Kalewold H. Kalewold

About

I am a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly with the Department of Philosophy and at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. I received my PhD in philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My primary research projects are in philosophy of science, philosophy of race, and political philosophy. In my projects, I often draw on the theoretical and emprical approaches of natural and social sciences to illuminate broader issues in philosophy of race, political philosophy, and public policy.

In philosophy of science, I am interested in explanation in the special sciences. In my dissertation project, On the Activities and Parts of the Mechanisms of Life, I develop the philosophical foundations of the new mechanist approach to explanation. My research draws on the life sciences, especially molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience, to illustrate my philosophical theses.

In philosophy of race, I have research interests at the intersection of race, metaphysics, and philosophy of medicine.

In political philosophy, my work is at the intersection of philosophy and public policy. I am currently working on projects defending a novel electoral system, advancing an account of domination for theorizing about algorithmic governance, and about intergenerational justice.

Contact

You can e-mail me at k.kalewold@leeds.ac.uk and you can find me on philpeople.

Book

Metaphysics of Race (Elements in Metaphysics)
Cambridge University Press, 2024 ( Abstract)

Are races real? Is race a biological or social category? What role, if any, does race play in scientific explanations? This Cambridge Element addresses these and other core questions in the metaphysics of race. I discuss prominent accounts of race such as biological racial realism, social constructivism about race, and racial anti-realism. If anti-realists are right, our societies find themselves in thrall to a concept that is scarcely more veridical than ‘witch’ or ‘werewolf’. Social constructionism grounds race in factors ultimately controlled by human thought and action. Biological racial realists argue that race is too quickly dismissed as biologically meaningful, and that it has a role to play in contemporary life sciences. I explore these views and show their virtues and shortcomings. In particular, I advance an argument against biological racial realism that draws on the metaphysics of naturalness and philosophy of biology and medicine.

Publications

"Is Race (Minimally) Biologically Real?"
Philosophy of Science, Conditionally Accepted ( Abstract)

Recent work by Michael O. Hardimon and Quayshawn Spencer defends a minimalist (or deflationary) biological realism about race. Their approach has two distinct features. First, unlike revisionist biological race concepts defended by, for instance, Phillip Kitcher and Robin Andreasen, minimalist biological races are a conception of race that correspond to our ordinary race concepts. Second, unlike hereditarian or essentialist accounts, minimalist biological races are not claimed to be robustly explanatory. This talk argues against their account of the biological genuineness of race. I argue the minimalist biological conception of race lacks the explanatory constraints of genuine biological kinds. Rather, minimalist biological races are gerrymandered kinds.

"The Hybrid Account of Activities"
Synthese, 2024 ( Abstract)

According to an influential account of the new mecanistic philosophy of science, entities and activities compose mechanisms. However, the new mechanists have paid too little attention to activties. Critics have charged that accounts of activities in the new mechanism literature are philosophically uninformative and opaque. This paper defends a novel account of causally productive activities, which I call the Hybrid Account, that marries the two dominant philosophical approaches to causation: production and difference-making. The Hybrid Account of Activities (HAA) identifies causally productive activities as robust difference-makers to the next stage of a mechanism. The Hybrid Account provides attractive solutions to causal identification and causal selection problems faced by earlier activities views.

"Lockdowns and the Ethics of Intergenerational Compensation"
Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, 2023 ( Abstract) (Link)

Lockdowns were a morally and medically appropriate anti-contagion policy to stop the spead of Covid. However, lockdowns came with considerable costs. Specifically, lockdowns imposed harms and losses upon the young in order to benefit the elderly, who were at the highest risk of severe illness and death from Covid. This represened a shifting of the (epidimiological) burden of Covid for the elderly to a systemic burden of lockdowns upon the young. This paper argues that even if lockdowns were a morally permissible reponse to Covid, the harms and losses they imposed on the young ground a claim of compensation. I defend an Intergenerational Compensation Argument that defends a claim for an egalitarian intergenerational transfer to compensate the young for the harms of lockdown.

"Race and Medicine in Light of the New Mechanistic Philosophy of Science"
Winner of the 2020 PSA Prize in Philosophy of Science & Race
Biology and Philosophy, 2020 ( Abstract) (Link)

Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a fashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifcally contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities.

Works In Progress

a paper defending a novel electoral system
a paper about metaphysical explanation in the life sciences
a paper about racialization
a paper about non-domination and AI decision-making
a paper about how to identify good parts in biology

Selected Teaching