Affirmative action has been back in the headlines lately, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike it down in college admissions. Some saw the ruling as a blow to fairness; others called it a constitutional course correction. Either way, the familiar battle lines reemerged. At its core, affirmative action aims to counter discrimination—past and present—based on traits that should not matter in hiring, housing, and other decisions, but often do. And, moreover, affirmative action has unfortunately been pigeonholed as solely about race.

Two Objections to Affirmative Action

What often gets missed in the usual shouting match over affirmative action is that the policy is not simply about righting past wrongs. There is another version of affirmative action that gets lost in the intellectual scuffle. Affirmative action, especially in its weaker forms (more on that later), can be a tool for surfacing competence that is systematically overlooked. Candidates can be passed over not because they’re less qualified, but because they lack superficial qualities that, though irrelevant for the job, successful candidates tend to have like looks, height, or a warm personality. Instead, these individuals, though incredibly qualified, are often awkward, plain, unpolished, or just unlucky in personality lottery. But if those traits have nothing to do with job performance, then using affirmative action to counteract their effects has nothing to do with lowering standards and everything to do with correcting for merit and competence.

As the policy is usually presented—as a policy tool aimed at rectifying past racial injustice—affirmative action faces two generic objections, one practical, one moral:

Anti-competence: It is a policy that favors individuals merely because they belong to a group that has been unfairly discriminated against—based on irrelevant and static personal traits—but ignores the value of merit and competence in hiring decisions.
Reverse discrimination: It is a policy that favors individuals for the same reason also risks unfairly discriminating against others—such as white or male candidates—based solely on their static personal characteristics.

Two Versions of Affirmative Action, Strong and Weak

These objections pose serious challenges to the legitimacy of affirmative action policies, though their force depends on the variety of affirmative action in play. There are two basic forms. The strong version holds that recognized discrimination justifies favoring one candidate over another—even when the latter is more qualified. The weak version holds that such discrimination is only a tiebreaker: it justifies favoring one candidate over another only when both are equally qualified. These versions do not contradiction each other, and in fact, the weak version encompasses the strong version, but not the reverse.

While the strong version is susceptible to the competence and reverse discrimination objections, the weak version only looks vulnerable to the latter. On its face, even the weak version seems to involve discrimination. But some moral philosophers defend it on grounds of fairness. As moral and legal philosopher Alan Goldman explains:

The rule for hiring the most competent was justified as part of a right to equal opportunity to succeed through socially productive effort, and on grounds of increased welfare for all members of society. Since it is justified in relation to a right to equal opportunity, and since the application of the rule may simply compound injustices when opportunities are unequal elsewhere in the system, the creation of more equal opportunities takes precedence when in conflict with the rule for awarding positions. Thus short-run violations of the rule are justified to create a more just distribution of benefits by applying the rule itself in future years.

Other moral philosophers like Louis Pojman disagree, arguing that discriminating against current job candidates to address past and ongoing discrimination against others only further compounds injustice. What is to be done? Insights from an incentives-based epistemology—the rigorous study of knowledge and ignorance by philosophers—can help to clarify debates about affirmative action. The point is not simply what people know, but what their incentives are in presenting or withholding information. Think of Fox Mulder’s frustrated line in The X-Files: “You don’t want to believe. You’re not looking hard enough.” The issue there is not only access to evidence, but motivation to see it. To give an example of using incentives to think about knowledge: we do not mistrust the sleazy used car salesman because he knows too little about the car—he probably knows more than any buyer. We mistrust him because he has an incentive to hide what would hurt the sale. In the same way, discussions about affirmative action can be clouded less by ignorance than by the incentives different parties have to frame evidence in ways that serve their own interests, e.g., hiring someone they personally like and find attractive over the more qualified, but less attractive competition.

Discriminates (Sometimes) Conceals Merit

Some individuals face discrimination that requires them to be more competent and work harder to achieve what others attain with less effort. Philosopher Dan Moller puts it well:

Much of our evidence reflects a kind of popularity: recommendations, previous hirings, and many accomplishments ultimately reflect that people thought highly of the candidate. How should this popularity influence us? Empirical evidence indicates that irrelevant personal attributes like beauty or warmth influence this kind of popularity to a startling degree, and accordingly we should discount for it. Conversely, we should favor those swimming upstream against such attributes […]. Faced with otherwise similar candidates, then, it’s powerful evidence against someone’s candidacy that they are good-looking, tall, confident, warm, extroverted, or well-connected […].

And later:

Faced with a pick of accountants at a firm, sound epistemology overwhelmingly suggests barreling past attractive, polite workers and urgently seeking out the ugliest, shortest, most boorish one available.

If some candidates have to work harder just to reach the same place, then they are often more qualified, not less. They’ve pulled even without the irrelevant qualities others have: good looks, charm, height, race, gender, or personality traits that light up a room but say nothing about job performance. Picture Sam. He is a forensic-accounting wizard, but short, awkward, and allergic to small talk. He flubs interviews. Not because he lacks skills, but because he isn’t polished and fun to be around. And yet, despite those superficial strikes against him, he has managed to gain the experience and expertise to rise to the top despite those disadvantages. He had to be twice as good and work twice as hard to get to the same level as his less experienced and skilled but better-looking colleagues.

Weak Affirmative Action and Hidden Merit

How exactly does this hidden competence link up with weak affirmative action? Simple. Earlier we saw that the primary moral objection to affirmative action is that it unfairly punishes one candidate for injustices someone else committed. But if the candidate being favored is genuinely more qualified—overlooked because evaluators got distracted by superficial traits—then it is not in fact ‘reverse discrimination,’ but a correction. So, weak affirmative action is not antithetical to merit but instead it when superficial traits would otherwise obscure it.

So why bother with affirmative action at all in this context? Because when done right—targeted, restrained, and focused on overlooked merit—it can help correct for the subtle biases that skew hiring decisions away from actual competence. That doesn’t mean we need a government-run program to pull it off. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of bureaucratic overreach from regulatory capture to sheer inefficiency. One need not settle the broader moral fight over strong affirmative action to see the value here. This isn’t about group guilt or historical payback. It is about making sure that candidates aren’t wrongly passed over because they aren’t funny or handsome enough. As Joseph Merrick—the person tragically labelled the Elephant Man—used to end his letters:

'Tis true my form is something odd,

But blaming me is blaming God;

Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.