Before I start talking about Affirmative Action I'd like to say something about this series, Philosophers Tackle Contemporary Issues. It sounds rather athletic somehow or other. >> Do you have your mic on? >> I think I have the mic on. Do I have the mic on? Yes, okay. 

Unlike other fields, social work or medicine, philosophy seems to many people to be an abstract subject with little relevance to daily life. It is an abstract subject, but that doesn't mean it's only important to academics. The true is, and I hope you don't get too upset at my mentioning this. We're all philosophers. Philosophy really isn't a specialized subject. As soon as you start thinking about the really hard questions concerning human life, concerning the world we live in, you're automatically doing philosophy. You're stuck. And because philosophy isn't a subject just for experts, it's really a subject for everyone, it means that philosophers really have to rely on other experts. When I'm dealing with Affirmative Action, it's not as if I think philosophers have a different way of thinking about it than other people, or have a special way of gaining the truth. Philosophers really have to rely on people in other disciplines, natural scientists, social scientists, and all the many departments in the Humanities. 

So what I want to do in this talk in addition to talking about Affirmative Action, because that's what it's about, is I'd like to really illustrate for you the kinds of distinctive contributions which I think philosophers can make to the discussion of lots of issues including Affirmative Action. Now the sort of contribution that philosophy can make is by drawing very careful distinctions and formulating arguments very explicitly. That can be sort of boring. It can also be rather exasperating. If you talk to many of my former students who discover that I can be both boring and exasperating. But I hope I won't be either this evening. Philosophers have a long history of exasperating people. I mean, after all the Athenians did away with Socrates because he was so exasperating. I hope by the end of the evening you won't be hoping that you've got a supply of hemlock on hand. [laughter] So anyway, I've got two basic aims. 

To help you clarify your own thinking concerning preferential admissions and to illustrate the way that philosophical reflection can help with these issues. Well, why am I talking about preferential admissions? As Russ pointed out, I've dealt with lots of different subjects. He's pointed out that I'm very board. That might mean very shallow. Affirmative Action actually hasn't been a subject that I've done extensive research on. It's rather something that I've taught many times in Contemporary Moral Issues. And it became a very live issue on campus here last semester with the report from the Center for Equal Opportunity. Indeed, my timing is sort of impeccable, because just yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear a Texas case challenging preferential hiring and admissions cases. I'm not going to talk about the Texas case. In my view, one really needs to know the details of a particular Affirmative Action plans before you can speak to them, and I just don't know the details concerning the Texas situation. 

Now here at UW the Center for Equal Opportunity in the fall issued a report in which they claimed, that after you control for other factors, African American applicants with the same ACT scores and class ranks as whites or Asian applicants, were a thousand times more likely, more than a thousand times more likely, to be admitted to the University of Wisconsin. Indeed, these are some of the things that the chairman and the president of the center said. Linda Chaves wrote, for example, "This is the most severe undergraduate admissions discrimination that the Center for Equal Opportunity has ever found in the dozens of studies it has published in the last 15 years. The studies show that literally hundreds of students applying as undergrads or to the law school are rejected in favor of students with lower test scores and grades, and the reason is that they have the wrong skin color or their parents came from the wrong countries." The president of the organization, Roger Clegg, added, "The University of Wisconsin should stop this discrimination. If it won't, then state officials in either the executive branch or legislative branch should step in. And if that doesn't happen, then the courts should end it." Obviously there's some very, very severe criticisms of the policies here. One thing to ask is, are they right? Is it the case that what's going on here is indefensible and unjust and unfair. I'm going to argue that, no, they're not right. Now, there's a great deal to talk about. There's a great deal more to talk about than I could possibly cover in an hour, so I'm going to limit my discussion in a number of ways. 

First of all, I'm only going to talk about preferential admissions with respect to undergraduates. The CEO has a report concerning the law school here, but the issues are somewhat different and there's only so much that I can talk about. I'm also only going to focus on preferential admissions policies with respect to African-Americans. The university also has preferential admissions for other disadvantaged groups, including especially Hispanics. Many of the arguments that I'll make carry over, but there are differences and I think it's wise to limit what I talk about. Here's an outline of the talk. First I'm going to discuss at least some of the facts. I'm not going to go into an enormous discussion of all of the facts in the Center for Equal Opportunities report. I'm then going to consider three arguments concerning preferential admissions. The first is what I think is probably the most common argument against preferential admissions, that it's discrimination and really all discrimination is wrong. 

