Given the framing of eugenics against the backdrop of our prosocial nature that I introduced in chapter 1 and elaborated on in chapter 5, one might expect that I would take the seventeenth-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes to be just another Bad Guy in the History of Ideas, a kind of antisocial social philosopher. After all, Hobbes famously depicted human life without any form of government—life in what he called the state of nature—in unflattering and pessimistic terms. Without the security afforded by state power, thought Hobbes, we would be in a war of “each against the other,” and our lives would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes’s views about this state of nature, human nature, and sociality here have been, and remain, central to the tradition of social contract theory within liberal political theory.
And those Hobbesian views have been taken typically to rest on the assumption that human nature is ruthlessly self-interested, and to imply that we are sociable only for instrumental reasons of self-advantage. Hobbes is the quintessential political philosopher of selfishness, the philosopher of what the Canadian political philosopher C. B. Macpherson has called “possessive individualism.” On this standard view of Hobbes, his views of the fictions of the state of nature and the social contract through which we enter political civilization make Hobbes a defender of the view that we are so constituted as a species that we must accept a form of government with absolute sovereignty, a “Leviathan” against which we have no natural rights as human beings or as citizens.
I think this standard interpretation of Hobbes is badly mistaken, however, and that Hobbes in fact has a prosocial view of human nature much closer to the one I have sketched. In fact, I take Hobbes to share the Aristotelian view that we are by nature sociable creatures, albeit ones who could readily find ourselves in circumstances that logically demand deference to state (or other) authority and require abandoning what Hobbes called “private judgment.” But even putting this aspect to Hobbes’s views on human nature to one side, there is something more immediate in his views that make him an ally rather than a foe in debates about human prosociality.
The characterization Hobbes gives of human life in the state of nature—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—does accurately picture what each of our lives would be like from infancy, not in the absence of the protective presence of the state, but without the facilitative presence of the care-givers that each and every one of us needs to survive that natural condition. What Hobbes notes about our vulnerability in the state of nature—that even the strongest of us can be killed by the weakest when the strongest is asleep—applies to each of us more generally during the natural states of infancy and early childhood. In short, our continued survival beyond early life depends minimally on others not knocking us off. More generally, without being able to rely on more active forms of basic assistance and aid—food, shelter, protection, removal from harm’s way—the life of each of us would be brutish and short, whether or not solitary, poor, and nasty. But we survive. Thus, we must be a prosocial species, even if imperfectly so.1
I have returned to this variant on the argument for our prosocial nature because the form that our prosociality takes is important for the response that I would like to develop to the puzzle of marked variation. Here we need to take a step back and reflect on the kind of sociality we have. That first step involves identifying what it means to be a social species, or to have sociality as a core feature of our nature.
We are a social species, but not uniquely so. For starters, we share many of our constituent forms of sociality with the two hundred or so species in the Linnaean order that we fall under, the primates. Sociality is part of our primate heritage, with various social traits that we possess being phylogenetically derived from the nearest common ancestors we share with existing primate species. And sociality, in even more various forms, is found across phylogenetically quite distant parts of the living world: in mammals and in so-called social insects, for example.
In the mobile living world, sociality is pervasive, and it is easy to understand why. Living agents that move around need to have means of responding (relatively) rapidly to features of their local environments that can change (relatively) quickly because of the movement of the agent. This is why sensory systems are ubiquitous in the mobile living world. When you are moving around, your proximal environment tends to change more rapidly in ways that are relevant to your survival and reproduction than it does when you have a sedentary way of life. This is why mice have elaborate, quick-time sensorimotor systems, but trees do not.
Any mobile living agent, unless it is extremely unfortunate or unusual, will often encounter other mobile living agents that are endowed with something like the same capacities and powers that it has, in part because it will be reproduced by, and often with, other such agents. For a mobile living agent to track, respond to, and even anticipate the behavior of other mobile agents requires even more sensory or cognitive sophistication than simply to track, respond to, and even anticipate other kinds of environmental resources.
