A Response to a Portion of "Theories of Equality: A Critical Analysis"

I wish to reply to two separate parts of Pojman's paper which criticize my writings. First, he misinterprets my answer to "When will affirmative action end?" I answer that affirmative action can end when the percentage of women and minorities hired in the job areas in question roughly equal the percentage of women and minorities in the available population who seek such employment.

Pojman thinks this might be a necessary condition that I require for affirmative action to end. But it is clearly only one sufficient condition, since I originally asked when affirmative action will end not "What must occur before affirmative action ends?" Obviously, there can be more than one set of events that leads to an end to affirmative action. For example, if the job areas in question themselves ended (for example, the manufacture of buggy whips), then that would also be a sufficient condition for the end of affirmative action for those nonexistent jobs. Clearly, when there are two or more sufficient condition for an event (in this case the end of affirmative action), then there is no one necessary condition for the end of that event.

Second, Pojman takes my writing with Anita Silvers out of context. The context was moral reasoning about blame. The point was that even if someone attacks black applicants as morally inferior because they are black, that attack still needs to address the issue of blame. Since being black is beyond one's control, and hence not one's fault, it would seem unfair for these attackers to blame blacks for being black anyway. Pojman's examples about basketball, the retarded, and hats are false analogies, since they don't concern blaming or placing moral responsibility. Further, Pojman assumes that retardation is genetic even though many if not most retarded people are so because of environmental factors (e.g., some prenatal disease, malnutrition, injury, drugs) rather than genetic ones. Pojman seems under the influence of books such as The Bell Curve here. The Bell Curve is negligent because in over 850 indexed pages it never includes any discussion of twins, according to its index. Yet twin studies (e.g., some done at Penn State, according to the San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 12, 1995) show that the difference in IQ between genetically identical twins is about 15%. Since the claimed difference in IQ between blacks and whites is also about 15%, opponents of equality and affirmative action who have racial IQ differences in mind, as Pojman seems to, should realize that these twin studies mean that a 15% difference in IQ is perfectly compatible with genetic equality and could realistically be entirely explained by environmental differences, just as environmental differences entirely explain the 15% IQ difference between genetically identical twins.

Sterling Harwood, J.D., Ph.D.
University of Phoenix
408-259-7777
svharwood1@aol.com

Pojman's Response to Harwood

1. The context of his statement "that affirmative action can end when the percentages of woman and minorities hired in the job areas in question roughly equal the percentages in the available population who seek such employment" led me and others (other people came to the same conclusion) to believe that Harwood saw equal results as a strongly relevant condition for its fulfilment. If he doesn't hold that, fine. But then he should explain exactly what the relationship of percentages to justice is in the first place. You could have equal outcomes but injustice and unequal outcomes and justice. That was my point. It seems to me that Harwood neglects it.

2. Re. Harwood's second point, I'm not sure which quote of mine Harwood has in mind. But his statistics on IQ studies seem at variance with the most thorough study I know of - and this is the one most quoted in the literature is Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr, et. al "Sources of Human Psychological Difference" the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart" (Science, Oct. 12, 1990) which studied more than 100 sets of reared apart monozygotic twins or triplets which showed that about 70% of the observed variation in IQ in this population can be attributed to genetic causes. This would suggest that while environment accounts for some difference in IQ scores, the main factor is genetic. For a thorough examination of these matters see Michael Levin's WHY RACE MATTERS (Praeger, 1997, pp. 87-114).

   Louis Pojman