TU 110 Integrated Humanities
Equality
Are we all created equal?
Social Equality was a key theme of the
enlightenment:
‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (French
Revolution)
‘All men are brothers under God’ (Voltaire)
‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness’ (US Declaration if Independence)
John Locke (1632-1704)
Natural law dictated that all human beings were fundamentally equal
Since every human being walked into the world with the same capacities as
every other human being, that meant that inequality was an unnatural
result of the environments that individuals are forced to live in.
 Enlightened thinkers like Locke were all well and good, but
their ideas had serious implications for the wealth, power ad
prestige of the European and American powers
 Inequality was the basis for both
 Imperialism
 Slavery
 Justification for Imperialism and slavery had to be adapted to
accommodate the new enlightenment thinking
 Polygenism - Joseph Arthur de Gobineau ‘Essay on the Inequality of
Human Races’ (1855) - whites were superior to other races and
advised great nations to preserve their racial purity,
 Craniometry - "The Aryan and his Social Role“ (1899) – explained
intelligence and racial superiority according to brain size
 Environmental Determinism - Ellsworth Huntingdon,
‘Civilization and Climate’ (1915) ‘The climate of many countries seems to
be one of the great reasons why idleness, immorality, stupidity, and weakness
of will prevail’

As unrealistic as some of those arguments may sound the issue of Race
and Intelligence has been a subject of debate and controversy sine the early
20th century

IQ tests in the USA show something called the ‘racial IQ gap’:
1. Asian American
2. White American
3. African American

American Psychological Association (1996) stated that the US racial IQ
gap was:
 Not due to bias in the content or administration of tests,
 Not due to socio-economic status,
 No adequate explanation of it has so far been given
 Some scientists argue that yes, there is a racial element to IQ
 James Watson "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa
[because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their
intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really”
(2007)
 Richard Lynn
 "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans," (2002)
 “Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis” (2006)
 John Philippe Rushton
 “Race, Evolution, and Behavior” (1995)
 Arthur Jensen
 “The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability” (1998)
 Others, and indeed the mainstream of society argues the opposite,
there is no racial or genetic factor involved in intelligence and
suggest other factors are more important, for example:
 Socioeconomic environment
 Health and nutrition
 Education
 Stereotype threat
 Caste-like minorities
 Rearing conditions