Social interactions in the nonhuman animal world take many overlapping forms. They can be, among other things, reproductive, cooperative, competitive, predatory, protective, domineering, resource-securing, mutualistic, exploitative, parasitic, pathogenic, altruistic, or sacrificial. Many of these forms of sociality take place with very little cognitive mediation, given that they occur between critters whose individual cognitive power is likely quite limited. Much of this sociality is merely aggregative in that it is the outcome simply of co-occurring individual behaviors that require little coordination with conspecifics. Jellyfish, like real fish, tend to form social aggregates; these jellyfish blooms, unlike the fish schools they may superficially resemble, fall into this category. Because at least much socially aggregated behavior can be done with minimal attention to conspecific behavior, it imposes a relatively low cognitive demand on the individual.2
Much socially coordinated behavior in both the human and nonhuman animal world, however, goes beyond simple forms of social aggregation. When it does, the cognitive demands of that coordination can be considerable. There are three general strategies for meeting those demands, all of which have been adopted in Homo sapiens extensively in shaping up the unique forms of sociality that we possess.
The first is to develop or acquire more sophisticated internal cognitive processing. This might include developing special sensitivity to cues that allow one to detect other nearby mobile creatures, or the specific state that they are in, indicative of whether they are friend or foe, potential mate or likely predator. It might include evolving special memory systems that allow the organism to recognize particular individuals, or even to track their past behavior. Or it might include building reflex-like responses to others, motor routines that allow rapid reactions in the face of expected or unexpected social behavior from these others. The most influential explorations of the cognitive demands of distinctive human sociality have focused on the development of such internal cognitive sophistication as representing the key evolutionary changes in our lineage that facilitate distinctive forms of socially coordinated behavior.
For example, the much-discussed Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis holds that the evolution of human intelligence was driven primarily by the cognitive demands of increasingly complex social coordination problems. The development of a theory of mind, allowing for an understanding of one another in terms of internal and sometimes nonmanifest mental states whose representational content can depart from that of what they represent, has been taken to be a significant cognitive achievement here. The basic idea here is that human sociality is both made possible and facilitated by increasingly complex internal computational processing—processing that is highly modular in response to specific selection pressures.
The second general strategy for meeting the cognitive demands of human sociality is to distribute the requisite sophistication to one’s cognitive processing between internal and external resources, in effect making use of various forms of situated, distributed, and extended cognition. While the general idea of distributed cognition has long found a home within the cognitive sciences, it has only been more recently that the relationships between distributed and extended cognition have been explored. Just as the idea of embodied cognition posits the distribution of cognitive loads between brain and body, the hypothesis of extended cognition proposes that this distribution extends beyond the body.
The reliance of cognizers on external storage systems—parts of the physical world that allow us to extend our biological cognitive capacities by storing information in the world and accessing that information as needed—is one primary way in which extended, situated cognition operates. But there are now philosophical accounts on offer of a variety of cognitive processes—for example, visual perception, moral cognition, emotional development, and musical cognition—that begin to round out the scope of extended cognition. On the extended mind hypothesis, parts of the world can be physically constitutive of cognition, not only as external storage systems, but also more generally. Cognition involves the incorporation and appropriation of cognitive resources, and the intuitive idea behind the extended mind thesis is that the resulting cognitive extensions can involve resources wherever they are located vis-à-vis the physical boundary of the organism itself.
The third strategy is not to distribute individual cognition through the adoption of situated and extended forms of cognition, but to supplement or even replace individual cognition with some kind of collective or group-level cognition. To fix on what group minds or collective cognition might be, consider the so-called “social insects,” the hymenoptera—the wasps, ants and bees—together with the termites.
