Affirmative Action

3 Pages 667 Words

Who Ever Is the Most Qualified
When a person is being interviewed for a job, should it depend on their color or sex whether they get the job or not? My reply is it shouldn't depend on either of those two things. It should be determined by whether they are the best qualified for the job they are applying for. The effects of affirmative action are hurtful to many people. I truly do not understand why there is such a thing as affirmative action. Louis P. Pojman gives this as a definition; ”Affirmative action is the effort to rectify the injustice of the past by special policies. Put this way, it is Janus-faced or ambiguous, having both a backward-looking and a forward-looking feature. The backward-looking feature is its attempt to correct and compensate for past injustice. This aspect of affirmative action is strictly deontological. The forward-looking feature is it’s implicit ideal of a society free from prejudice; this is both deontological and utilitarian“(420). Just by this definition you could tell affirmative action was not well thought out.
First of all you can not change the past. Therefore what ever is being done now about the rights of women and blacks does not compensate for how they were once treated. As Louis P. Pojman Said, “Sometimes a wrong cannot be compensated, and we just have to make the best of an imperfect world”(430). By giving an unqualified women a job over an over-qualified man does not fix all the problems we had in the past. Also if a black person and a white person both applied for the same job and the white person had more experience, should the black person just be hired to meet a quota? That would not be fair. This to me is doing the same thing we had done in the past except it is reversed against white people.
By giving a job to a black person just because of their color is just as bad as turning them away for their color. Louis P. Pojman explains, “This message holds t...