Return Of The Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur

For several years I encountered one particular, and particularly unpersuasive, defense of racial preferences so often that I named it the “Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur” and its own tag line, IUNS. Here’s a summary and definition from one of those old posts, which follows a typical example in italics below quoted from the New York Times Book Review:

… Supporters of affirmative action cogently point out that this sort of “affirmative action” for athletes (as well as for alumni children) has never, at least until now, elicited cries of foul on the ground that it violates meritocratic principles. Somehow that kind of indignation seems to arise only in response to the putative advantages of minority candidates.

For some reason, every time this point is made — and it is made in virtually every defense of racial preferences — it is always made with a sort of breathless sense of discovery, as though the author had just come up with an unanswerable “gotcha!” that will drive the final nail into the coffin of racist or redneck or Republican (but, from a liberal point of view, I repeat myself) objections to affirmative action.

Here are the two fallacies on which that argument depends:

1. The Merit Fallacy

I’m sorely tempted to call this one The Meretricious Fallacy (Meretricious: “tawrdrily and falsely attractive”; “superficially significant” — Merriam-Webster Collegiate Online). Anyway, this is an argument that no one who accepts the legitimacy of criteria based on anything other than merit can make a principled criticism of racial preferences. It is a fallacy because it wrongly assumes that the only criticism of racial preferences is that they offend the merit principle. That is not true. They also offend, and more fundamentally, the principle that no person should be rewarded or punished based on race or religion. For example, merit is totally irrelevant to the illegitimacy of an admissions office in a public institution giving preferences to Presbyterians. (And preferences to Jews or Catholics or wiccans would have been equally illegitimate, even if the rationale were to compensate for past discrimination.)

2. The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations

This is the argument that all discrimination is alike; if you can discriminate for one reason, you can discriminate for any reason. Thus if it’s acceptable to give preferences based on athletic or musical ability or the alumni status of parents, it’s also legitimate to give preferences based on race or religion. Preferences, in short, are preferences; if one is O.K., all are O.K.

In some respects No. 2 is simply the other side of the coin of No. 1. The Merit Fallacy says that if you accept any exception to merit you have no principled basis to criticize any exceptions to merit, and The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations says all discriminations are on the same moral plane….

I bring this up now because the never dormant Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur has just raised its ugly head again, in the form of a hopelessly confused misunderstanding of anti-Asian discrimination and disparate impact theory by Matthew Yglesias in SLATE, which I have just criticized here.

 

Say What?