I admit, I'm still very on the fence about this genetics-and-intelligence stuff -- I know enough to realize I need to actually sit myself down and read a lot more books before I can offer much of value. My first response was outright rejection, even a bit of moral revulsion, until I recalled the Osmium Parable:
I admit, I'm still very on the fence about this genetics-and-intelligence stuff -- I know enough to realize I need to actually sit myself down and read a lot more books before I can offer much of value. My first response was outright rejection, even a bit of moral revulsion, until I recalled the Osmium Parable:
I realized my sense of morality was based on an assumption about the world that may or may not be true. That I needed to step back and say, "okay, what is the fundamental principle at work, that I am not afraid to apply fairly and consistently whether I'm right or wrong"?
There was an implicit link between my belief in the worth of a human and their intelligence; thus, suggesting that someone was less intelligent was suggesting they were worth less than their fellow human beings. Laid bare, it's obviously absurd, and I can reject it, but it went unspoken in my mind for a long time. And most of the knee-jerk rejection of the possibility is based on the same unexamined belief in others.
I'm thinking of something Susan Sontag once said (I can't find a citation, but I think I've got it more or less correct): "Human beings do not differ at all, except in intelligence."
There's more to this than meets the eye. Obviously Sontag didn't mean that people don't differ in height, weight, age, or skin color. Her point was that differences in intelligence are the only morally significant differences: the only ones that affect a person's inherent worth.
So on the one hand she was rejecting a kind of conservative or traditionalist view, which would be that having (say) a certain skin color actually *does* increase your inherent worth. But she was also rejecting a particular type of liberal view, which I think is captured by the slogan of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: "All Lives Have Equal Value". A lot of people on the left are committed to this principle, and it requires you to believe one of two things. Either you have to believe that differences in intelligence don't affect people's inherent worth, or you have to believe that differences in intelligence don't exist.
The people Freddie is describing are trying to defend the second position, even though it's very hard to defend. I think they're forced into it by the fact that the first position is also pretty hard to defend, at least if you don't believe the Judeo-Christian narrative about equality in the sight of a creator god.
For the record, I absolutely support vaccinating African children and the other things the Gates Foundation does, but not because I think all lives have equal value. Spending half an hour at a cocktail party is enough to disprove that hypothesis, IMHO
If a bear is charging you what matters if if the guy with the rifle is a good shot, not how good his aim is. "Value" here is so subjective as to be meaningless. How smart does your average cop have to be? Yet a society without cops, or one in which they avoid doing their job, is going to be a very unpleasant place to live.
If you are a materialist, the term "value" is just a human invention anyway. Certainly more intelligent people have greater economic utility, but jumping from this to moral value is a spurious leap of logic.
IMHO everything that gives a human life inherent worth is completely unrelated to intelligence. The dull can love their children, and their beloved. The dull can suffer great pains, both physical and mental. The dull can experience great joys. My capacity for empathy for them is in no way limited because they don't read as many books as I do, or have a hard time understanding basic algebra.
When Sontag said intelligent people were worthier I'm pretty sure she wasn't talking about their economic utility. She was a completely different kind of snob: more Nietzsche than Ayn Rand.
Nietzsche himself identified this as a problem that arises from the decline of religion. In a society where almost everyone believes the Hebrew Bible is revealed truth, people can agree that all humans are "essentially" equal because even if they're not equal in any other respect, they're equal objects of God's love and that's the only thing that counts.
When you stop believing in revelation, it turns out there isn't a clear secular substitute for God's equal love. It becomes hard to see what makes people equal in moral worth despite not being equal in anything else.
I dunno. Maybe it's the residual ethics from my Catholic upbringing. Maybe it's a result of being a heavily-teased nerd growing up. Or maybe it's because I'm a vegan who avoids stepping on insects. But I've not once looked at someone and thought "You know what, I think I'm superior to them!" The idea of using myself or anyone else as a yardstick to compare individuals just doesn't even cross my mind. I am me, and they are themselves, and that is enough.
I do think it's possible though to defend the ethics of absolute equality in moral worth on the principal of the Golden Rule. I recognize that in a hierarchy of moral worth I wouldn't be at either the top or the bottom. I do not want others to be morally more worthy than myself, therefore I reject judging any as morally less worthy.
People who avoid eating meat (or stepping on bugs) for ethical reasons don't usually believe that animals have *just as much* moral worth as people. They believe animals have some, and that's enough to justify a moral response.
In theory you could construct a moral outlook for human relations that also did without the idea of equal worth, but it would go against all of Western social thought since the Enlightenment. (All respectable social thought, anyway. Plenty of people do operate without a belief in humans' equal worth, but moral philosophers hardly ever talk about them except to point out that they're obviously wrong.)