Secondly, I'm going to consider what I think is probably the most common agreement in favor of preferential admissions, that it rectifies, or corrects, past injustice, that it's a form of reparations. I'm going to criticize both of those arguments. Although they're the most common arguments, I don't think they're very good arguments, and I think I'll persuade you that they aren't. Then I'm going to turn to an argument that I think does have some merit. I don't think it's decisive all by itself, but I think it's an agreement that has significant merit, that preferential admissions lessens inequalities and opportunity. Last, I will conclude. So let me turn to the facts. By saying the facts here, I'm not positive these are the facts. This is that data that the Center for Equal Opportunity themselves provided. I can't vouch for its accuracy. 

I mean, they got a lot of this information from the university. I assume it's roughly accurate, but since I'm going to be criticizing them, I certainly can't be accused of being unfair if I'm using their own data. That's what I'm doing here. They provided data for 2007 and 2008. I'm only going to look at the 2007 data because that allows one to examine the retention information for an additional year. Basically, I want to make three remarks about the data that you see in front of you. First of all, it's obvious that there is-- well, not obvious, but it appears to be the case that there is significant preferential admissions. The median ACT and the median class rank, that would be sort of percentage-wise where you were in your class, is certainly significantly lower among African-American students who are admitted than among white students that are admitted. The same thing actually applies with respect to Hispanics. Asians also have very high ACTs and median class rank. 

That's the first thing. The second thing, I was actually quite surprised about this. The retention data I think is surprisingly good. The center points out that the retention percentages are lower among African-American students, but they're still very high. One thing that's well known is that students who come from poorer homes tend to drop out of college more. There's a great deal more financial stress on them. And it's certainly likely that African-American students here do come from poorer homes. There was a report just this past April from the PEW Foundation, or whatever it's called, that the ration of wealth of whites to African-Americans in 2009 was 20 times, not 20% higher,20 times the median wealth among white Americans as opposed to African-American. That is, a median wealth of $113,149 as opposed to a median wealth of $5,677. So we're dealing with enormous disparities. 

With respect to Hispanics, at was 18 times. Hispanics also, in terms of wealth, are remarkably disadvantaged. The third thing I want to note about this data is that the total number of African-American students admitted is 354. If it were the case that every single African-American student who was admitted was admitted because of preferential admissions, the total number of white applicants who could be harmed, assuming the same number would be admitted whether you have the policy or not, is 354. That's the maximum possible negative influence it could have on white applicants. Since, obviously, many of the African-Americans students here would be here regardless of preferential admissions, the effect on white applicants is very small. It would be very surprising if it made more than a 2% difference in whether a white applicant was accepted or not accepted. Now, you might say, wait, wait, how is that possible? The Center for Equal Opportunity says that African-American applicants are more than a thousand times more likely to be admitted, and Hausman is now saying we're talking about, not an insignificant number, we're talking about perhaps a couple a hundred students. But that's all we're talking about. How does that make sense? Well, I think it helps to understand what's going on to distinguish two questions. 

I've phrased this as questions that a rejected white applicant might ask. Suppose, just to personify this person, suppose this person is named Jack. Jack, let's suppose, is an applicant to UW as an undergraduate who was rejected. He might say, well, with my qualifications, would I have been admitted if UW-Madison did not have a preferential admissions policy for Africa-Americans? For roughly a couple hundred people the answer is going to be, yes. You know exactly how many people. If you want to know, have I personally been harmed, at least in this immediate sense, perhaps there's a social benefit, but have I been harmed with respect with my chances of getting into the university by the university having the policy? This is obviously the right question to ask. This says, you know, if they didn't have the policy, would I have been admitted or not? The second question is different. The second question, and this is a question I think a lot of people ask if they're disappointed in admissions, white students ask. With my qualifications would I have been admitted if I had been black? Or equivalently, this is really just the same question. Would a black student with my qualifications have been admitted? Given the existence of preferential admissions, certainly, for some people, the answer to this would be, yes. 

But what's the point of this question? The point of this question, I think this question is taking for granted that if it's the case that I would have been admitted if I'd been black, or that a black student with my qualifications would've been admitted, then there's something unfair. Well, maybe and maybe not. I think that what we really need to do is address the question of, are policies like this fair or not, we need to address these questions explicitly, head-on. That's indeed what I'm planning on doing. I want to turn to what is I think the most common argument that preferential admissions are indeed unfair. The most common argument that there's something fundamentally unjust about preferential admissions. This is the argument that, look, we all know that discrimination was terribly wrong when it was practiced against Africa-Americans. The fact that we've now shifted who we're doing it against doesn't make it right. Discrimination is simply wrong. I think one can see this in the Center for Equal Opportunity report. 

