EUNUCHS, SOCIAL DEATH, AND POPULAR TREES AROUND THE CORNER FROM MY FATHER’S HOUSE

Leonard Harris, Ph.D.Department of PhilosophyPurdue UniversityWest Lafayette, Indiana 47907

I

Two ideas have a conjoined legacy: reasoning ability is sin qua non with

having a unique quality of 'reason' and moral codes derivative from reason sin qua non

with moral intuitions. The proper use of reason, mutatus mutandis, is to have the proper

moral intuitions. However, “reason” exists alongside officially sanctioned rape, torture,

mutilations, and vicious experimentation on the bodies of the subaltern—the lesser or

non-rationals. Cruelty has always accompanied the valorization of reason. Analogous to

the reality that democracy has always been accompanied by slavery, not as slavery’s

aftermath but its shadow, whether in Rome, Greece, England, Brazil, China, or the

United States, reason and the practice of cruelty have always existed together (Patterson,

Washington). They have existed together not as the practice of cruelty resulting from

flawed reasoning procedures or failure to derive right moral codes from intuitions but as

shadows. Whether under the authority of physicians well-educated and inculcated with

the inferential expertise of reasoning on slave ships, at auction blocks, or in modern

hospitals, where the black body is treated as if it can tolerate more pain than others,

physicians have practiced cruelty within a community that defines their behavior as

reasonable (Rogers). The view that rational moral foundations and its correlative moral

intuitions provide adequate codes of conduct for healthcare professionals is misguided

(Bayer, et al.). I explore why we should be cautious of standard codes of conduct and

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suggest an alternative approach that entails a broad range of sensibilities associated with

honor and dignity.

II

Kant, Hume, and Hegel were racists (Eze). There is no history of “reason”—

discursive, dialectic, abdicative, or amplicative—without the history of empowered

rational agents treating others as abject and inferior. There is no history of derivations

from principles, propositions, codes, rules, or forms of consciousness to empathy, care,

and compassion without the derivations eliciting multiple signifiers and plastic social

categories that make cruelty appear normal. Subalterns, the debased,, wretched and

degraded exist in plain view of all 'normally' persons endowed with reason; no matter

what moral intuitions they have correlative to their moral codes normal persons live

conformably among suffering populations. The following helps us understand why

cruelty and reason are married.

Reason is an intrinsic quality of which reasonableness is a probable expression.

Rationalism supposes absolute transposability, exchangeability, and replace-ability. Each

reasonable person, using rationalism as a model what it is to be a reasonable person, can

be replaced by another reasonable person because each would arrive at the exact, or

nearly exact, same right answers. This is analogous to Aristotelian character dispositions;

they may be considered intrinsic and particular acts are good, or misguided, expressions.

There must be acts that are proper expressions of dispositions, otherwise character traits

cannot be mapped to dispositions. So too, reasonableness must have a correlative

association with reason. It cannot be the case that reasonable agents endowed with

intrinsic sensibilities will reach fundamentally different answers. This is so because each

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relies on their moral codes derived from intuitions using the same instrument: reason. If

answers fundamentally differed, then there would have to be something defective in the

nature of reasoning itself. That is, the model of propositional argumentative thinking

would be flawed. In an anti-black society, when using this model, every white person is

considered invested with the essential quality of reason. Even if a white person were not

reasonable, it would be assumed that he has the appropriate intrinsic quality of reason.

This is so whether he is a thief or priest. Every black person in an anti-black society is

assumed to be invested with the qualities of bestiality, imbecility, and infantile emotions

whether he is a president or housekeeper. Indignities are visited upon the latter more

often than the former racial kind. The most well-off or accomplished black individuals

who clearly evince the trait of reasonableness and thereby must have the correlative

moral intuitions in an anti-black society are deemed in some way “beyond race,” above

the common kind, or an exception to the norm. The cognitive structure instantiated by

the reasoning model establishes a rank ordering of rational kinds that only allows for, at

best, exceptions to the rule. However, the exceptions cannot be seen as possessing reason

as such but, at best, expressing reasonableness. The least well-off of the colonized, for

example, or the victims of racial prejudice may be seen as aberrant, deviant, or defective

and, if not absolutely irredeemable, at least not likely to ascend to a level showcasing the

best traits of their kind (Serequeberhan). Their kind, however, can never ascend above

their assigned inferior status.

