Journal of Controversial Ideas

The psychological clinical science paradigm holds that mental health problems should be treated with therapies having the strongest evidence for their efficacy. For the past several decades, clinical scientists have conducted randomized controlled trials identifying specific treatments that best alleviate symptoms of many psychological disorders, as confirmed by objective, reliable assessments. However, a growing number of psychologists, exemplified by ^{Rodriguez-Seijas et al.} (²⁰²⁴), argue that the paradigm fosters a racist, White supremacist subdiscipline. They urge clinical scientists to embrace an antiracist agenda by promoting equity (i.e., equal outcomes) for minority and majority groups in access to doctoral programs, publications in high-impact journals, faculty positions, and grants. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the arguments and evidence bearing on the claim that the paradigm is infected with racist, White supremacist ideology, and to defend the meritocratic standards that have underwritten the success of clinical science. Full article

There are compelling reasons to accept Revisionism in just war theory, i.e., the view, roughly, that combatants fighting on the unjust side of a war have no moral right to kill combatants fighting on the just side. This seems to imply that participating in an unjust war as an ordinary soldier is gravely immoral. Indeed, it’s hard to see why such soldiers aren’t the moral peers of the low-level Holocaust perpetrators who have been found guilty of many counts of aiding and abetting murder. This article explores the implications of Revisionism for the moral culpability and blameworthiness of unjust combatants. I argue that (i) some unjust combatants who respect the rules of war are as culpable, and may be just as blameworthy, as low-level Holocaust perpetrators; however, (ii) there remain good grounds for thinking that such perpetrators are often more blameworthy than ordinary unjust combatants even if Revisionism is true. Full article

A common justification for no platforming on university campuses contends that it is immoral to discuss and debate certain “problematic” points of view. The conventional line of response from campus free speech advocates denies this contention. This article offers an unconventional answer to the moral no platformer. I concede that it is immoral to publicly discuss and debate certain points of view. But I advocate doing it anyway. The argument appeals to the notion of admirable immorality and a traditional conception of what a university is. Full article

Liberal education used to command wide political support in Britain. Social democrats and social liberals disagreed with conservatives on whether the best culture could be appreciated by everyone, and they disagreed, too, on whether the barriers to understanding it were mainly social and economic, but there was no dispute that education ought to aim to hand on the best that has been thought and said. That consensus has vanished since the 1960s. The dominant currents of thought on the left now reject any notion of a universal culture that might form the core of worthwhile learning. This paper considers why the British left supported liberal education, why they have moved away from it, and what the implications are for the future of education policy on the left. Full article

Appeals to individual agency and responsibility are increasingly viewed as antithetical to the goals of reducing stigma towards overweight and obesity and are sometimes even framed as anathema to civil discussion in academia. The current paper argues that this is a naïve view of agency and responsibility and, contrary to helping prevent or reduce stigma, removing these concepts from our conversations around obesity may instead worsen outcomes for those most at risk. This paper provides background for what follows and an introduction to the topic, before detailing and responding to the most common arguments for the futility of agency: from subconscious processes; from biological determinism; from free will; from obesity as a disease; and from framing and stigma. It then considers the impact on research of this proposed framing / perspective. The final section considers three key shifts in conceptualisation which I believe are necessary to highlight the importance of agency in weight management, whilst also providing the best care possible to patients and society at large. The proposed conceptual shifts are: agency is necessary but often not sufficient as it is constrained; diseases are not created equal; and there are multiple pathways to obesity. Acknowledging these fundamental realities can help us avoid the schism currently developing in researchers’ and clinicians’ conceptions of overweight and obesity. Full article

Trans women make claims about their sex and/or gender membership, but they also make various claims about their inner life: that they feel like a woman or that they are a woman inside. I will consider the hypothetical case of Marty, who is a scientist studying the embodied experience of women. After years of research Marty realises that he is trans and transitions to become ‘Mary’. Does Mary know what it is like to be a woman? Mary has all the scientific knowledge, but can only imagine what it is like to be a woman. After transitioning, she learns nothing new about being a woman, only about being a trans woman. In the second part I will assess Talia Mae Bettcher’s ‘first-person authority’ account of gender avowals and the ‘liberatory project’; this constitutes the strongest defence available for trans claims such as I feel like a woman or I am a woman inside. Full article

Tribalism is often derided as a morally primitive form of human organization. But for most of human history, people organized themselves into tribes that facilitated collective action and provided their members with a sense of security and identity. In stark contrast, liberal cosmopolitans have promoted the ideal of the world community. They tend to diminish the moral importance of tribal attachments and instead claim that altruism should have a more universal scope. We argue that although tribalism can encourage needless conflict, it can also provide meaning, promote important virtues, and increase the long-run viability of human groups better than liberal cosmopolitanism. We call the view that we endorse “enlightened tribalism.” We end by identifying some of the problems tribalism can create, and distinguishing the kind of tribalism that leads groups of people to flourish from the kinds that lead to unnecessary suffering or self-destruction. Full article

