Concluding Comments

Abstract

In my original paper I sought to argue that compensatory justice is simply the wrong model for justifying reverse discrimination and I suggested that distributive justice might provide a more appro­priate model. Jenny Teichman, in her summary of the issues raised and discussed by Elizabeth Wolgast and myself, drew attention to one (though not necessarily the only) obscurity in my paper, namely whether I thought that adoption of the distributive model would allow one to refute the objections to reverse discrimination or merely render one psychologically freer to accept it. Now I certainly did not intend the first of these, and though I can see that the second is indeed a likely empirical consequence of my argument, I did not intend it either! Rather, operating at the level of criticism of the style of argumentation, I proposed something akin to a “paradigm shift”, leaving it to experts in the area of distributive justice to exploit or explode my proposal.