4 ms·

It depends how you conceptualize fairness. If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is in

It depends how you conceptualize fairness. If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair.

rayiner 3mo ago
No, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Where else in our society do we justify imposing a moral wrong on a specific individual on the premise that moral wrongs may have been committed against other individuals?
- dahart 3mo ago
  The death penalty is an example of two wrongs making a right in the minds of many people. It’s also at the same time an example of two wrongs not making a right. Imprisoning people is wrong, unless the government does it? All so-called lawful punishments of individuals are a form of hope that two wrongs do make a right. Whether affirmative action is a wrong is your presumption, and it’s hotly contested, absolutely not universally agreed upon, which makes your use of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ a straw man. There are plenty of things wrong with preferential affirmative action, but I reject the framing that it’s evil, this is essentially an ad hominem attempting to quash any debate of the actual relative merits or the outcomes. I feel like we can’t make forward progress if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons that history has happened the way it did. See Chesterton’s Fence.
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    > Imprisoning people is wrong, unless the government does it? All so-called lawful punishments of individuals are a form of hope that two wrongs do make a right. In that case, the punishment is not a “wrong” because the person being punished has moral culpability due to their bad act. That’s different from imposing a punishment on someone because of someone else’s bad act. That’s a principle that some societies hold that ours does not. In clan based societies, a wrong committed by one member of clan A to a member of clan B can justify retaliation against a different member of clan A.
    - dahart 3mo ago
      I reject your presumptive framing that affirmative action is a “punishment”. If you help someone, you are punishing the entire world?
      - tanseydavid 3mo ago
        > Where else in our society do we justify imposing a moral wrong on a specific individual > If you help someone, you are punishing the entire world? You are missing (or maybe even ignoring) the huge difference between these two viewpoints.
        dahart 3mo ago
        I’d be very happy to discuss the nuances and relative merits. I agree that it’s time to have race blind admissions and stop preferential treatment. I’m arguing against the hyperbolic notion that affirmative action is inherently immoral. @rayiner is trying to cut off the idea that it had any upsides and was ever reasonable. I’m still trying to convey that racism != any and all types of discrimination.
    - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
      >That’s different from imposing a punishment on someone because of someone else’s bad act. I shell out thousands for engineered plans for a petty AF retaining wall because the boomers and their parents were cheap fucks and kept building shit that mushed over too fast (all retaining walls fall over, it's just a question of time). Damn near every area of society has tons of stuff like this. It's just blood guilt/debt with extra steps IMO.
- esafak 3mo ago
  If you take something from me and the government takes it back that's two wrongs in your book??
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    If I steal something from you and then you retaliate by stealing something from my cousin, then that’s the definition of two wrongs.
    - freejazz 3mo ago
      In what way did your cousin ever have anything in this context? His admission wasn't rescinded, he never had it in the first place.
    - BrenBarn 3mo ago
      So, what if you steal $1000 from me and then give it to your cousin?
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
    - lupusyndrby9 3mo ago
      we all work for a company that steals from gamma employees for hundreds of years and share the proceeds with nu employees .to make amends the company gives the descendants of gamma employees a tiny fraction of what they’ve stolen as a bonus and the nu employees descendants ,who continue to profit from the previous theft by an order of magnitude more then gamma employees bonus, complain about gamma employees descendants preferential treatment being unfair
      - rayiner 3mo ago
        Your hypothetical fundamentally misrepresents the economics of what happened: > share the proceeds with nu employees … nu employees descendants ,who continue to profit from the previous theft by an order of magnitude Slaveholders were feudal lords. They didn’t “share the proceeds” with the serfs. They “privatized the profits and socialized the losses,” as we would say today. The profits flowed to a handful of families who happened to be white. But all the other white people suffered a deadweight loss. And the civil war nuked much of the south’s wealth. The war cost the south $2 billion, more than the south’s GDP and almost as much as the total value of its real and personal assets. The war also cost the union over $3 billion, an amount equal to its entire GDP. After that, there wasn’t some pool of money to generate dividends shared by all white people. Instead, there were taxes to pay for a war over something nearly all over them never benefited from. If your ancestors were white independent farmers or sharecroppers, they were poorer for having to compete with massive plantations powered by slave labor. German Americans (the largest group of white Americans) never even arguably benefited from slavery. Half of them came here as indentured servants themselves in the 1840s. They scraped out a hard life in the midwest while having to compete with slave plantations in the south. Their biggest involvement with slavery was fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers to end it. And of course Irish, Italians, Asians, etc., came here after slavery ended. So let’s tweak your example to reflect the reality. The C-suite of the company happened to be nu, and stole from gamma employees. They hired their nu kids as nepo babies and shared the profits with them, while underpaying the other nu employees. Eventually, some of the nu, including a large number who joined the company only recently, overthrow the C-suite and end the theft. Over the next 150 years, more nu employees keep joining the company, so today more than half have no ancestors who were even here during the theft. Then the company creates a promotion policy where it gives a big preference to gamma employees over employees who happen to be classified as “nu”—regardless of whether the nu employee’s ancestors were even at the company during the time of the theft. Nobody would consider that a fair arrangement.