As their name suggests, the social insects exhibit much sociality, from nest-cleaning behavior to hive temperature regulation requiring the coordination of the behaviors of thousands of bees. Although individual wasps, ants, and bees clearly have some level of cognition, on an individual level it is relatively limited. Despite this, social insect colonies as a whole or in sizeable part, accomplish impressive outcomes that are very naturally described by attributing perceptual or sensorimotor properties to those groups of organisms. These include the perceptual and communicative abilities involved in gathering information about food sources and the motoric capacities to utilize resources and avoid predators and dangers in the world. Some of these capacities or abilities manifest both some level of intentionality and a degree of concern over the integrity of the colony. These include the ability of a bee colony to locate distant sources of nectar and regulate the relative number of foragers and hiver workers in accord with the richness of the source, and the ability of a termite colony to rapidly repair damage to its nest. Yet it is very implausible to think that these abilities are possessed by individual members of the hive, nest, or colony. In short, the behavior of at least some groups is such that it seems directed at self-preservation, where the self here is a colony, and the means of achieving that goal involves group-level decision making that draws on collectively distributed perception and sensing. The relevant, putative cognitive activities here—for example, perceiving, remembering, deciding, monitoring—are what I have elsewhere called group-only traits, which are possessed only by a group and not by the individuals that comprise the group.
This appeal to group-level cognition is familiar to those working on sociality in the fragile sciences, having been made by the sociologist Emile Durkheim in his influential invocation of collective representations. Durkheim originally drew a distinction between collective and individual representation as part of an argument for the autonomy of the social sciences from psychology. Durkheim’s basic claim here was that just as psychology worked with individual representations, so too would sociology be the science that studied collective representations. Contributing to what I have elsewhere called the collective psychology tradition in hypothesizing group minds, Durkheim’s appeal to collective representations was both a response to perceived concerns about individual and national degeneracy and also manifested a more optimistic tendency among both psychologists and social scientists who saw in the group mind something meliorative and uplifting. For Durkheim in particular, it was through collective consciousness and representations that virtues such as cohesiveness and solidarity that offset and counteracted social factors causing individual detriment could be emphasized.
The influence of Durkheim’s views here within the fragile sciences, and the reach of the collective psychology tradition into the popular imagination, have created a comfort with the idea of group-level cognition in the social sciences that has fueled recent work on collective memory, decision making, and cognition more generally. That idea has also received more intense philosophical scrutiny in recent work on shared intentionality and collective social action.3
In recent philosophical and psychological work focused on human sociality, the idea of shared or collective intentionality has loomed large. Collective intentionality has come to be conceived as some kind of crowning achievement of our species, and perhaps of our closest ancestors and living relatives. It is a sort of keystone accomplishment that brings in its wake new forms of sociality, building on and utilizing forms of individual cognition that are themselves distinctively human. More specifically, over the past twenty years shared or collective intentionality has been used to explore supposedly distinct forms of human cooperation and conflict, the role of institutions in human social life, and even the broader nature of social reality itself. Precisely where (and how) we locate shared intentionality among the individual enhancements, social distribution, and group-level implementation of cognitive sophistication remains a matter of ongoing debate. While we need not enter into that issue here, it will pay to have some understanding of what motivates the appeal to shared intentionality, since it is shared intentionality that provides the basis for the normative dimension to human sociality important to the puzzle of marked variation.
Much human social behavior is cooperative, shared, or joint. We do things together: we work and play, we walk and talk, we celebrate and mourn, we laugh and cry. There seems to be little reluctance to view ourselves as undertaking such behaviors or actions together, to accept collective action, in addition to individual action. Collective actions, such as building a fire together or holding hands, are no more ontologically dubious than the corresponding individual actions. Consider distributive and joint or shared forms of collectively acting.
A collective or group of individuals acts distributively when the components of the overall action are distributed across the actions of those individuals. In distributive collective action, the group does something that no individual in the group herself does, except insofar as she contributes to the collective action itself. To take a simplified example, one beaver finds and transports waterlogged debris to a particular place in a creek; a second beaver then places that material in the growing dam. The collective action of building a shelter—a beaver lodge or dam—is distributed across this pair of actions. To find and transport that material, or to arrange it, is to build a shelter only insofar as these component actions form part of the collective action.
