When does academic philosophy become a criminal enterprise? The academic philosopher Dr. Nathan Cofnas has been threatened with prosecution by the Belgian anti-discrimination watchdog. They believe that his philosophical defense of free scientific inquiry, and his argument that it is morally permissible to investigate possible genetic causes of racial differences in intelligence, amounts to illegal “racial discrimination.”
Cofnas is now forced to consult criminal lawyers in a bid to stay out of jail. Whether these charges are likely to actually result in a jail sentence is not the issue at present—rather, the prosecution itself is the issue. Criminal proceedings discourage any academic who wants to stay out of jail from attempting to explore this research topic.
The case is being launched by Unia—the state-funded “independent centre for equal opportunities,” which is the Belgian equivalent of America’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC). The Belgian equal-opportunities police have determined that Cofnas “repeatedly breached the country’s anti-racism law,” which prohibits inciting racial discrimination or encouraging racial segregation.
Unia said the US philosopher was spreading ideas in Belgium that rank people in a hierarchy on the basis of supposed scientific knowledge.
It said those ideas were being used to justify discrimination based on origin or skin colour, and to encourage forms of segregation.
What did Cofnas say to provoke the ire of the equal-opportunities police? According to his own explanation, the argument he seeks to analyze runs as follows:
- Empirical premise (equality thesis): All races and sexes have on average the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits.
- Moral premise (moral equality): All people have an equal right to achieve their potential.
- Conclusion (wokeism): The persistence of massive group disparities presents us with a moral emergency to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome.
As he explains it, he specifically rejects the first point—the empirical premise. He rejects the premise that on average all races have the same innate intelligence. He argues that there are differences in the average IQ of different races, and that genetic differences between races play a role in explaining group disparities. His argument—which he describes as “race realism”—has shocked and horrified the equal-opportunities police. They see it as Nazi-coded.
To understand the hysteria that has overcome the equal-opportunities police, it is important to point out that Cofnas’s research is not controversial merely because it is “anti-woke” or merely because he rejects “equal outcomes.” Those are standard views among academics who describe themselves as classical liberal.
Anti-woke arguments are also tolerated by many progressives, at least those who have not “progressed” so far as to reject reason and rationality. Even among progressive philosophers, not all academics are woke activists.
Like most classical liberals, Cofnas treats “equal outcomes,” or what is sometimes known as “equity,” as a morally unjustified demand. But he accepts that the classical liberal notion of merit-based “equality of opportunity” is a moral ideal to which society may legitimately aspire. He says that racial differences being real “does not tell us what our ultimate values should be or what kind of society we should build.”
Therefore, it is deeply ironic that the equal-opportunities police have decided to persecute him—he does not reject their precious equal opportunities!
Cofnas is no authoritarian, in the sense of trying to dictate society’s ultimate values. He does not call for racial segregation or apartheid. Indeed, on the classical egalitarian moral question he holds the same views as many academic liberals in objecting specifically to “equal outcomes,” affirmative action, racial quotas, and the like, while upholding “equal opportunities” for individuals based on merit.
The equal-opportunities police were outraged when Cofnas exposed Jason Arday as a plagiarist, which they saw as a threat to their DEI schemes, and they were even more outraged when it emerged that Cofnas had said there would be very few black students at Harvard if admission was based purely on merit.
But these views are not, in themselves, jail-worthy. They have been expressed over the decades by liberals of different stripes. Not all liberals support DEI-policing of the woke academy. Cofnas, for example, advances the standard “disparities do not prove discrimination” argument made by Thomas Sowell. Like Sowell, he holds the view that desiring equal opportunities is reasonable and fair but implementing that aspiration as an “equal outcomes” policy is misguided and unworkable. Yet nobody has threatened to report Sowell—or his employer, the Hoover Institute—to the EEOC for illegal racial discrimination.
Sowell also rejects the equality premise on empirical grounds. In Disparities and Discrimination, he works out the extremely unlikely probability that everyone in the world would simultaneously have exactly the same “prerequisites for success.” He rejects the premise that we should expect equal or proportionate outcomes between groups:
What does this little exercise in arithmetic mean in the real world? One conclusion is that we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites—which is to say, most meaningful endeavors.
If both Sowell and Cofnas reject the “woke” claim that disparities are caused by discrimination, why are the equal-opportunities police hunting down Cofnas but not Sowell? Even in Belgium—the dark heart of the European Union equality enforcement bureaucracy—academics do not go to jail merely for questioning “wokeness.” Therefore, we must look deeper for the reason why the equal-opportunities police want to jail him.
Unlike Cofnas, Sowell does not see genetics as necessarily important in explaining unequal racial disparities. That is not because Sowell deems genetics irrelevant, but because his research project is different from Cofnas’s. Sowell says that his aim is “to challenge one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation, or genetics.” For example, he points out that economic outcomes differ even among men of the same race with the same IQ, illustrating his argument that no single factor explains variation in economic outcomes.
Sowell acknowledges that “not all the prerequisites [of success] are necessarily within the sole control of the individual who has them or does not have them.” He certainly does not claim that a person’s race or IQ is entirely within his personal control. His aim is not to identify the factors that do explain different outcomes, but, rather, to reject the notion that in a state of nature we should expect to see equal outcomes among all groups.
Further, Sowell sees the interplay between variables as potentially infinite, so that we could never derive a closed set of causal factors that would explain all differences in economic outcomes. He insists that causation is multifactorial.
It must be noted that Cofnas does not claim that genes are the one and only single explanation for all economic outcomes. On that point, his argument is not inconsistent with Sowell’s multifactorial argument. Cofnas does argue that race is a relevant causal factor in understanding economic outcomes. But it does not logically follow that it is the only causal factor. It is a causal factor whose impact, of course, depends on other factors in play in individual cases.
The live wire in Cofnas’s argument is that heritable cognitive differences are important in explaining differences in racial outcomes. He argues that genes are one non-trivial factor that explains the variation in intelligence between races. He sees hereditarianism as important in mounting effective opposition to the woke revolution.
Any realistic path to victory over wokism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites. As I explained in “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination.
While other scholars have also argued that disparities do not prove discrimination, they attribute disparities to environmental, not genetic, factors. This keeps them off the radar of the equal-opportunities police. Cofnas argues specifically that race science is relevant in understanding causality. This makes him a target.
Cofnas argues that race is a sufficiently important factor that scientists should be at liberty to ask questions about it. In that sense, he is only mounting a classical liberal free speech and open inquiry argument. But he is toxic to the equal-opportunities police because they fear that if he is right to reject the empirical equality premise, then their egalitarian moral aspirations and socialistic policy conclusions would have to fall.
Ultimately, they are persecuting him for the same reasons they persecute anyone who seriously challenges their socialist goals.
