One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”
Oxford University Professor Nick Bostrom—the Swedish philosopher famed for his argument that we might be living in a simulation and popularizing the field of “existential risk”—shared the offensive message in an apology posted to his website. In the document dated Jan. 9, Bostrom wrote that he had “caught wind that somebody has been digging” through the archives of an old listserv mailing list called the Extropians, and that he wanted to “get ahead” of someone surfacing the “most offensive stuff” which could be used in “smear campaigns.”
“The Extropians mailing list was a forum in the mid-90s where people had conversations about science fiction, future technologies, society, and all sorts of random things,” Bostrom wrote in the apology. “It was not moderated, so the noise level was very high—occasional interesting ideas but also large quantities of silly, mistaken, or outright offensive stuff.”
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Bostrom, 49, who is white, then shares an extract he wrote from a thread he says concerned “offensive content and offensive communication styles.”
“I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct,” the quoted excerpt begins. “Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and I think it is true.
“But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n------!!!!”
Bostrom did not redact the n-word in his apology.
“I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago,” Bostrom writes in bold below the offensive excerpt. “It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.”
Bostrom, who is the director of Oxford’s influential Future of Humanity Institute, does not explicitly apologize for the substance of the comments about relative IQ. He goes on to say that he believes that it is “deeply unfair” that inequalities in access to education, nutrients, and health care lead to unequal social outcomes “including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity.”
He signs off by once again calling his email “idiotic and offensive.”
“The University and Faculty of Philosophy is currently investigating the matter but condemns in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications,” an Oxford University told The Daily Beast in a statement. “Neither the content nor language are in line with our strong commitment to diversity and equality.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Prof. Bostrom for comment.