At one point they say critics of these preferences say that these policies are no better than the discriminatory ones that they replaced. Here's a couple of other formulations of this. The first is a quotation from a philosopher that teaches at a college in New Jersey, Lisa Newton. "The quota system is unjust for all the same reasons that the discrimination it attempts to reverse is unjust." The second quotation I read in the New York Times this morning in the discussion of the Texas case. This is from a legal scholar by the name of Hans von Spakovsky. He wrote, "Any form of discrimination, whether it's for or against, is wrong." I think it's an argument that has lots of resonance. I think, at first glance anyway, it appears to be a very solid, very impressive argument. Now in terms of trying to understand this argument, get more deeply into it. The first thing we need to do is be very clear about what we mean by discrimination. The word, I think, causes a lot of confusion because we use it in two different ways. 

One way we use it is in a completely morally neutral way where discrimination is simply distinguishing among things in terms of some criteria or other. We want our admissions department to discriminate among candidates in terms of their qualifications, in terms of their ACT scores, in terms of their class rank as undergraduates. That's a kind of discrimination among the candidates in a neutral sense. That particular discrimination I don't think anyone thinks is in any way objectionable. We also use the term discrimination in a pejorative way. To say that that's discrimination implies, that's wrong. The way this gets confusing is that in the neutral sense UW obviously discriminates. The question then is, is it wrong or is it right? In the pejorative sense the question is, does UW discriminate? Because one can slide back and forth between those two notions of discrimination, it's really easy to get confused. Obviously, Spakovsky, in the second quote, is using it in the pejorative sense. He clearly doesn't think that any form of drawing distinctions is wrong. 

He thinks that any form of drawing distinctions in this unjust way is wrong. I think a way to avoid confusion is actually to avoid using the word discrimination, and so in discussing this argument I actually am not going to use the word, but I think you'll see that I'm-- Well, I hope you'll see that I'm actually dealing with the issues. Clearly, there's nothing wrong with drawing distinctions among candidates with respect to some criteria or other. Nobody has any questions about that. The question is, well, what's wrong with preferential admissions? Presumably the immediate answer someone might give, well, the problem, what makes it wrong, is not that it discriminates or distinguishes among candidates. I've got to avoid the word. I just said I was going to avoid it. [laughter] It's not that it distinguishes among candidates, but it distinguishes among candidates on the basis of race. And that's wrong. If you think about it, it's not always wrong to discriminate among-- Well, I'll use an example, job candidates with respect to race. 

Suppose somebody were making a film, were doing a re-make of Gone With The Wind. They're casting actresses to play Scarlett O'Hara. They say, we aren't going to consider any African-American actresses. That's obviously justifiable. I mean, just try to imagine Whoopi Goldberg playing Scarlett O'Hara. It really-- The movie just gets changed a little bit that way. So obviously, sometimes, it's okay to take race into account. So what exactly is the argument? Presumably, the problem is that race usually isn't a qualification, and what we really want to do is just rely on qualifications. Here is my attempt to reformulate what I think is the argument. I've done, sort of, the philosopher's thing of lying this out as a very careful-- in a very explicit way. 

This is an argument which has three premises. The first premise is a general moral principle. It says, it's wrong in hiring or admissions to take into account anything other than the applicant's qualifications. I'll say what I mean by a qualification in a minute. Second, that preferential admissions takes the applicant's race into account. Third, that race is almost always not a qualification. I put it as almost always because we do have exceptions, like the one I just gave you. Then the conclusion, which follows from the premises, is that preferential admissions is almost always wrong. Now, before I go further, I want you to look at this argument and ask yourself, has Hausman sort of cooked the books here? Is he trying to pull wool over my eyes? Or has he really done a conscientious job of trying to capture what it is that lies behind this argument, which is usually put in terms of discrimination, that discrimination is wrong. You know, I tried to be fair, but I'm unsympathetic to the argument, and so I man have presented it in a way that isn't fair. 

