Legislating Reality

1. Legislating Reality

“Legislating reality” is a favorite thought pattern on the left. This is the error of using practical aims, including moral or political goals, to determine what the descriptive facts are, or what one may say the descriptive facts are. The former disjunct is fallacious; the latter is tyrannical and foolish.

Note: I’m not talking about ideas like “you’re not allowed to publish the plans to make an atomic bomb, because that could lead to bad consequences.” I’m talking about arguments like “Claim x could be used to justify bad behavior; therefore, ~x” or “… therefore, no one should be allowed to say x.”

Perhaps there are extreme cases where the second disjunct would be justified, but I haven’t seen any in reality.

2. The Cofnas Case

A recent case is the reaction to the appointment of philosopher Nathan Cofnas to Ghent University in Belgium. This led to demands for Cofnas to be fired, and even criminally prosecuted. For background, Cofnas has argued for hereditarianism, the view that there are real, on-average differences in psychological traits, including cognitive abilities, across groups, including races, and genetic differences are at least part of the cause of this.

Pierre Thiriar (a Justice on the Court of Appeal in Antwerp) wrote about Cofnas:

“… in the light of Belgian criminal law and more specifically the anti-racism law of 30 July 1981 … This is not a borderline case of protected speech, but a coherent discourse that can be qualified as punishable under Articles 20 and 21 of that law. … [P]ackaging a discourse as ‘scientific’, ‘philosophical’, or ‘critical’ does not prevent it from being punishable when it objectively incites discrimination or propagates ideas of racial superiority.”

Thiriar thinks that Cofnas is advocating racial discrimination. I don’t think so; I read him as advocating for an end to the discrimination advanced by the woke left.

But some of Cofnas’ views nevertheless could be used by someone to support discrimination. How so? I guess the thought process might be something like this, which I will call the Racist Argument:

R1. Black people have a lower average IQ than white people.

R2. This is partly due to genetic factors.

R3. IQ determines how we should treat people, in certain contexts (e.g., employment or college admission decisions), with lower-IQ people being disfavored.

R4. It is not IQ simply that matters, but rather genetically-based IQ. Thus, if A has a lower IQ than B because of environmental factors, then A should get the same treatment as B (in the relevant contexts), but if A has a lower IQ because of genetic factors, then A should not get the same treatment.

R5. Actually, what matters for how we treat individuals is not their individual characteristics but the average characteristics of their race.

R6. Therefore, blacks should be discriminated against in certain contexts (e.g., employment or education decisions).

R6 follows from R1-R5. R1 is an empirical fact that no one likes but is rarely disputed. R2 is the controversial, “hereditarian” thesis for which Cofnas is under fire. R3 (or something similar) seems to be pretty widely accepted. R4 and R5 are arbitrary and irrational moral assumptions that I would be extremely surprised if Cofnas supported.

The Terrifying Nathan Cofnas

Suppose someone already believed R1, R3, R4, and R5. Then, upon reading Cofnas, they might come to believe R2, whereupon they might draw conclusion R6. That’s how Cofnas could be promoting racial discrimination, I guess.

I guess the anti-Cofnas argument goes something like this:

1. Hereditarianism can (and is likely to?) be used to support racial discrimination.

2. Racial discrimination is very bad.

3. So

   1. hereditarianism is false, and/or

   2. no one should be allowed to defend hereditarianism.

3. Reality Doesn’t Care About our Values

Conclusion 3a is a non sequitur. This is self-evident, but it bears stressing because so many seem to fall prey to the fallacy of legislating reality.

You’ve heard that reality doesn’t care about your feelings. Nor does it care about our political values. We cannot count on nature to conspire to produce the most politically convenient patterns of facts. If the recognition of some fact would lead people to adopt bad policies, that will not stop nature from throwing that fact at us. If, for example, an evil dictator has decided that he will start a nuclear war if it rains tomorrow, that circumstance will have no effect whatsoever on the actual likelihood of rain.

By the way, in that hypothetical, it would be no use trying to convince ourselves that it isn’t going to rain. If it’s going to rain, we might as well find that out, to the extent that we can, so that at least we can make whatever meager preparations are possible before the nuclear war starts, or so we can start planning other ways to stop the nuclear war (e.g., assassinating that dictator).

Similarly, the potential negative consequences of certain bad people’s believing hereditarianism have no effect whatsoever on the actual likelihood of its being true.

4. Noble Lies

Still, in the above hypothetical, perhaps we should all tell the dictator that it isn’t raining. If you meet someone who plans to tell the dictator that it’s raining, you’d be justified in forcibly stopping them from doing that, whether or not it is actually raining.

But that’s a contrived hypothetical. Let’s get back to the real-world case, which differs in multiple ways.

