SUSAN HAACK
215
in the pages of
Philosophy,
twenty years or so ago, in response to an article
arguing (yes, really!) that it was perfectly okay. Though I am sure dis–
criminatory hiring is a bad thing, however, I am not sure preferential
hiring is a good thing.
In fact, if the reason it's a bad thing
if
the philosophy department at
Euphoric State fails to hire the best candidate because she is a woman, is–
as I think it is-that
her sex
is
irrelevant,
it might look as
if
there is a very
simple argument that preferential hiring is a bad thing. If what is bad is that
an irrelevant consideration, the sex of the candidate, is influencing the
process, how could it be any less bad to give preference to someone who
is not the best candidate on the grounds that she is a woman, which
requires the same irrelevant consideration to influence the outcome?
A common response is that sex is relevant after all: that appointing
women contributes to a desirable diversity in the academy; that women are
needed as role models; that women have special philosophical insight. The
trouble with the first of these
sugges~ns
is that "diversity" has become
(to borrow Barzun's phrase) one of those foam-rubber, public-relations
words which muffies the otherwise obvious: that a philosophy department
as varied as you like with respect to sex, race, ethnicity and all that, all of
whom were students of Professor Davidson's working on adverbs ending
in "-ingly"(or all of whom were students of Professor Harding's tracking
down rape and torture metaphors in Newton-or whatever) would not, for
all its diversity in one sense, be diverse in the sense that matters.
But perhaps
you
are imagining a department as intellectually diverse as
you like, but all of whom are male Americans of Greek descent. Wouldn't
there then be a case for hiring someone female, and/or not of Greek
descent? If the idea is that this is a way to improve intellectual diversity,
my reply is that there is a better way: read the candidates' work. If the idea
is that, since
ex hypothesi
we already have intellectual diversi ty, social diver–
sity is the next priority, my reply is that a university's priorities ought
always to be the best possible intellectual work and teaching; quality of
mind, not sex or ethnicity, should be the criterion.
But then I see that, if intellectual bent were significantly correlated
with sex, ethnicity, race or whatever, neither of the scenarios just imagined
would be possible anyway. So it is a relief to realize that the question of the
relevance of sex doesn't need to be settled at this point. The argument
considered above fails for reasons independent of the ques tion of the rele–
vance or irrelevance of sex; it relies on a confusion of "candidate who
is
the best" with "candidate who is
judged
the best."
Suppose the reason a woman doesn't get hired even when she's the
best candidate is that women's abilities tend to be systematically underval–
ued; then a policy of preferring a female candidate even when she was not