- webnrrd2k 3mo ago
  I disagree with your charaterization of the problem as exclusively a moral wrong... Was it only a moral wrong? Was the only effect a moral one? Or were there physical or tangible effects, too? For example, were there economic affects? I'm not claiming to know the solution to the problem of ~200 years or slavery and ~100 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and further discrimination. I am saying that doing nothing about it seems pretty fucked. I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it, which you seem to be doing, makes you look like the worst kind of offensive and racist asdhole, too.
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    > I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it I'm saying it's immoral to try to correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it. And it's not even me saying that, Plato said that 2,400 years ago. That doesn't mean you can't do anything. You can have race-neutral policies that directly target individuals who have economic need. Cory Booker's baby bonds proposal, for example, would go a long way towards erasing racial wealth gaps: https://www.acluok.org/news/baby-bonds-path-toward-prosperity-future-generations/ https://www.acluok.org/news/baby-bonds-path-toward-prosperit.... And it would do so without creating a new racial class system.
    - webnrrd2k 3mo ago
      Plato said a lot of shit. To be honest, I don't really care. The Bible said a lot of shit, too. I don't need Plato to tell me that in America, black people, native Americans, and all sorts of other immigrants got well and truly fucked for a long, long time. I don't need Plato to tell me that I find this, and other forms of racism, personally offensive. Also, it's seems suspicious to insist that all Affirmative Action be halted before these race-neutral policies are implemented. It's almost as if it's some sort of cheap justification for more shitty racism. How about we get rid of affirmative action after we get a this baby bonds proposal? And also a bunch of other stuff that creates a more equatable playing field? Again, minorities were fucked over for decades-to-centuries before Afirmative Action, why not just let it ride for a little while before knocking out the ladder from under them? Again, I object to your characterization of Affirmative Action as wrong or immoral. It was designed to counter centuries of institutionalized racism. I'll grant that the implementation has been imperfect, but what in this world is perfect? It's just better than doing nothing, it's better than wasting further lives, it's better than creating a permanent underclass. Could it be improved? Yes. Should there be an open discussion about it's effects? Yes. But I think the results should be more like "tweaks to the system" rather than an outright ban, or crying and gnashing of teeth about how Affirmative Action immoral. One other thing, you keep asserting that "correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it." A few comments ago I pointed out some obvious counter examples, which you neglected to address. The important point was that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. That doesn't make it immoral. It may be a difficult choice, but it's the kind of choice adults make all the time, and that's just part of living in a civilized society. [EDIT: I made a mistake when I said "A few comments ago" - it was a separate thread in this discussion]
dahart 3mo ago
Yep. Maybe a little bit like a sports handicap, you’re not trying to give someone a better chance of winning than everyone else, you’re trying to give them equal chances based on historical data. Gemini gave me an okay analogy: “If a pendulum is knocked permanently off-center by a structural bend or a magnetic field, the only way to center it again is to apply an equal and opposite force. Affirmative action policies attempt to apply this counter-weight to straighten the broader societal scale.” I’m not sure but is there a question about whether we actually had pre-existing unfairness? Blacks got the legal right to vote in 1965. Before that was effectively institutionalized racism, fully entrenched cultural bias, right?
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  There were things like redlining, where blacks could only buy housing in certain areas. Those areas also tended to have worse schools, so the next generation of blacks was less well educated than whites of equivalent intelligence. That led to worse jobs, which led to worse financial outcomes, which led to living in worse parts of town, which led to the next generation having less education... So, yes, there was pre-existing... "unfairness" may be too strong for some of it; it wasn't all unfairness. Some of it was the effects of past unfairness, even if the (deliberate) unfairness was no longer present. The pendulum was in fact bent, to at least some degree. But I like the analogy, because you only apply the counterforce until the pendulum is straight. Then you stop. Things were bent enough that affirmative action may in fact have been necessary. But it should not be necessary forever. Even if it was the right thing to do, there comes a time when the right thing to do is to stop. (Then you get into "is now the right time", and things get a whole lot murkier...)
  - dahart 3mo ago
    Yes! Exactly. Affirmative action should naturally end itself if it works. The goal is to equalize opportunity and stop preferential treatment, not to hang on to preferential treatment. Well said, it does need to stop eventually. Now might be the right time, even if we’re not all the way there, given all the problems and unintended consequences and all the backlash.
  - 3mo ago
anamax 3mo ago
> If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair. What definition of "some people" and "unfair" are we using? I ask because I'm pretty sure that Obama's daughters "have a bias in their favor" in comparison with my lily-white nieces. (The parents of said nieces make around $40k/year.) Is it fair to apply "countermeasures" to benefit said daughters relative to said nieces? You can argue that said nieces have an unfair bias relative to similarly situated black children, but that's not how these systems tend to work. And, it's not just Obama's daughters.
- BrenBarn 3mo ago
  I totally agree that there are lots of problems with just assigning the benefits based on coarse categories like "race". My point is just what I said in the quote: a process that seems "locally" unfair may produce a more "globally" fair result. Or it might not! I mean, you have to do it right. But if your goal is to produce a fairer result you might do things even though they seem unfair from a different perspective.