One way of thinking about the limitations of rationalism and its marriage to

cruelty is this: even if there were a priori forms of pure intuition, there could be no

derivation manual to tell us exactly how best each intuition, or a network of intuitions, is

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to be applied in complex cases. And even if every person were invested with an

invariable, common, intrinsic, deep structured morality, that is, some set of moral

percepts that are preconditions for the possibility of moral considerations, a sort of a

priori conditionality hard-wired into every brain, there could be no procedure or

reasoning strategy that tells us slavery is wrong or that rape, genocide, ethnocentricity, or

racism unjust. The immiserated are never considered capable of being raped or harmed

by genocide, ethnocentricity, or racism; their misery is always considered natural,

normal, beneficial, necessary, evolutionary, cleansing, or religiously helpful to their kind.

Their sentient status as feelers of pleasure and pain are ranked; their reason is ranked

beneath the superior; their status as existential free agents capable of making a contract is

compromised by their relative imbecility. The raping of slave women in America, for

example, was a crime against their masters’ property; the laws of racial segregation were

intended not only to help keep “Negroes” in their place but to ensure that they lived

according to their nature.

A culture that defines itself as rational, such that what it is to be human is to

possess reason, must make what it means by “reasonable” operational. Therein lies the

trick. There are no value-free derivations and no conceptions of reason that sit outside

the sphere of deep structural, social, and cognitive value vicissitudes. It is the picture of

reason sin qua non moral intuition that is flawed.

It is well known that reasons are almost never causes for action. Nearly any

reputable theory of psychology, cognition, or social psychology relying on empirical

research confirms that human behavior is far more complex than can be captured by

simple algorithms depicting movement from reasons to actions. It is false that there is a

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simple causal relationship between principles, propositions, rules, norms, and behavior,

even if there is a deep structure that grounds or explains the surface when we look at

social reality. Nonetheless, it is almost sacrilege among scholars interested in devising

norms of behavior for physicians to contend the obvious; procedures, rules, guidelines,

norms, and codes are at best suggestive (Flack, Pellegrino, Beauchamp, Childres). A

world full of racial kinds, and an anti-black society, is not a world where reason as an

episteme exists segregated from the pollution of racially infused reasons and

explanations; procedures, rules, guidelines, norms, and codes are themselves implicated

in the sustaining of misery.

III

The Popular Tree Narrative or Dr. Dick’s Socially Dead Eunuch

Dr. Dick was a rationalist and an explanatory realist. He used standard procedures

for drawing inferences and methods of explanation that relied on causal connections

established by empirical evidence and received categories supported by the most

reputable scientists (Harris). But he was not at all averse to consulting a range of moral

theories to help guide his judgments. He considered deontological standpoints, utilitarian

calculations, contractarian sensibilities, and religious feelings to help him form his moral

beliefs and make considered medical judgments. He was concerned with the welfare of

his community and normally deferred to his patients’ preferences. He believed that all

persons were members of the human family. Dr. Dick specialized in castration and

abortion.

Dr. Dick castrated George Washington Carver (1864-1943).* Dr. Dick was in

charge of the orphaned Carver in an 1860s Arkansas community that practiced slavery,

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serfdom, and segregation by race (Tise). Shortly after his birth, Carver and his mother

were under the authority of pro-slavery night raiders and, as rumored, Dr. Dick. Once

returned to his original masters, Moses and Susan Carver in Diamond Grove, Missouri,

Carver served them until he was freed at the age of twelve. He was freed after slavery

had already ended in 1865. But this was Arkansas and Missouri in the nineteenth

century.