For there to be joint or shared collective action, there needs to be not simply distributive collective action but in addition some kind of coordinating glue that makes it an action that is completed together. When a team of contractors builds my house, or a restaurant cooks my meal, there is not simply distributed collective action but also the kind of coordination and cooperation that makes for joint or shared collective action. What is the coordinating glue in such an action? One hypothesis is that joint or shared intentionality, particularly shared intentions, is what provides this coordinating glue. Such shared intentions have been central to the literature on collective intentionality, where they are often called “we-intentions”: first-person plural intentions. But the more important point here is that this coordinating glue is something mental, however it is conceived more precisely.4
So my starting point is a certain view of sociality in general (section 6.3), and of human sociality in particular (section 6.4). I take sociality to be a ubiquitous feature of the biological world, especially the mobile biological world containing creatures with some self-governing capacity to move from location to location. Sociality requires some kind of at least minimal group living, interactions with conspecifics, and a differential sensitivity of some kind to the presence of others, both conspecifics and nonconspecifics. While sociality per se does not mark us off from other species, the specific form that our sociality takes does. I hypothesize that human sociality is distinguished by three related features:
Having already introduced the key component ideas here in the previous sections, I will simply say something briefly about each of these three features.
Not all mobile organisms that display a differential sensitivity to others have cognitive capacities, and even when they do have such capacities, their reactions to others are not always governed by their cognitive mechanisms, but by chemical sensitivities (in the case of bacteria and other single-celled organisms, as well as social insects); by the detection of threshold levels of environmental resources (in insects and birds); and by low-level perceptual mechanisms that do not feed into higher cognitive capacities (in birds and mammals).
Spelling out both just what makes a process cognitive, and precisely when we find cognition proper in the natural (or even artificial) world, are notoriously thorny issues. But some standard answers to these questions are helpful in corralling the phenomenon of cognition. Cognition involves representation crunching, and the processes that crunch those representations are often computational in nature, ideas at the heart of the classic computational and representational theories of mind, but also available to proponents of alternatives to those views (e.g., connectionism). Insofar as cognition proper goes beyond both perception (on the input side) and behavioral reflexes (on the output side), it involves interactions between internal representations, as well as between internal and external representations, that give rise to the agility and flexibility in behavior that is the beacon of underlying cognitive processing. Cognition is not uniquely human, but it is also not ubiquitous in organismic responses to the social world.
Our response to evolutionary pressures and social circumstances includes not simply more complicated internal processing but also forms of cognition that are distributed among mind, body, and world, as well as those that operate at the level of the group itself. Extended cognition allows us to create cultural capital that serves as common cognitive resources—as when we devise writing systems—and then to make use of such common cognitive resources for individual cognitive extension—as when we use pen and paper to jot down notes for ourselves. While I think that nonhuman animals have made use of extended and collective cognitive systems that rely on shared intentionality, human animals have made themselves masters of these cognitive trades. Traditions, rituals, ceremonies, rehearsals, and cultural symbols are among components of extended cognitive systems familiar to those in the fragile sciences of sociality, particularly cultural anthropologists and sociologists.
Normativity exists when there is a distinction between a correct, proper, or appropriate way for a process, event, or outcome to turn out, and an incorrect, improper, or inappropriate such way. Like extended cognition, normativity arises in and through both nonhuman and human cognition; it is not solely a feature of our own species’ activity. But again like extended cognition, the most familiar and robust forms of normativity are those that are the product of distinctly human practices and institutions that presuppose a kind of shared intentionality. This normativity encompasses the norms generated within legal systems, within codes of etiquette, and by morality. Such norms may be made explicit in the form of rules or commands, or may be implicit in the ways in which we interact with one another. The threefold sophistication to our cognitive processing structures our sociality partly through this normativity.
