Applicant A's termination is not reasonable. Simply because the applicant received an average performance does not justify been fired. The applicant should have allowed chance and time for improvement, so as to develop and on the other hand able to improve sale in subsequent quarters. The essays by Thomson and Nagel defended the use of preferences but on different grounds. Thomson endorsed job preferences for women and African-Americans as a form of redress for their past exclusion from the academy and the workplace. Preferential policies, in her view, worked a kind of justice. Nagel, by contrast, argued that preferences might work a kind of social good, and without doing violence to justice. Institutions could for one or another good reason properly depart from standard meritocratic selection criteria because the whole system of tying economic reward to earned credentials was itself indefensible.

Unfortunately, many people’s views about affirmative action are not subject to rational consideration, any more than people could be persuaded to think coolly about the “monster Bank” or Communism. If people did think about affirmative action by weighing its costs against its benefits, passions would not run so high. After all, the research record gives complete warrant to neither the hopes of supporters nor the fears of opponents.