I will leave it to you to judge that. In any event, my objective here is not to sort of win something. My objective, unlike-- Right now in Arizona the Republican candidates are going at one another and their objective in the debate is to make themselves look good and to make the other candidates look bad. That's not my objective. My objective is, with respect to a fairly limited set of issues, to actually get at the truth of the matter. I'm trying to present an argument that I'm unsympathetic to in the most charitable and the strongest way I can, so that if I refute it, I can actually be confident that I'm right rather than that I've just played some sort of trick. Let me explain what I mean by a qualification. What I mean by a qualification is any fact about a candidate that's relevant to the legitimate goals of the organization that's doing the selection. So high school class rank and ACT scores are qualifications. They're relevant to the goals of the university. 

They're relevant to whether one succeeds in the university. Suppose that we have an applicant who weighs 350 pounds and with one hard rush can convert a medium sized trailer to a heap of scrap metal. I think a lot of people in our football program would think that such a candidate is highly qualified. [laughter] Presumably there would be some academic qualifications as well, but being able to do that would count as a qualification, because it's relevant to the goals of the university. Among the goals of our university are having first-rate athletic teams. If this were a university in Europe it wouldn't be a qualification at all. European universities don't have sports teams. It simply wouldn't be a qualification. Whether it's a qualification is relative to what the goals of the organization are. I also want to insist that the goals be legitimate goals. 

If you had a racist university where what they were concerned with was white supremacy, then race would of course be relevant to those goals, but I don't take those to be legitimate goals. So a qualification is any feature of an applicant that's relevant to the legitimate goals of an organization to which the applicant has applied.  This argument that I've put on this slide is an example of what philosophers call a valid argument. What they mean by a valid argument is that the conclusion follows from the premises as a matter of logic. The relation between the premises and the conclusion here is strong relationship. Anyone who asserts these three premises is, as a matter of logic, committed to asserting the conclusion. If you assert the premises and deny the conclusion you're simply contradicting yourself. Valid arguments are very, very powerful in that regard. If you're disagreeing with someone and you can get them to agree on your premises and you have a valid argument, then they have to agree with your conclusion. If they disagree with your conclusion they have to believe that something's wrong with at least one of the premises. 

It's a way of channeling disagreement, and hopefully making progress in reaching agreement. Now, what we want is not just a valid argument, but we want, the the terminology that logicians use, is a sound argument. That is, an argument that is valid, and in addition, all the premises are true. Let's look at this argument and see whether all the premises are in fact true. Well, premise number two is easy. That's obviously true. Preferential admissions takes the applicant's race into account. Premise number three is controversial and I'd be inclined to think that it isn't true. As most of you are aware, one argument that's made with respect to preferential admissions is that it promotes diversity on the campus. Among the goals of the University of Wisconsin are training people for leadership positions both in business and in government. 

In order to succeed in those positions one really needs to have an understanding of lots of different kinds of people, and having diversity on this campus promotes that goal. There's a reasonable argument to be made for diversity, and a reasonable basis for criticizing premise number three here. I think that's a significant argument, but it's not one that I'm going to say anything more about, at least during the talk. What I want to do is I want to focus on premise number one which looks really plausible. It looks as if it explains why it was that the racial exclusion and discrimination that African-Americans encountered throughout the United States, but especially in the south through a century after the Civil War. It looks as if this premise explains why it's wrong. But, in fact, I think this premise is false. Let me give you three cases which constitute counter-examples. First of all, with respect to civil service examinations, and I believe with respect to admission to some colleges, veterans are given preferences. They're not given preferences because being a veteran is a qualification. 

They're given preferences because people who've risked their lives, have been willing to serve in the military, we feel that we own something to them. This is a kind of, a small, compensation that we provide to people who've done some very, very difficult and dangerous things. Let me give you a second example. This is a hypothetical example, but one could easily imagine cases like this. Suppose you have someone in New York City, let's say, who owns a small, corner grocery store, and who decides to hire his daughter to deliver groceries for him. Why does he hire her? Let us suppose she's not the most qualified. She's actually sort of scattered brained and not all that competent, but he really wants to keep and eye on her. Lots of young men have been gathering around her recently and he doesn't know about her after-school activities. And after all, he's like to keep the money in the family, so he hires her. He's violating this principle. 

He's taking into account something other than qualifications. Maybe you can argue that her being his daughter is a qualification. This third case is actually one I know from my own family. My father, who's been dead now for quite a long time, ran a small company in Chicago that sold replacement parts for diesel locomotives. Most of his employees did very unskilled labor, just taking a bunch of gaskets from a big box and counting them out and putting them in a small box. He used to hire lots and lot of ex-convicts. He hired ex-convicts not because he thought they were the best workers, but because he thought, if somebody served their time, they really deserve a second chance. It's really, really hard for ex-convicts to get work. And if they don't get work they wind up committing crimes again and going back to jail. He thought that this was a good reason to hire these workers. 

