With Affirmative Action, we can give equal opportunities in

education to the general public, which gives equality and fair

competition. Without affirmative action, we create a
disadvantage to minorities who do not have fair access to a
good educational system and have a lesser preparation for
standardized tests such as the SATs and ACTs. When
Affirmative Action allows us to help historically disadvantaged
groups and create equal access to education.
Contention
o When we do not give everybody the same challenges
and opportunities, which creates a competition and
gives equality.
o
Peter McHugh, (Social Theorist, Yale University), Human Studies, Volume 28, p. 137,
2005
MUST HAVE SAME HARDSHIPS AND REWARDS TO HAVE EQUALITY
Sharing equality is not simply a matter of sharing of objects, say hardships and
rewards. It is not a distributive standard. In fact many collectives which do share also believe it appropriate that
hardship and reward maybe unevenly distributed. To share freedom, emancipation, the kind of
sharing that we will name shared being, is more elemental than that (even though it can of course affect distribution). It is
to recognize that human experience of the world is of an intersubjective space,
an arc of encompassing language and history within which is formed a sense
of tradition, of place, and of ones self in that place. In that respect shared being is substantial,
really an experience of itself, of being within lifes substance as a particular living composition of the possible and impossible.
In that experience its space and language become objectified, objectified as unalterable form and structure and all possibility

It is a materialization of the real. Shared being in our case is for white

faces to extend that notion of a person to black faces, faces with the capacity to
understand themselves, their evaluations, and their choices in some
reasonable accord with the trajectory of the real.
and limit.

The competitive environments that are for opportunities are not spread out equally.
Without Affirmative action, disadvantaged groups would already know that they
dont have the opportunities that the white man has and would be less motivated
to work hard and would be less successful in life.

Barbara R Bergmann (Professor American University), In Defensive of Affirmative

Action, Volume 83 p. 31-32, February 1997

How do the reasons for affirmative action stack up against the reason for
special admission of athletes, alumni children, the Nebraskans, the wealthy
well-connected, the deans friends children? The reasons for affirmative action are far more
compelling-helping to cure this countrys racial cleavage, furthering the parity of blacks in the job
market, getting blacks and whites to know each other on campus, making an

allowance for the bad environment and lack of feelings of self-worth that man black youngsters have had to battle through.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (lectured at many schools including Harvard, Yale, Cornell,
Duke, Appiah graduated from Cambridge), Group Rights and Racial Affirmative
Action, Volume 15, 2011
Since legal collective rights are extremely common, as I pointed out, it is hard
to mount a principled objection against a legal collective right to outreach in
virtue of its being a legal collective right. But there is a further reason why a collective right to
outreach for blacks is uncontroversial: It does not seem to entail denying the individual rights of non-blacks. That is
because it is explicitly stated as granting the same collective right to other
groups as it offers to the previously excluded groups. Even if an individual
white person could show that a policy of outreach reduced his probability of
employmentwhich, of course, it often wouldit is hard to see how, in these
circumstances, he could claim that this reduction in probability amounted to
denying him a right. As we shall see below, it is often not the group right for the formerly excluded that opponents
of afrmative action really object to, it is the alleged denial of some individual right to
members of historically privileged groups. In this case there is no plausible argument of this form.