ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF PREFERENTIAL HIRING
One of the major arguments to support preferential hiring claims is that these policies are an ethically legitimate means for compensating people for the harms that they have suffered. Just as compensatory justice requires that consumers injured by a negligently designed product deserve to be compensated, a similar principle requires that individuals harmed by discriminatory hiring processes receive compensation for that harm. Failure to compensate continues a practice of undeserved disadvantages (for victims of discrimination) and undeserved advantages (of white males competing within an unfairly restricted job pool).
Three issues need to be resolved to adequately assess this argument. Compensatory justice requires that the compensation be proportionate to the harms done, that the party paying the compensation be responsible for the harm, and that the party receiving compensation be the party harmed. The ethical status of the compensatory argument depends on how these three requirements are met by preferential hiring policies.
At first glance, compensatory hiring practices do seem to compensate for harms done in a relatively straightforward and proportionate way. Women and people of color have been denied equal opportunity in the workplace (refer to the census data described in the opening sections of this chapter), so repaying that harm with preferential treatment in hiring and promotion seems reason- able. The “preference” in hiring is only an appearance that results from considering the issue only after the fact of the initial harm. Viewed from a longer-range perspective, the preference only equalizes the situation and returns it to the point at which it would have been had the original discrimination not occurred.
Consider, by analogy, a situation in which someone is defrauded of one thousand dollars. Compensatory justice would require that the person be repaid the one thousand dollars (other aspects of justice might require further payment as punishment, of course). If we only consider the situation at the point of (re-) payment, it has the appearance of a one-sided benefit to the injured party. But when we consider the situation within the context of the original fraud, compensation is a repayment that brings the scales of justice back into balance. Of course, preferential hiring does not compensate women and people of color for other harms they might have suffered (e.g., it doesn’t compensate for slavery). It does, however, reasonably compensate for unjust harms done in the workplace.
The second condition on compensatory justice is more controversial. It appears, especially to young white males who are denied equal access, that the people paying the compensation are not responsible for causing the harms. It was not, after all, the present generation of young white males who discriminated against women and people of color in the workplace. Since they are not responsible for the harm, it would be unfair to cause them harm in return.
Defenders of the compensatory argument respond by denying that young white males are making the repayment. The compensation is being repaid either by the private business or by society, either or both of which do bear some of the ethical culpability for past discrimination. In making this compensatory payment, young white males are denied the competitive advantage they previously enjoyed and appear to be harmed. However, they are only being denied something that they did not deserve (i.e., an unfair competitive advantage).