Like the freaks at an old time carnival and the live eel-eating geek, this is a pretty disgusting display. The manager of an intern program for a “major global institution” asks permission from the New York Times Magazine’s advice columnist “The Ethicist” to offer full time positions based on race rather than performance. Of course, the manager never says “race,” what he says is that although the “more privileged” interns “appear to be” performing at a higher level than those “who come from less privileged backgrounds,” he wants ethical leave to make the final hiring decisions by “taking personal life circumstances” into consideration. In other words, he wants to discriminate against the white interns.

The euphemisms are so thick you best use a trowel to read the query, but NYU ethics professor Kwame Anthony Appiah not only follows his lead but also (predictably) goes to great lengths to rationalize what is an obvious appeal to DEI ideology. Permit me to dissect The Ethicist’s intellectual dishonest double-talk; this time I’ll have The Ethicist’s words in italics and mine in regular text:

We live in a class society.

Objection! “Class society” suggests that this is a formal, enforced system like India or Great Britain. The only classless societies, theoretically, are ideally-functioning communist societies, which don’t exist. The Ethicist exposes his bias immediately.

People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too: They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to an employee’s actual performance.

Appiah is assuming cause and effect when the distinction is unknowable. Families that make an effort to create social assets, cultural awareness and beneficial connections for their children tend to raise more successful children. Rich people don’t all become rich because riches have been providentially bestowed on them, but this is how The Ethicist frames the issue. After all, Karl Marx says it is so.

But they can also contribute to the employee’s perceived performance. People often make judgments about the intelligence of speakers on the basis of their accents, for example, and one form of cultural capital is having the accent of the white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes. So you can ask yourself whether your judgment about which of these interns is doing best has been shaped by features that don’t reflect the contribution they’re likely to make. You’re obviously alert to this possibility, because you write that the more privileged interns “appear” to be performing better; it’s worth thinking about whether you can identify evaluative measures that are less subject to this kind of bias.

Nice try. Because the inquirer used the equivocal “appear,” The Ethicist leaps to the conclusion that the real meaning was “the whte interns may not be as good as their performance indicates.” His bias is palpable. In jobs requiring communication, for example, clear and understandable speech is a significant asset, and legitimately so. Anyone seeking to rise in business who hasn’t dealt with the problem of an accent handicap has demonstrated a significant lack of industry and responsibility. Appiah just brushes away the importance of being able to be understood as a mirage. Baloney! Learn to speak clearly and well. If speaking clearly and well means learning to sound like a white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes individual, then do it. If you want to keep sounding like Snoop Dogg on principle, swell, but don’t come around whining about prejudice when you can’t get the jobs you want.

But another question is what weight to give to the fact that the objective contributions of the less privileged interns are made, to some extent, in spite of their disadvantages.

Wait a minute. How is the intern program manager supposed to know what disadvantages the various interns have dealt with and overcome (or not)? Oh, right: their color and their accents: those reveal all.

This is the zenith or stereotyping and bias. My sister had a major operation on her back when she was 12 that required her to be in a hip to chin body cast for almost a year. It was a serious emotional, social and educational catastrophe; it ended her promising athletic career; it left her feeling insecure and unattractive. Her prospective employers never learned about what she had overcome: all they knew was that she was white, articulate, obviously brilliant, and graduated from Harvard. Who are the intern master or Prof. Appiah to confidently conclude that my sister’s abilities and accomplishments weren’t achieved “in spite of” significant disadvantages? I get it: she was white and spoke well. That’s all they need to know.

There are at least three considerations here. One has to do with what your interns’ current performance shows about their future performance. You might think, for example, that the more privileged interns who are doing well are drawing on resources — the kind provided by their family and their university — that will be less available to them as they continue with the firm. The less privileged interns, not having had so much to rely on, may be able to perform better in the future because they have less support to lose.

Wow. The Ethicist is really stretching for that rationalization.

A second consideration involves the possibility that — as some social scientists have argued — groups with members from a variety of backgrounds tend to be better at problem-solving than groups whose backgrounds are relatively homogeneous. If you advantage the already advantaged, your firm will be more upper-middle class and less diverse.

Some social scientists have argued that without any reliable data whatsoever. It is purely ideologically-based fake science, like the studies showing that more diverse staff are more productive. “Some” social scientists will argue just about anything you can imagine.

