It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.
(Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 140 [first published in 1790])
Note from KBJ: Apply what Burke says to race-based and sex-based affirmative-action programs, which reward and punish on the basis of association rather than desert. Could there be anything more irrational or unjust?
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 