William H. Harwood

Although the commentary on Aristotle’s problematic discussion of slavery is vast, his discussion of nobility receives little attention. The fragments of his dialogue On Noble Birth constitute his most extensive examination of nobility, and while their similarity to the παμβασιλεύς of the Politics has recently been recognized, their relevance to natural slavery has hitherto gone unnoticed. Yet by declaring that true nobles – particularly the god-like ἀρχηγός – preternaturally possess superhuman characteristics, Aristotle precludes their easy inclusion in the kind “human” in a manner inversely mirroring the preternatural subhumanity of natural slaves. Building on recent scholarship which argues that Aristotle’s “defense” of natural slaves is better understood as an indictment, On Noble Birth becomes most coherent if read as a hypothetical investigation into what would be required for “nobility” to name something true rather than equivocal, with the conclusion that “true nobility” is an empty set.

Interrogating received knowledge is constitutive to any critical project, and recently there has been a wave of scholarship which argues for locating the origin of racist-thinking prior to modern Europe—even prior to the Common Era—without any real consideration of the potential dangers accompanying such a seismic redefinition. By expanding “racism” to include potentially any pre-modern xenophobic or ethnicist atrocity, even well-meaning scholarship dilutes the peculiar injustice of modern Europe’s most successful epistemological weapon. As a result, we lose any criteria to distinguish ubiquitous oppressive projects from specifically racist-projects of hegemony and domination. However laudable its intent, such scholarship falls prey to methodological, epistemological, and practical errors that hamstring the ameliorative impact of contemporary anti-racist work while ironically diminishing racism’s impact. For if every conflict is racist, then contemporary colorblindness is correct: if white supremacy isn’t particularly white, then racism is a distinction without a difference.

This paper examines Aristotle’s discussion of slavery, showing his description of actual slavery to be an indictment and those regarding natural slavery to be a hypothetical investigation of a separate kind. Aristotle not only precludes the inclusion of natural slaves and freepersons in a single natural kind, but also articulates such bizarre requirements for natural slaves that they ultimately cannot exist. While this reading avoids notorious difficulties associated with Aristotle’s discussion of slaves, it replaces them with impossible preconditions for just slavery—so much that one must consider the possibility that Aristotle did not believe there was such a thing as “just” slavery. Was Aristotle’s otherwise acute mind blinded by the prejudices of his time? Or is this the inevitable result of “defending” the indefensible: an ad absurdum that has been ironically misunderstood and anachronistically misapplied to modern race and racism?

Although there is much discussion in scientific and law journals regarding direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), there is a paucity of philosophical-ethical examination of how such services threaten to repeat the essentialist, racial-projects of the past. On the one hand, testing for ancestry can be cathartic: for those lacking familial history as to when and how they came to be where they are, DTCGT can offer powerful access to their lineage and identity-formation. On the other hand, DTCGT inevitably reinscribes problematic epistemologies of race—even when the companies claim that their tests can be tools to combat white supremacy. Tracing the roots of biological essentialism back to Aristotle, through the invention of raza as cocreator of modernity, and up to critical race theories today, provides a strong foundation to examine the nascent race-thinking underlying DTCGT. Borrowing heavily from Paul Taylor and Charles Mills, but also enlisting scholars from other disciplines, such as Ifeoma Ajunwa (law), Alondra Nelson (sociology), and Troy Duster (genetics), provides the broad scope necessary for thoughtful, agile engagement of that which is ameliorative, unethical, and even dangerous—for all of us—in the age of 23andMe.

This paper offers a sketch of the complicated conflicts which arise—and metastasize seemingly daily—in the era of Big Data. Given the public’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-voluntary data surrender, and industry’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-anodyne collection of the same, inaction is not an option for any near-just society. By revisiting the philosophical basis for Panoptic apparatus, sketching the tumultuous history of US contract law trying to protect the public from itself, and comparing existing industry codes for similarly-situated—read: terrifyingly invasive—fields, the paper will provide a preliminary framework for identifying and confronting the galaxy of problems associated with data analytics.

In the first part of the 21st century, the complicated relationship between transparency and security reached a boiling point with revelations of extra-judicial CIA activities, near universal NSA monitoring and unprecedented whistleblowing – and prosecution of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. This article examines the dual necessities of security and transparency for any democracy, and the manner in which whistleblowers radically saddle this Janus-faced relationship. Then I will move to contemporary examples of whistleblowing, showing how and why some prove more damaging or beneficial than others. I will conclude with some suggestions as to practical reforms which might mitigate the seemingly inevitable pendulum-swinging between Snowden-style vigilantism and a panoptic security state.