Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Emily Yoffe asserts that I attacked her "as a tool of the racial and ethnic preference lobby."

She stands by her ethical advice to someone, but quite aside from my problem with that ethical advice, I'd like to say that it's unethical to portray what I said so inaccurately.

Here's the post I wrote, which isn't a general attack on her support for affirmative action. I was calling attention to the problem of incomplete honesty from those who seek to benefit from affirmative action and the way the school applying its policy has shared interests that cause it not to want to know about a false or misleading statement. This is the very issue that had been in the news with respect to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The schools want to be able to say that they have a good proportion of minority students, so they may not mind if an applicant claims, based on family lore, to be a member of a minority group.

Yoffe professed not to notice any harm to anyone in this interaction between a school and an applicant. That was, at best, willfully blind. As an ethicist, she ought to want to address the larger problem. And now, after linking to me as she did, she has an ethical obligation toward me that needs some attention.

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