This article defends a new type of preferential hiring. Rather than compensating groups for past or present employment-related discrimination, it seeks to ensure that groups with disproportionate unemployment rates that are due significantly – but not necessarily wholly – to their members having relatively narrow competencies, such as autistic individuals and people with hearing loss, ADHD and lower education levels, are prioritized for jobs that match their abilities. After defending such competency-based preferential hiring based on its benefits for persons with narrower competencies and for societies more broadly, I address several criticisms, including concerns that this approach may be stigmatizing.

In “Parental Love and Filial Equality,” Giacomo Floris and Riccardo Spotorno offer an explanation for why parents should treat their children as equals. The authors argue that this moral obligation is grounded in parents’ duty to love their children in an attitudinal, though not necessarily emotional, sense. This duty, they contend, requires them to disregard variations in their children’s status-conferring properties, as long as those properties meet a minimum threshold. This article argues that this account of filial equal treatment has serious shortcomings. In its place, it proposes a more outcome-oriented or consequentialist account.