Philosophy of Science and Race

Naomi Zack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134728022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2003. In this concisely argued, short new book, well-known philosopher Naomi Zack explores the scientific and philosophical problems in applying a biological conception of race to human beings. Through the systematic analysis of up-to-date data and conclusions in population genetics, transmission genetics, and biological anthropology, Zack provides a comprehensive conceptual account of how race in the ordinary sense has no basis in science. Her book combats our everyday understanding of race as a scientifically supported taxonomy of human beings, and in conclusion challenges us to be clear about what we mean by race and what it would require to remedy racism.

1.
Philosophical Racial Essentialism: Hume and Kant

Background

The kinds of oppression and discrimination that are now associated with racism have a longer history than the idea of race. Varied forms of clannish ness, tribalism, regionalism, and xenophobia can be traced to the earliest days of recorded human history, and there is evidence of group-based conflict and competition among ancient Homo sapiens, hominids, and other primates. Chauvinism based on nationality and religion also predate racism and racialism, or belief in the existence of races. Much of what is now considered racism instantiates more specific and more general types of discrimination than that directly resulting from biological ideas about race. For instance, people can be described as racist about skin color or ethnicity, which are more specific than race, and about gender or human species identity, which are more general than race.^l Ideas of race as human biological typology, and the racism(s) distinctively associated with them, did not appear in Western culture, science, or philosophy before the eighteenth century.² This is partly because of the historical origins of the modern science of biology and partly because of the historical development of Western colonialism, which was justified by systems of human classification privileging Europeans and (white) Americans.³

The Western philosophical contribution to scientific ideas of race is difficult to assess in terms of motive and influence. Were the primary philosophers of race influenced by the external economic and cultural events of colonialism, so that their speculations about hierarchical human taxonomy were mere rationalizations for the injustices committed by Europeans as they expanded into Africa and the Americas? That is, was the primary philosophical thought on race influenced by what we would call external societal pressures? Or, were philosophies of race developed autonomously, based on the best information available in intellectual contexts sheltered from external social and economic forces? And, whether externally influenced or autonomous, was this thought innocent of the kind of malice that today would qualify it as racist? Whatever the answers, the philosophical contribution influenced social, political, and scientific formulations of human difference and became a formidable intel lectual obstacle to abolitionism and egalitarianism.

The ways in which Hume and Kant described Africans as inferior to whites have received sharp critical attention recently, because according to contemporary standards, both philosophers were virulent white supremacists. However, little if any analysis has been done on the racialism, or ontology of human races, which underlay Hume and Kant's value judgments about what they thought were racial differences. The aim of this chapter is to pinpoint the gaps in their thinking about an ontology of human races. This requires some prior reflection about essentialism, and I will begin with several historical considerations.

Today, it is derogatory to call a thinker or a concept essentialist, in one or both of two ways: a charge is made that nonexistent essences are being posited; a belief in the existence of essences is alleged to be held as a justification for discrimination against people with an assumed essence. Both forms of the derogation can be imprecise because the concept of essences is complicated. There is no empirical foundation for a concept of essences, outside of the nonbiological physical sciences. Moreover, any contemporary concept of essences in the physical sciences would be different from the historical, metaphysical connotations of the term. The extension of essentialism, or a notion of essences, into the biological and social sciences is no longer accept able to most practitioners, although they may sometimes, perhaps unintentionally, presuppose the validity of essentialism. As a result, the use of racial essentialism in cultural contexts and the criticism of such usage makes it necessary to describe three false levels of belief: beliefs that biological things have essences; beliefs that biological essences underlie human cultural or social typologies and cause cultural or psychological essences; beliefs that members of a culture or society are mistaken about the nature of the biological or cultural and psychological essences that cause its typologies. The third level is the most difficult to address when theoretical and practical liberation has been constructed on the basis of nonexistent essences, of any kind, especially when the essences have been posited as foundations for liberatory identities. Indeed, essentialism in the last sense is still evoked as a basis for group solidarity in established nonwhite cultural ideologies.

