Section 5 :
There is nothing left of the argument!
You didn't read carefully my comment. Here :
if you decide to ignore this bit of a sentence in your section V-B, you will be once again accused of selective reading. You should be careful about that.
It's just a warning. You can ignore it, but don't be too surprised if Pigliucci (who knows...) decides to charge you. And don't forget they seem to insist on this following idea : "ecotypes (and hence races) ... are usually selected for only a relatively small number of traits that are advantageous in certain environments".
As I noted prior, Kaplan's (in email) defined "folk races" in an open manner, such that it could include Sesardic-like natural divisions. He just said, basically, "how people use the term in common discourse" and noted that "how" could differ by users. So Kaplan's definition could be consistent with my interpretation of Pigliucci's usage.
First, I have to say that Sesardic gave me a reply :
Dear Meng Hu,
Thanks for the email. In response to your question, I don’t see much difference between how Kaplan and I understand the notion of folk race. In particular, I fully agree with his statement that you quote:
...there is no one set of "folk racial categories" in the U.S. -- different survey instruments recognize different races, and the same instrument will recognize different races at different times, and individual people differ in what races they recognize in their everyday lives, etc.
Best,
Neven
While my attention is directed to the paragraph that Sesardic has quoted, your attention is directed to the broad categories that Kaplan's definition of folk races seem to encompass (and not even stated clearly by Kaplan himself). The bit of sentence closest to what you said was "there is a kind a broad overlapping sense of what races get picked out in everyday life, and how those races are identified, in the U.S. context" (regarding survey instruments) and yet it's not even close to the idea that "Kaplan defined "folk races" in an open manner, such that it could include Sesardic-like natural divisions".
I don't want to insist, really. Again, it's just a warning. In hotted debates, like politics and economics, or religion, or races, people can easily be very dishonest. They read your text, try to refute 1 or 2 of your arguments, out of, e.g., 10. When it's done, they will affirm they have debunked the entire article and all of your argument, even though their "review" is a comment on a few "trivial" points you've made.
The above discussion is not a big hole, it will not affect your defense of biological races, yet it's something that dishonest people may want to insist.
I will add the following footnote after my first usage in section II -- or do you want something else.
It's OK. But if it appears somewhere in section 2, I recommend you to indicate that you'll talk about that subject in depth in section 4.
Section 6 :
About the view of so many people that race would give a justification for discriminatory actions (e.g., apartheid, slaves, ...), you can say that this conclusion is presumptuous. It implies that the past will condition the future. Because this has been done in the past given an environment where the belief of genetic difference was the norm, if we recreate that environment, we will end up just like before. And that, indeed, their claim is hysterical, not rational.
The arrow of causality is not even clear. It could be that a factor X that causes a group of people to go to war with another racial group is also what causes that group of people to believe (with or without proof) that racial genetic differences are real. Not necessarily that such belief would cause this factor X. Since you read many forums and blogs, I bet you have noticed that these guys usually resort to the same argumentation. Something like "what if there are racial genetic differences ? That doesn't matter to me, and I won't treat other groups differently". So, such belief may not have any effect on them. Imagine they're religious, Christians, what do you think they will do when they agree with the hereditarians ? They will continue to be good Christians, e.g., go to Church once in a week, as they do usual, and they will live as usual. That's all. Yet these stupid people can't resist making "association fallacies" and a perfect illustration is given in the citation of HoSang in your section VI-B.
Furthermore, it is simply not true that hereditarians would necessarily caution discrimination, apartheid, slavery etc. And it is not even true that they are necessarily anti-egalitarians and would enjoy seeing blacks stuck in the poverty trap. Gottfredson (
2005) and Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve (their 2 last chapters) said that America must give more opportunities to the poor, by making the good policies, and they believe that the truth (about the reality of genetic group differences) would help America to administer the best remedy. What they want, especially the authors of The Bell Curve, is to make IQ less important in achieving social success.
(P.S.: Note that the above paragraph is not my own view; personally, I don't care about this stuff, and I'm not egalitarian. I'm just giving an argument that I'm likely to make if I want to show that egalitarianism and hereditarianism are not incompatible.)
