(FORTUNE Magazine) – We have closely studied the opinions delivered by five different Supreme Court factions in the case of Wygant et al. v. Jackson Board of Education et al., and you know what? We still cannot figure out when it is naughty to reverse- discriminate and when it is nice. There now seems to be absolutely nobody under those robes willing to just haul off and say you can't discriminate. So the forecast here is for additional decades of ontological hairsplitting over the difference between a ''compelling'' government interest and one that is merely ''important,'' and if you are wondering who cares, the answer is that Brother Powell says a compelling interest must be demonstrated before you can have preferences for minorities, whereas Brother White is among those basically in favor of importance. Meanwhile, Sister O'Connor has been cleaving to the view, which could well catch fire anytime, that the distinction ''may be . . . negligible.'' Then there is this marvelous hiring-vs.-layoff distinction the robesters have been laboring to evolve. According to Wygant, affirmative-action plans can still be rated progressive and constitutional if they merely result in white people not being hired, but are nonkosher if they result in whites with seniority actually getting fired when it is time for layoffs. According to the plurality of Powell, Burger, Rehnquist, and O'Connor, ''Denial of a future employment opportunity is not as intrusive as loss of an existing job.'' We seldom agree with Brother Marshall on affirmative-action cases but found ourselves with him when he expressed a certain bewilderment over this line of reasoning. The relevant distinction, he made plain, is not between getting hired and getting laid off; it's between high-seniority whites getting laid off and recently hired minorities getting laid off. Once you accept the premise that those minorities are entitled to their jobs because of race, why would you not also worry about the intrusiveness of their layoffs? Also not evidencing steel-trap mentation on our scorecard was Brother Stevens carrying on about the competing short-term and long-term considerations. Right here and now, he argued, government bodies must often take race into account in their hiring and firing decisions. They are doing this to help us reach the ''ultimate goal,'' which ''of course'' is to be colorblind. And yet we somehow do not sense that ultimacy is any closer than it used to be.