In the history of philosophy, Aristotle, from the Metaphysics, is usually credited with the first empiricist (in the sense of pertaining to existent physical objects) essentialist analysis that could be applied to living things. Aristotle posited the essence of a thing as something in the thing that made it what it was: "Each thing itself, then, and its essence are one and the same in no merely accidental way. . . . because to know a thing at least is just to know its essence. "⁴ Elliott Sober explains that Aristotelian essences, as the defining component of species, were constitutive: The essence of a species or natural kind was believed by Aristotle to be present in each member of the species, and it was what made it a member of that species.⁵ Aristotle distinguished between essential properties and accidental properties. The essential properties, or essences of things, could not be changed without changing the kinds of things they were. Accidental properties, and changes in them, did not affect identity in this way.

In addition to their ontological, constitutive role, Aristotle thought that essences, but not accidents, were important to study. The study of essences was the proper subject of science, the content of knowledge. With the beginning of early modem empiricism, there was a general philosophical revolt against the a priori methods of Aristotelian scholasticism as a way of gaining knowledge about existing things. It was thought that the scholastics had spent too much time on definition and not enough on observation. The revolt extended to a rejection of the notion of real essences as determinants of what individual things were, in taxonomies of natural kinds. Part of the rejection resulted from the difficulty in imagining how real essences could ever be observed, part from skepticism that scientific knowledge could yield certainty as Aristotle and his followers assumed.⁶ John Locke argued in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that we can never know real essences if they are substrata that cause the presence of those defining properties that we can observe. The defining properties of physical things, such as the hardness, malleability, and color of gold, are nominal essences, according to Locke. Nominal essences are not in things, as essences, but are chosen by us to be defining (or necessary and sufficient conditions) of classifiable things, based on human interests and systems of meanings.

This then, in short, is the case: Nature makes many particular Things, which do agree one with another, in many sensible Qualities and probably too, in their internal frame and Constitution: but 'tis not this real Essence that distinguishes them into Species; 'tis Men, who, taking occasion from the Qualities they find united in them, and wherein, they observe often several individuals to agree, range them into Sorts, in order to their meaning, for the convenience of comprehensive signs.⁷

Locke did not deny the existence of real essences, but, as Irving Copi notes, he was content to posit them as unobservable causes of nominal essences.⁸ It is now widely accepted that what Aristotle called "essences" and Locke called "real essences" have been successfully identified in some physical sciences, such as chemistry.⁹ In such sciences, there would seem to be no need for a concept of Lockean nominal essences because any observable real essences would serve as nominal essences as well. However, the situation is different in the biological sciences. Most theorists and researchers do not now believe that biological natural kinds have real essences. In addition, there is debate about whether they have what Locke considered to be nominal essences, or characteristics present in all or most members of a natural kind that it makes sense to define as determining membership in that kind. More will be said about methods of biological classification, in future chapters. The point to be taken here for an understanding of racialist essentialism is that in its origins, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea of race was a particular instance of [the ideas of] Aristotelian essences or Lockean real essences. This essentialist modern idea of race was anachronistic in its time, because empiricist philosophers who used it would have had the benefit of Locke's seventeenth-century critique of Aristotelian essences.

It should be emphasized that both Aristotelian and Lockean essentialism pertain to physical reality. When contemporary critics identify something as racialist, essentialist, or racist, they are often talking about presumed links between biological real or nominal essences, on the one side, and psychology and culture on the other side. That is, they are talking about relations. By contrast, Aristotelian essences and Lockean real essences were [supposed to be] actually in physical things. However, neither Aristotle nor Locke seems to have thought that anything resembling biological racial essences were determinant of human psychology or culture. Ivan Hannaford notes that in the Physiognomonica, which is commonly attributed to Aristotle, the author rejects as indicative of psychological or cultural difference the kinds of physical traits that later in history came to be associated with racial difference.¹⁰ Locke did not have an idea of biological race as something that could he associated with cultural difference. In his day, politically and morally important human differences were mainly associated with differences in religious belief and affiliation. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, he uses an example of what today would resemble racial discrimination to argue for the absurdity of discrimination based on religious difference:

Suppose this Business of Religion were let alone, and that there were some other Distinction made between men and men, upon account of their different Complexions, Shapes and Features, so that those who have black Hair (for example) or gray Eyes, should not enjoy the same Privileges as other Citizens . . . can it be doubted but these Persons, thus distinguished from others by the Colour of their Hair and Eyes, and united together by one common Persecution, would be as dangerous to the Magistrate, as any other that had associated themselves merely upon the account of Religion?¹¹