In any case, you have said more or less the same thing, as shown in the passage below :
In practice, intraspecific race was not infrequently employed to support the monogenist dogma, according to which human groups were lineages of the same species and thus not radically different either ontologically, morally, or physiologically. Insofar as objective moral worth was grounded in natural law and insofar as humans were said to share a common nature as a birthright (the biblical view at the time of the concept’s development), the concept precluded an “objective’ and self-conscious conviction” of “radical inferiority”. The species concept, on the other hand, did allow for this – and it was, at times, employed by some polygenists, for example Josiah Nott, to justify social hierarchies.
And the two citations of Hodge (2013) regarding family and religion are excellent.
But sometimes, I wonder how your opponents will react. Consider that passage :
The myth of “equality” and “universality” has supported the horrors of the Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Holodomor – ultimately the greatest democides of the 20th century. It continues to support totalitarian humanism around the world.. We cannot simply ignore the harm this myth has caused and pretend that the myth never existed. The scientific, democratic and ethical goal should be to eliminate the false concepts of “equality” and “universality” completely.
I'm Ok with what you say. But remember that equality does not have a pejorative meaning. The word equality has the idea to bring groups of people closer, so to speak. But "race" affirms the differences between groups of people; it tends to encourage groups to distance themselves. That's what they will say, at least.
Ethnic and kin preferentialism is natural, in the sense of being partially genetically conditioned (Lewis and Bates, 2010; Weber et al., 2011; Orey and Park, 2012) and in the sense of being evolutionarily rational (Salter, 2003).
The first idea can be supplemented with additional yet different kind of studies. You have two studies (
here and
here) that show that people have dogs which "look like" their owners, and that they have cars that "look like" their owners (
here). There's another study that shows that people tend to be attracted to their own traits (
here). This generally supports Rushton's hypothesis (
1989) that we are more altruist to people who look like us and the general idea that people cry more for relatives who are more likely to share genes in common (
Littlefield & Rushton, 1986). That gives some support to the argument that people prefer people and things that look just like them. It shows that racial preference should be better termed as preference to one's self, and that it was already there; that is, the acceptance of biological race is irrelevant to the formation of these preferences. Even when accepted the belief there are no races, people would still prefer people that look like them. And it's much more than skin color. If you remember, it's more or less what I tried to say to Kaplan in my mails; the race denials want to believe that racial preferences are caused by belief about races, and that "racist" people forget about the most important aspect : the individual level. But as I said, it works the other way around. At the individual level, people prefer those who look just like them; groups of people far away geographically happened to be much less alike, either due to larger genetic distance or cultural distance or both. It just happened that individual preferences correlate with racial preferences. But race has nothing to do with it, to begin with.
The second idea deserves to be developed somewhere in section 6. Although you cited Salter's book On Genetic Interests, you didn't refer to his argument against utilitarianism and his proposal for a reasoning based purely on adaptiveness.
The problem with those based on “ethnic conflicts” is that “ethnic groups” are often not organized around a biological race concept.
Agreed. But your opponents will probably tell you that the acceptance of biological races can only worsen the situation. However, you can say that such acceptance is a poor predictor of conflicts, as suggested in VI-D. At the same time, they are likely to argue that the acceptance of biological races would tend to favor laws and promote behaviors which hurt black people. But read what follows below.
Some concede that it is not known for certain whether environmentalism or naturism is actually the case, but argue that this does not matter since false environmentalism (3) can have no negative externalities. But the actual effect of (3) is a perverted form of justice in which unjust treatment is dished out for the sake of attempting to equalize unequal groups and in which groups are ethnocided for the sake of preventing differences not unjustly caused.
I prefer geneticism over naturism (a word I have never seen in life before today). I have, by the way, never heard that geneticism invokes the idea of additive genetic effects or naturism saying it does not make that assumption. Regardless, I think your opponents can easily counter the argument in (3). False geneticism (and even true) would cause discrimination against some other races. One perfect illustration is criminal justice.
Have a look at this article. It says that when blacks are arrested, they receive greater punishments than do white people. The bias against blacks is due to the fact that most judges are whites. The racial bias diminishes substantially when at least one of the judges is black. And when whites are judged by black judges, these black judges apply stronger punishments than do white judges. Furthermore, blacks receive no extra punishment when they are accused of crime. The race of the person accused of crime (the defendant) does not affect the probability to get a death sentence. The variable that has an impact on the probability to get death sentence is the race of the victim.