As a result, he often had to fire them. It's not as if they were all bad workers, but they certainly weren't all good workers either. If you accept this principle that it's wrong in hiring or admissions to take into account anything other than the applicant's qualifications then you'd have to say that what my father did was really wrong. That's not the way I felt. That's something I'm quite proud of him for. In my view, this purported principle, this premise number one here, is false. Now one thing that I think makes it hard to see that it's false is that there are often other reasons why it's wrong to hire or to admit people on the basis of things other than qualifications. For example, suppose that my father didn't own his own company. Instead he worked for a large corporation, and corporation policy was, hire the most qualified person. If he then hired ex-convicts because he was concerned about their circumstances he'd be violating his responsibilities to his company. 

He's be doing something wrong not because there's something wrong with taking into account things other than qualifications, but because he'd be violating what the orders were. If his company said, hire ex-cons and he only took into account qualifications he's be guilty of the same kind of wrong. In addition, it's really important not to lie to people. If you have a company and you say, our policy is to hire the most qualified people, and then you don't do it, that's obviously wrong. You're lying to people. So it's very often the case that taking into account things other than qualifications is wrong for one of these other reasons, not because this principle itself is justifiable. Okay, where am I? Now, one thing that may be puzzling you is if this principle is as unacceptable as I've suggested, does that mean there was nothing wrong with Jim Crow? Does that mean there was nothing wrong discrimination against African-Americans? Of course not. If one considers the horrors that were done to African-Americans post-slavery clearly lots of terrible things were done and we have to explain why. On my view it wasn't that we were taking into account things other than qualifications, there's another explanation. To approach that, let's consider something that in many ways is trivial. 

I shouldn't put it that way. It might appear to be trivial. In the south there used to be segregated bathrooms. I actually saw these myself when I was a young boy vacationing with my parents in Florida. My father was actually thrown out of the Whites Only bathroom. He didn't look particularly African-American, but he tanned very darkly, and when he was very dark he looked as if he might come from southern India. That was good enough for the racists down in Florida at the time. I'm pretty sure this was at the Miami airport in 1954, but I'm not absolutely positive of where it was. I did witness him being thrown out of the Whites Only bathroom and told to go where he belongs. What's wrong with segregated bathrooms? Suppose that they were equally nice. 

In fact, they weren't, but suppose that they were equally nice. You might say, look, they treat whites and blacks in an entirely symmetrical way. They actually used to say Colored Only, rather than black. But Colored Only, Whites Only, it's entirely symmetrical. They all have their own bathroom. What could possibly be the matter with it? Well, I mean, one really needs to think about the context and the reason. In fact, obviously, this was an incredibly humiliating insult toward blacks. The content in the United States, it needed be the content every place in the universe, the content in the United States in that particular era, was that there's something unclean, defiling, about mere contact with Africa-Americans. It was deeply insulting and humiliating. The issue wasn't whether it took into account race or not, it's the content of what the policy meant. 

In 1941, Marian Anderson who was a very, very great African-American contralto came and gave a concert at Lawrence University in Appleton. Although Lawrence didn't have any laws that said that African-Americans couldn't stay in town, no hotel would allow an African-America to stay there. After she gave her concert at Lawrence University she had to go to a hotel in Neenah or Menasha. That wasn't a huge inconvenience. Neenah and Menasha are fairly close to Appleton, but just imagine how it would feel to be in-- You know, and this was true of Appleton, but it was true of lots and lots of places. To be in a town and to have there be a sort of social consensus. It's not like anyone was concerned these hotels having these policies. That there was something so debases, so defiling, so awful about you in terms of your race, that you could not even stay in a hotel with the favored people. This is, you know, it's horrendous. What's going on here is not whether you took race into account or not. 

What's going on here is the content of the way people are treated. The Jim Crow policies, this was a matter of systematic denigration of African-Americans by white society. It resulted in poverty, oppression, and exclusion and that's what made it wrong, not that it took race into account. Preferential admissions of whites just isn't like that. It doesn't denigrate whites. It doesn't oppress them. It doesn't exclude them from the mainstream. I would be very surprised if you went to our admissions office and found that there were a whole bunch of racists there who were out to make life miserable for whites. When Lisa Newton said that the quota system, and she's thinking of preferential admissions for African-Americans, was wrong for all the same reasons that racial exclusion and oppression of blacks was wrong, she couldn't have been more mistaken. If is was wrong it wasn't wrong for any of the same reasons. 

