Cofnas Podcast

In his 2020 book, Human Diversity, Charles Murray writes that “it is obvious how senseless it is” to conflate “intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth....There shouldn’t be any relationship between these things and human worth.”

In “Are Smart People Superior?,” I argue for the opposite conclusion. Of course there is a relationship between intelligence and human worth. Much of what we value about human beings is related to cognitive capacities that vary among individuals. Some people are more valuable than others in part because they are more intelligent.

Murray joins me on the Podcast to settle this issue once and for all.

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Stephen Kershnar is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He has done important work on a number of controversial topics in philosophy.

Due to ongoing litigation, we weren’t able to talk about the most recent controversy he was involved in. I will simply note what is public information, namely, SUNY Fredonia is shutting down its philosophy department, which will have the effect of terminating its only member (Steve).

Timestamps

00:00 – How Steve got in trouble

2:05 – Do we really need to attack every taboo?

36.49 – The contradictions of institutionalized philosophy

1:18:15 – What is racism?

1:29:44 – Do people differ in value?

1:40:48 – Closing

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Amy Wax is Professor of Law at Penn.

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Michael Huemer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s written several books, most recently Progressive Myths, and he writes the Fake Nous Substack.

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Timestamps and sources

0:27 – Why no one wants to read peer-reviewed philosophy

MH: “Publishing in Philosophy”

50:40 – What is wokism?

MH: Progressive Myths

NC: “Was I Wrong about Woke?”

1:05:05 – Vegetarianism: For and against

MH: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

NC: “Is Vegetarianism Healthy for Children?”

F. Leroy & NC: “Should Dietary Guidelines Recommend Low Red Meat Intake?”

1:26:00 – Is ethics real?

MH: Ethical Intuitionism

MH: “A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skepticism”

NC: “A Debunking Explanation for Moral Progress”

NC: “How Gene–Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth”

2:17:27 - Closing

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Nicholas Wade worked as an editor and science journalist at the New York Times from 1982 to 2012. He is the author of several books including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. His megaviral 2021 article, “The Origin of COVID: Did People or Nature Open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?,” played a major role in making the lab-leak theory mainstream. Wade initially self-published “The Origin of COVID” on Medium after it was rejected from “every outlet [he] could think of, left, right, and center.”

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:51 Social behavior vs. IQ

8:51 Rice vs. wheat farmers

16:14 Persistent race differences

19:30 Environmental explanations

28:55 Response to A Troublesome Inheritance

36:43 Academic censorship

39:53 Reforming academia

49:59 Origins of race denial

58:11 Making race realism mainstream

1:01:15 A racial hierarchy?

1:11:04 Academia after race realism

1:13:50 Groupthink and resistance to the lab-leak theory

1:20:43 Conclusion

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Noah Carl is a sociologist, writer, and editor at Aporia.

In this episode we discuss whether hereditarianism is the cure for wokism, and the relationship between intelligence and human worth.

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Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, she suggested that “all cultures are not equal,” and she observed that, on average, black students do not perform as well as white students at Penn Law. She has been fighting for her job ever since.

In this episode we discuss strategies for defeating wokism. Contra Richard Hanania who says we should “shut up about race and IQ,” Amy and I say that we can dewokify the elites by teaching them the truth about race.

Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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