Stalking the Wild Taboo -Michael Levin

Michael Levin

Michael Levin is a Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York and the Graduate center, City University of New York. He is well known in Libertarian circles and has written much about social issues in the US, especially feminism, race, crime, and other politically incorrect topics.

Thoughts by professor Levin

On misinformation about race. - [B]ecause of the misinformation that exists about race, disparate impact has an absolute veto power on virtually every sensible idea anybody has…sensible and reasonable things will inevitably have different effects on the races. Let’s do the sensible things anyway, if there is no reason not to do them except for the disparate impact. That itself would probably go a long way toward defusing our problems.

On the power of genes. - No matter how many penguins congregate on an ice floe, or for how long, they will never form a constitutional monarchy. It therefore makes perfect sense to seek to explain a group phenomenon via the characteristics of the group's constituent individuals, and equally good sense to suppose that some of those characteristics are genetically influenced...This is the structure of genetic explanations of cultures and of cross-cultural differences - in particular, differences between cultures composed of different races.

Books by Michael Levin

Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem, Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-824415-0.

Freedom and Feminism, Transaction Books, 1987. ISBN 0-88738-125-1.

Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean, Praeger Publishers, 1997. ISBN 0-275-95789-6

Essays by Michael Levin here and elsewhere on the web

Why Race Matters: A Preview Michael Levin's summary of Why Race Matters as published in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 12: 2 (FALL 1996)
Squaring the Circle Michael Levin's review of Jared Diamond's, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
The Case for Torture Michael Levin defends that which most folks reject as barbaric.