It's not a matter of exclusion, denigration and hatred. And that's what made Jim Crow so obviously unacceptable. Let me move on then to the second argument, an argument in defense of preferential admissions. I should say, by the way, the fact that I've criticized this argument just says that this is a bad argument. It doesn't say that it's conclusion is false. It's conclusion might be true. There might be some other good arguments. I haven't in any way given you an argument that preferential admissions is right. I haven't given you an argument that it's wrong. I've just criticized one argument, and I've said that it's really not a good argument, although it's one used all the time, namely this morning in the New York Times, for example. 

The second argument I want to talk about is the argument that preferential admissions is a matter of rectifying or fixing past injustice. To motivate that, suppose it were the case that Russ saw me riding my bicycle to work and he thought, gee, that's a really nice bicycle. So he swiped it. I don't have my bicycle to ride home anymore. He's stolen my bicycle. As a matter of justice, he really ought to give it back to me, obviously. Moreover, I'm owed a certain kind of compensation for the inconvenience of having to walk home, and to find the bicycle and report him to the police, and all sorts of stuff like that. It's common sense that part of justice is that when someone commits a wrong and violates the rights of somebody else, that they should compensate the victim of their injustice and any kind of stolen property should be returned. Obviously, African-Americans have, over the past centuries, been victims of incalculable injustices, enslavement, assault, rape, kidnapping, murder. It just goes on and on. 

Enormous injustices. And obviously again, most of those past injustices have never been rectified, have never been corrected. This, in the view of many people, can be used as a justification for preferential admissions and hiring. One can make an argument, and I haven't completed the argument because I actually think it's very difficult to complete the argument, but I started the argument here. I call it the rectification argument, the argument that we should correct past injustices. We start out with a moral premise. Those who commit injustices owe their victims damages. That seems obviously right. Massive injustices have been perpetrated against African-Americans. That's obviously true. 

And I think that it is very plausible to maintain that those who committed these injustices owe damages to their victims. However, having gotten that far, we've got lots of problems. First of all, it's not clear how we get from this to an argument specifically for preferential admissions. Secondly, we need to identify who are the perpetrators of this injustice, and who are the victims. If we're thinking about slavery, obviously both the perpetrators and the victims have been dead for a very long time. We then have the question of to what extent do the descendants of perpetrators of injustice owe compensation or some sort of rectification to the descendants of victims of injustice. Sometimes one can make good sense of this. There's been many cases of artworks that the Nazi's stole from eastern and western Europe, and the current possessors of those artworks who weren't the thieves themselves certainly should give them back. But with respect to injustices that happened a very long time ago where in between, let's say, ill gotten gain, was lost and then re-earned or whatever. It's really very, very difficult to figure out what anybody owes to anybody else. 

Obviously, in terms of moral responsibility, I'm not morally responsible for what my father or grandfather or great-grandfather did. The possibility of carrying out rectification leads us immediately to huge difficulties. It's also, I think, would be a very unhealthy inquiry for our country to try to determine, what did your great-grandfather do? I think that those of us that would like to see racial healing and an elimination of the kinds of injustices that we currently see really wouldn't want to follow that path. If we move on to reparations things get a little bit easier. Reparations,although they aren't very well understood, constitute compensation that's provided by the government, ultimately the tax payers of course, to acknowledge and to partly rectify past injustices that were perpetrated by the government. So the most prominent example of reparations in the United States was the reparations that we paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II. Each of them received $20,000, or if they had died, their immediate descendants received $20,000. These reparations were provided out of general revenue. Everybody paid taxes, including Japanese-Americans, for it, because it was a civic duty. The wrong wasn't done by one individual or another. 

There was no attempt to identify individuals or to claim, look, you benefited from the internship, you didn't. It was everyone's responsibility, because collectively, acting on our behalf, the government had been guilty of very, very serious injustices against Japanese-Americans. This is a way of acknowledging it, and at least partly compensating and rectifying the past circumstances. That's what reparations are all about. Reparations make things a little bit easier because at least we've identified the perpetrator. The perpetrator is the government. The US government, the state and local governments, obviously committed tremendous injustices against Africa-Americans, and tolerated lots more that they could and should have stopped. So that helps. We know who the perpetrators are, but how much? What's the right amount? How do we actually restore justice? To whom? Who is owed this? Our president is an African-American but he has certainly no more connection to slavery than any white American would have. Also, if you think about using this as a justification for preferential admissions, there's a huge problem. 

