> [!abstract] > The act of gatekeeping human traits. > [!abstract] > Broadbent (2009) uses the helpful term, “biological chauvinism” to describe the way that biomedicine actively excludes consideration of entities and processes that don’t fit into its worldview: “a refusal to countenance causes of ill health that are not biological” (Broadbent 2009: 305). Biological chauvinists might appeal to ontological or epistemic commitments, e.g., the assumption that knowledge of the body is nothing but knowledge of organic chemical processes, and any processes not clearly reducible to such terms are not yet worthy of being given full consideration. But the strongest case for this chauvinism rests more on pragmatic grounds than on such philosophical assumptions. Biomedicine has built itself into a massive global institution and research enterprise while operating under that assumption (to repeat Krieger’s phrasing from Section 1.1, the assumption is that “the domain of disease and its causes is restricted to solely biological, chemical, and physical phenomena” (Krieger 2011: 130)). This is a powerful argument, though it cuts both ways; Section 5 discusses critiques attempting to undercut the value of what biomedicine has indeed built while operating under that approach. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024). This is close to my heart as a [[Vegetarianism|vegetarian]] with concern about speciesism and animal welfare. It applies to many speciesist reflexes, such as: - Refusing to acknowledge that other animals are conscious and experience qualia, simply because they do not possess the same aptitude for language as we do (Broca's area); - Refusing to acknowledge that AI might be intelligent in at least some near-human sense of the word, simply because it runs on "dumb" next-token prediction heuristics. I find that biochauvinism arbitrarily focuses on some internal mechanism, as opposed to considering the expressed behavior as a whole. Just because humans have a monopoly on some reductionist definition of a trait, doesn't mean they have a monopoly on the trait itself. >[!related] >- **North** (upstream): [[Quantum theory of the mind]] >- **West** (similar): [[Carbon fascism]] >- **East** (different): — >- **South** (downstream): [[Vitalism]]