Written by Noah Carl.
A lot of epithets get thrown at hereditarian research: “racist”, “eugenicist”, “white supremacist” etc. A new paper by Lucas Matthews, James Tabery and Eric Turkheimer argues that it’s… “abhorrent”. The paper was published in the Hastings Center Report. This is the journal which, back in 2023, published a paper saying that hereditarian research should be held to higher evidentiary standards, and that when such standards are not met, “there should be a very strong presumption against its being conducted, funded, or published”. The authors – of whom there were nineteen – made this blatantly anti-Mertonian recommendation despite claiming to have “very diverse views”. Bo Winegard and I submitted a brief commentary on the earlier paper, but the editors declined to publish it. So rather than risk the same outcome again, I thought I’d respond to the new paper here.1
Matthews, Tabery and Turkheimer: There is one more area in the value-harm map: scientific research that has little value and poses significant harm … It is this science that we call “abhorrent.” It is abhorrent because it serves no end other than to cause harm … Our case study is the genomic race science that we described at the outset.
The authors devise a “value-harm map” for classifying scientific research. The map has two dimensions: value (e.g., scientific value) and harm. So research can vary in terms of how valuable it is and in terms of how much harm it poses. The authors use “abhorrent” to describe research that has little value and poses significant harm. And they assert that “genomic race science” constitutes an example of such research. In fact, they go as far as to say that “its abhorrent nature warrants moral disgust”.
