Apology for an Old EmailI have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with aview towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people. The Extropians mailinglist wasa forum in the mid-90s where people had conversations about science fiction, future technologies, society,and all sorts of random things. 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. For a few years,
while I was a student in London, I occasionally posted to this mailinglist, contributing postings in all of thesecategories.
The best thing would probably have been for all of those words to have been buried and forgotten.
Good ideas have been taken up in other contexts, further developed, and written up in more readable
formats; and the no-good stuff deserves to rest in the great ash heap of history. The mailinglist served auseful function at the time, as a place where people from around the world could have freewheelingconversations about wild ideas. Nowadays the Internet offers many other forums that better serve thosefunctions.
But I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed andinterpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get
rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file. I should warn that this is unpleasant business; readon at your peril.
So here goes. (The context was a tread about offensive content and offensive communicationstyles.)I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. 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.
What are my actual views? I do think that provocative communication styles have a place—but not
like this! I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic
healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive
capacity. This is a huge moral travesty that we should not paper over or downplay. Much of my personal

charitable giving over the years has gone to fighting exactly this problem: I’ve given many thousands ofpounds to organizations including to the SCI Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine
Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission.
Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not myarea of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others, who havemore relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic orgenetic factors play any role.
What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.
Some of the most horrific atrocities of the last century were carried out under the banner of eugenic
justifications and racist rationalizations. In contemporary academic bioethics, the word “eugenics” issometimes used in different and much broader sense, as including for example the view that prospective
parents undergoing IVF should have access to genetic screening and diagnostic tools (as is currently theestablished practice in many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom). There is arich bioethical literature on these issues (see e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/), and it
involves many complex moral considerations that cannot be captured in a single word or a slogan. I would
be in favor of some uses and against others. Broadly speaking, I’m favorable to wide parental choice inthese matters, including for some applications that would qualify as “enhancements” rather than“therapies”—to the extent that this distinction makes sense. I have written several papers about the ethics
of enhancement, e.g. “The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics” (Ethics, 116, 2006);“Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges” (Sci Eng Ethics, 15, 2009); “In Defenseof Posthuman Dignity” (Bioethics, 19, 2005), and one edited volume “Human Enhancement” (Oxford
University Press, 2011).
I think for people interested in the societal consequences of genetic medicine, or in the ethics ofpreimplantation genetic diagnosis, selection, or engineering, or in human enhancement ethics moregenerally, either on the side of pro or con, we are more likely to improve our collective understanding andwisdom and by open-minded and thoughtful engagement with the arguments and the existing literature,
rather than by name-calling or sloganeering—let alone by idiotic and offensive emails like the one I wrote
26 years ago, and for which, again, I truly and sincerely apologize.
Nick Bostrom
9 January 2023

Outcome of investigation by Oxford University (10 August 2023):“we do not consider you to be a racist or that you hold racist views, and weconsider that the apology you posted in January 2023 was sincere. … webelieve that your apology, your acknowledgement of the distress youractions caused, and your appreciation for the care and time that everyone
has given to this process has been genuine and sincere. We were also
encouraged that you have already embarked on a journey of deep andmeaningful reflection, which includes exploring the learning andself-education from this process.”