Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:

1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in the law, seem extremely high.

2) It is interesting that LW sees so many rational arguments for policies that would give more resources to whites or Asians, especially white or Asian males with high test scores who may not have gone to college. While these arguments are phrased as both logical and obvious, LW rarely (ever?) entertains the easily constructed, similarly phrased arguments that would push resources away from LW's typical membership. For example: "It's been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners." Or how's this: "It's been known for generations that religious identification with the in-group eases working relationships and obviates friction over expressions of belief, so employers should as a default prefer employees share their religions."

I said it was conceivable but unlikely. You disagree?

If you look at the history of law, philosophical arguments end up influencing legal arguments all the time.

I absolutely agree. It is conceivable that in the future, arguments could change the courts' regard for this doctrine. But it is unlikely. The law has been in place for fifty years, and the doctrine has seen a ton of challenges in court.

This is a somewhat fundamentalist view of the law, and I am guessing many federal judges at all levels, and regulatory bodies of technical experts, would add something to your definition. I agree with you that the statutory basis for these court rulings is very clear.

But it's also pretty clear that the doctrine of disparate impact, which is what he asked about, has been clarified and nuanced through litigation of those statutes. My point was that over many decades, the courts have not overturned this doctrine due to any philosophical objections of litigants.

Thanks! Do consequentialist kind of port the first axiom (completeness) from the VN-M utility theorem, changing it from decision theory to meta-ethics?

And for others, to put my original question another way: before we start comparing utilons or utility functions, insofar as consequentialists begin with moral intuitions and reason the existence of utility, is one of their starting intuitions that all moral questions have correct answers? Or am I just making this up? And has anybody written about this?

To put that in one popular context: in the Trolley Switch and Fat Man problem, it seems like most people start with the assumption that there exists a right answer (or preferable, or best, whatever your terminology), and that it could never be the case that an agent will do the wrong/immoral/unethical thing no matter what he or she chooses. Am I right that this assumption exists?

Are you asking rhetorically?

The American legal justification for the disparate impact doctrine, and for declaring race a protected category, is the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the legislative justification for that was a history of massive mistreatment of individuals based on skin color.

I gather from the thrust of arguments in this thread that you may be strongly opposed to government protection of racial minorities in the United States, and that you may not believe that racial bigotry is--or possibly even was--a problem that needed legal redress. It is worthwhile to note that the legal basis for these doctrines is well established and, through the wonders of litigation, much studied and highly nuanced. That does not speak to any philosophical objections you have but, frankly, no philosophical objections you make have any bearing on the legal justification.

Fair enough. For "main debate" please read "pertinent legal question."

I'm pretty sure the courts have allowed that IQ-like tests are acceptable in many situations for many types of employment. It's not a hypothetical. I guess I'm saying the question of the "validity of the tests" is a red herring, even if it's an ideological hot potato. I think the main debate these days is not at all about the validity of the tests, it's a debate over business necessity versus disparate impact.

Actually, the legal rationale for restricting the use of such tests in certain kinds of hiring is not that they're invalid. If you proved to the courts that they were "valid," meaning an accurate reflection of crystallized intelligence/abstract reasoning/g/whatever, this would not undermine the central legal argument against them, which is that they produce disparate impacts on protected classes.