First of all, if we're thinking about reparations and doing it in a rational way, we'd want to provide them first to those who've been most harmed. Indeed, preferential admissions doesn't tend to go to those African-Americans who've been most harmed by our regrettable racial history. That fact that they have been able to develop the credentials to succeed in our university means that they've done relatively well. And more seriously, if this is a common responsibility for wrongs that our government did, how could you possibly justify imposing the cost exclusively on applicants to college and applicants to jobs. If you take reparations seriously, we've got a collective, moral responsibility to right past wrongs. It's carried out by the government. We all should be contributing. But, in fact, we're only asking a small portion of the population who bears no special responsibility to pay all the costs. It seems obviously unjust. If we had a whole set of different policies, this policy, that policy, that policy and we were really seriously attempting to rectify past injustices in a variety of ways, than preferential admissions and hiring might be justified as a portion. 

But since it's basically the only thing we're doing that aims to in any way redress the injustices that African-Americans have encountered, it's arbitrary and unjustifiable, because it imposes the costs in a way that can't possibly be justified. I really don't think one has a good argument here. I also really worry, because as soon as the word reparations shows up people get confused, whether they're against them or whether they're for them. Many of you may remember the ad that David Horowitz put in the Badger Herald which led to a huge fuss on campus. If you'd look at the ad he had things like, we cannot identify the descendants of the perpetrators. Few Americans own slaves. Most Americans have no connection to slavery. Those are the kinds of arguments all of which are absolutely and completely irrelevant to the issue of reparations. It isn't about identifying, you know, Justin, you're great, great-grandfather did so and so. It's not about that. 

It's about a collective responsibility for righting wrongs carried out by our government. But opponents don't understand that. Supporters don't understand that either. There was a Op Ed piece be Henry Louis Gates in the Times a couple of years ago in which he pointed out quite accurately that many Africans were involved in the slave trade. He then drew the conclusion that that somehow or other mitigated the need to provide any sort of reparations. And you just go-- It doesn't make any sense at all. People just get confused. As soon as we go down the path of emphasizing reparations I think we're inevitably into finger pointing. I don't think finger pointing is a useful way of addressing our problems. For those reasons I don't think that the rectification or reparations argument is much good. 

I want to turn-- How am I doing in terms of time? I'm running a little slow. I'll challenge your patience and talk about my last argument, and then trim my conclusions. The argument that I want to defend is an argument in terms of equal opportunity. Now that might seem really perverse because, after all, the Center for Equal Opportunity is really upset about preferential admissions. They think that it's inconsistent with equal opportunity, while I'm going to argue that it actually promotes equal opportunity. We can't be both right. How can it appear that we are? Let me give you an analogy. Suppose that we've got a very homogeneous community. It's middle class, there are no kids who are particularly disadvantaged or disabled or whatever. It's very, very homogeneous. 

In the local elementary school we've got two first grades and two second grades. We've got one really, really terrific first grade teacher, then we've got a second first grade teacher who bears a really close resemblance to the Wicked Witch of the West. Similarly, in second grade we've got one really delightful, excellent teacher, and the other teacher former students all call Lord Voldemort. [laughter] It's a real problem. The school board wants to treat the children fairly, and part of treating the children fairly is, before first grade there should simply be a lottery. They're unable for whatever reason to get rid of the bad teachers. They've got the good teacher and the bad teacher, and before first grade they agree they shall hold a lottery. That's the fair way to deal with a circumstance like this. There's then a disagreement between two policies. One policy would be to have a second lottery before second grade. 