In Dr. Dick’s view, castrating Carver was pro-bono cosmetic surgery. It provided

only a small tax deduction that was far lower than his normal fees. Castrating Carver was

a benevolent act, fueled by the morally intuited virtues of compassion, paternalism, and

empathy.

On deontological grounds, Dr. Dick imagined that if he were in Carver’s place, he

would choose to be a eunuch. That is, through empathy, he imagined that he would not

be treating Carver as a means to an end but an end. Carver could become dedicated to

the pursuit of higher goods—knowledge—rather than the lower goods that plagued his

kind’s normal pursuits—namely, sensual, emotive, bestial sexual desires. The pursuit of

knowledge, according to all the major accounts of ancient philosophers with whom he

was familiar, was of greater merit than the pursuit of carnal pleasures. Arguably, his act

followed a universalizable maxim of empathetic understanding and gave priority to

higher attainable goods as themselves worthy intrinsic ends. Carver’s penis was a

predicable cause of future problems.

As a eunuch, Carver would be socially dead, unable to create future generations,

without membership in a community that cherished its past. As a eunuch, Carver would

escape the horrible burden of being seen as an African savage invested with the character

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disposition of sexual deviance that could be exercised. For Dr. Dick, the only history of

Africans known to the educated elite was that of Africans as savages. Castration would

provide Carver with a body more akin to an ascetic white monk than a bestial black man.

Becoming a eunuch would be like moving from hell, entrapped with the uncontrollable

intrinsic bestial drives of his kind, to purgatory, free of the worst features of his

race/gender kind. He would be sexually dead, unable to engage a woman. And

therefore, given his kind, pursue universal goods of the vocational sort through forced

asceticism. He could ascend.

Dr. Dick reasoned on utilitarian grounds that Carver would face a world that

considered him a likely rapist of pristine white women because he would be driven by the

slovenly emotions common to his race. He would be seen as incapable of self-restraint,

creative cognition, technical expertise, or excellence of virtue. However, eunuchs could

be educated, trusted around white women, elicit empathy, and remain perfect slaves.

Carver’s castration was calculated by Dr. Dick as a reasonable choice of voluntary bodily

cosmetic alteration under conditions of duress, servitude, and tragic alternatives.

The disgust that might be elicited over Carver’s bodily lack would be outweighed

by the benefits, reasoned Dr. Dick, since Negroes were generally despised. Dr. Dick had

no evidence that one form of being despised was any different than another. Negro males

were the victims of white citizens’ sanctioned brutality—wanton police brutality, forced

labor, and the theft of their property. They were frequently terrorized with beatings and

lynching, if not for raping white women then looking insufficiently self-effacing with a

bowed head, hunched back, humble smile, or frayed, worried eyebrows above a downcast

gaze. Removal of a troubling organ would be, according to Dr. Dick, a benefit to Carver.

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Carver’s moral character would be improved by a cosmetic change because he would be

more motivated to focus on the higher qualities of life engendered by education, and he

would become talented in beneficial pursuits (similar to eunuch tax collectors in India or

eunuchs in charge of harems in the Ottoman Empire). Avoiding accusations of sexual

impropriety and haughty demeanor, Dr. Dick calculated, was a good. Like a good

utilitarian, Dr. Dick wanted the best quality of life for Carver in the face of known

adversities.

In the event that his deontological or utilitarian reasoning was deemed faulty,

given inevitable fallibility, Dr. Dick went further and relied on the best established

science of his day. Like Mill’s utilitarian evaluation of why women who were forced to

choose between an unhappy marriage or spinsterhood should be allowed to choose

polygamy, the kind of servitude facing Carver would be less egregious than the normal

racial slavery of his kind if he were a eunuch.