The problem is that without an objectively verifiable claim about humans being equal in some crucial way, there's no solid secular basis for liberalism, socialism, feminism or any of the other doctrines that nearly all of us (not just the left) accept in some form or other.
Nietzsche rejected all those doctrines in favor of a sort of aristocratic proto-Nazism. But even if you're sure that's the wrong solution, as most people are, I think the problem remains unsolved.
A minimum guarantee of rights is there to ward off authoritarianism. Large carve outs based on IQ or some other arbitrary criteria would fatally weaken the whole enterprise.
I'd actually argue the existence of psychopathy is a much bigger issue for equal human moral worth than stupid people. Psychologists are finally coming around to the idea that psychopathy is largely immutable (and possibly genetic) as increasingly early childhood detection and intervention has done nothing.
But - at least to me - it's much harder to treat someone who has no ethical center as a free moral agent. How do you empathize with someone with no empathy after all?
I'm talking about psychologists here. It's baby steps for them, you know.
But the idea of immutable...monsters...from birth is something which is horribly threatening to the idea of equal moral worth. Even taking into account that most psychopaths are not sadists, and will generally only willingly hurt other people if they think it's to their advantage.
Because if there is a (relatively small) percentage of the population which is just irredeemably evil (for lack of a better way to put it) it becomes arguable from a utilitarian perspective that outright elimination is the best policy.
Basically the world would be better off with no psychopaths, and since we cannot cure them, we should just get rid of them one way or another. I'd certainly hope it's through targeted gene editing or selective abortion at worst however.
I think you have it backwards. People have an inherent tendency to like (for lack of a better term) the idea that all people are created equal. When someone came along a created a religion that tapped into that pre-existing preference, it was very popular.
Nietzsche agreed, sort of. He thought most people found Christianity attractive because it tells them they're just as good as the handful of people who are truly excellent, even though they aren't. He called that "the slave revolt in morality".
I think people are forced to defend position 2 because they are unable to consciously acknowledge that "intelligent people are worthier than others" is one of their foundational cultural beliefs. Contra your expectation, I think people will find it indefensible that moral worth scales with intelligence when they are forced to cache it out so plainly.
I admit, I'm still very on the fence about this genetics-and-intelligence stuff -- I know enough to realize I need to actually sit myself down and read a lot more books before I can offer much of value. My first response was outright rejection, even a bit of moral revulsion, until I recalled the Osmium Parable:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/belief-identity-bias-and-the-osmium-264
I realized my sense of morality was based on an assumption about the world that may or may not be true. That I needed to step back and say, "okay, what is the fundamental principle at work, that I am not afraid to apply fairly and consistently whether I'm right or wrong"?
There was an implicit link between my belief in the worth of a human and their intelligence; thus, suggesting that someone was less intelligent was suggesting they were worth less than their fellow human beings. Laid bare, it's obviously absurd, and I can reject it, but it went unspoken in my mind for a long time. And most of the knee-jerk rejection of the possibility is based on the same unexamined belief in others.
I'm thinking of something Susan Sontag once said (I can't find a citation, but I think I've got it more or less correct): "Human beings do not differ at all, except in intelligence."
There's more to this than meets the eye. Obviously Sontag didn't mean that people don't differ in height, weight, age, or skin color. Her point was that differences in intelligence are the only morally significant differences: the only ones that affect a person's inherent worth.
So on the one hand she was rejecting a kind of conservative or traditionalist view, which would be that having (say) a certain skin color actually *does* increase your inherent worth. But she was also rejecting a particular type of liberal view, which I think is captured by the slogan of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: "All Lives Have Equal Value". A lot of people on the left are committed to this principle, and it requires you to believe one of two things. Either you have to believe that differences in intelligence don't affect people's inherent worth, or you have to believe that differences in intelligence don't exist.
The people Freddie is describing are trying to defend the second position, even though it's very hard to defend. I think they're forced into it by the fact that the first position is also pretty hard to defend, at least if you don't believe the Judeo-Christian narrative about equality in the sight of a creator god.
For the record, I absolutely support vaccinating African children and the other things the Gates Foundation does, but not because I think all lives have equal value. Spending half an hour at a cocktail party is enough to disprove that hypothesis, IMHO
If a bear is charging you what matters if if the guy with the rifle is a good shot, not how good his aim is. "Value" here is so subjective as to be meaningless. How smart does your average cop have to be? Yet a society without cops, or one in which they avoid doing their job, is going to be a very unpleasant place to live.
