I'm going to try to apply this approach to one goal of the civil rights movement that Ayesha mentioned. Suppose someone claims that elite state schools are justified in only admitting white students. The argument might be that this is a fair policy because there is a difference between the intellectual abilities of blacks and whites. In other words, race is a relevant difference because there is a difference between the intelligence of different races.

One way to counter this view would be to argue that each applicant should be judged individually. In other words, only his or her intelligence matters. Group differences, if there are any, are irrelevant.

But I want to take a different approach. Suppose that we can demonstrate that there is no difference between the intelligence of blacks and whites taken as a whole. If we could do this, we would have shown that race or color was irrelevant to developing a school admissions policy. In this case, relevance would turn on a scientific question.