A Thought on Reading Professor Appiah

In his book, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Kwame Anthony Appiah differentiates among three conceptual constructs:

• Racialism, the belief that "there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, which allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race."
• Extrinsic racism, the belief that moral distinctions can be made between races because they believe that the racial essence involves certain morally relevant traits.
• Intrinsic racism, the belief that moral distinctions can be made between races quite independent of the morally relevant traits of individuals of those races, much as we make more distinctions between "our family" and "others not of our family".

I would point out that we also associate race with geography. For example, there are all sorts of medically relevant heritable characteristics, such as proclivity to Type II diabetes or gout, which could be used to divide people into groups, but we would not say that the diabetes prone are a race.

Appiah points out that racism presupposes racialism. If you can not divide people into races, then how can you attribute distinctions to membership in those races. He also points out that racialism, as he defines it, does not presuppose moral distinctions. We might differentiate the tall from the short, the blond from the red head or the twin from the single born, without assuming that there are any morally relevant characteristics of such distinctions.

I suppose that something like intrinsic racism is possibly an evolved, inherited characteristic of man. It seems clear that there is an evolutionary advantage to individuals who protect their direct lineal descendants, and so feeling a moral responsibility to take care of your kids and grandkids seems likely to have been built into us. We are social animals joining with a group to provide mutual protection and support seems also to have had survival benefits and thus to have been an evolved trait which we see as moral responsibility -- we would feel bad were we not to help those with whom we live and work. On the other hand, it would not have been a survival trait to help all the others that we came into contact with. The sheep do not do well be nurturing the wolves. So one expects there to have been an evolved distinction between those we feel we have to help and those for whom we have no such feeling.

I would guess however that the distinction between us and them is cultural, even if it builds on an innate tendency to treat others of "us" differently than one treats an "other".

The problem would seem to be that racialism is based on a naive understanding of the determinants of human behavior. There are more than 20,000 human genes, each of which may have several variants. While behavior, which would seem to be the only basis for morally relevant traits, may have a genetic component, it would appear to be the result of combinations of complex sets of genes as well as environment and "nurture". Moreover, there seems to be little reason to believe that any of the genetically based traits that are open to simple observation are closely related to any of the behavioral traits that might be morally relevant. Tall people might thereby have an advantage at basketball and people with fair skin might have an advantage producing vitamin D in low sunlight, but it is hard to see how these traits could be morally relevant.