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ABSTRACT This article addresses the question of whether race is a biological category and whether it is permissible to use it in biomedicine. I suggest that instrumentalism, a view that race is a problem-solving tool rather than a concept with an objective referent in nature, may be more consistent with the available scientific evidence. I argue that, to be morally permissible, the instrumentalist use of race in research and medicine requires stringent guidelines. I then provide four normative rules to guide race research in the biomedical sciences. The paper gathers evidence from philosophy of science, genomics, legal history, and normative ethics in order to ground the biomedical use of race in a converging ethical and epistemic framework.
The utility of a notion testifies not to its clarity but rather to the philosophic importance of clarifying it.
-Nelson Goodman (1983)
Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries.This remark is true in all the sciences.
-Claude Bernard (1865)
THE GENOMIC REVOLUTION raised hopes that the putative utility of race in biomedicine could be grounded in the view that race has a biological reality and scientific validity (Burchard et al. 2003; Risch et al. 2002). However, the rebuttal of the contention that race is a biological category has been sharp among genomic scientists (Cooper, Kaufman, andWard 2003; Long and Kittles 2003; Serre and Pääbo 2004). Some researchers worry about the reification of race in science and medicine (Bolnick 2008; Duster 2005; Gannett 2004; Lee, Mountain, and Koenig 2001). Still others warn that false assumptions about subgroup differences may undermine the goals of evidence-based medicine (Rogers and Ballantyne 2009). In what follows, I suggest that despite the new momentum the DNA revolution gave the concept, race in the biomedical sciences appears to be more of a convenient designator for multiple presumed layers of human population structures and, in public health settings, a multipurpose managerial tool. For instance, it may help probe environmental and genetic risk factors in disease etiology and surveillance, assess fairness in healthcare allocation across social groups, and tailor care to group needs.
Accordingly, I suggest an instrumentalist conception of race,which holds that racial partitions in the biomedical sciences need not be predicated on a putative match with evolutionary differentiations within...