What Indirect Affirmative Action Can Do

Affirmative action is under pressure in the United States. At the moment, affirmative action is both legally prohibited and politically ill advised. For an egalitarian, this is not good news. What to do? This paper aims to show that indirect affirmative action can be useful for the egalitarian. It does so in two steps. First, it explains what indirect affirmative action is. Providing a paradigm-based definition, it argues that an intention to disproportionately benefit a minority is not a necessary, but a paradigmatic, condition of indirect affirmative action. Second, it shows that (i) indirect affirmative action survives prominent objections to affirmative action, (ii) reasons of equality of opportunity and integration give us reason to pursue indirect affirmative action, and (iii) in a politically inegalitarian climate like the current one in the US, indirect affirmative action is particularly strategically useful vis-á-vis direct affirmative action for the egalitarian, and it provides a preliminary case for why it is sometimes permissible to pursue indirect affirmative action as a form of egalitarian gamesmanship.