Dr. Dick read the work of renowned physicians, clergy, and historians at Yale,

Harvard, Miami University, and Northwestern University. Dr. Dick used the best

empirical evidence of his day, including all its categories, kinds, and socially accepted

character traits. Established scientific and medical expertise was nearly unanimous,

although occasionally rejected by minority opinion, that slavery and racial segregation

were good for the moral and physical development of slaves. They also confirmed that

humanity had always maintained a hierarchical scale of kinds of persons, ranked from the

lowly to the high. As confirmed by numerous empirical studies comparing cranial sizes

and first-hand experiences, the Negro’s pain threshold differed from whites. It was clear

that the black body was intrinsically identical to the white body; it conformed to its

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nature. Dr. Dick confirmed that to be a slave was to be black, that is, blacks were slaves

not because they were black, but because slaves are black. In 1787 the British

government settled three hundred former slaves and seventy white prostitutes in Sierra

Leone, West Africa. The former slaves, or descendants of slaves, were returned to their

natural environment. The lowly prostitutes were not identical in status or kind to blacks

but lower than respectable whites. Both unwanted kinds - law abiding black Christians

and law breaking immoral white women - could be reasonably dispatched together. In

1820 the American Colonization Society and the U. S. Congress followed suit by

financing the immigration of African Americans to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The

American Colonization Society considered the inferior to be black, and, if they were

living among themselves, they could develop according to their natures without

infringing on white America’s purity. Dr. Dick, on naturalist grounds, reasoned that

living according to nature maximized the moral and medical well being of the species.

When Dr. Dick used Hegelian dialectic reasoning and Hegel's view of the master-

slave relationship he concluded that Carver’s life would be meaningful because he would

realize his highest nature possible and be recognized, both self-consciously and by others.

Through meaningful work Carver would become aware of how he produced himself and

thereby fully self-conscious,. And by virtue of this accomplishments, he would have a

good chance of being recognized by others as a self conscious producer. Possibly, on Dr.

Dick's reading of Hegel, ;the master-slave relationship had already reached it dialectical

zenith unknown to most persons. If so, Dr. Dick reasoned, all is well. Dr. Dick felt he

evinced compassion by going beyond the required medical codes of his day when he used

Hegelian logic to consider the reasonableness of his choice.

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Dr. Dick was not at all religious. To counter the proclamations of religious

zealots, who regularly claimed that their particular brand of superior holiness solved all

problems, Dr. Dick checked the Abrahamic religions of the Mohammadeans, Jews, and

Christians. They, after all, sanctioned his profession. Their religious traditions included

a vast array of competing opinions, always giving sanction to slavery and eunuchs. Each

faith had a long and glorious history of making and using eunuchs, approved by the Old

Testament. Castrating physicians were members of high religious orders (Scholz). The

secularist, humanist, and authors willing to deviate from the actual words and practices of

their religious founders and texts were the only one's expressing a minority opinion.. Dr.

Dick elected to remain faithful to religious tradition. Dr. Dick, hardly a man intent on

upholding beliefs nor biblical scholar, with limited access to ancient or learned tomes,

relied heavily on the March 10, 1743, work, “Dissertation politico-theologica de servitute

libertati christianae non contraria,” penned by the renowned theologian Jacobus Eliza

Joannes Capitein (1717-1747), as his guide. Capitein had argued that slavery and other

forms of subjugation, as tools, were just because they brought otherwise eternally

damned souls to Christianity. Capitein's insight was that what counted as egregious pain

and suffering, as well as warranted obligations, was always tied to who was considered a

member of a moral community. Members of a warranted moral community are due

deference; others count progressively less if at all. Capitein was chaplain at the slave fort

Elmina in Ghana beginning in 1742. By blessing the enchained and raped, the maimed

and beaten, Capitein saw himself as benevolent. Capitein’s empathy, his attunement to

the “other,” was a function of how he understood the beings he encountered. In addition

to his many other honors, Capitein’s portrait was drawn by P. Van Dyke and etched by P.

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Tanje with the inscription, “Look at this Moor! His skin is black, but his soul is made

white, since Jesus himself intercedes for him. He goes to teach the Moors in faith, hope,

and charity, so that they, made white, may honour the Lamb together with him.” Dr.

Dick left it at that.