Repatriation laws, which aim to return human remains and artifacts from past peoples to modern Native American tribes, have recently changed at both the federal and state levels. California has two large public university systems where skeletal collections have been used for both research and teaching. In this paper, I investigate the current availability of human remains collections – both for Native American remains and non-Native American remains – for research in the California State University and the University of California systems. From the responses that I have received and a search of the anthropological literature, it appears that the repatriation process has caused the cessation of human remains research at California’s public universities. Full article

The correlation of increasing size with latitude, known as “Bergmann’s rule”, was first articulated in the 1840s, but its potential applicability to humans was not recognized for another century. In this paper, I have tested if human craniometric data collected by 19th-century naturalists supported this “rule”. At least in the northern hemisphere, they did. Bergmann recognized a relationship between size and latitude in the 1840s, but others studying humans did not, possibly because they were preoccupied with applying anatomical data to debates about human intelligence. Links between cranial anatomy and racist dogma have long been debunked and profound similarities across human populations show that ethnic prejudice has no basis in evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, human populations are not homogeneous or less subject to evolutionary processes than other organisms. Some of these processes are evident in the datasets collected by 19th-century naturalists, whatever their socio-political views may have been. Full article

Intelligence is the best predictor and the most important causal factor in job performance. Measuring intelligence therefore provides information about future job performance and employment. This applies to different professions and social groups, including immigrants and refugees. Two previous German studies with N=29 and N=552 refugees found average intelligence scores of IQ 92 and 86, respectively. A newer study with N=499 refugees and immigrants from N=15 countries conducted in 2017 to 2018 using the BOMAT, a German non-verbal and purely figural matrices test, found an average IQ of 90 (using the norms of the manual, 84 using a recent German comparison sample). Overall (as a result of our “mini-meta-analysis”), refugees’ cognitive abilities are about (5 to) 10 IQ points higher than the average abilities of people in their home countries (measured by student assessments or intelligence tests and compiled by various research groups), but 12 (to 15) IQ points below the German average. Positive selection, people that are more intelligent being more likely to leave their countries of origin, and accessibility to testing all likely play a role. At the individual level, refugees’ IQ was correlated with education: Each additional year of schooling corresponded to about 2 IQ points (r=.41). At the cross-national level, education was again significantly correlated with immigrants’ average IQ, but so were the level of cognitive ability in the home country (five different measures), income (GDP per capita as indicator of standard of living), positively valued policies (e.g., democracy), indicators of evolutionary ancestry, and culture (religion is used as a measure here). Individuals’ cognitive abilities could be better predicted with individual-level data than with country-level data (multiple R=.50 vs. .34). However, if individual predictors are not available, group predictors are not useless. Path analyses at different data levels showed indirect effects of country of origin cognitive ability on refugee intelligence via income and level of education. Full article

Rindermann, Klauk, and Thompson (2024) purport to give evidence regarding the determinants of intelligence test scores among refugees who have immigrated to Germany from different countries of origin, and they speculate these intelligence test score differences have negative implications for future economic development in Germany. We describe critical flaws in their measurement, statistical analysis, and interpretation of individual- and country-level differences among the immigrant participants, particularly regarding the authors’ specious reference to “evolutionary ancestry.” We contrast their pseudoscientific approach with valid scientific methods. Human intelligence and human evolution are controversial areas of scientific inquiry that require the highest levels of scientific rigor and editorial discretion, which are absent here. Full article

The relative intelligence of prospective migrants likely does little to move the needle on the central issue in the ethics of immigration, namely, whether states are morally entitled to forcibly exclude outsiders. Even so, I argue that varying levels of intelligence may be relevant to a number of theoretically interesting and practically pressing issues. In particular, such variations may in some cases (1) affect the number of refugees a country is obligated to accept, (2) be relevant to the advisability of encouraging refugees to resettle rather than attempting to help them where they are, and (3) have implications for relational egalitarians who are especially concerned with inequalities among fellow citizens. Full article

Rindermann et al.’s article concludes that certain refugees may have a lower IQ and as a result may not provide as significant an economic contribution to host states compared to the average citizen, and so may be an economic cost. This commentary first casts doubt on this conclusion. It then, and most importantly, demonstrates that even if this conclusion were true, it would be irrelevant insofar as it would have no moral or legal significance in mitigating or defeating obligations towards refugees. The commentary shows that any normative view that IQ and economic contributions can mitigate or defeat obligations to provide protection has unacceptable implications. The commentary then demonstrates that legal and moral obligations to refugees are in no part contingent on IQ and economic contributions and to suppose otherwise would simply represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature, grounds, and weight of obligations towards refugees. Hence, supposed IQ or economic contributions are entirely irrelevant to, and cannot undermine the strength of, refugees’ claims to protection nor states’ obligations to provide it. Full article