So we have a kind of externally mediated, cognitively driven normativity, and it constitutes an important feature of human social life. One thing that this cognitively mediated normativity does is allow us to distinguish not simply between individual people but between kinds or sorts of people. Because of this dimension to our cognitive toolkit, there is an important place for the appeal to human cognition in addressing the puzzle of marked variation.5
In saying that we distinguish between kinds or sorts of people I mean neither that we ordinary folk have rich conceptions of natural kinds that we apply to people, nor that human kinds or sorts are true natural kinds existing in the world independently of how we think about the world. (For these reasons I tend to speak of sorts of people rather than kinds of people.) Rather, in saying that we distinguish between sorts of people I mean only that we employ various categories to distinguish among those whom we recognize as people. In fact, we do so quasi-recursively: once we have already sorted people by one type of criterion, we then continue the process with other subsidiary criteria. People sort one another (and themselves) into many different categories: by their height and weight, their eye, hair, and skin color, their sex and sexual behavior, their income level and type of employment, their personality and beliefs, their tastes in recreation and entertainment, their ancestry, religion, and ethnicity, their astrological sign and year of birth, and their marital and parental status. This mixture of cross-cutting and hierarchical sorting is a ubiquitous feature of how we think of one another and ourselves. Yet such sorting is not a mere mental exercise, for it contributes both to what one does, and to the normative constraints that apply to oneself and to others.
One of the primary ways we use such human sorts is in determining whether other people are, in some important way, like us. The plural referent “us” in “like us” is deliberate, and refers to some type of social group. Therefore, in saying that we sort people in terms of their being—or not being—like us, I am saying that we sort them in terms of whether they belong to our social group. Social groups, as I am thinking of them here, are simply groups of people. They can vary in terms of their permanence, in their value to how we lead our lives, in their relationship to our own sense of identity—of who we are—and in the extent to which membership in them is up to each of us, what we might think of as a dimension of Heideggerian thrownness to belonging. Others who are “like us” might share any of our appearance, our sex, our skin color, our ancestry, our language, our history, our values, our social position, our interests, our political engagements, or our activities. When they do so, they are “one of us,” along one or more dimensions. When Meryl joins the Baker Street Tennis club, she becomes one of us (if we are already club members); when Bryan takes out Canadian citizenship, he becomes one of us (if we are already Canadians); and when a child is born in contemporary Western societies, he or she becomes one of the family (again, if that child is our child).
This sorting of human beings is no mere matter of cognitive registration. It has normative uptake, often of a significant kind. It also generates a distinctive type of knowledge, departing from typical third-person knowledge, knowledge of facts that could be known by anyone. Instead, it generates information about how others relate to oneself. As such, it is properly conceived as a socially located agent, first-person plural knowledge: first-person because it is knowledge of one’s self; plural because it is not just me-knowledge but we-knowledge, knowledge that I have of myself as a part of some us. Much of this first-person plural knowledge is fleeting, but it is that which is lasting that is of interest here.
The connection between externally mediated, cognitively driven normativity and the “one of us” deployment of human sorts is something like this. Prominent among the norms that feature in our social lives are those that are generated by, and form a part of, the social groups that we belong to, including those that are significant for our identities. These are our norms, and not only do they apply to those in our group, but they also are enforced and transmitted through the extended cognitive systems utilized by that group. Like human sorts themselves, norms can vary from the frivolous to the identity-determining, as well as along other dimensions of variation. Our externally mediated, cognitively driven normativity is group focused, and it is this that provides the link to our employment of human sorts for the determination of co-belonging. For we use human sorts in this way as a means of engaging in the kind of externally mediated, cognitively driven normativity that characterizes and pervades human sociality.
Suppose that we do have “like us” or “one of us” human-sorting mechanisms. And suppose that disablement—like race/ethnicity and sex/gender—is one complex domain that these mechanisms operate within. Then all it would take for us to end up with the kind of difference between people being marked as subnormal is for the norms that make someone not like me, that is, not a member of my group, to be ones that class as subnormal those people who have (or even simply are perceived to have) disabilities or impaired parts. Such norms are abundant, both in our shared social and cultural spaces and in the internal processing that mediates individual cognition.
We can express this point in terms of the idea of cognitive scaffolding that is commonly invoked in work on distributed and extended cognition. All societies and cultures contain a lot of external cognitive scaffolding that stigmatizes disablement in ways that direct and reinforce our “like us” mechanisms. What the historical eugenics movement provided were specific ways to think about human improvement that centered on the elimination of disability, particularly cognitive disability, by making the category of feeble-mindedness central to the conception of a range of social ills and how they could be cured in future generations. By introducing cognitive scaffolds that subhumanized the feeble-minded, but also others whose questionable mental health was a key eugenic trait, eugenics channeled our cognitively mediated sociality in a particular way, both building on existing dispositions to cognitively react to one another via “like us” detectors and continuing to structure how people with disabilities, especially intellectual ones, are viewed in our supposedly post-eugenic society.
