Mismatch

Abstract

This chapter scrutinizes objections pointing to the putative fact that affirmative action is both under- and overinclusive, i.e. it both benefits people who are not relevantly disadvantaged and harms people who neither bear responsibility for nor are innocent beneficiaries of the injustice that the relevant affirmative action schemes address. While the empirical premise of the initial version of the under-/over-inclusion objection is true, its normative premise is implausibly demanding, i.e. that any degree of under-/over-inclusion renders a scheme unjust. Hence, I propose to revise this argument such that its normative premise becomes less demanding and, thus, more plausible in that, inter alia, it coheres with the belief that a penal system might be justified even if it raises issues about under-/overinclusion similar to those raised by affirmative action. The resulting argument is a better objection in that its normative premise, with some qualifications, seems relevantly true. However, it is no longer clear that the required empirical premise is true, i.e. that the mismatch between deserved and actual harms and benefits is not smaller with affirmative action than without.