I am no expert on these matters. (For an expert opinion, you might consult Philip Kitcher's recent work.) But I would like to point out that "the interests of free inquiry" is an ambiguous phrase. It is one thing to say that ethically, such a study should not be conducted. It is quite another thing to say that the government or some collection of private citizens should take action to prevent a scientist from conducting such a study. Just as "free speech" considerations prohibit the government from preventing certain kinds of speech but do not deem all speech to be ethically permissible, so "the interests of free inquiry" may prohibit the government from preventing certain kinds of studies but do not deem all studies to be ethically permissible.

An interesting question is whether a private grantmaking organization should fail to fund such a study. Considerations of "free inquiry" do not require it to be blind to the reasons why such a study might be unethical (just as the interests of "free speech" do not require that a private university or other private institution provide a forum for advocates of all sides in a dispute to speak). When the government is the grantmaking organization, matters get even more complicated.

So what I am trying to say is that there are several questions here: (i) is such a study ethical? (ii) If not, how should that fact be taken into account by governments, grantmaking organizations, scientific institutions (such as journals and universities), and individual scientists themselves (where the answer may be different for different members of this list)?

As for whether such a study is ethical, I would say (speaking nonprofessionally -- I am not an ethicist) that if it is reasonably believed that the outcome of such a study would likely be grossly misused by the public at large, then that fact constitutes a strong (though perhaps not decisive) reason to believe that it would be unethical to conduct such a study. (Other reasons would have to be weighed against this one, including whether any benefits might result from carrying out such a study.)

Your beliefs about smokers obviously do affect your reaction to them. Likewise, it's not impossible that your beliefs about black people affect your response to their appearance. Not impossible. But not inevitable either, so let's suppose your lack of attraction is innocent. The rest of your question is: why shouldn't you comment on people's appearances in just the way you'd comment on art? Why can't we proclaim the ugliness of some person or race? Simple answer: people aren't art. There are different rules for talking about people because the impact is different. If you are tempted to openly announce your dislikes, you might want to ask yourself why.

I wonder if you meant "impermissible" rather than "permissible", but either way I'll try to address the question. With respect to any ethical principle, at almost any level of abstraction, it's hard to say that it applies under literally any circumstance (maybe "do the right thing" is an exception, but it obviously doesn't help much). "Never torture innocent children" seems a pretty secure principle, yet it's not hard to devise a situation in which maybe one has to violate it - say the fate of millions of lives really depends on torturing this one child. (Leave aside how you can know that this is so, a real problem for alleged "ticking bomb" scenarios.) So I would say any kind of racial profiling is wrong because it violates certain basic rights, especially the right to be treated with dignity and to be treated fairly under the rule of law - which means that you have to have specifically done something to be singled out for negative treatment. But like all rights, this one too can be swamped by utilitarian considerations when the expected (dis)utilities go sufficiently high. Remember though, expected (dis)utilities require not only the possibility of really bad consequences, but also a plausible case that the probability is sufficiently high as well. In the real world, it's awfully hard to see making a reasonable case of that sort, so the ban on profiling is pretty secure.

How about sharing some of the literature from the social psychology research on stereotypes? This way you won't be arguing back and forth about "intentions" (conscious or unconscious) but instead giving them some robust research on social cognition that shows how racial (and gender and other social group) categories can bias thinking even in well-intentioned individuals. Ziva Kunda's book _Social Cognition_ is a good place to start, as is Virginia Valian's book _Why So Slow?_.

First of all, I think it's good you bring this up. Better to discuss such matters openly than to pretend they don't exist.

One should be clearer, perhaps, about the step from belief to action. Surely many things correlate with race, gender, or religion; and we may notice these correlations and form beliefs about them and perhaps even test these beliefs through large-scale data collection. In some case, the mere researching of such correlations is morally dubious, by fostering contempt for a group even while serving no legitimate social purpose.

But in the case of crimes, there is a legitimate social purpose: deterrence and apprehension. So it is hard to deny that knowing more about the people who tend to commit certain kinds of crimes can be useful. But then how useful such knowledge will be depends on what one would be able and morally permitted do with it if one had it.