Note the following paragraph that I quote :
According to these mock-jury experiments, both white and black jurors seem to discriminate. Professor Johnson did not, however, think the juror bias was intentional. “Because the process of attributing guilt on the basis of race appears to be subconscious,” Johnson says, “jurors are unlikely either to be aware of or to be able to control that process.”
What's interesting here is that racial preferences seem to be hardwired into our genes. "Conflicts" resulting from this seem inevitable. White people seem afraid that US whites discriminate against US blacks but ignore that the process is reversed in South Africa. What that seems to imply is that multiculturalism doesn't work, and nationalism (and with it, racial homogeneity) may not be a wrong alternative.
In my opinion, it's easy to counter the sort of arguments used by your opponents. People practice nepotism in their everyday life. They care more about their own children than the children of strangers, are more affected by the death of a member of their own family than to someone else, and for the same reason, they grieve more for the death of someone who is more related to them. The reason, I suspect, is because they share more alleles with the deceased person, which in this case would represent a greater genetic loss. Alleles in common decrease with genetic distance (i.e., from blood family members to blood relatives to ethny to race to species to genus). Some proof of it is suggested by the studies of Littlefield & Rushton (
1986), Rushton (
2005), Segal (
2002).
So, it's not illogical that a white judge would feel more offensed if a non-white kills a white person. And that, for this reason, they punish strangers more severely. Your child has about half of your alleles. If you help him survive by practicing nepotism, you're helping yourself in increasing your likelihood of reproductive success. For exactly the same reason, you're more likely to gain in reproductive success if you practice nepotism for people of your own race vs other races. That's why nepotism is not irrational, and that's why it also involve harsher punishment for strangers who "attack" your own people.
The study of races didn't come before the recognition of visible, physical differences. It is because of such visible differences that the idea of races can come to mind at some point. "Races" do not create differences. And it's difference (not race) that has been the source of conflicts. This is generally not related to physical appearances but differing opinions. As you know, the acceptance of genetic differences wouldn't change the matter much more. I believe people don't care so much about genetics than what they seem. When two groups are entering into conflicts, probably the idea of whether the other groups are different due to genetics or environment is irrelevant. In any given country, a majority group may feel offensed by the cultural, religious practices of some other minority groups, and whether such tradition has genetics roots has no relevance. If the disagreement can't be resolved, sooner or later, one group would feel like taking action.
The previous statements, however, assume that utilitarianism matters. It's not always obvious. Having children (or helping others) is not considered to be a bad thing. And it is adaptive in the sense that it enhances your reproductive success (fitness). But what if children bring not happiness (
as it seems) ? Does that mean everyone should stop making babies ? On the other hand, race is not a meliorative term, and the very term "race" insists on the existence of differences between people. Does that mean differences, per se, are bad ?
Why adaptiveness should be valued over utilitarianism ? Consider this passage from Salter (2006, p. 284) :
In defending religious thought from the evolutionary perspective, D. S. Wilson puts rationality in its place thus:
Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought. Evolutionary biologists should be especially quick to grasp this point because they appreciate that the well-adapted mind is ultimately an organ of survival and reproduction. . . . It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective.
Or this one, page 288 :
Utilitarianism has its problems, especially with justice. There are realistic scenarios in which an act or rule justified by utilitarian ethics is repellent to moral intuition. One such scenario is as follows. A suspected murderer surrenders to the town sheriff and convinces the latter of his innocence. The murder is causing widespread anger and a mob outside the gaol house, constituting most of the town's adult population, calls for the suspect's lynching. Acceding to the mob's demand would bring an immediate rise in average happiness in the town. but doing so strikes us as dereliction of the sheriff's duty and also as immoral on the grounds of punishing an innocent person. Let us change the scenario a little. Now the sheriff discovers that not only is the suspect innocent but the real murderer is the mayor. The latter killed out of passion and is most unlikely to repeat the offence. Indeed, his conduct has been exemplary all his life, while the suspect is a vagabond petty thief who lowers the tone of the town, damaging its nascent tourist industry. Convicting the mayor will ravage the town's social order, produce widespread shame and embarrassment among his extended family, and effectively kill off the tourist industry, throwing dozens of breadwinners out of work. Only the sheriff is aware of the evidence needed to convict the mayor and absolve the suspect. What should he do? Utilitarianism dictates that he let the suspect hang and the mayor go free. Yet this strikes us as unjust.