And for the love of God, stop using “advantage” as a verb!

The third consideration, as you’ll have anticipated, has to do with the role of decisions like yours in perpetuating social inequality. Simply advancing those who are doing best in part because of their privilege reinforces the unfairness from which they are already benefiting.

You mean, handing out jobs according to who does the best work, demonstrates superior skills, and is most likely to be most successful in enhancing the work of the company? That kind of “perpetuating social inequality?” Boy, The Ethicist turned into Chairman Mao so slowly I almost didn’t notice it!

Notice that the first two considerations are about doing what’s best for your firm. If class markers distort perceptions of an intern’s performance, it’s in the firm’s interests to reduce this distortion.

Of course, the Ethicist is advocating a bias that assumes that “class markers” are the reason some interns “appear” to be better than others. Occam would hold that the reason some interns “appear” better than others is because they are better than the others.

If a well-managed diverse workplace is, in fact, more creative, then the firm has an interest in securing one.

Again, there is no evidence that a diverse workplace is any more creative than a less diverse workplace, except that “some social scientists” would like that to be true.

But trying to avoid replicating economic and social inequality is about making a contribution to the commonweal. To be sure, your decisions will have at most a marginal impact. Only concerted action by many parties could achieve significant change. All the same, you should not participate in injustice, even if your non participation makes little difference to it.

This is an “it is isn’t what it is” tour de force! Choosing who to hire based on skin shade, race and ethnicity along with presumed “disadvantages,” aka the hiring party’s biased assumptions, is fair, while deciding who get a a job based on performance is “replicating economic and social inequality.”

Plenty of people think, of course, that our society should be meritocratic, in the sense that its rewards should relate to individual talent and effort, rather than, say, parental resources.

Plenty of people are capable of rational thought unpolluted by Marxist cant.

My own view is that most debates about meritocracy are confused. Talent and effort are both things that arise not just from our innate capacities but also from our circumstances; it’s muddled to suppose that talent and effort can be contrasted with parental inputs. Some people work hard in part because they were raised in ways that made it likelier that they would want to work hard. Your well-honed musical or athletic skills may have arisen, in part, because your parents invested in developing them long before you yourself had any ambitions. Once again, hierarchies have a way of reproducing themselves.

And The Ethicist is calling other people confused? All talents, tendencies, abilities and character traits are the product of many influences, and even a detailed study of them can’t possibly determine whether an ability or trait is rooted in a boon or a tragedy. Since it is impossible to determine where abilities and talents come from with certainty, and because bias will pollute any attempt to try to unravel the mystery, the only fair and responsible approach is to accept results at face value, face value not meaning “by the color of the face.”

At the same time, there are good reasons not to make economic rewards depend on race, class, gender and other social identities.

Yes, those reasons are called fairness, avoidance of discrimination, respecting the Constitutional principles underlying American democracy, and common sense.

We should aim at having a fair scheme of social cooperation. Constructing society to advantage some classes of people systematically over others gives the less advantaged little reason to accept the terms of social cooperation.

“Wait a minute!” Part 2. Constructing society to systematically discriminate against others based on their presumed advantages gives the “privileged” little reason to accept the terms of social cooperation either.

There are good reasons, as well, to want a society in which all people can develop their capacities in ways that prepare them for a satisfying life, a life in which they can find a way to contribute not only to their own welfare but also to the general welfare.

And we achieve that in society when people believe that the more diligently they work, the more they try to improve their skills and the degree of their determination to succeed on their own merits rather than based on the political power of their advocacy groups, the more valuable they are to society as a whole.

What you are seeing in your interns may reflect the extent to which these ideals are not met by our society.

Or, more likely, it reflect the fact that some of the interns are just better prepared to do the job than the others, and deserve to be rewarded for it.

A final line of thought. Firms like yours compete fiercely to get their top candidates, which is one reason salaries in finance can be so high. But — if you’ll permit the provocation — I wonder how much difference it would make to your profits if you made a habit of picking the person that you had ranked third or fifth.

Or seventh! Or twenty-fifth! Maybe relative ability is an illusion!

I’m going to have to give serious thought to whether Prof. Appiah is worth my time (or yours) after this. This column makes it disturbingly likely that he is just another progressive hack existing in the bubble of woke academia. He’s just wordier than most.