4.1. What’s the threat?

First, what is the probability that America, or some other liberal democracy, is going to bring back slavery, or Jim Crow, or even widespread racial discrimination against blacks in employment, because of people like Nathan Cofnas? I would say close to zero. The very reason why the campaign to suppress him might work is why the threat that it responds to is bogus—because elite culture in modern liberal democracies is utterly against Jim Crow and other anti-black discrimination. It is, indeed, far more sympathetic to pro-black discrimination.

More generally, the society in which you can effectively suppress anyone who defends X is not the society that needs to be protected from X-believers. Quite the opposite. If the X-believers were in danger of taking over, it would be impossible to suppress them; if you can suppress them, then that means the anti-X people are the ones in power, which probably means it is their excesses that we need to worry about.

4.2. Does it work?

Still, suppose you’re worried about Trump-loving potential racists who might be turned into full racists if they hear hereditarian arguments. Suppose that these proto-racists instead hear that a professor was trying to make the case for hereditarianism, but a campaign by left-wing professors and political activists silenced him. What are they going to think?

a. “Oh, I guess hereditarianism must be false”? Or

b. “Oh, it looks like the hereditarian case is so unanswerable that the left-wing elites are afraid to let us hear it”?

In fact, campaigns like this cause people who never heard of Nathan Cofnas (or whoever the target of the cancellation attempt is) to hear about him. Even if he gets fired from Ghent, that won’t stop anyone from reading what he has to say on the internet.

Why would the woke cancellers give him this publicity? Perhaps because they aren’t actually trying to promote the social outcome they say they’re trying to promote; perhaps they are just trying to signal their own affiliation with the woke faction.

4.3. The other premises

I guess we’re supposed to imagine a person who already accepts R3-R5 but doesn’t yet believe that mean IQ differences across racial groups are partly genetically caused, and then they learn the latter from Cofnas, and then they start supporting discrimination.

I don’t know how many such people exist. It can’t be many. But if one wants to combat the Racist Argument, it would make more sense to concentrate on attacking R4 and R5. If we think that racial discrimination would be wrong if racial differences were environmentally caused, why would it be okay if they are partly genetically caused?

And why might racial discrimination be wrong? Perhaps because each person is a unique individual who deserves to be judged based on his own individual characteristics, not the group he belongs to. This, to me, is a completely reasonable and obviously correct moral stance. It’s the obvious explanation for the wrong of racial discrimination. If that’s not what you believe, then I really don’t know why you would be confident that racial discrimination is wrong (is that just supposed to be an axiom?). Whether average differences across races are genetic or environmental is completely irrelevant to that argument.

I am having a hard time thinking of any rational viewpoint in which employers could justly discriminate based on race if and only if the average differences were genetic. Would the idea be that if differences are environmentally caused, then we should instead change the environment to eliminate the differences? That could be something for the government to consider. But employers deciding whom to hire do not have the option of changing the environments in which job applicants were raised so as to increase their IQ’s.

5. The Epistemological Poison of Guilt-by-Association Thinking

As you can guess, I think the Racist Argument mentioned in sec. 2 above is very dumb. If you have a dumb argument for a bad conclusion, usually you should focus on attacking the least plausible premises of the argument. In this case, that would be R4 and R5. In particular, R5—the idea that people should be evaluated based on the race that they belong to—is obviously the core racist premise.

Maybe the Wokesters are not confident that they can argue against R5—or, worse, they actually believe R5. So they pick some other premise in the Racist Argument and declare that no one is allowed to defend that premise.

The other problem is that hereditarianism sounds like stuff that the Nazis said. It sounds sort of characteristic of them. And we hate the Nazis, so we can’t support hereditarianism. That’s the guilt-by-association argument.

The problem with this way of thinking is that morally bad people are not guaranteed to always be factually wrong about everything important that they say. What if an evil person starts trumpeting some actual fact, F, which he falsely uses as a reason for undertaking some awful policy? Suppose he repeatedly insists that F is his central reason for the awful policy. Do we then have to start denying F?

This gives the evil person too much epistemological power. What if someone insists that the law of non-contradiction is the core of his justification for wanting to destroy the human species? Do we then have to start embracing contradictions?

For an example that leftists can appreciate, suppose that a serial killer says that industrial society is harming the environment, destroying freedom, and making us unhappy. Suppose he uses that belief as his main reason for sending mail bombs that injure and kill scientists. Do we now have to put a taboo on anyone’s arguing that industrial society harms the environment, etc.? (You don’t want to sound like the Unabomber, do you?) Oh no, we wouldn’t do that, because that’s a left-wing view. Instead, we would just argue that murdering scientists is not a good solution to the problems of industrialization.

In the case of the argument for racial discrimination, we should focus on the actual reason why discrimination is unfair, that it fails to recognize people’s individual characteristics.