In the case of serious crimes there is, I think, a clear presumption in favor of using such knowledge and hence of acquiring it. If those who commit a certain kind of serious crime in some city are described (by the victims and witnesses) as predominantly fitting a certain profile, then it makes sense to concentrate scarce police resources on people fitting this profile. To take an extreme example, if virtually all rapes and attempted rapes in some city are reportedly committed by males, then it makes little sense to have half of the plainclothes anti-rape task force trailing females.

Criminal profiling of African Americans is different in three important respects. First, insofar as correlations exist, they tend to be much weaker than just described. Second, there is a long-standing history of severe discrimination and disadvantage the ongoing social and psychological effects of which racial profiling is likely to aggravate. Third, those engaging in (perhaps expressly authorized) racial profiling may have a certain degree of racism that may influence their racial profiling in ways that unduly harm African Americans and in turn deepen the profilers' racism.

These three considerations may typically be weighty enough to disqualify most actual racial profiling that has taken place. But I don't think they can show that racial profiling is wrong in principle or even merely always wrong in this country. There may be cases where racial profiling is likely to be highly effective in reducing serious crime even while its cost are much lower than usual. For example, consider a city that is racially mixed and where blacks are highly overrepresented among those who commit and also among those who fall victim to a certain crime. Suppose a special task force is formed to combat this crime, and suppose it is an all-black force. In this case, the three considerations against racial profiling are much weaker than usual, and it is certainly arguable that racial profiling can proceed so long as it really does prove highly effective against the serious crime in question.

Good question. If race is a morally irrelevant feature of persons, to what extent should it matter (if at all) in deciding how to act?

To begin, it is worth noting that there is huge controversy about what to make of our ordinary racial categories. There seems to be a fairly wide consensus amongst geneticists that there is no meaningful genetic or biological classification that maps onto the racial classification system that we currently use in the US. So some have argued from this that 'races' are illusions. However, it is compatible with this that our racial terminology actually picks out social groups, i.e., groups of people who are viewed and treated in a certain way within the dominant cutlure. It seems fairly clear that people who appear "white" and people who appear "black" or "asian" or "hispanic" are viewed and treated differently within our culture.

So when you suggest that by treating people of color differently Whites are "affirming they are different based on their color", there are several ways of interpreting this. Consider a White person X, and a person Y of a non-White racial group R:

• X treats Y differently from how X treats White folk because X thinks that R's are by nature different from White people in ways that warrant different treatment (good or bad).

There are two things one should ask about this: 1) Are R's by nature different from White people? and 2) Does this supposed difference warrant different treatment (good or bad)? Since we have no reason to think that any racial group is different from Whites "by nature," the answer to (1) is no, and so the answer to (2) must be no as well. I think this was the thought behind your question.

But consider another interpretation:

• X treats Y differently from how X treats White folk because X thinks that R's have been socially and historically disadvantaged compared to White folk and this disadvantage warrants different treatment, e.g., with an eye to correcting the disadvantage. [Does this count as being "motivated by the color of that person."? I'm not sure.]
  

Again there are two questions: 1) Are R's different from White people due to social and historical factors? and 2) Does this supposed difference warrant different treatment? Since we have no reason to think that there have been social and historical differences between Whites as a group and non-Whites, the answer to (1) is yes; the answer to your question then turns on how we answer (2). It seems to me that there are facts about the social and historical differences between the races that justify institutions having different policies toward different groups: if injustice has been done to R's in the past, there should be efforts to remedy the injustice. But what about individual interactions? Should I treat my Black neighbor differently from my white neighbor? This is tough, for it will depend a lot on the details of the situation, I think. You'll have to look at the ways in which the social and historical differences matter in the particular situation and so might (or might not) warrant different treatment. I don't think you need to worry, though, about ignoring color completely and always treating everyone the same, for that would, in effect, be ignoring an important part of our history that has caused serious harm.

First, I need to applaud your engagement with this argument. Many people would hesitate to criticize, simply because they agree with Lincoln's conclusion. But, as you implicitly note, whether we agree with the conclusion is quite independent of whether the argument is any good.

