  Why, indeed? This is a hard question if one defends affirmative action in terms of compensatory or distributive justice. If directly doing justice is what affirmative action is about, then its mechanisms must be adjusted as best they can to reward individual desert and true merit. The “coal miner’s son” example is meant to throw desert in the defender’s face: here is affirmative action at work thwarting desert, for surely the coal miner’s son—from the hard scrabble of Harlan County, say—has lived with far less advantage than the neurosurgeon’s son who, we may suppose, has reaped all the advantages of his father’s (or mother’s) standing. Why should the latter get a preference?