Thus, the ideas of normalcy and subnormalcy that mark disablement and medical pathologization derive from a kind of cognitively mediated normativity that is created, reinforced, and transmitted through individual, extended, and group-level cognition. These ideas are thus rooted in distinctively human forms of cognition and sociability, and understanding them more fully involves further specification of mechanisms that operate across the cognitive and social domains. I have speculated that “like us” detectors constitute one such mechanism. On this view, our ideas about marked human variation are neither distinctively nineteenth-century nor intrinsically tied to what is often thought of as the heyday of eugenic thought and practice. Those ideas both predate and postdate the eighty-year period occupied by the short history of eugenics (1865–1945), and likely underpin ongoing views of, and attitudes toward, human variation and disability. Independent of the kind of social constructivism about normalcy that took place in the nineteenth century, there is a further socio-cognitive dimension to our responses to marked variation associated with the detection of subnormalcy among human variation.
In articulating a socio-cognitive framework for addressing the puzzle of marked variation I have spoken loosely of “one of us” and “like us” mechanisms, and suggested that these are first-person plural mechanisms. In this section I want to sharpen my characterization of such mechanisms and the corresponding first-person plural knowledge they generate by considering two much-discussed hypotheses about human social cognition, the first arising within anthropology, the second in developmental psychology.
In “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain? Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories,” the anthropologist Francisco Gil-White brought the adaptationist thinking of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology to bear on the question of how we perceive ethnic groups. Dissatisfied with the predominance of constructivist perspectives on the anthropology of ethnicity, and reintroducing the idea of essentialism back into thought about ethnicity, Gil-White argued for a particular hypothesis about how ethnic groups are perceived. Here Gil-White invoked a specific mechanism, a module for processing living kinds that was familiar in literature on cognitive development. In keeping with the rejection of traditional essentialism that is widespread in both the biological and social sciences, Gil-White acknowledged that ethnic groups do not in fact have essences: there is no set of intrinsic properties, each necessary and together sufficient, defining membership in an ethnic group. Yet attuned to the developmental literature on psychological essentialism, Gil-White nonetheless wondered aloud about why it is that ordinary people often treat ethnic groups as if they had essences. His core hypothesis, as summarized in the abstract to his paper, is as follows: “Humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were ‘species’ because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the ‘living kinds’ mental module that initially evolved to process species-level categories.”
Gil-White’s argument is something like this. We have a “living kinds” module, which is a cognitive adaptation that evolved to detect species. Ethnic groups on the surface are similar to species, and for this reason, we treat them cognitively as if they were in fact species. Thus, ethnic groups serve as a trigger for our living kinds module, which is why we treat ethnic groups as if they had essences, when in fact they do not. Put in terms that the philosopher and anthropologist Dan Sperber has introduced, we have a module whose proper domain is species-level categories, but whose actual domain is ethnic groups.
Gil-White’s hypothesis posits a psychological mechanism, a living kinds module, that detects in the biological world a certain natural kind: species. Gil-White considers species themselves, of which Homo sapiens is one example, to have intrinsic essences. Our living kinds module is also pressed into service in our perception of a certain kind of social group, an ethnic group. We can (and do) come to distinguish between our own ethnic group and those of others. But there is nothing about the living kinds module that makes the comparison between ourselves and others crucial to its operation. It is in this sense that the living kinds module generates third-person knowledge.
