Well what you certainly don't do is say 'more black kids drown than white kids, I best save the black lad to make the numbers more even'
The analogy is clear. A white lass who's grown up in abject poverty. Moved from foster home to foster home all her life and never had any real Christmas presents is told that a job is unavailable to her because she's the wrong skin colour. That's just wrong and can't be justified. If we care about giving EVERYONE a fair shot at life we should be helping everyone who needs it regardless of skin colour. It's the trolley problem again isn't it. You've got a runaway train heading directly to five people on the tracks. You can divert the train onto a siding where one person is standing. This one person is perfectly healthy. Do you direct the train to that person and deliver kill them to save the other five? Or do you let the train continue on its path and kill the five people? There's no right or wrong answer to that.
What's your answer to the trolley question though? It's not a direct analogy for this situation so your answer isn't necessarily representative of your views on positive discrimination, I'm just curious what your gut said you would do. I personally have never been able to decide what I'd do despite thinking about it regularly for quite a few years. Also depending on your answer there's a follow up question which again is nothing to do with this thread really but again I'm curious (I only heard the follow up question this week)
It's like Sophie's choice, I'm certainly too gutless in theory to make the decision but maybe if I had to and adrenalin kicked in I could.
Morning Donny, Just picking up on this, free third level education certainly won't help every single individual. But I believe it's as close to a silver bullet there is. I grew up in Ireland where we have free third level, the dropout rate post GCSE is around 7%. I went to University with a lot of people who wouldn't have gone to uni if it wasn't free. These people graduated as woodwork and metalwork teachers, quantity surveyors and business people. This in turn frees up loads of jobs down the funnel for others who wish to start as labourers on building sites or similar and work their way up, or learn a trade. It creates a highly educated workforce which draws in multinationals and brings job prosperity. It creates entrepreneurs who in turn create jobs. The worse case scenario is you head off to uni for a few years and don't engage with your course, but at least you'll have left your small town, left your comfort zone, met people from around the country and often around the world and expanded your horizons.
The answers given to the trolley problem depend on your culture and other factors - in China and East Asia, they save old people before children. Most of the world would save women before men, except South America. There are other differences too.