If you are a materialist, the term "value" is just a human invention anyway. Certainly more intelligent people have greater economic utility, but jumping from this to moral value is a spurious leap of logic.
IMHO everything that gives a human life inherent worth is completely unrelated to intelligence. The dull can love their children, and their beloved. The dull can suffer great pains, both physical and mental. The dull can experience great joys. My capacity for empathy for them is in no way limited because they don't read as many books as I do, or have a hard time understanding basic algebra.
When Sontag said intelligent people were worthier I'm pretty sure she wasn't talking about their economic utility. She was a completely different kind of snob: more Nietzsche than Ayn Rand.
Nietzsche himself identified this as a problem that arises from the decline of religion. In a society where almost everyone believes the Hebrew Bible is revealed truth, people can agree that all humans are "essentially" equal because even if they're not equal in any other respect, they're equal objects of God's love and that's the only thing that counts.
When you stop believing in revelation, it turns out there isn't a clear secular substitute for God's equal love. It becomes hard to see what makes people equal in moral worth despite not being equal in anything else.
I dunno. Maybe it's the residual ethics from my Catholic upbringing. Maybe it's a result of being a heavily-teased nerd growing up. Or maybe it's because I'm a vegan who avoids stepping on insects. But I've not once looked at someone and thought "You know what, I think I'm superior to them!" The idea of using myself or anyone else as a yardstick to compare individuals just doesn't even cross my mind. I am me, and they are themselves, and that is enough.
I do think it's possible though to defend the ethics of absolute equality in moral worth on the principal of the Golden Rule. I recognize that in a hierarchy of moral worth I wouldn't be at either the top or the bottom. I do not want others to be morally more worthy than myself, therefore I reject judging any as morally less worthy.
People who avoid eating meat (or stepping on bugs) for ethical reasons don't usually believe that animals have *just as much* moral worth as people. They believe animals have some, and that's enough to justify a moral response.
In theory you could construct a moral outlook for human relations that also did without the idea of equal worth, but it would go against all of Western social thought since the Enlightenment. (All respectable social thought, anyway. Plenty of people do operate without a belief in humans' equal worth, but moral philosophers hardly ever talk about them except to point out that they're obviously wrong.)
The problem is that without an objectively verifiable claim about humans being equal in some crucial way, there's no solid secular basis for liberalism, socialism, feminism or any of the other doctrines that nearly all of us (not just the left) accept in some form or other.
Nietzsche rejected all those doctrines in favor of a sort of aristocratic proto-Nazism. But even if you're sure that's the wrong solution, as most people are, I think the problem remains unsolved.
A minimum guarantee of rights is there to ward off authoritarianism. Large carve outs based on IQ or some other arbitrary criteria would fatally weaken the whole enterprise.
I'd actually argue the existence of psychopathy is a much bigger issue for equal human moral worth than stupid people. Psychologists are finally coming around to the idea that psychopathy is largely immutable (and possibly genetic) as increasingly early childhood detection and intervention has done nothing.
But - at least to me - it's much harder to treat someone who has no ethical center as a free moral agent. How do you empathize with someone with no empathy after all?
"and possibly genetic"
Possibly? "Genetic influences explained 69% of the variance in the latent psychopathic personality factor, "
I'm talking about psychologists here. It's baby steps for them, you know.
But the idea of immutable...monsters...from birth is something which is horribly threatening to the idea of equal moral worth. Even taking into account that most psychopaths are not sadists, and will generally only willingly hurt other people if they think it's to their advantage.
" horribly threatening to the idea of equal moral worth."
How so?
Because if there is a (relatively small) percentage of the population which is just irredeemably evil (for lack of a better way to put it) it becomes arguable from a utilitarian perspective that outright elimination is the best policy.
Basically the world would be better off with no psychopaths, and since we cannot cure them, we should just get rid of them one way or another. I'd certainly hope it's through targeted gene editing or selective abortion at worst however.
I think you have it backwards. People have an inherent tendency to like (for lack of a better term) the idea that all people are created equal. When someone came along a created a religion that tapped into that pre-existing preference, it was very popular.
Nietzsche agreed, sort of. He thought most people found Christianity attractive because it tells them they're just as good as the handful of people who are truly excellent, even though they aren't. He called that "the slave revolt in morality".
I think people are forced to defend position 2 because they are unable to consciously acknowledge that "intelligent people are worthier than others" is one of their foundational cultural beliefs. Contra your expectation, I think people will find it indefensible that moral worth scales with intelligence when they are forced to cache it out so plainly.
I really appreciate your transparency and good faith grappling -- we need everyone to do this!