> It's an empirical phenomena rather than a theoretical one. Agree. > The laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem. The laws are r

> It's an empirical phenomena rather than a theoretical one. Agree. > The laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem. The laws are reactionary and there to fix an empirically scoped problem. Again agree with the statement. Its the scope definition that I think is ill-defined, and in the main, my point is that the actual repercussions of these laws on individuals are ignored. If groups had feelings and emotions and human rights positive discrimination would make more sense. However, only individuals have feelings, desires, a sense of moral right and wrong, and without knowing any details how can someone punish one individual and reward another based off of nothing either of those individuals can control and while simultaneously knowing no relevant details about the actual context in which the supposed "fairness" action should take place? Imagine in a society the distribution of people of attribute X has a lower mean educational attainment than those of Y and that both distributions are normal - this is the empirical datum. As a legislator you see this datum and think its horrible, as you rightly would, and so you enact some positive discrimination laws which make it more difficult for Y's to get accepted into and graduate from schools and easier for X's to get accepted into and graduate from schools. This all seems fine and in a few years perhaps the distributions close in on each other. The actual question is this: was that a morally and ethically good thing to do? How can you find out? You could look at the group distributions and you might be happy, but I think this ignores the ethic responsibility a society has to being just and fair towards every individual in a like manner. Thus if Bob has a score of 250 and Jane has a score of 300 on a collegiate entrance exam - ceteris paribus - then Jane should be admitted to the school irrespective of her being a member of set Y because to not do so is to act out unfairly against a real individual, who has done nothing to deserve this, who has feelings and a right to self-actualization of her own. At the very least, each society should look at the effects positive discrimination laws have on real individuals, detailed subcategories based on controllable factors such as personality, skills, etc - instead of groups, and honestly weigh the costs. As a last example, how many Asians get turned down each year who would otherwise have been admitted to ivy league schools and made better lives for themselves and their families if it were not for the unfortunate fact that they were arbitrarily shoved to some group labeled Asians, which had been assigned higher entrance exams scores than the rest of the applicants, and their worth weighted heavily based on this group assignment? Is this fair and justifiable at the level of the individual applicant?