It depends how you conceptualize fairness. If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair.

rayiner 3mo ago

No, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Where else in our society do we justify imposing a moral wrong on a specific individual on the premise that moral wrongs may have been committed against other individuals?

dahart 3mo ago
The death penalty is an example of two wrongs making a right in the minds of many people. It’s also at the same time an example of two wrongs not making a right. Imprisoning people is wrong, unless the government does it? All so-called lawful punishments of individuals are a form of hope that two wrongs do make a right. Whether affirmative action is a wrong is your presumption, and it’s hotly contested, absolutely not universally agreed upon, which makes your use of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ a straw man. There are plenty of things wrong with preferential affirmative action, but I reject the framing that it’s evil, this is essentially an ad hominem attempting to quash any debate of the actual relative merits or the outcomes. I feel like we can’t make forward progress if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons that history has happened the way it did. See Chesterton’s Fence.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  > Imprisoning people is wrong, unless the government does it? All so-called lawful punishments of individuals are a form of hope that two wrongs do make a right. In that case, the punishment is not a “wrong” because the person being punished has moral culpability due to their bad act. That’s different from imposing a punishment on someone because of someone else’s bad act. That’s a principle that some societies hold that ours does not. In clan based societies, a wrong committed by one member of clan A to a member of clan B can justify retaliation against a different member of clan A.
  - dahart 3mo ago
    I reject your presumptive framing that affirmative action is a “punishment”. If you help someone, you are punishing the entire world?
    - tanseydavid 3mo ago
      > Where else in our society do we justify imposing a moral wrong on a specific individual > If you help someone, you are punishing the entire world? You are missing (or maybe even ignoring) the huge difference between these two viewpoints.
      - dahart 3mo ago
        I’d be very happy to discuss the nuances and relative merits. I agree that it’s time to have race blind admissions and stop preferential treatment. I’m arguing against the hyperbolic notion that affirmative action is inherently immoral. @rayiner is trying to cut off the idea that it had any upsides and was ever reasonable. I’m still trying to convey that racism != any and all types of discrimination.
  - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    >That’s different from imposing a punishment on someone because of someone else’s bad act. I shell out thousands for engineered plans for a petty AF retaining wall because the boomers and their parents were cheap fucks and kept building shit that mushed over too fast (all retaining walls fall over, it's just a question of time). Damn near every area of society has tons of stuff like this. It's just blood guilt/debt with extra steps IMO.
esafak 3mo ago
If you take something from me and the government takes it back that's two wrongs in your book??
- rayiner 3mo ago
  If I steal something from you and then you retaliate by stealing something from my cousin, then that’s the definition of two wrongs.
  - freejazz 3mo ago
    In what way did your cousin ever have anything in this context? His admission wasn't rescinded, he never had it in the first place.
  - BrenBarn 3mo ago
    So, what if you steal $1000 from me and then give it to your cousin?
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - lupusyndrby9 3mo ago
    we all work for a company that steals from gamma employees for hundreds of years and share the proceeds with nu employees .to make amends the company gives the descendants of gamma employees a tiny fraction of what they’ve stolen as a bonus and the nu employees descendants ,who continue to profit from the previous theft by an order of magnitude more then gamma employees bonus, complain about gamma employees descendants preferential treatment being unfair
    - rayiner 3mo ago
