The Pros And Cons Of Affirmative Action

This section, in a general way, tries to summarize the main arguments used in order to advocate or attack the use of affirmative actions, as well as the pros and cons of it by the light of the social psychology. This section, more than summarizing pros and cons, tries to offer a handful of reactions to some arguments. However, more profound and practical analysis of the points made in this section that concerns policy matters will be shown at the policy implications section.
First of all, it is plausible to say that when talking about affirmative actions and its validity or not, the original uses mainly philosophical and historical arguments . It’s important to have this in mind because although the focus of this study is the social psychology …show more content…
Many authors, politicians and public figures advocates in favor of the affirmative actions policies arguing that it’s necessary in order to confer historical reparation to minorities. According to Crosby , affirmative actions must entail people from determined groups that have, due to historical conditions, been borne and have lived in a reality where the group suffers from discrimination. The main target groups of North-America’s affirmative actions are Women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans .
However, the corrective justice argument runs into limitations, this is because, as Kang and Benaji point out, our society tends to view discrimination as a species of individual tort – in other words, it must identify the wrong, the specific perpetrator and the specific victim. And the affirmative action does not fit this model of correction. The problem is that beneficiaries of affirmative actions are not regarded as the specific victims of the prior discriminations. Therefore, the historical reparation argument to justify the affirmative action policy could be viewed and criticized as being a form of ‘unjust enrichment” …show more content…
An example of this would be the benefits from class diversity . This is a problematic argument. There is skepticism about the values added by diversity in a calculus classroom, for example . Another criticism to this rhetoric is that one can always conjure up potential policy benefits of a race-conscious distribution of resources . As Kang and Benaji points out, this approach can be viewed as transforming race into qualifications, and that can be dangerous in a way that it can weaken the legitimacy of the affirmative action as a cure for discrimination, limiting opportunities for minorities . That would be against the whole purpose of affirmative action, having a strong “backfire”