Locke's analogy is a kind of reductio ad absurdum and it underscores how far he was from drawing important human distinctions on the basis of differences in physical appearance. Indeed, in the context of nominal essences in the Essay discussion mentioned above, he is at times unsure, given the existence of "monsters," that there are real divisions between human and animal species, apart from where, given the nature of our ideas, it is convenient to draw boundaries.¹² Assuming that for Locke, as for us, differences between humans and animals would always have to be greater than differences within the human group, and assuming that Lockean real essences were, like Aristotelian essences, constitutive, Locke could not have thought there were differences in real essences between human groups.¹³ Furthermore, in his discussion of personal identity, also in the Essay, Locke notes that shape seems to be part of the definition or nominal essence of human beings, because we would deny membership in the category of humanity to cats and parrots which could speak, think, and even philosophize!¹⁴ While skin color differences were acknowledged in Locke's day, they were not associated with what would he considered racial difference now or even then. During the early days of the British mercantilism, the Crown encouraged slave trading as a way to develop a monopoly over the transportation of British goods. Sea merchants were resistant at first. In 1621, Richard Johson refused to accept as commodities, "any who had our own shape."¹⁵ That is, Johson, like Locke after him in the cat and parrot examples in the Essay, thought that sameness in physical shape was sufficient for sameness in species identity, and along with that, sameness in being worthy of moral consideration.

The notion that physical biology alone determines culture and psychology does not have a long history in the concept of race, because it has only been since the 1930s that theorists in the human biological sciences have broadly agreed that cultural differences among human groups are not inherited along with [what are believed to be] physical racial differences.¹⁶ Indeed, only after culture had been distinguished from hereditary biology did it become possible to debate the extent to which biology did or did not cause the cultural differences associated with distinct biological races. Before the conceptual separation of culture from biology, racialist essentialists generally assumed that culture and psychology were inherited within distinct biological racial groups, presumably via the Aristotelian or real essences of race. Such mythology is evident not only in Hume and Kant's speculations about race, but in writings by political theorists such as Thomas Jefferson, as well as in the widely accepted pronouncements of white supremacist cultural authorities, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, neither Hume nor Kant made explicit political or social proposals about race. Their writing on race was ostensibly about the ontology and taxonomy of race: It provided a philosophical foundation for subsequent anthropometric studies of racial difference, as well as for white supremacist political doctrine. The philosophy of science question that needs to be answered for each of them is, Where and to what extent did they go beyond the evidence available to them and the logic they otherwise followed?

Hume on Race

Hume's views on human racial difference occur in a footnote within "Of National Characters," first published in the 1754 edition of his Essays Moral, Political and Literary.¹⁷ Richard Popkin's account of the broader intellectual context of this footnote leaves little doubt that Hume was aware of the importance of the footnote's content, because he wrote it during a public debate about whether the human species had one origin or several that corresponded to different races. Hume disagreed with Compte de Buffon's monogenic environmental account of human difference, which was based on earlier writings by Montesquieu. The monogenic racial theorists attempted to explain how differences in climate, living conditions, and diet could have caused apparent differences in human groups, and they concluded that these group differences were neither inherent nor permanent. In contrast, the polygenic theory of distinct origins for different races was used to argue that Africans, Asians, and Indians were permanently inferior to whites.¹⁸ That is, both the monogenicists and polygenicists began with the premise of white superiority, but differed about its nature.

Hume's discussion in "On National Characters" begins with a caution against the vulgar tendency to make sweeping generalizations about group traits. He insists that the causes of national characters are moral, that is, psychological and cultural, as opposed to physical. He rejects the environmentalist thesis on the grounds that human beings develop their cultures and characters through imitation caused by continued, close social interaction. Hume believes that these moral causes operate on people individually, and that the effects of different types of government are in principle no different from the effects of different professional conditions, such as those of soldiers and priests.

Hume claims empirical support for the thesis that cultural differences have cultural causes: "If we run over the globe, or revolve the annals of history, we shall discover every where signs of a sym...