Guilty Grammar

I am currently reading Michael Sandel's wonderful book 'Justice', it leads you on a moral journey in which various modern(and true) or hypothetical situations are raised to explore competing theories on justice. If you are a die-hard conservative or a bleeding-heart lefty like myself you will have your beliefs tested and trialled but ultimately justified. The most interesting thing about this book is that it does not seek to convince you whether we should have free-market liberalism, a meritocracy or a Rawlsian egalitarian society; rather it helps you to understand why people have these different views and helps to develop your own justified moral code.

Some of the situations explored are affirmative action, price-gourging and a horrific situation in which four soldiers had to choose between letting two innocent afghans go at the risk of placing their own lives in risk or to kill them in cold blood. The area I would like to cover in this post is however the issue of affirmative action and it's implications for selective education.

Firstly, I am now convinced of the view that we deserve no reward for the qualities we possess, insofar as to say that you have done nothing to deserve greater intelligence, good looks or a propensity for working hard. From this it can be said that any wealth or success that you acculumate as a result of possessing these qualities is undeserved, you are just simply lucky. Here controversy arises, the free-market liberal will dispute this and say we have a right to do whatever we like (so long as it does not infringe on someone else's rights) and anything we achieve is ours to enjoy. Somewhat similarly, the meritocrat will say that you deserve what you achieve provided we all start the race from the same point i.e. if through a progressive tax system we can provide a standard level of education and opportunity for all, then it is fair to let you be rewarded for where you excel. Rawls would disagree, and this is where I find myself torn. By all means we should exploit our natural gifts according to Rawls, but only so that we might contribute to the community or specifically the least well-off. The point is that we have no more a right to what we accumulate through our natural talents than anyone else in our community because the qualities we have that allowed us to accumulate such wealth are not deserved in themselves they are pure luck.

This can be applied to justify affirmative action (positive discrimination). Universities are a tool for doing something, they have a specific mission and their admissions criteria should be catered towards achieving this end. We might say that the universities mission should be to offer an opportunity for study to the most able students in our society in order to ensure we produce the best possible class of intellectuals to run our businesses, courts and parliaments. Conversely, a university's mission might be to improve social mobility or produce community leaders. Here it might be more useful to include a significant proportion of different races or a specific gender, a university would then be justified in operating a system of affirmative action which is technically in place in every university just that the discrimination is focused on academic ability (a policy that might not serve the university's mission best). The point is that if I do not get accepted to Cambridge specifically because I am a white, middle-class, grammar school student, my complain cannot be that I deserve the place more than someone else, so long as that student would be a better choice in order to achieve the mission statement. I might have a legitimate recourse in arguing that the mission of the university is misguided and that it should instead be to focus on producing the most academic students possible -although the university might maintain that a diverse range of students allows greater personal and academic progress through an interchange of more diverse ideas. Similarly, students who are accepted should not consider themselves better students, only that they are better suited to achieving society's or the university's mission at that particular time in history.

This system has allowed me to keep my faith in Rawlsian justice whilst still disagreeing with affirmative action in the form that it currently takes. However, I need to take a long look in the mirror and ask myself whether this is because I cannot bring myself to agree with discriminating against myself or because I genuinely believe in Rawls fairness principle.