Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? [...] How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing?
Lots of things that are bad when considered in isolation are good in context because they help to fix other bad things. Chemotherapy drugs are basically poisons; but it happens that they poison your cancer even worse than they poison you and may make you healthier overall. Knocking a house down reduces the available places for people to live, and costs money, and makes noise and mess; but after you’ve done that, maybe you can build another better one on the same site. Buying insurance has negative expected (monetary) value, and the great majority of the time it loses you money; but by an astonishing coincidence the rare times when it helps you are correlated with the rare times when you find yourself in sudden need, and it turns out to be a good idea in many cases overall.
Anyway: the point here isn’t whether affirmative action is a good idea; it’s whether it’s something whose removal should be a high priority for anyone who ultimately wants an end to all racial discrimination. For the answer to be “no”, it is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person can consistently think affirmative action is beneficial overall. (I think they can, even if that turns out to be badly wrong.) It is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person who agrees with you that affirmative action is a bad idea can consistently think that dealing with other forms of racial discrimination is a higher priority. (I think they can.)
But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.
Fine. Again: the question is not whether affirmative action is, on balance, a good idea. The question is whether someone could reasonably consider it’s not such a bad idea as to be a good place to start if you want to reduce racial discrimination.
height [...] prettiness [...] being disfigured [...] not coming from this village [...] So what’s special about race, again?
The scale of the discrimination involved, the amount of harm it’s done, and the extent to which that harm has been visited consistently on the same people over and over again. (In reality, I think; but as usual it suffices if Usul reasonably thinks this is the case.)
If you’re shorter than average, you are likely to do a little worse than average in various ways. (It’s not clear how much that’s just plain prejudice and how much it’s that actually height genuinely correlates with things like intelligence and good health. And yes, one can make an analogy with race here.) Roughly and on average, one inch of height = $800/year of salary in the US, certainly not to be sneezed at. But being white rather than black = $14k/year of salary in the US. That corresponds to a difference of about six standard deviations in height.
If you’re taller or shorter than average, your children probably will be too. The correlation from generation to generation is somewhere around 0.6, I think. So whatever advantages or disadvantages accrue to taller or shorter people will accumulate a bit down the generations. But I’m pretty sure the correlation between parents’ and children’s race is a lot higher than that. If you’re black, your parents and your parents’ parents and your parents’ parents’ parents will probably have had all the same disadvantages as you, for as far back as history goes.
Lots of things that are bad when considered in isolation are good in context because they help to fix other bad things. Chemotherapy drugs are basically poisons; but it happens that they poison your cancer even worse than they poison you and may make you healthier overall. Knocking a house down reduces the available places for people to live, and costs money, and makes noise and mess; but after you’ve done that, maybe you can build another better one on the same site. Buying insurance has negative expected (monetary) value, and the great majority of the time it loses you money; but by an astonishing coincidence the rare times when it helps you are correlated with the rare times when you find yourself in sudden need, and it turns out to be a good idea in many cases overall.
Anyway: the point here isn’t whether affirmative action is a good idea; it’s whether it’s something whose removal should be a high priority for anyone who ultimately wants an end to all racial discrimination. For the answer to be “no”, it is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person can consistently think affirmative action is beneficial overall. (I think they can, even if that turns out to be badly wrong.) It is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person who agrees with you that affirmative action is a bad idea can consistently think that dealing with other forms of racial discrimination is a higher priority. (I think they can.)
Fine. Again: the question is not whether affirmative action is, on balance, a good idea. The question is whether someone could reasonably consider it’s not such a bad idea as to be a good place to start if you want to reduce racial discrimination.
The scale of the discrimination involved, the amount of harm it’s done, and the extent to which that harm has been visited consistently on the same people over and over again. (In reality, I think; but as usual it suffices if Usul reasonably thinks this is the case.)
If you’re shorter than average, you are likely to do a little worse than average in various ways. (It’s not clear how much that’s just plain prejudice and how much it’s that actually height genuinely correlates with things like intelligence and good health. And yes, one can make an analogy with race here.) Roughly and on average, one inch of height = $800/year of salary in the US, certainly not to be sneezed at. But being white rather than black = $14k/year of salary in the US. That corresponds to a difference of about six standard deviations in height.
If you’re taller or shorter than average, your children probably will be too. The correlation from generation to generation is somewhere around 0.6, I think. So whatever advantages or disadvantages accrue to taller or shorter people will accumulate a bit down the generations. But I’m pretty sure the correlation between parents’ and children’s race is a lot higher than that. If you’re black, your parents and your parents’ parents and your parents’ parents’ parents will probably have had all the same disadvantages as you, for as far back as history goes.