Kal Kalewold

Are races real? Is race a biological or social category? What role, if any, does race play in scientific explanations? This Cambridge Element addresses these and other core questions in the metaphysics of race. It discusses prominent accounts of race such as biological racial realism, social constructivism about race, and racial anti-realism. If anti-realists are right, our societies find themselves in thrall to a concept that is scarcely more veridical than 'witch' or 'werewolf'. Social constructionism grounds race in factors ultimately controlled by human thought and action. Biological racial realists argue that race is too quickly dismissed as biologically meaningful, and that it has a role to play in contemporary life sciences. The Element explores these views and shows their virtues and shortcomings. In particular, it advances an argument against biological racial realism that draws on the metaphysics of naturalness and philosophy of biology and medicine.

Voting occurs on Election Day. In the history of electoral democracy, this fact has been closely identified with the practice of elections. However, I argue the temporality of election time generates problems that undermine or disable crucial democratic values such as­ responsiveness, popular rule, and government accountability, among others. This paper outlines and defends a new electoral system I call “registral voting.” Under this system voters electronically register their votes daily—thereby eliminating the distinction between electoral and non-electoral periods—with the results determined by summing up votes over the whole term of office. In effect, under registral voting every day is election day. Registral voting reduces the capacity of politicians to manipulate near-election events for their benefit and empowers voters to make informed choices based on a wide range of salient information as and when they arise. Registral voting preserves the virtues of electoral democracy while mitigating or eliminating anomalies of election time highlighted by critics of elections and empirical studies of voter behavior.

Recent work by Michael O. Hardimon and Quayshawn Spencer defends a minimalist (or deflationary) biological realism about race. Their approach has two distinct features. First, unlike revisionist biological race, minimalist biological races are a conception of race that correspond to our ordinary race concepts. Second, unlike hereditarian or essentialist accounts, minimalist biological races are not claimed to be robustly explanatory. This article argues against their account of the biological genuineness of race. I argue that the minimalist biological conception of race lacks the explanatory constraints of genuine biological kinds. Rather, minimalist biological races are gerrymandered kinds.

Lockdowns were a morally and medically appropriate anti-contagion policy to stop the spread of Covid. However, lockdowns came with considerable costs. Specifically, lockdowns imposed harms and losses upon the young in order to benefit the elderly, who were at the highest risk of severe illness and death from Covid. This represented a shifting of the (epidemiological) burden of Covid for the elderly to a systemic burden of lockdown upon the young. This article argues that even if lockdowns were a morally permissible response to Covid, the harms and losses they imposed on the young ground a claim of compensation. I defend an intergenerational compensation argument that defends a claim for an egalitarian intergenerational transfer to compensate the young for the harms of lockdown.

According to an influential account of the new mechanistic philosophy of science, entities and activities compose mechanisms. However, the new mechanists have paid too little attention to activities. Critics have charged that accounts of activities in the new mechanism literature are philosophically uninformative and opaque. This paper defends a novel account of causally productive activities, which I call the Hybrid Account, that marries the two dominant philosophical approaches to causation: production and difference-making. The Hybrid Account of Activities (HAA) identifies causally productive activities as robust difference-makers to the next stage of a mechanism. The Hybrid Account provides attractive solutions to causal identification and causal selection problems faced by earlier activities views.

Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities.