When We Debate “Biological Differences”

“The framing of these arguments, I believe, is largely misguided. Right and Left are, after all, moral and political positions and not scientific ones.”

In the last two years or so, there have been several high-profile incidents and discussions that have attracted unusual amounts of attention to the issue of biological differences between humans. Two prominent examples of this are the so-called “Google Memo,” the discussions around the gender pay-gap, and the now infamous debate of racial differences in IQ, which resurfaced since Sam Harris rehabilitated Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. All of these cases have one common thread: the Right will argue that differences between human groups (i.e. men and women, or Caucasians and African-Americans) are explained by biology, while the Left will argue that they are largely the result of socialization and historical circumstances. The framing of these arguments, I believe, is largely misguided. Right and Left are, after all, moral and political positions and not scientific ones. My intention here is not to make some kind of “both sides are equally wrong” argument. Rather, I want to argue that the Left is on the correct side of this issue—just not for the reasons that are traditionally put forward.

I am not a scientist, and what little scientific knowledge I have is decidedly not in biology, so my intent is not to try to convince anyone of either side of these discussions. Instead, I want to put the scientific facts aside and look at the issue from the point of view of metaethics or moral epistemology. What this means is that, rather than making an ethical case, I want to look at what the proper construction of a moral argument around these topics is—and how we should interpret the varying positions around them. As a disclaimer (or as a way to make my own bias explicit), I should say that, in line with most other leftists, I do not believe that most differences in outcomes between the various human groups can be explained by biology. But the point is that whatever is the case is irrelevant, which is why this is about metaethics.

There are two arguments that are related to the one I want to make, but ultimately different, so I want to briefly address them. The first is the is-ought problem, sometimes also referred to as Hume’s law. Simply put, this states that a set of premises about facts—the “is” part—can’t lead to a normative conclusion, or an “ought” statement. This is relevant, but it is not the whole picture; so it will be addressed further. The second one is the argument sometimes made by proponents of biological differences that we should not be alarmed by this because, after all, we shouldn’t be racists or sexists simply because humans are factually equal—but because we have basic human decency. Now, on some level this is true: we should not be sexists or racists under any circumstances. The problem with this line of reasoning is that the appeal to basic human decency limits the discussion to individual attitudes. This obscures the more insidious and reprehensible nature of invoking nature or biology when making ethical claims.