Ludovica Lorusso

The justification of race in biological explanation

In medicine, racial differences are frequently presented as part of the best explanation of differences in the risk of diseases. The problem of using racial classification in biomedical research has become important because of its ethical consequences in society. However, the biological relevance of the concept of race cannot be established by any ethical argument and the epistemological role of racial categorisation requires clarification. In this paper, different issues related to the concept of race are considered. This paper analyses the semantic problem concerning the definition of race, considers the ontological problem of race, drawing attention to the biological evidence for genetic differences among human groups, and presents a promising epistemological approach to the problem of race. The purpose of the paper is to examine whether, or when, racial categories belong in biological explanations. It shows that the concept of race cannot be justified in biology because it does not lead to successful predictions, and that genetic discontinuities are sufficient to explain differences in diseases but not needed in the explanation. The biomedical field should search for genetic patterns related to diseases, and should not assume racial discontinuities among human groups and use racial clusters as proxies for undetected genetic patterns.

A tattoo is not a face. Ethical aspects of tattoo-based biometrics

Purpose This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology (TRT) and tattoo similarity detection technology (TSDT), which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies. Design/methodology/approach The paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics. Findings TRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many more personal features that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought. Practical implications The findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biometrics before it is intensely implemented by law enforcement agencies. Social implications Tattooed individuals – inasmuch as they are more controlled and monitored – are negatively discriminated in comparison to un-tattooed individuals. As tattooing is not uniformly distributed among population, many demographic groups like African–Americans will be overrepresented in tattoos databases used by TRT and TSDT, thus being affected by disproportionately higher risk to be found as a match for a given suspect. Originality/value TRT and TSDT represent one of the new frontiers of biometrics. The ethical and social issues raised by TRT and TSDT are currently unexplored.