>So my question is: Are normative and positive issues (believing in
>differences and supporting racist policies) more confused and mixed
>in the debate on race than what we find in other debates? And if so,
>why? Is there a "rational" reason for this?
I think normative and positive issues get mixed up with great
frequency in political discussions. Consider the issue of welfare.
The normative question is (roughly) "is it right for the government
to transfer money from richer to poorer people." But in practice,
people who think it isn't are also likely (although not certain) to
believe that most of the recipients are not "deserving" (in a
positive, not normative, sense--are welfare queens, or lazy, or
whatever) and those who think it is are also likely to think that
most of the recipients are poor for no fault of their own, that
getting out of the poverty trap is extraordinarily difficult, etc.
I think this in part reflects issues of cognitive dissonance. It is
uncomfortable to believe both that a certain policy is morally wrong
and that the absence of that policy has serious bad consequences--so
most of us persuade ourselves either that the policy that seems just
to us also has good consequences or that the policy that we think has
good consequences is also just.
That said, I think the race case is particularly tangled for two reasons:
1. People who believe blacks are poor because of discrimination would
like objective evidence for their beliefs. The obvious way to get it
is by looking at average wages, life expectancy, and similar
objective measures. But that evidence is worthless if there are
substantial innate differences, so they want to believe, and have
others believe, that there are no such differences.
2. People who are arguing in favor of the "nurture" side of the
debate in its strong form do so (I think) with a bad conscience,
since the general evidence that a lot of characteristics are heavily
influenced by heredity is so strong, as is the evidence that
different human subpopulations differ substantially. If they abandon
the indefensible part of their position--the claim that everything is
nurture and/or that human subpopulations are so mixed that there
cannot be any significant difference in their innate
characteristics--they are left with only an empirical claim (that the
actual differences in behavioral, as opposed to physical,
characteristics happen to be too small to matter), and one that might
easily turn out to be false.
If you are defending an important claim that, if tested, might easily
turn out to be false, the obvious way of doing it is to demonize
anyone who might want to test it--or has tested it. Hence you get
cases such as the Canadian professor who published a book arguing for
a coherent pattern of racial differences (and providing a theory to
explain it) being the subject of a criminal investigation (eventually
dropped) and attempts to get him fired (he had tenure), and
eventually being forbidden to teach classes.
The alternative, of course, is to abandon the claim as unimportant,
recognize that getting statistical evidence on the consequences of
discrimination is a harder problem than simply measuring averages,
and fall back on the (in my view) more defensible moral
argument--that moral judgements ought to be applied to individuals,
not to groups.
The one person I know of who has offered convincing evidence that
differences in outcomes in the U.S. between blacks and whites are not
primarily due to genetic differences is Thomas Sowell--precisely
because he was willing to consider the question seriously. In _Ethnic
America_ he provides figures on West Indian immigrants to the U.S.
which show that they do quite well; if I remember correctly, their
mean income passes the national mean in about a generation. West
Indians are, judging by their appearance, "blacker" than most
American blacks, so if the reason American blacks do badly is
genetic, it ought to apply even more strongly to West Indians.
Of course, the same thing is true if the reason is discrimination.
Sowell's conjecture is that it is cultural--essentially that
plantation slavery in the U.S. South produced a less functional
culture than peasant slavery in the West Indies (again, I'm going by
memory, so may not be doing full justice to his argument).
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