Salter (2006, p. 289) also says that one criterion of utilitarianism, happiness, is subjectively defined, but that adaptiveness does not have such problems :
Another weakness of utilitarianism is its happiness criterion. Happiness is an emotion, and thus a proximate rather than an ultimate interest. As an indicator of ultimate interests it is better than nothing, but fallible. Individuals suffering from mania appear happy and claim to be so, but are prone to maladaptive behaviour. Drug addicts experience periods of intense happiness, and this can be maintained for a time if the supply of drugs is kept up. Yet drug addiction tends to be maladaptive. Humans strive for resources and status, that is clear, but achieving this goal does not increase happiness in any simple or predictable way. By contrast reproductive fitness is an objective measurable by number of offspring and continuity of one's familial and ethnic lineage.
And some pages later, he develops his idea of adaptive utilitarianism :
The consequence of ultimate import is not happiness of the greatest number but adaptiveness of the greatest number. This notion underpins a survival ethic - which I shall refer to as 'adaptive utilitarianism' - which has important advantages over happiness and other proximate criteria.
...
A universal ethical system, one that was applicable to non-human animals, and to organisms anywhere, would emphasize the value that unites all life: reproduction. Adaptive utilitarianism would apply to all species anywhere because it deals with the fundamental reproductive interest of all life.
...
Another weakness of utilitarianism that a survival ethic corrects is the arbitrariness of the clause prescribing that happiness be maximized. Whether the criterion is happiness, pleasure or economic profit, Mill and the economists who adopted his approach thought that it was impossible to get too much of a good thing. This is an improbable view if proximate interests are not goals in themselves but means to adaptiveness. Even too much wealth or too many mates is bad if the monopoly diminishes the society bearing one's genetic interests. Too much happiness can diminish prudence and thus harm other interests, such as status or wealth, reducing fitness. Like other proximate interests, happiness necessarily exists in balance with other states, and is thus best optimized rather than maximized. Adaptiveness, in the sense of ability to survive and reproduce, is different. One cannot be too well adapted.
...
Only the means used to pursue interests count in evaluating actions. Since being adaptive is morally uncompelling, it is deemed unacceptable if any harm whatsoever is committed in its name. In other words, it is neither right nor wrong to pursue genetic interests; but the means used in that pursuit do vary in moral quality.
...
Pure adaptive utilitarianism implies that it can be moral to harm minority interests in defence or expansion of majority ethnic genetic interests. This follows from the unqualified statement that it is positively good to behave adaptively and better to pursue the adaptiveness of the greatest number. The mixed ethic allows frustration of others' interests but only in defence. Since an aggressing group violates others' rights to life, liberty and property and accompanying procedural rights in order to expand its genetic interests, its victims are justified in harming the aggressor in acts of defence. The rights-centred ethic holds that pursuing ethnic genetic interest is not bad, so long as no harm is done in the process. This disallows aggression because it violates rights, but it also disallows defence when the aggression only threatens genetic interests, since these are given nil weight.
...
It is in the face of the pure ethic that Alexander's caution about unrestrained interest seeking rings true: '[Ethical] rules consist of restraints on particular methods of seeking self-interests, specifically on activities that affect deleteriously the efforts of others to seek their own interests.' The mixed ethic has such restraints in the right to survival of the losing group with reduced but viable resources. But it balances these rights against the right to strive for one's ethny, which permits asymmetrical outcomes. Recall Hamilton's view that some competition must be allowed to continue.
...
