Does Affirmative Action Reduce Competence?

The logic of diversity hiring under its own premises

Consider these premises:

A: There is systemic oppression of certain groups (race, gender etc.) in society, which favors the dominant (male) heterosexual ethnic majority.

B: This oppression goes across all systems in society, including primary, secondary and higher education, as well as professional selection processes.

C: Competence is to a large degree, perhaps exclusively, a cumulative function of education—formal and informal, including job experience.

D: Oppressed groups are, on the whole, less competent if they are at a stage in their lives after first contact with the oppressor’s educational system. The later the stage of their education, the worse the effect. (Think of it as a talent pool shrinking over time due to educational oppression.)

E: Selecting for oppressed groups specifically (“affirmative action”) leads to an overall loss of competence.

Logical relations

If A, then B.
If B and C, then D.
If D, then E.
—
If A and C are true
then E is true.

Formally:

(A → B) ∧ ((B ∧ C) → D) ∧ (D → E)
entails (A ∧ C) → E
—
A ∧ C ∴ E

In plain language: if there is systemic oppression and education plays a (key) role in building competence, then diversity hiring leads to a reduction in overall competence.

This means if you want to argue that selecting for oppressed groups (at any stage later than first contact with the oppressor’s system of education) does not lead to a loss of competence, you would have to challenge premises A or C, or the logical relationships outlined above.

Analysis

Premise A is seldom explicitly challenged, because the argument for affirmative action derives its power from the very idea of systemic oppression. However, it is sometimes implicitly denied when people use the “compensation” argument: oppressed groups have suffered so much in the past that it’s their turn now; we must pay them back what we took from them. Implicit here is the acknowledgement that even if there were no oppression at present, we should still do it, with the benefit that in this case, the competency argument would fail. However, this doesn’t fully solve the competency issue, since even educational oppression in the past (since the persons concerned were born) leads to a loss of competency. You would have to argue that there was no oppression since at least the person’s first contact with the oppressive system—something most proponents of affirmative action probably won’t accept.

B cannot be denied without denying A, but it can be de-emphasized by focusing on vague terms such as “white supremacy” in the hope that people don’t see the logical implication (that it entails educational oppression and therefore loss of competency in the group).

C follows from the blank slate theory (the idea that we are all born moldable, and our competency and other characteristics are a function of our socialization, including, importantly, our education). Challenging it would lead to questions of hereditary differences among humans, or worse, among human groups. It might also raise questions about psychopathology and its influence on competency. Usually, people who argue for affirmative action don’t want to go there.

They still have one way out, though: they can attack C by postulating that competency is not a universally valid concept, but relative to a specific culture. For example, “white hetero” or “male” culture produces and rewards competence c1, while “black queer” or “female” culture produces and rewards competence c2. The educational system and the job market are geared towards c1, and therefore c2 is suppressed or not even perceived. You can then make the case that the oppressor’s educational system may reduce c1 in the marginalized group, but not c2.

There are at least two problems with this. First, since in that picture (see premise A) there are no formal institutions that teach c2 (or at any rate significantly less), it’s hard to see how the overall level of c2 could be anywhere near that of c1, unless you deny that formal education has any value.

Second, this way out rests on the assumption that c2 is at least equivalent to c1 in its utility for society at any competence level x [U (c2_x) ≥ U (c1_x)]. This case is sometimes made, for example, in feminism: “female competence is different, but our society would be better off if we had more of it.” Black supremacy arguments can take a similar form.

A way out of this objection, of course, would be to accept the proposition that c2 has less utility than c1 for our society, and sacrifice the difference in utility that the relatively less useful competency c2 generates for our society. This means accepting the degradation of said society so that it can give way to a new society built on the principles of c2. The downside is that this essentially concedes the point that affirmative action reduces competency as we usually understand it.

Such attacks on competency are therefore not often made openly: they are very radical in that they imply a “creative destruction” of our culture and its systems, with at the very least negative short-term consequences. It is not a popular argument, to say the least.

More often than not, we see a strategy that has been employed by sophists since time immemorial: a masterful play of cat and mouse with the premises, where you react to an attack on one premise with a defense of another premise, i.e. moving the goalposts. That way, you can obscure the logical connections and leave your opponent confused. Another way is to postulate implications that seem plausible at first, but which are simply not there, and then argue against such implications. An example would be to say that E implies race-based hereditary differences in competence, when no such thing is implied and E, in fact, just follows from A and C—two premises that, again, most advocates for affirmative action accept.

Of course, there is also the nuclear option of denying the validity of logic altogether. But this move derives its power from a confusion between a valid criticism of the method of using formal logic (and the analytic method in general) for tasks where it often does more harm than good, and the validity of basic logic that underwrites our reality and its accessibility. Denying the latter simply blows everything up. And it is ludicrous to begin with, because without logic, you cannot even form a sentence that denies the validity of logic. For instance, saying that “basic logic is relative to culture” presupposes the law of non-contradiction [¬(p ∧ ¬p)], because it implies that “basic logic is relative to culture” and “basic logic is not relative to culture” cannot both be true.

In conclusion, it would appear that affirmative action (selection based partly on membership in an oppressed group) leads to an overall loss of competency under the very premises typically accepted by its advocates. Avoiding this conclusion necessitates radical ideas such as allowing society and its systems to degenerate and fall apart, or even denying the validity of logic.

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