Dr. Dick, by all comparisons in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America,

was a caring physician who arguably demonstrated magnanimous qualities; he made no

mistakes in reasoning nor did he lack empathy or compassion. He made Carver, the

soon-to-be-famous Tuskegee scientist, a eunuch in accordance with right reason and the

morally intuited virtues of compassion, paternalism, and empathy. To his credit, Dr.

Dick disposed of Carver’s penis by feeding it to his pigs rather than disrespecting it like

other households, which had used the severed hands of lynched black men as table

ornaments. Dr. Dick felt benevolent, sitting in his small unadorned office, having

employed reason to aid a less fortunate creature at his own expense (Ainslee).

IV

Dr. Dick’s castration of Carver was consistent with American ways of thinking.

His reasoning was not common among medical professions in the nineteenth and early

twentieth century, which relied on “reason” and moral, objectively true, foundations. The

kind of rational agent Carver was understood to be situated the kind of autonomy,

deference, trust, and authenticity he was accorded. Simply using different theories of

“reason” does not dissipate the problem. Arguably progressive for their time, John H.

Noyes, Jonathan Edwards, and William James, for example, were racialists and supported

colonialism. They existed in communities that made racialism and colonialism normal.

The pragmatist William James believed that evolution, pragmatic choices, and

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acculturation of western civilization by the less fortunate would eventually make possible

racial equity. James’s pragmatist reasoning and aversion to rationalism hardly meant he

did not use commonly accepted categories considered socially warranted and

scientifically verified. Having read W. E. B. DuBois’s 1903 Souls of Black Folk, for

example, James thought he had found a depiction of the authentic Negro in DuBois’s

third chapter on black folk culture. That is, he had found a depiction (Negro spirituals) of

an authentic Negro kind due appropriate paternalistic sentiments and praise. Analogously,

Dr. Dick’s compassion, paternalism, and empathy were contingent on his understanding

of features considered endemic to Carver as an individual instantiation of his racial kind.

Carver was never the kind of being that would have full autonomy (Allen). Carver’s

authenticity, autonomy, and worth were coterminous with his kind.

Using the idea of racial kinds as social kinds, Dr. Dick was stuck with conceiving

of the human world in terms of kind traits. He was not saddled with the traits that he

used, but with some set; the aesthetics of race, where black is degenerative and the

imagery of bestiality and sexuality associated with persons of black hue, are treated as

authentic in an anti-black society. The litany of signifiers is continually compounded,

and in an anti-black society, it is married to what it is to be seen as socially dead or

inferior, a subaltern, degraded embodiment of depraved inclinations. There are no

additional sets of principles, propositions, rules, concepts, or moral attitudes that would

make Dr. Dick an appropriate physician.

If Dr. Dick used a richer utilitarian, deontological, or dialectical approach, he

could have decided not to castrate Carver. However, almost no normal, intelligent person

possesses rich theorizing ability. Such a requirement fails to accept the obvious:

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reasoning is never a perfect science. Dr. Dick’s reasoning was a sufficiently rich use of

logic, appeal to confirmed science, and reliance on reigning philosophies. His flawed

stereotypes and subtle prejudices were no more apparent to him than they were to the

founders of rationalism and empiricism. Contrary to Pellegrino’s and Peterson’s

approach, there were no series of mistakes that Dr. Dick made that could be simply

corrected by a set of right judgments or a few new moral sentiments. There is simply no

objective world where Dr. Dick can sit outside of his culture anymore than contemporary

health professionals sit outside of theirs (Dula). Principles and propositions do not cause

unmediated, just, or unjust behavior; imagining mediation or derivation processes that

would make it possible for principles and propositions to do so is to miss the point. Dr.

Dick is irredeemable because of his episteme.