The other policy is to have just the single lottery before first grade, and ensure that every child gets one good teacher. What that would mean is that the kids who get the good teacher in first grade get the bad teacher in second grade and vice versa. At the school board meeting you can hear arguments like the following. Those who favor the single lottery would say, if everybody has a good teacher one year and a bad teacher for one year, their schooling will be as close to equal as we can make it, and we'll have done what we can with the teachers we've got, to make children's opportunities over the rest of their lives, equal.  If you're thinking very narrowly about opportunity, in the case of the analogy about the opportunity of having a good second grade teacher, two lotteries gives you the equal opportunity of having a good second grade teacher. If, on the other hand, what you're thinking about is lifetime equality of opportunity, it obviously depends a lot more than just first and second grade. If you're thinking about lifetime equal opportunity, clearly the policy where everybody gets one year of a good teacher and one year of a bad teacher, provides for more equal opportunities than one where you have lotteries before both years. It's obviously that I think that the relevant notion of equal opportunity should be the lifetime notion, not the myopic view which just focuses on second grade. Or, if we go back to preferential admissions, it simply focuses on whether you get into UW or not. It doesn't consider whether, once we take into account inequalities and opportunity before you ever got to UW, which of them provides the greater equality of opportunity. 

Another feature of the analogy which I think is very helpful is that when we're looking at the one lottery policy, where you get a good teacher one year, a bad teacher next year, you're not punishing anyone. You're not attempting-- It's not as if you say to the first graders who had the good teacher, you wicked little kids we have to punish you now and give you a bad teacher. There's nothing like that. It's simply of way of trying to promote equality of opportunity. Indeed, not only is it not the case that they didn't do anything wrong, nobody did anything wrong. We're not trying to rectify of correct past injustices. We're trying to equalize opportunity. With respect to the inequalities and opportunities that African-Americans and whites face in our society, a lot of them are the results of injustice. That's for sure. But the point of this argument isn't to rectify the past injustice. 

The point of this way of looking at preferential admissions is that we want to equalize opportunities not in this myopic way, of opportunity of getting into UW, but in this lifetime sense of equalizing overall opportunities. Crucial to this is that it escapes the objection to the rectification view that, how can you justify imposing the costs of reparations or rectification on people applying to college and people applying to jobs. After all, these are everybody's responsibility. Here we aren't punishing anyone. We aren't imposing the costs of carrying out one policy or another on one group. The question is, is it the case-- Here, let me go to the next slide because it gets a little complicated here. The relevant question to ask if we're asking about whether equality of opportunity treats-- Back up. The relevant question to ask if we're asking whether preferential admissions treats those who don't get the preferences fairly, is a question like this one. This is again a question that a white student would ask. "How do my odds of being admitted to UW-Madison with its preferential admissions policy compare to what my odds would have been if there weren't any preferential admissions policy, and I and all the other applicants had had the qualifications we would have had if opportunities for college had been equal?" That's a mouthful, I know. 

That's one of the reasons people don't like philosophers, for mouthfuls like that. [laughter] But the idea is, is it the case that when one takes into account the advantages that many, obviously not every white applicant at all, there is plenty of white applicants who've had to deal with really, really difficult situations. But on average, white applicants have been privileged in a variety of ways, and they've been in circumstances that have given them greater opportunities than African-Americans. If we push on the scales a little bit here and provide preferential admissions are over all opportunities made less equal or more equal? It seems to me that they're actually made more equal. I have a hypothesis here that the odds of being admitted for most white applicants with preferential admissions are at least as good as they would have been if there were true equality of opportunity. Well, I've got some other slides but I'd better go quickly. I've really run over. Let me just go to my last slide, my re-cap, what I've argued. I've argued that preferential admissions isn't racism in reverse. It doesn't commit anything like the kinds of wrongs that Jim Crow involved. 

There is no objection to be made in principle to the mere fact of taking race into account in admissions. Secondly, I was very critical of the argument in terms of rectification and reparations. It's very hard to identify perpetrator, victim, figure out how much. And using preferential admissions and hiring as the sole way of addressing these questions leads to an arbitrary imposition of costs on a few people who aren't particularly responsible. I defended equal opportunity, and I mentioned diversity as another justification as reasons in favor of preferential admissions. I don't think the Center for Equal Opportunity has shown that preferential admissions at UW is unfair or harmful. There's a whole bunch of other arguments. I'm not maintaining that I've shown that preferential admissions policy are, all things considered, wonderful policies to have. There's a slue of arguments for them and against them that I haven't had a chance to touch on at all. I've had a fairly narrow plate of things to talk about. 

And I hope I've shown you, that by drawing distinctions carefully and formulating arguments explicitly, philosophy helps. I've given you an example of one very careful formulated argument. I've shown you the importance of distinguishing between compensation as a way of correcting injustice, and compensation as a way of equalizing opportunity. I've distinguished between the sorts of questions one might ask in asking about whether these policies are harmful or unjust. And, well, I hope I've done my job. I'll stop there. [applause]