A short and related article I stumbled upon: "Getting Serious about Seriousness, Aristotle on the meaning of Spoudaios," by Matthew Lu.

I think the claim is supported logically by the fact that no purely logical reason for considering races to be inferior or superior seem to be possible. If they were possible, it should be easy enough to find them, or they certainly should have been found by now, and yet they have not been, and seemingly cannot be, found, hence the conclusion that they at least do not seem to be possible.

But that's the very thing the racist denies, they will point to decades of studies on intergroup IQ scores, peer reviewed studies on rates of violent crimes when controlling for income, historical differences in regional development, etc.

The "race realist" (like the "gender realist") often comes armed with a wealth of scientific studies. And they can also point to no small number or cases where people have been persecuted for, or driven out of the sciences for daring to contravene the "social construct" or "no differences narrative," hence casting aspersions on "scientific consensus" as being manufactured by fear of accusations of "racism."

Stephen Pinker has some good stuff on this. The most common response to this issue, something like what you're saying, implies that: "if there are actually meaningful differences between races, then racism actually wouldn't be bad and maybe we should even become racists." It forces anti-racists to have to litigate the interpretation of expert data like IQ studies, behavioral genetics, etc. and get into debates about statistical controls, etc. because they have already accepted premises like: "if there is intergroup variance in anything other than the 'physical' (i.e., the mental) then racism is actually acceptable." Indeed, the "meritocracy" imagined by modern liberalism would tend to suggest this.

This is a problem that is very widespread and I think it stems from an inability to ground human dignity and worth in anything in post-modern liberalism. So racism has to be opposed on the grounds that is a transgression of the liberal ideal of individuals getting proper deserts for their actions. The transgression of racism in neo-liberalism is not the dehumanizing and alienating circumstances of the urban and rural underclasses afterall, but rather that membership in this "lower class," and more importantly membership in the small, and ever shrinking "winner class" are not evenly distributed across racial categories, implying that some exceptional individuals are not receiving appropriate desert.

For instance, a common position for both leftist elites and guys like Charles Murray is that automation, AI, etc. will deprive a vast underclass of work and make them dependent on "the state." And while both argue that standards for this underclass should be improved (they have instead been declining by many measures), they think its existence is inevitable. Racism then, is about the relative rates of people of x group making it to the upper class, whether we should expect that this is proportional to population statistics or whether we should expect between group variance in attainment to this class. The problem is not the "meritocracy," but only whether the meritocracy is effectively sorting winners from losers based on the "right" criteria, and not depriving would-be exceptional individuals from exceptional individual status.

The racists' case is thus made easier, since it becomes an argument about proper sorting. The wealth gap between white and black Americans is now larger than it was under Jim Crow (and the Arab-Jewish gap in Israel). Yet if this can be shown to result from proper "data-driven decision-making" and meritocracy, so much the worse for equality. Hence, we get debates over whether credit scores are "structural racism," because they are an example of a mechanism effecting such outcomes.

Race and sex, being highly visible and biological, are the preferred identities of analysis here. They are "constructs" but they are the focus precisely because exceptional individuals cannot yet transcend them if they choose to. Whereas class, religion, ethnicity, regional background, etc. tend not to be a focus, because the upwardly mobile individual is responsible for transcending (and really abandoning) them.

This is a problem that is very widespread and I think it stems from an inability to ground human dignity and worth in anything in post-modern liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ding ding ding. :up:

See also:

My suggestion would be to think about a vegetarian who confronts you, "No species is, tout court, inferior to another." Do you have to stop eating meat? Is their claim falsifiable? Does "tout court" have a discernible meaning in that context? If we cannot enslave those of a certain race, can we enslave those of a certain species?

(Of course it is possible that this suggestion will only confuse you - haha. Still, if natural reason can make these sorts of judgments about species, then at least some "tout court inferior" claims are not nonsensical or unfalsifiable. Note too that racism only came to an end with substantive answers to the falsifiability question. Racism would never have come to an end if we just claimed that the racist had the burden of proof (because the burden of proof is culture- and time-relative).) — Leontiskos

Another observation is that “being at cross purposes” seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. — Leontiskos

One thing I am interested in understanding are the cross-purposes involved in more minor dismissals. When people aren’t engaging rationally, what exactly is it that they are doing instead? What is their purpose or telos? (I have noticed that the number of people who restrict themselves to rational inquiry is incredibly small, even on a philosophy forum.)

In the U.S. Trump provides a good example. He dominates political discourse, and there are lots of people who say they want to discuss politics, but what they actually want to do is beat the anti-Trump drum. Rational discussion of a political issue strikes them as a distraction, and sooner or later they find their way back to their telos of beating the anti-Trump drum. One is then presented with the simple choice of either providing the person with the anti-Trump catharsis that they desire, or else finding an interlocutor who is able to engage in more interesting activities.

That sort of thing is a type for what happens in so many pseudo-intellectual dialogues. There is a feigned interest in X while the true interest lies in Y (and it is precisely the dissimulation which is frustrating). Soon enough focus is lost and the person falls back into the rut of their pet thesis or their pet modus operandi.* That shift is most readily apparent when one is faced with one’s own cognitive dissonance, and thus flees into safe, familiar platitudes. In severe cases the person’s whole approach becomes bound up with justifying that flight from genuine philosophical discourse.

In these more minor cases we should try to work through the problems, but how is that done? One way is by enforcing <standard Socratic principles of dialogue>. Another is by becoming painfully clear about what thesis the person is arguing for and what arguments they are relying on to support it (i.e. a move towards formalized argumentation).

Yet the root problem is a bit deeper, and regards a rectification of the sub-philosophical telos. This is where Socrates really shines, and he usually preempts the whole issue by asking his interlocutor if they want to engage in dialogue at the outset. The general idea is to somehow persuade or encourage one’s interlocutor to engage in real philosophy instead of simply regurgitating the half-baked thoughts that have been floating around their heads for the last 15 years.


* This is precisely the age-old problem of <rationalization> or subordinating reason to the passions.