The question worth asking, I take it, is why Lincoln thinks the justification for slavery rests upon the claim that "the lighter [have] the right to enslave the darker". Certainly you are right that this does not, and need not, follow from the thought that whites have the right to enslave blacks. But, on the other hand, it is so obvious that it doesn't follow that it seems uncharitable to Lincoln to suppose he thought it did---which is not, of course, to say he didn't think it did. What it means is that we ought now to search for some other reason he might have thought that the justification involved "lightness" rather than whiteness.

That's an historical question, and I'm in no position to answer it. But here's one line of thought one might consider. Suppose we agree that there are white folks and black folks. Suppose we grant, moreover, that one of them has the right to enslave the other. Which? The situation seems symmetrical at this point. So we need some reason difference, and perhaps Lincoln is suggesting that many people thought it was relative lightness of skin color.

It is, by the way, already questionable whether there are white folks and black folks in the sense racists suppose there are. See, for example, Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), and many other writings along the same lines.

Your friend represents you as offering a bad argument: people who say they're unattracted to people with characteristic X are prejudiced; your friend says he's unattracted to black women; hence, your friend says, you conclude that he's prejudiced. But that doesn't strike me as a plausible diagnosis of what's going on. The problem isn't that you are relying on the bad argument your friend accuses you of. The problem is that your friend's supposed preferences are awfully hard to credit.

The obvious question to put to your friend is this: does he find all women with dark complexions sexually unattractive? If he says yes, then he might be telling the truth, but it's not easy to believe. If he says no, then things are equally puzzling: among people conventionally labeled "black," there is a wide, vast variety. Could it really be that there's something that all black women have in common that makes them unattractive to your friend? What could it possibly be?

And so we have a puzzle. Your friend is expressing a preference that's awfully hard to fathom given what we know about most people. When we're faced with cases like this, we cast around for explanations. And when race is part of the mix, the hypothesis that there's some unacknowledged prejudice at work has a certain plausibility.

Please note that since I don't know your friend and haven't ever talked to him about any of this, I can't claim to know what's really going on here. And since the word "racism" is so loaded, I've left it out of the conversation entirely. But one more general point might be worth making: human relationships and human attraction are both pretty complicated. If your friend isn't prejudiced, and if he's a properly modest thinker, then he might want to pull his horns in a bit. Few of us know ourselves as well as your friend's remark presupposes.

I'll have to leave the bit about Gauss aside. All I know about the "personal equation" was that astronomers had noticed certain sorts of systematic variations among observers. But there was a different theme in your question that I'd like to address.

A preamble: Yes, Hume, Kant and other western philosophers, no doubt all on this panel included, operate in a mileu that's saddled with various prejudices. I'd add that I'm not aware of any large cultural mileu that's exempt from this sad fact, and Africa, like the west, provides its own set of depressing illustrations. But I'm a bit uncomfortable with using a term like "Western Thought" (or, for that matter, "Eastern Thought" or "African thought" or even "South African thought") as an analytical concept. (I'm uncomfortable for similar reasons when my students write papers with sentences that begin "Society holds that...") As noted, the history of the west embodies a good many prejudices and false ideas. Some of these make their way into political and philosophical thinking. But some of those same ideas are roundly denounced and incisively criticized by thinkers within the very same broad tradition.

This bears on a more general point. Although some philosophers reason from propositions that function more or less explicitly as axioms, that suggests a model of doing philosophy that doesn't seem to me to fit the practice very well. Part of the problem is that this "top down" model simply doesn't capture what goes on in a lot of the best philosophical thinking. Philosophers are sensitive to abstract principles when they seem pertinent, but also to low-level intuitions and to stubborn facts. To borrow a phrase that John Rawls made popular, good philosophy looks for a "reflective equilibrium" among considerations of various sorts and at various levels of abstraction.

But even insofar as some philosophy fits the model you suggest, any philosopher who formulates an explicit axiom and reasons from it can expect that the axiom will become the target of counterarguments and counterexamples. The philosopher's impulse in the face of a sacred cow is to slay it. That's an important part of what keeps the discipline honest.

I'm not sure what you mean by "legitimate harm," but it strikes me that any failure to accord others the dignity they are due as human beings causes significant harm to oneself and to others.

If you agree that racism is a failure to respect human dignity, you ought to recognize it as morally objectionable and ought work to correct that failure in your own life by, for example, striving to overcome the racist fears you describe.