      Your hypothetical fundamentally misrepresents the economics of what happened: > share the proceeds with nu employees … nu employees descendants ,who continue to profit from the previous theft by an order of magnitude Slaveholders were feudal lords. They didn’t “share the proceeds” with the serfs. They “privatized the profits and socialized the losses,” as we would say today. The profits flowed to a handful of families who happened to be white. But all the other white people suffered a deadweight loss. And the civil war nuked much of the south’s wealth. The war cost the south $2 billion, more than the south’s GDP and almost as much as the total value of its real and personal assets. The war also cost the union over $3 billion, an amount equal to its entire GDP. After that, there wasn’t some pool of money to generate dividends shared by all white people. Instead, there were taxes to pay for a war over something nearly all over them never benefited from. If your ancestors were white independent farmers or sharecroppers, they were poorer for having to compete with massive plantations powered by slave labor. German Americans (the largest group of white Americans) never even arguably benefited from slavery. Half of them came here as indentured servants themselves in the 1840s. They scraped out a hard life in the midwest while having to compete with slave plantations in the south. Their biggest involvement with slavery was fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers to end it. And of course Irish, Italians, Asians, etc., came here after slavery ended. So let’s tweak your example to reflect the reality. The C-suite of the company happened to be nu, and stole from gamma employees. They hired their nu kids as nepo babies and shared the profits with them, while underpaying the other nu employees. Eventually, some of the nu, including a large number who joined the company only recently, overthrow the C-suite and end the theft. Over the next 150 years, more nu employees keep joining the company, so today more than half have no ancestors who were even here during the theft. Then the company creates a promotion policy where it gives a big preference to gamma employees over employees who happen to be classified as “nu”—regardless of whether the nu employee’s ancestors were even at the company during the time of the theft. Nobody would consider that a fair arrangement.
webnrrd2k 3mo ago
I disagree with your charaterization of the problem as exclusively a moral wrong... Was it only a moral wrong? Was the only effect a moral one? Or were there physical or tangible effects, too? For example, were there economic affects? I'm not claiming to know the solution to the problem of ~200 years or slavery and ~100 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and further discrimination. I am saying that doing nothing about it seems pretty fucked. I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it, which you seem to be doing, makes you look like the worst kind of offensive and racist asdhole, too.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  > I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it I'm saying it's immoral to try to correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it. And it's not even me saying that, Plato said that 2,400 years ago. That doesn't mean you can't do anything. You can have race-neutral policies that directly target individuals who have economic need. Cory Booker's baby bonds proposal, for example, would go a long way towards erasing racial wealth gaps: https://www.acluok.org/news/baby-bonds-path-toward-prosperity-future-generations/ https://www.acluok.org/news/baby-bonds-path-toward-prosperit.... And it would do so without creating a new racial class system.
  - webnrrd2k 3mo ago
    Plato said a lot of shit. To be honest, I don't really care. The Bible said a lot of shit, too. I don't need Plato to tell me that in America, black people, native Americans, and all sorts of other immigrants got well and truly fucked for a long, long time. I don't need Plato to tell me that I find this, and other forms of racism, personally offensive. Also, it's seems suspicious to insist that all Affirmative Action be halted before these race-neutral policies are implemented. It's almost as if it's some sort of cheap justification for more shitty racism. How about we get rid of affirmative action after we get a this baby bonds proposal? And also a bunch of other stuff that creates a more equatable playing field? Again, minorities were fucked over for decades-to-centuries before Afirmative Action, why not just let it ride for a little while before knocking out the ladder from under them? Again, I object to your characterization of Affirmative Action as wrong or immoral. It was designed to counter centuries of institutionalized racism. I'll grant that the implementation has been imperfect, but what in this world is perfect? It's just better than doing nothing, it's better than wasting further lives, it's better than creating a permanent underclass. Could it be improved? Yes. Should there be an open discussion about it's effects? Yes. But I think the results should be more like "tweaks to the system" rather than an outright ban, or crying and gnashing of teeth about how Affirmative Action immoral. One other thing, you keep asserting that "correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it." A few comments ago I pointed out some obvious counter examples, which you neglected to address. The important point was that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. That doesn't make it immoral. It may be a difficult choice, but it's the kind of choice adults make all the time, and that's just part of living in a civilized society. [EDIT: I made a mistake when I said "A few comments ago" - it was a separate thread in this discussion]

