Equality as a Hostage to Fortune

Gould and Boas are allies in the same fight, but they reveal a quiet fault line in the scientific case against racism: both ground human equality in empirical fact rather than moral principle — and Gould, unlike Boas, admits how precarious that is.

Boas's move, as Degler describes it, was to deny innate differences outright: observed social differences flow from different histories, not different biologies. This was radical and enormously effective. But it is an empirical claim, and empirical claims are hostages to evidence. If equality rests on the finding that no significant innate differences exist, then the moral commitment is only as secure as the data — and every new study becomes a potential threat to human dignity.

Gould sees this trap and half-steps out of it. His formulation is stranger and more honest: equality "just worked out that way." It is not an ethical principle, not guaranteed by nature — a hundred plausible alternate histories would have produced real biological hierarchies and "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." We are, in effect, morally lucky. The contingency of history spared us a world where Boas's claim would have been false.

But notice Gould's parenthetical: equal treatment may still be an ethical principle even if equality of endowment is a contingent fact. That aside does the crucial work Boas's framework cannot. It suggests the moral commitment should be decoupled from the empirical one — that we ought to treat people as equals regardless of what biology turns out to say, precisely because biology might have said otherwise.

The synthesis: Boas won the empirical battle, but the Boasian strategy builds antiracism on ground that science could, in principle, shift. Gould's contingency argument exposes the vulnerability — and his parenthetical points to the repair. The strongest position isn't "science shows we're the same," but "we happen to be the same, and it wouldn't matter morally if we weren't." One quote celebrates the fact; the other reminds us not to lean on it too hard.