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Notes -
Are my philosophy professor's objections to the biological definition of race sound?
My philosophy of race class has considered and dismissed the biological definition of race. We've explored five objections to race-as-biological:
Objection 1: It isn't possible to locate the boundaries between racial types with any precision. The biological definition of race aims to divide humanity into distinct categories on the basis of physiological traits that don't admit of clean divisions. but this is hopelessly arbitrary given the absence of differences of kind between purported racial groups (there are only differences of degree). Skin color, for instance, varies along a continuum without discrete segments that perfectly track racial distinctions. "Short" and "tall" aren't good enough for anatomy or basketball, and neither can the imprecise idea of "races." Race attempts to bracket "lumps" apart from each other, but this is a vain effort because there are only continuua.
Objection 2: Scientific authority: Scientists don't talk of "races" but instead prefer to speak of "populations." As John H. Relethford says in his introduction to biological anthropology:
Objection 3: There are no reliable lumpings/clusters of characteristics for "race" to track. For example, skin color is supposed to go with a certain hair texture and with certain facial features, consistently, but racial traits just don't hang together this way: many dark skinned people have straight hair, aquiline noses, thin lips, and many light skinned people have curled hair, full lips, and wide noses.
Objection 4: Modern dictionaries do not define race biologically.
The last objection makes very little sense to me, but here goes:
Objection 5: Human heredity is much more complicated than the transmission of racial essences. It involves a myriad of environmental factors, to produce the traits that distinguish humans from each other. Biological race-thinking is incapable of producing an adequate scientific account of this complexity.
Do you find these objections convincing? If not, why not?
1-3 are good arguments against poor ideas of race, or racism, but not smarter ones. Races - uh - subpopulations with significant shared heredity and traits - can still be smarter or have different characters than other subpopulations, just like subspecies / populations of animals, which also can have messy boundaries and mixes of traits while retaining distinctions. If jews were 50 iq points smarter than blacks on average, 1-5 could still easily be true - and in that situation 'jewish' as a 'race' is worth distinguishing, although even without the term 'race' it'd be extremely obvious
Argument 1 proves bad faith on part of the professor as it relies on the beard fallacy. which he as a philosophy professor should be well aware of!
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