On Gil-White’s view, our evolutionary history is one in which we first have a living kinds module for detecting species in general, applying it to our own case to detect conspecifics and distinguish ourselves as members of a common species from other organisms. We then come to use this module in this same way within our own species to detect people who are co-ethnic and distinguish ourselves as such from individuals in other ethnic groups. The shift here is from third-person to first-person knowledge. But rather than starting with species detection, might we not start with a cognitive endowment that allows one to detect those like oneself in some salient way—in perceptual appearance, in behavior, in language, in where we live—delivering knowledge that is first-person in that the content it delivers is ineliminably tied to the perspective of the particular cognizer? On this view, our evolutionary history is one that starts with a psychological mechanism that generates first-person plural knowledge—knowledge about us—with that knowledge being later, if at all, generalized to the level of conspecifics and to the species-level more generally. The evolutionary trajectory here, in short, would be just the opposite to that implied by Gil-White’s hypothesis.
Cognitive mechanisms that are first-person rather than third-person in nature have been central to the work of the developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff on imitation and sociality. Building on a now classic study that showed that very young infants spontaneously imitated an adult movement, such as a tongue protrusion, over the past forty years Meltzoff has articulated a theoretical framework for integrating subsequent findings about imitation, gaze direction, mental state detection and attribution, action, observational learning, and first-person experience in infants under two years of age.
The basic idea to Meltzoff’s theory is that infants use first-person knowledge of their own intentional actions in order to understand the actions of others and the unobservable mental states—goals, desires, aims—that generate them. Meltzoff is concerned with presenting a view of infants that overturns the dominant view of them as asocial creatures, the sort of influential view that one finds in thinkers as different as Freud and Piaget, but does not rest content with the claim that we are born with an innate theory of mind that simply unfolds over time. Infants are geared to imitate actions, where these are not simply movements but behaviors that are generated by intentions. Crucially, they can use their own bodily self-knowledge in order not only to imitate but also to anticipate what agents will do, and what it is that those agents want to happen from their intentional actions. While some bodily control (and the self-knowledge that it presupposes) is an arduous and late (if ever) acquired accomplishment, more important here is the fact that both can take forms that are immediate and effortless, and can even involve little cognitive effort. Tongue protrusion, bodily orientation, head turning, gross reaching, and vocalization are all bodily actions that even very young infants can engage in with intentional purpose, and in interaction with another person. They presuppose some bodily self-knowledge, and their recognition in others—also manifest in young infants who are subsequently motivated to engage in the same actions—presupposes a mechanism that generates first-person plural knowledge: what Meltzoff calls “like me” detectors.
Although these mechanisms do generate some first-person plural knowledge, their principal outputs are first-person singular knowledge, knowledge about one’s own actions, and how it coordinates, compares, and differs with those of others in one’s immediate environment. By contrast, for the mechanism that I have in mind as underpinning our sense of group identity, the “like us” mechanism, first-person plural knowledge is an intrinsic output: the “like us” mechanism delivers representations that are not only comparative in nature, but compare individuals vis-à-vis the social groups they are perceived as belonging to. Thus, the postulated “like us” mechanism tells those who possess it not simply whether another is the same as or different from oneself, as does Meltzoff’s “like me” detector, but by doing so with respect to social group membership carries information about the corresponding social groups.6
Both the discussion of the constructivist view that appeals to biopolitics from chapter 5 and that of the socio-cognitive framework introduced in this chapter invite further questions and call for more details. Yet I hope that the general contrast between the two views should be clear in terms of the response each gives to the puzzle of marked variation. The constructivist view sees marked variation as closely tied to the rise of eugenic ideas and practices. By contrast, the socio-cognitive framework takes the eugenic nexus to provide just one particular way in which a recurrent socio-cognitive disposition plays out.
In terms of the seven desiderata for any adequate response to the puzzle of marked variation, I have argued that the constructivist view’s only real strength lies in the first desideratum. Recall that these say that that response should:
I think that the socio-cognitive framework satisfies all of these desiderata, and that it is quite easy to see why it does so.