Vulgar relativism holds that every normative claim has no truth-value beyond, or

any further than, the agent of its promotion. Contrary to Pellegrino, it is false that either

there is a morality based on some foundation, meaning in this case a platform of

principles, propositions, or axioms considered justified by reason and used to derive,

indicate, or suggest surface norms, or that we are left with an untenable, vulgar

relativism. Codes of conduct and principles that help guide policies and behavior to

enhance human well-being are valuable tools. However, it is false that they are

necessarily based on valorized class predicates or foundations as well-reasoned principles

and propositions outside of culture.

Dr. Dick’s deep cognitive structure and ontological categories of being are

corrupt. Dr. Dick cannot be saved. To use the ontological language of Duns Scotus,

Carver is a haecceity; he is an individual, and his “thisness” is unique as a young, black

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orphan in the care of a doting physician. His quiddity, or “whatness,” what he shares

with others, is universal to his kind and forms his being as an instantiation of being

(whether it is his species being or his genus as a sentient being in the universe). His

“whatness” is derivative of his racial mark. “Rational being” is a class predicate and,

conceptually, cannot escape the limitations of what it is to be a class predicated —

surreptitious dependency on a metaphysics of essence; the “thatness” of the class

pervades all of its normal members as a kind. Nothing in Dr. Dick’s and Carver’s world

makes it possible to ignore the fact of race. Every individual is thus automatically unique

and simultaneously capable of being an exception. Every individual is thus necessarily

an instantiation of several kinds with shifting social definitions and fuzzy boundaries.

They are thereby a carrier of physical traits definitive, correlative, or associative with

their kinds’ - more or less stable; more or less well defined - morally intrinsic traits:

“thisness.”

A picture that accepts complexity, perpetual revisions, value transposition,

complicated references, and a willingness to reject completely an episteme that is

irredeemable is a preferable option to a picture of foundations and human right moral

intuitions sin qua non with reason. Human dignity should be considered a good due all

persons, independent of reason, categories of kind, and utility; there should be a

hermetic, unsubstantiated, and unmediated acceptance of persons as agents due dignity. 

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REFERENCES

*Carver’s story here is fictitious. There is no evidence that he was a eunuch. Dr. Dick is my literary creation. Carver and his mother were given to pro-slavery night raiders by his owner, or they were stolen. One story has it that Carver was returned to his master for a payment of a race horse, another that he was surreptitiously retrieved by his master, and another that he was retrieved by his master from his night raider friends that originally held his family captive while the status of slavery was resolved in Arkansas.. Carver and his mother were separated during his captivity, and she was never found. By the age of twelve, he was freed.

Ainslee, Donal C. 2002. “Bioethics and the Problem of Pluralism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 19, 1-28.

Allen, Anita, Unpopular Privacy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bayer, Ronald, L. O. Gostin, B. Jennings, B. Steinbock, Public Health Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childres, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, circa 1979.

Beauchamp, Tom L. 2003. “A Defense of the Common Morality,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13, 259-274.

Dula, Annette, and Sara Goering, “It Just Ain’t Fair:” The Ethics of Health Care for African Americans, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1944.

Eze, Emmanuel C., Race and the Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Flack, Harley E., and E. D. Pellegrino, African-American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics, Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1992; Edward D. Pellegrino “Response to Leonard Harris,” 150-158; Lynn M. Peterson, “Response to Leonard Harris,” 159-164.

Harris, Leonard, “Autonomy Under Duress,” Harley E. Flack, Edmund D. Pelligrino, eds., African American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics, Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1992, 133-149.

_____“Honor, Eunuchs, and the Postcolonial Subject,” in Emmanuel C. Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Company, 1997, 252-259.

Patterson, Orlando, Freedom, New York: Basic Books, 1991.

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_____Slavery and Social Death, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rogers, Molly, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science and Photography in 19th Century America, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Scholz, Piotr O., Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History, Trans. J. A. Broadwin and S. L. Frisch. Princeton: Marcus Wiener (German 1999), trans. 2001.

Serequeberhan, Tsenay, Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition, Illinois: Africa World Press, 2007.

Tise, Larry E., Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America 1701-1840, London: University of Georgia Press, 1981.

Washington, Harriet A., Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,” New York: Harlem Moon, 2006.

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