Brief Summary of Materials on Biological Determinist

Justifications of Social Inequality

1. Powers: Rejects moral criticism of U. S. foreign policy. Racial and national conflict and domination are inevitable, and “constructive.” Because this is inevitable, “we are not estopped by an moral consideration from extending our territory at the expense of Spain or any other power. It is inherently as admissible to subjugate the Philippines with the sword as it is to subjugate France by industrial superiority.”

2. Beveridge (and President McKinley) Example of a paternalistic view point in foreign policy. Filipinos are not capable of governing themselves, so imposing a government on them that does not have their consent is not wrong. The U. S. must look out for its “little brown brothers.”

3. Aristotle: Another paternalistic view. Natural slaves are those who are unable to reason beyond merely recognizing rationality in another person. Natural slaves have a natural tendency to have muscles and bad posture. Since the natural slave cannot reason, making him a slave is not unjust, since he will benefit from this relationship, even if he does not agree to it. Natural slave and natural master can be friends, but this is not guaranteed, of course.

4. Rousseau’s answer to biological determinist claims about the “natural” origin of individual differences in physical or mental characteristics. Rousseau argues that people tend to develop the abilities that are required to meet their needs which would otherwise go unmet. Since people needs are quite different in their different social roles and classes, they turn out to be different. Many mistake these difference as the result of “primitive constitution of bodies,” that is as determined by genes. That this mistake occurs is shown by Aristotle’s claim that a natural slave has a natural tendency to be strong. The data on the Hawaiian men of Japanese ancestry who are much taller than Japanese men of their generation, show that height is not completely determined by genes, a fact which many people find surprising.

5. Early I. Q. testers (Goddard, Terman) wanted to show that some people were much less intelligent than others in order to argue that there cannot and should not be social equality because of the IQ differences between people.

6. A. Jensen: Argues that I. Q. tests really measure something called "general intelligence," that blacks are less intelligent than white because they get lower scores on the test, and that that difference in scores is at least partly determined by genes. Claims that we therefore can not expect equal performance from all races in school, and must recognize that there are "large numbers of children who have limited aptitudes for traditional academic achievement."

7. “Racism, Intelligence, and The Working Class”: this pamphlet argues that all of Jensen’s claims are false, but in our selections, it argues that IQ test doe not measure a person's general ability to learn or to think, but it detects attitudes and values that characterize middle and upper class people. In other words, that IQ tests have a systematic class (and race) bias, which is just what their original developers wanted them to have. Thus social inequality is not going to be justified because of the “natural” differences in IQ, since there aren’t any.

8. E. O Wilson: Argues that social inequalities between men and women will never disappear. Presumably it would follow from that it is futile to try to eliminate gender inequality.

9. E. O. Wilson: Argues that much of human behavior is directed by biological factors, including inherited tendencies to learn or to adopt certain ideas and attitudes. Important examples: altruism (making sacrifices for other people), tribalism, xenophobia (fear and antagonism to other nations or races). This is all built on the assumption that differences in these behaviors and attitudes are at least partly genetically determined, a claim for which Wilson provides no evidence, and which does not seem to be required in order to explain the phenomena he mentions. For example, you don’t need a genetically determined tendency to learn to hate snakes in order to explain why people actually learn to dislike snakes. A few stern warnings from parents or knowing of people who have been injured or killed by snakes provide an ample basis for disliking snakes. Similarly with the social and economic explanations for ethnic conflict, war, and religion. They work as good explanations without the “prepared learning” Wilson hypothesizes.

10. Rosenthal: Describes Wilson’s thesis as the claim that human nature is inherently fascist. For example, Wilson interprets the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as population control, resulting from overcrowding. Rosenthal counters that those events resulted from a number of economic and political events that have nothing to do with biologically determined differences. For example, the Hutu and the Tutsi are not different genetically, but only by culture and politics. Their conflict was greatly increased by the various imperial powers that tried to manipulate and dominated them. Similarly, Rosenthal argues that the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was the result of economic conflicts and the interference of the big powers that wanted to split the country into small pieces, not any innate tendencies left over from the Stone Age in human beings.