Best Applicant For The Job example essay topic

Premises to prove that Affirmative Action is Wrong: 1. It is wrong to hire anyone other than the person who will do the best job. 2. Whenever one takes race or sex into account in hiring, one will hire someone other than the person who will do the best job.

3. Therefore, it is wrong to take race or sex into account in hiring. 4. Affirmative Action programs require employers to take race and sex into account in hiring. 5.

Therefore, affirmative action programs require employers to do something wrong. The above argument for Affirmative Action being morally impermissible is a valid argument. Each of the premises follows the previous one correctly and the conclusions that the argument makes are deducible from the premises stated before them. The premises may follow each other and the conclusions may be deducible by them, but that does not mean that the premises themselves are correct.

For instance, premise 1 is not valid, or we can at least provide an argument to prove it invalid. Premise 1 states that it is wrong to higher anyone other than the person who will do the best job. However, in many cases, there will be more than one person who can perform the tasks of the job just as well as the other applicants. In most cases there is a "tie" between people that have the same ability to do a job. Say Joe, Ted, Mary and Muhammad all applied for the same job along with 50 other less qualified people. Joe, Mary, Ted and Muhammad are all just as qualified as the other for the job and at this point are all the person who will do the job best.

With this, the one in charge of hiring a person for the job has to rely on some other factor to choose one of these four people (Joe, Ted, Mary and Muhammad) to hire. Not one of them is better than the other for the job, but only one can be hired for the one open position. We can try to fix this premise by making it say", It is wrong to hire anyone other than the person who will do the job best, and if there is more than one applicant who will do the job equally best, then the new employee must be chosen through a random procedure, such as a blind drawing or a lottery". This little "amendment" to the first premise will fix the problem of multiple "best" applicants. Premise two may also be proven invalid.

In many cases the best person for the job may survive sex or race discrimination. For instance, Andrew, a typical white male, is the best applicant for the job, and the organization doing the hiring for that job discriminates against females. Andrew, being the best person for the job, can still be hired because he is not a female, so discriminating against females did not hurt the company by eliminating the best person for the job. The company still has the best person for the job, and was lucky that the best person was a male and not a female. So, to make premise two a valid one, we can change the wording around a bit. Making premise two say", Whenever one takes race or sex into account when hiring and doing so eliminates the best applicant for the job because of that discrimination, one will hire someone other than the person who will do the best job", makes it a valid premise to follow premise one.

Now that we have changed premises one and two around, we must also alter the conclusion of those two premises (premise 3) so that it deduces a correct conclusion from them. In doing so, premise three will look like this; "Therefore, it is wrong to take race and sex into account in hiring when it eliminates the applicant who will do the job best from being hired". With this sub-conclusion in tact, we are ready to move onto the next premises. Premise four states an obvious truth; Affirmative Action programs do require employers to take race and sex into account in hiring. Now that premises one through four are valid, we have to look at our overall conclusion of the argument and see if it follows from the premises stated above it. The conclusion statement, statement number five, has to be altered to make it validly deduce a conclusion from the newly revised premises.

Premise number five will look like this; "Therefore, Affirmative Action programs require employers to do something wrong if, and only if, the program eliminates the applicant that will do the job best because of the discrimination against sex and race that the program makes the employers follow". The new revised valid argument looks like this: 1. It is wrong to hire anyone other than the person who will do the job best, and if there is more than one applicant who will do the job equally best, then the new employee must be chosen through a random procedure, such as a blind drawing or a lottery. 2. Whenever one takes race or sex into account when hiring and doing so eliminates the best applicant for the job because of that discrimination, one will hire someone other than the person who will do the best job. 3.

Therefore, it is wrong to take race and sex into account in hiring when it eliminates the applicant who will do the job best from being hired. 4. Affirmative Action programs require employers to take race and sex into account when hiring. 5. Therefore, Affirmative Action programs require employers to do something wrong if, and only if, the program eliminates the applicant that will do the job best because of the discrimination against sex and race that the program makes the employers follow. I believe that each of these premises is now true and the argument is now a valid one.

However, one may still object to the validity of one or more of the premises or the whole argument all together. One objection may be that it is not wrong to hire someone that is less than the best applicant for the job. Another argument against this may be that the employer has the right to hire whomever he / she wants to on what ever basis they would like to because the company is the employers property and they have the right to do what they want with it by way of the constitution. To counter that view, one can say that the people who apply have rights as well, and the employer may not violate certain rights that the applicants have during the hiring process.

Which right takes priority over the other is a whole different argument in itself. Another objection to the employer having the right to hire an employee on whatever basis they want because it is their property is that jobs are a public resource and should be used for the public benefit. Public benefit could be looked at economically or socially. Economically, a business may do better by hiring all beautiful females because they have a high heterosexual male clientele, and a town's economical stature may rise because this business does well. Socially, on the other hand, discrimination could hurt the public by suppressing certain races or sexes. With all of these objections and counter objections in mind, I still believe that the revised argument stated above reflects a good argument about the permissibility of Affirmative Action.

It is possible to believe that the program is permissible under certain circumstances, and the circumstances that I believe Affirmative Action is permissible under were made clear through my arguments.