Let me summarize my answer to the first question, 'Does defending ethnic genetic interests ever justify frustrating other interests?'. Pure adaptive utilitarianism approves of ethnic genetic interests frustrating other interests so long as this maximizes the adaptiveness of the greater number. The mixed ethic also approves but affords basic rights to all parties, including minorities. The rights-centred ethic rejects frustrating other interests because this causes harm. I have argued in favour of the mixed ethic. The analogy between family and ethny helps clarify the moral issues at stake. Ethnic identity combined with a feeling or belief that the ethny constitutes an extended family is likely to induce a sense of duty towards it. An observer might agree that such a duty exists. The analogy indicates that if it is wrong to divert a parent's nurture from his or her children, then it is also wrong to divert individuals from identifying with or aiding their ethnies. The family analogy would lose force if it were plausibly argued that adaptive behaviour cannot be moral because it is discriminatory. This is Kant's classic argument that moral rules must be universalisable. However, this position is vulnerable to a reductio ad nauseam, since it implies that mother love is not morally good and that moral behaviour is impossible in the long-term future. It is also vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum, because it implies that moral behaviour could not have evolved.
In sum, Salter seems to say it is justifiable to frustrate others' interests if the reason is to defend one's own (i.e., fellow) ethnic genetic interest. He explains this in detail at pages 299-310. You should read it, if you find the time (I have asked someone a while ago to upload my scan on libgen; check it out).
One very important passage about morality is on page 308, where you read :
Alexander implies that universalism is often a competitive tactic, or can be, and concludes thus: 'If morality means true sacrifice of one's own interests, and those of his family, then it seems to me that we could not have evolved to be moral.'
That's the best argument that morality can only be evolutionary maladaptive. And that we have evolved only to "discriminate" human groups (so, Singer's argument doesn't work). At the same time, morality can be understood in a different way. At page 308, again, you read :
Darwin considered moral behaviour to have evolved to be universalistic within the tribe but particularistic between tribes. In his view self sacrifice was a losing strategy for isolated individuals but a winning one when put to the service of inter-tribal competition:
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children of the same tribe, yet an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, who were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.
This type of morality is not the naïve and blind one previously described. Again, the same idea is illustrated : discrimination is not maladaptive and undesirable. Salter (2006, p. 271) even says that the defense of genetic interest is not incompatible with foreign aid. He says there is a correlation between national homogeneity and foreign aid (as % of GDP) and explains that it could be explained by the fact that the country becomes more generous when it is not threatened by ethnocentric reactions to growing numbers of foreigners within their territory : "Cross-racial support for children would be much less maladaptive for donors and their ethnic groups if they sent support to the children, instead of bringing the children to the supporting society. Individuals who wish to help homeless children but also care for their own people could subsidize adopting couples from the child's own ethny, or kindred ethnies." (Salter, 2006, p. 271). At the same page, he says that trans-racial adoption is malaptive if the adopted children do not reciprocate equally. For instance, if an adopted black (by white family) decides to help poor black families, it's a genetic loss for the white population since an adopted white child would have help poor white families. But that applies to ethnies as well. The adoption of danish children by english families, he says, can cause genetic loss, although to a much, much lesser degree. In fact, the genetic loss increases with the genetic distance regarding the adopted child.
In a multi-ethnic society, when one desires to avoid practicing nepotism there emerges several threats to adaptiveness. One is interracial relationship. Children from produced by interracial couples will harm at least the interest of one of the two groups; the racial group he doesn't choose to marry. While it can't be negatively affected when each group marry members of their own group. Another issue is with reproduction. If a dominant group in his home country produces less babies than minority groups, that is necessarily maladaptive for the dominant group. Thus, if humanism implies you must give equal weights to all human groups, it implies that you'll be under the threat of losing your (reproductive) fitness.
From the evolutionary perspective, it should be adaptive to apply strategies that give relatively more advantages, conveniences, amenities, to the people of the dominant group, and it should be no less adaptive for people to make "discriminatory" choices in their everyday life.
(P.S.: The Salter 2006 correspond to the Salter 2003 book you have cited. I just happened to have the 2nd edition.)
That being said, I am going to edit some of my earlier messages, and I encourage you to do the same, if you think it's needed. Some of the links don't work anymore because now the threads are merged, and the previous ones have disappeared. And I also want to ensure that the readers understand to which posts (specifically) I am responding.
(edit: Oh by the way, I noticed now that the number of views is only 692. It's unfortunate that merging the thread does not merge the number of views. Maybe next time, multiple threads should not be allowed.)
