Responses to Allen, Appiah, and Lawson James P. Sterba Received: 1 March 2010 / Accepted: 2 April 2010 / Published online: 26 March 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract In my Responses, I take up the various definitional and justificatory challenges that Anita Allen, Anthony Appiah and Bill Lawson raise to my defense of affirmative action and I try to build bridges and remove the apparent disagree- ments between our views. In the process, I have found a way to replace race-based affirmative action with a non-race-based program which retains all the benefits that a race-based program can provide and secures additional benefits as well. Keywords Colorblind Á Discrimination Á Group rights Á White intransigence I want to thank my three critics, Anita Allen, Anthony Appiah and Bill Lawson for their very thoughtful comments on my book, Affirmative Action for the Future. 1 My initial responses presented at an Author Meets Critics Session sponsored by the Committee on Black Philosophers at the APA Eastern Division Meeting in December of 2009 in New York City came just a few days after my daughter’s hot- air balloon wedding in North Carolina and so they may have lacked a certain down- to-earth quality. Happily, this published version of our session has given us all a chance to improve upon our initial presentations. The net result is that I think that it is now possible to see how the argument of my book can be further advanced in new and interesting directions. In what follows, I will discuss my critics’ now revised comments in the order in which they were initially presented at the session. J. P. Sterba (&) Philosophy Department, University of NotreDame, NotreDame, IN, USA e-mail: sterba.1@nd.edu 1 (Sterba 2009). 123 J Ethics (2011) 15:291–306 DOI 10.1007/s10892-011-9105-3