One reason for this anomaly may be that the remarkably dim have never successfully organized politically, whether because of an understandable reluctance to so identify themselves, or because the members tend to get lost on the way to the meetings. Or perhaps we tolerate this unfairness because society has agreed that some forms of discrimination are okay.

Those who, through no fault of their own, are born fools are simply out of luck, as indeed are the lazy and the untrustworthy. Perhaps these latter traits owe more to environment than to genetics, but is that any less a matter of fate? Why, then, do we prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, race or disability, when character and ability are just as randomly assigned?

We are confronted by many such ambiguities in the debate over "employment equity," which is to say hiring quotas, also known as reverse discrimination. To navigate the issue safely requires that we make a number of practical and moral distinctions. The case for employment equity, on the other hand, rests on confusing, eliding or indeed denying such distinctions need even be made.

Exhibit A: Max Yalden, chief of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. To the argument that people are not statistics, but individuals, and that therefore disparities between groups should not be redressed by discrimination against individuals, Mr. Yalden responds with . . . a statistic. There is no discrimination against white, able-bodied males, the chief commissioner has decreed, because "white men without disabilities made up nearly 55 per cent of all workers newly hired" in 1993, against their 45-per-cent share of the labour force. Equity for the group is equity for the individual.

Exhibit B: Michael Kinsley, writing in The New Yorker. Unlike Mr. Yalden, Mr. Kinsley admits that "affirmative action" (the American euphemism) means reverse discrimination. He just won't admit it's wrong. Critics of the policy, he writes, hanker after an impossible moral clarity in an issue clouded with ambiguities. Indeed, their own position is full of contradictions.

If it's okay to discriminate on some groundsm (see above), he asks, why not race? Why is it all right to discriminate in favour of disadvantaged groups at some points in the process, such as in recruiting, but not in hiring? Why may private groups, such as scholarship funds, give preference to blacks and women, but not the government? "A pure, discrimination-free society is not merely a hopeless ideal," Mr. Kinsley concludes. "It is a logical mirage." If, then, equality is a chimera, on what grounds can we object to reverse discrimination?

Of course, this would also be a dandy argument for apartheid. The case against discrimination, reverse or otherwise, rests upon precisely the distinctions Mr. Kinsley asks us to skip over. There is a difference between discrimination as the happenstance of private bigotries, and discrimination as the deliberate, mandatory, universal credo of the state. There is a difference between policies that help women and minorities compete for jobs, and policies that effectively shut members of other groups out.

And there is most certainly a difference between race or sex and ability as grounds for discrimination. There doesn't actually have to be a reason for this, other than public consensus that there should be a difference. As a society, we have decided that race and sex should normally be irrelevant in deciding whom to hire. Having so decided, we cannot then suddenly make them supremely relevant.

Of course we do not live in a pure meritocracy, with perfect equality of opportunity. There is no meaningful sense in which the child of a crack-addicted single mother has the same opportunity in life as the child of such a privileged background as, for example, my own. But unequal opportunity is still opportunity. And so long as all enjoy legal equality - including protection from discrimination - we have the foundation from which to work toward equality of opportunity. Hiring quotas, on the other hand, lead us in the opposite direction.

Far from an impossible moral ideal, equal treatment in law is an attainable moral imperative. We are all dealt different hands in life. We can try to even out the cards. But, in the end, each must be allowed to play his hand himself.