dahart 3mo ago

Yep. Maybe a little bit like a sports handicap, you’re not trying to give someone a better chance of winning than everyone else, you’re trying to give them equal chances based on historical data. Gemini gave me an okay analogy: “If a pendulum is knocked permanently off-center by a structural bend or a magnetic field, the only way to center it again is to apply an equal and opposite force. Affirmative action policies attempt to apply this counter-weight to straighten the broader societal scale.” I’m not sure but is there a question about whether we actually had pre-existing unfairness? Blacks got the legal right to vote in 1965. Before that was effectively institutionalized racism, fully entrenched cultural bias, right?

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
There were things like redlining, where blacks could only buy housing in certain areas. Those areas also tended to have worse schools, so the next generation of blacks was less well educated than whites of equivalent intelligence. That led to worse jobs, which led to worse financial outcomes, which led to living in worse parts of town, which led to the next generation having less education... So, yes, there was pre-existing... "unfairness" may be too strong for some of it; it wasn't all unfairness. Some of it was the effects of past unfairness, even if the (deliberate) unfairness was no longer present. The pendulum was in fact bent, to at least some degree. But I like the analogy, because you only apply the counterforce until the pendulum is straight. Then you stop. Things were bent enough that affirmative action may in fact have been necessary. But it should not be necessary forever. Even if it was the right thing to do, there comes a time when the right thing to do is to stop. (Then you get into "is now the right time", and things get a whole lot murkier...)
- dahart 3mo ago
  Yes! Exactly. Affirmative action should naturally end itself if it works. The goal is to equalize opportunity and stop preferential treatment, not to hang on to preferential treatment. Well said, it does need to stop eventually. Now might be the right time, even if we’re not all the way there, given all the problems and unintended consequences and all the backlash.
- 3mo ago

anamax 3mo ago

> If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair. What definition of "some people" and "unfair" are we using? I ask because I'm pretty sure that Obama's daughters "have a bias in their favor" in comparison with my lily-white nieces. (The parents of said nieces make around $40k/year.) Is it fair to apply "countermeasures" to benefit said daughters relative to said nieces? You can argue that said nieces have an unfair bias relative to similarly situated black children, but that's not how these systems tend to work. And, it's not just Obama's daughters.

BrenBarn 3mo ago
I totally agree that there are lots of problems with just assigning the benefits based on coarse categories like "race". My point is just what I said in the quote: a process that seems "locally" unfair may produce a more "globally" fair result. Or it might not! I mean, you have to do it right. But if your goal is to produce a fairer result you might do things even though they seem unfair from a different perspective.