This is chiefly because the underlying cognitive mechanisms that it posits—like us detectors—operate on normatively meaningful social categories, some of which (such as kinship) are key to our prosocial life (desideratum 2), others of which operate on marked variation in other domains (desideratum 3). With a focus on cognitive mechanisms that can operate in very different social and cultural circumstances, this view is also apt for making sense of disability both before (desideratum 5) and after (desideratum 1) the explicit eugenic era. In positing first-person plural knowledge, it is geared both to capture the phenomenology of marked variation (desideratum 4) and to connect social and psychological dimensions to the puzzle (desideratum 6). By responding to the puzzle of marked variation by appealing to our socio-cognitive nature, it avoids the particular version of the explanatory regress represented by the open question-style argument I gave (desideratum 7), though it does invite those skeptical about nonreductive, naturalistic responses to the puzzle to articulate their own form of this problem.
Grappling with the puzzle of marked variation has brought out further dimensions to eugenics, past and present, and called into question the adequacy of the dominant social constructivist narrative about disability and its relationship to eugenics. Human variation is a part of the natural world, and marked variation within that is a part of a human world structured by forms of cognitively mediated sociality. I want to complete this extended discussion of human variation and disability by taking up one further sorting of people within a category of disablement—one that brings us back to the idea of standpoint eugenics more explicitly.
Consider thalidomiders, people who were, and still sometimes are, born with visible variation in their limb formation as a result of their mothers having taken the drug thalidomide during pregnancy. Thalidomide, first sold under the name Contergen in Germany late in 1956 as a sedative treating morning sickness and insomnia, came to be approved in almost fifty countries over a five-year period before its adverse effects on the development of the fetus were verified and the drug withdrawn. (The drug was never approved by the Federal Drug Administration in the United States, but was available in Canada in 1961–1962.) Thalidomiders have variation in any or all of their limbs, including extreme truncation of one or more limbs, more moderately shortened limbs, and variations in digit number and location when the hand or foot is formed. Most thalidomiders in the West were born between 1958 and 1962, with the majority born in Germany, where thalidomide was sold earliest and for the longest period. The case of thalidomide was a principal motivation for more rigorous testing—especially on pregnant women—of pharmaceutical drugs before they received regulatory agency approval. It also played a broader role in shifting social attitudes in related areas, such as in attitudes toward abortion and prenatal screening.
The biochemist and disability theorist Gregor Wolbring is a German-born thalidomider and one of the biochemists who has worked on thalidomide derivatives effective in relieving some of the symptoms of leprosy and some cancers, and has drawn attention to the role of thalidomide in pharmaceutical regulation and the role of society in the lives of thalidomiders. As Wolbring puts it more bluntly, thalidomiders became the “poster children” not only for stricter regulation of pharmaceuticals, but also for the fight for a woman’s right to an abortion in the era leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. We can spell out the rationale or logic that Wolbring sees relating thalidomide-induced “birth defects” and large-scale and wide-ranging social policy changes in the Western world. To avoid something that monstrous being born, society should undertake to provide for the rigorous and systematic regulation of drugs taken during pregnancy; it should also ensure that any woman carrying a fetus detected as being like that have the right to terminate her pregnancy. Both of these societal changes were mediated via governmental policy and legislation. From Wolbring’s standpoint, this provides a striking and extreme case in which the marked variation associated with thalidomiders has eerily similar life and death consequences during the last quarter of the twentieth century as did Harry Haiselden’s advocacy of the euthanasia of “defective infants” in its first quarter.
Thalidomider, of course, is not a medical term, and is rarely used in medicine itself—“thalidomide victim” is the most commonly found generic term for people who underwent development changes in their bodily formation due to their mother’s having taken the prescribed drug thalidomide. “Thalidomider” is, rather, a self-identifying expression, one used by such people in talking about themselves, individually and collectively, in the first-person and in the third-person. Like the general shift from “victim” to “survivor” that was pioneered within feminist discussions of child molestation, rape, and other sexual crimes, and that I have adapted here in articulating a standpoint eugenics, its introduction in the context of the extreme subhumanization experienced by thalidomiders represents a kind of reclamation of one’s own personhood, dignity, and self-respect.
This self-affirming signaling of marked variation contrasts with the language of victimization, tragedy, and loss permeating the medicalized discourse that provides the dominant framing of public awareness of thalidomide-related phenomena. It represents the prosocial flipside of the one-of-us mechanisms that, I have been suggesting, structure The Eugenic Mind.7