Justin’s Notes

Equality Held Hostage: When a Moral Commitment Rests on an Empirical Accident

2026-07-29 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy of human-nature theories quietly reveals that each camp grounds human equality in a different place: Religionists in God-given attributes, Culturists in a uniform and infinitely plastic psyche, and Biologians merely in shared species membership — a species that, he pointedly adds, "exhibits regional differences." The unstated implication is that the Biologian's version of equality is the thinnest and most fragile of the three. It offers no guarantee.

Gould — usually cast as an enemy of exactly the biological determinism Derbyshire favors — turns out to accept this fragility head-on. Racial equality, he says, "is not given a priori... It just worked out that way." A hundred plausible alternate histories would have produced genuine inequality and "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." This is a striking concession from someone often lumped with the Culturist camp: he refuses to smuggle equality in as an axiom, treating it instead as a contingent empirical fact about how human evolution happened to unfold.

But Gould's parenthetical does the crucial work Derbyshire's taxonomy omits: equality of endowment is not an ethical principle, "though equal treatment may be." That distinction rescues the moral commitment from the empirical hostage situation. If your case for treating people equally rests on a factual claim that populations are identical, then every new finding of difference becomes a moral emergency — which is precisely why Culturists police the science so anxiously, and why Religionists retreat to nonbiological attributes that no data can touch. Gould's move dissolves the anxiety: the norm of equal treatment does not need the fact of equal endowment, any more than it needs God.

Read together, the notes suggest that Derbyshire's three camps are really fighting over where to hide equality so that science cannot threaten it. Gould's answer is that you don't hide it at all — you stop pretending it was ever a scientific claim. The Biologian can then follow the evidence wherever it goes, because the ethics were never riding on it.

Woven from these notes

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed
Equality [of the races] is not given a priori. It is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen.
— Gould