Equality. Meritocracy or Affirmative action?

I just finished a 3 week vacation around Australia so I figured this blog should be about the philosophy of equality.

For a long time I've been struggling with the issue of equality. Is affirmative action a good thing or is it discriminatory? Should we value equal outcomes or equal opportunities? How should we treat people if certain groups of people have evolved differently?

For many years I've been a die hard fan of a meritocratic society. In a meritocracy, all citizens have the opportunity to be recognized and advanced in proportion to their abilities and accomplishments. In a nutshell this means you value equal opportunities, not necessarily equal outcomes. An example is Uber: to become an Uber driver, nobody looks at your race, gender or sexual orientation, instead all they look at is your ability to do the job, and the more lifts you provide, the more money you make. It's easy to see why I was such a fan of this form of functioning; it seems to avoid any form of discrimination and maximizes efficiency.

However, I've been trying to reconcile this with my mostly positive views on affirmative action. Affirmative action is the policy of awarding groups of people that have historically faced severe prejudice with additional education or employment benefits. There's no doubt that racism and sexism has existed and that it continues to exist in subtle ways. Perhaps affirmative action is an effective way to shock the system out of these cultural quagmires. A Meritocracy, by comparison, seems painfully slow in countering this problem, because even though it would be rational to hire the best person for the job, some employers will consciously or unconsciously lean on cultural stereotypes and avoid hiring blacks or women. Minor side note: It's not entirely irrational for employers to do this by the way! There is always going to be some uncertainty behind potential candidates (after all, your uni grade and a 10 minute interview can't give an employer complete knowledge about work ethic or how social you are), and in this void of uncertainty it would be rational for an employer to predict a candidates skill set according to stereotypes assuming those stereotypes are a statistical average of the group the candidate belongs to. I'm a fan of affirmative action for these types of causes, however, I can't help the obvious contradiction between affirmative action and a meritocracy. Affirmative action, no matter how well intentioned, involves treating groups differently, whereas a meritocracy avoids looking at groups all together.

So what's the solution? Perhaps use affirmative action for a fixed time until all the cultural problems have been ironed out, and then switch to a meritocracy? It seems like a good idea, but I don't think it'll work. And I think the main reason it won't work is because right now most people on this earth believe dogmatically that 'all humans are created equal'. Don't get me wrong, I liked Martin L King's speech, and I'm gonna let him finish, but from a Darwinian perspective, it can't be true. Humans, although very similar, have evolved with slightly different traits including intelligence - a highly prized employment skill. The problem of applying affirmative action until all the cultural problems are ironed out is that 1) Prejudice and stereotypes will never fully disappear so long as different groups exhibit average differences and 2) It's impossible to know when they've been ironed out since average genetic differences imply a natural split of gender in a particular field might not be 50 50. This means a temporary application of affirmative action in theory could turn out to be a perpetual form overbalance in practice.

To add more fuel to the fire, here are a bunch of other things to consider:
1) Should disabled people still be looked after in a meritocracy even though they can't contribute as much? Presumably yes, and if so, where do you draw the line?
2) Female only scholarships in Engineering are a clear case of affirmative action. Perhaps a much more subtle form of affirmative action is government drink driving ads targeting young males. Both are government payed incentives targeting groups. If you're against one, why aren't you against the other?
3) A meritocracy rewards the best worker regardless of group he/she belongs to. This seems fair because you can't choose the group you belong to, whereas you can choose work ethic. However, at a very deep philosophical level, your intelligence, personality and work ethic are actually determined by things external to you (see my previous posts about determinism), so the act of rewarding an individual based on merit becomes as arbitrary as rewarding an individual that belongs to a group.

In the end I think I figured out the solution! The solution is that neither meritocracy or affirmative action, or any combination of the two are fundamentally good. I know this is going to sound super dissatisfying, but at a fundamental level if we define good as whatever maximizes well being, then what is good may be a form of governance that is entirely different from anything we've mentioned. Maybe it's true that a meritocracy could be highly correlated with maximizing well being, but it's entirely possible, given the primal nature of our brains, that extreme inequality could also maximize well being.