Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [84]
Affirmative Action for Whites?
Here is a test for the diversity argument: Can it sometimes justify racial preferences for whites? Consider the case of Starrett City. This apartment complex in Brooklyn, New York, with twenty thousand residents, is the largest federally subsidized middle-income housing project in the United States. It opened in the mid-1970s, with the goal of being a racially integrated community. It achieved this goal through the use of “occupancy controls” that sought to balance the ethnic and racial composition of the community, limiting the African American and Hispanic population to about 40 percent of the total. In short, it used a quota system. The quotas were based not on prejudice or contempt, but on a theory about racial “tipping points” drawn from the urban experience. The managers of the project wanted to avoid the tipping point that had triggered “white flight” in other neighborhoods and undermined integration. By maintaining racial and ethnic balance, they hoped to sustain a stable, racially diverse community.15
It worked. The community became highly desirable, many families wanted to move in, and Starrett City established a waiting list. Due in part to the quota system, which allocated fewer apartments for African Americans than for whites, black families had to wait longer than white families. By the mid-1980s, a white family had to wait three to four months for an apartment, while a black family had to wait as long as two years.
Here, then, was a quota system favoring white applicants—based not on racial prejudice but on the goal of sustaining an integrated community. Some black applicants found the race-conscious policy unfair, and filed a discrimination suit. The NAACP, which favored affirmative action in other contexts, represented them. In the end, a settlement was reached that allowed Starrett City to keep its quota system but required the state to expand minority access to other housing projects.
Was Starrett City’s race-conscious way of allocating apartments unjust? No, not if you accept the diversity rationale for affirmative action. Racial and ethnic diversity play out differently in housing projects and college classrooms, and the goods at stake are not the same. But from the standpoint of fairness, the two cases stand or fall together. If diversity serves the common good, and if no one is discriminated against based on hatred or contempt, then racial preferences do not violate anyone’s rights. Why not? Because, following Rawls’s point about moral desert, no one deserves to be considered for an apartment or a seat in the freshman class according to his or her merits, independently defined. What counts as merit can be determined only once the housing authority or the college officials define their mission.
Can Justice Be Detached from Moral Desert?
The renunciation of moral desert as the basis of distributive justice is morally attractive but also disquieting. It’s attractive because it undermines the smug assumption, familiar in meritocratic societies, that success is the crown of virtue, that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. As Rawls reminds us, “no one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.” Nor is it our doing that we live in a society that happens to prize our particular strengths. That is a measure of our good fortune, not our virtue.
What’s disquieting about severing justice from moral desert is less easy to describe. The belief that jobs