The antidiscrimination paradigm: irrational, unjust, and tyrannical.

• Author: O'Neill, Ben

Part I. Antidiscrimination Is Irrational

In this article, I examine the antidiscrimination paradigm and the phenomenon of discrimination on the grounds of demographic characteristics such as race, sex, and so on. For brevity and concreteness, I focus mainly on race discrimination, although my thesis applies equally to discrimination on other grounds, such as sex, age, disability, and sexual orientation.

Race and Racism

To understand this discussion, we need not delve into the complex world of anthropology to tease out biological definitions of race. (1) Although anthropological racial classification is an interesting subject in its own right, for the purposes of discussing race discrimination and the antidiscrimination paradigm, the prevailing scientific definition of race, the question of borderline cases, and the precision of different racial categorizations based on biological or other characteristics are of little relevance. (2)

In fact, what is usually called race discrimination has little to do with scientific racial classification. Rather, it is discrimination based on clear observable characteristics that are widely regarded as attributes of race--things such as skin color, face and body structure, hair texture, and other external physical characteristics. Thus, whether these things are essential to the anthropological definition of race and whether race has any precise anthropological definition are of no consequence. (3) What is relevant to cases of race discrimination is that different people have different-colored skin, different body structure, different kinds of hair, and so on, and that these characteristics are often used to infer a person's race and to discriminate on this basis.

Although there is much disagreement over the meaning of the term racism, I take racism to be a thesis that asserts that the contents of the mind are determined by genetic heredity--or, in simple terms, that "biology causes behavior." This view is the essence of the explanation advanced by Ayn Rand, who explains racism as follows:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage--the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the character and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. (1964, 147) Racism as a Causal Thesis

As this explanation of the concept makes clear, racism is a causal thesis. This thesis does not merely assert that racial characteristics happen to be correlated with intellectual or moral characteristics (though such correlation is obviously a consequence of the causal thesis), but rather also holds that genetic factors cause these characteristics. (4)

Although correlation between racial characteristics and other characteristics may occur in the absence of a causal genetic influence on character, mere correlation between racial and other characteristics is occasionally adopted as the defining feature of racism, so that any assertion of an empirical relationship between beliefs or character traits and race is regarded as racist. Indeed, it is common to hear any empirical assertion about differences in racial groups decried as racist, without regard to whether it is a causal assertion or not. David Stove uses the term in this sense and therefore accepts the thesis of racism as true, saying: "'Racism' is the belief that some human races are inferior to others in certain respects, and that it is sometimes proper to make such differences the basis of our behaviour towards people. It is this proposition which is nowadays constantly declared to be false, though everyone knows it to be true; just as everyone knows it to be true that people differ by age, sex, health, etc., and that it is sometimes proper to make these differences the basis of our behaviour towards them" (1999, 147). Thus, to Stove, unlike to Rand, an assertion that some race of people is inferior to another in some respect because of a particular cultural practice rather than a genetic cause would be regarded as racist (of course, Stove would also accept that such an assertion might be true).

This latter definition of racism is highly problematic. First of all, it multiplies concepts beyond necessity because it essentially equates racism with race discrimination. Second, it does not sit well with the historical evolution of the concept of racism, which emerged during the Enlightenment as a result of attempts to explain sociological and cultural differences between racial groups in terms of emerging and influential genetic ideas of causation. (5) For these reasons, the conception of racism as a causal thesis is the correct approach, and the notion of racism as merely a thesis about the empirical relationship between characteristics should be rejected. (6)

Racism as the Belief that "Biology Causes Behavior"

According to Rand's definition, racism is a thesis about the contents of a person's mind, not a thesis about his physical characteristics. Thus, it is not racist to believe that the biological characteristics of white people cause them to have lighter skin than black people. Indeed, it is obvious that this difference exists and that the biological characteristics of race do cause different physical characteristics in people, including different skin, hair, and eye color, different face and body structure, and so on. In fact, precisely these physical differences are the primary basis on which we place people in different racial groups in the first place.

Moreover, Rand stresses that racism is not a thesis about the cognitive apparatus of different races of people--it is about the contents of their mind, including their convictions, values, and character. In this view, the wider scientific issue of cognitive development and its relationship to genetic factors relates to the theory of racism only insofar as it hypothesizes whether genetic factors cause people's convictions, values, and character. (7) A theory that asserts that genetic factors are a substantial cause of these things can properly be regarded as racist, whereas a theory that asserts only that genetic factors influence cognitive development in some other way cannot be so regarded.

Although it is useful to elucidate the meaning of race and racism in discussions of race discrimination, one of my main aims is to demonstrate that causal theories of genetic determination are irrelevant in determining the rationality or irrationality--and the morality or immorality--of race discrimination in cases of passive observation. We will see that statistical dependence between characteristics is what is important for inferences from passive observation. Causal theories are relevant only insofar as we wish to know people's actual underlying nature rather than merely to predict how they will behave in particular circumstances. Thus, whether race is causally related to a person's convictions, values, and character or not--that is, whether various racist theories are true or not--is beyond the scope of this article and will be shown to be irrelevant to the inferential problem of discrimination (for a refutation of the theory of racism, see Rand 1964, 147-57).

The Antidiscrimination Paradigm

Most people now reject the thesis of racism; in other words, they reject the view that a person's genetic lineage determines his beliefs and character. However, many people have concluded not merely that racism is false, but also that in the absence of irrational discrimination, no correlation should exist between racial characteristics and other characteristics, regardless of the cause. Indeed, antidiscrimination activists' dogma has long been that all race discrimination is necessarily arbitrary and irrational--a manifestation of ignorance, fear, and prejudice.

In fact, causal theories of racism have often been regarded as the sine qua non of race discrimination, so much so that many commentators define all race discrimination as racism. For example, Kevin Reilly, Stephen Kaufman, and Angela Bodino take this position when they state that "[r]acism is prejudice or discrimination against other people because of their 'race' or because of what is thought to be their race (their biology or ancestry or physical appearance)" (2003, 15, emphasis added). Even with this definition, they maintain the claim that "[r]acism involves the assumption that people's birth or biology determines who they are: that behaviour is based on biology" (15). In other words, they regard the causal thesis of racism as a necessary condition for any form of race discrimination.

According to many people who adopt this prevailing view, to engage in any form of race discrimination is to identify oneself instantly as an ignorant bigot, a primitive relic, not conversant with modern notions of reason and justice. And yet this view of discrimination can be entirely discredited by an examination of some of the most basic findings of the science of statistical inference and prediction.

Statistical Inference and Discrimination

The discipline of statistics is concerned with the logic of inductive reasoning--with determining what inferences and predictions about the unknown follow logically from observed data. Statistical inference applies the mathematics of probability theory to decision problems involving unknown but relevant information. It is grounded in quantitative coherence theories, (8) which demonstrate that inferences made in accordance with the rules of probability theory are the only ones capable of avoiding certain...