https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018...y-politics
EXCERPT: Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina [...] Four centuries on, we in Britain live in a more open and tolerant society ... But the modern dangers that academics face don’t need to be state-sanctioned, or indeed lethal, to have an effect on their work. According to McMahan, and a number of his colleagues, there is a new climate of intellectual caution developing as a result of intimidation from both outside and within the academy.
McMahan has spent most of his career doing what moral philosophers do: thinking and writing about often recondite ethical questions. ... Recently, however, he has put aside his own academic concerns to announce that he is helping to set up a new journal to combat what he sees as an encroaching intolerance of free expression. Called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, the publication promises to include articles by anonymous writers – that is by writers whose ideas are deemed so controversial that it is unsafe for them to reveal their identity.
There is going to be one issue a year and the criteria for selection, says McMahan, are that the articles “give plausible arguments, good reasons and verifiable evidence in support of a position that is controversial, in the sense that is likely to arouse anger and hostility in some people, and that these arguments should be presented in an unpolitical non-ad hominem manner. That is, we’re not going to accept papers that are designed to antagonise people. We want to protect the authors not their ideas, so I certainly think that the journal should welcome the publication of replies.”
Although its first issue is unlikely to appear for at least a year, the journal has lived up to its name by already attracting controversy. The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik derided it as an irresponsible “safe space” that was “thin-skinned, elitist, coddled, unable to engage in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace of ideas”.
The Observer columnist Kenan Malik suggested that the very idea of anonymous articles should be “anathema to anyone who cherishes free speech and academic debate”. Ideas, he argued, “become ‘controversial’ only in a social context. Not because they are published in a journal that calls itself ‘controversial’”.
What brought their attention to the proposed journal was a Radio 4 programme entitled University Unchallenged, which examined the thesis that there is currently a lack of viewpoint diversity within British and American universities. Several academic contributors voiced the opinion that a fear of attacks by students, colleagues and social media activists had hobbled academic research in certain sensitive areas, particularly those that deal with issues of race, gender and colonialism. As McMahan put it: “There is, I think, a greater inhibition on university campuses about certain views, for fear of what will happen. Threats from outside university tend to be more from the right. The threats that come from within university tend to be more from the left.”
[...] the historian ... and anthropologist, Gemma Angel ... tweeted that the programme was “basically an opportunity for white male rightwing politically motivated researchers to whine on about how unpopular their abhorrent ideas are.” It was, she said, “disgusting”.
What seems beyond doubt is that there is a growing debate about whether academic freedom is quite as free as we like to imagine. But ... for some observers, such as Nesrine Malik, free speech defenders are concealing their real interests behind misleading language. She claims that freedom of speech is being “used as a demand for ‘freedom from consequence’ for the speaker”.
McMahan is what philosophers call a consequentialist, which means that, morally speaking, one judges conduct by its consequences. I ask him what he thinks about Malik’s implication that he’s seeking freedom from consequence. “Let her get 50 death threats in three days and see what she thinks,” he says, before quickly apologising for the uncharacteristic outburst.
A mild-mannered vegan, McMahan is not given to shoot-from-the-hip reactions. His preference is to mull over issues, do the research, and then give a measured, rational response. But he clearly feels angered by what he sees as two major misconceptions. The first is that he and his journal co-founders have not faced any real danger, and the second is that they are rightwingers.
By far the most celebrated figure behind the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton. He is renowned for his work on animal liberation, and is seen by many as the godfather of animal rights as well as the intellectual force behind the growth of veganism. A plain-speaking Australian, Singer has experienced many death threats as a result of his philosophical writings on euthanasia, abortion and newborn infanticide. He was also once physically attacked on stage while trying to give a lecture in Germany. [...] Yet both Singer and McMahan at are pains to point out that they are senior tenured academics and therefore their careers are largely safe from the kinds of censoring pressures they say are exerted on less established colleagues.
The idea for the journal came from the third and most junior member of the founding triumvirate, Francesca Minerva, after she received numerous death threats. Minerva is a bioethicist at the University of Ghent. In 2012 she co-authored a paper on the moral viability of newborn infanticide. She argued, as have several others, that there is no moral difference between a late abortion and ending the life of an extremely premature baby, and that therefore, at least in principle, both should be allowed.....
[...] But are the threats academics face worse now than in the past? Singer has been writing about academic censorship at least since the early 90s, so why does he believe that the point has been reached at which there is a need for authorial anonymity? “There are certainly more obstacles to freedom of speech,” he says. “I’m not exactly sure why. People have become sensitive to things being said, and it’s clear that people have suffered personally from saying them. So the situation has got worse for freedom of speech in that respect.”
Many academics dispute that proposition ... As one historian told me: “A lot of people who think we need this are the people who scoff at the idea of safe space for students. If we’re realistic, we’re talking about a handful of death threats. I would defend colleagues’ rights to make arguments that I profoundly disagree with on academic and political and moral grounds, but I don’t think we need a journal that allows people to do that anonymously.” Unfortunately this academic wanted to remain anonymous himself, because, he said, he didn’t believe the issues were “best pursued in newspapers”. Several others also refused to speak.
One academic who is on record as opposing the idea that academia suffers from a lack of intellectual diversity is Jon Wilson, a historian at King’s College London. He accepts that there are more leftwing than rightwing academics [...] But as Wilson told University Unchallenged, that’s because academics are naturally left-leaning, in the same way that the military is naturally right-leaning.
That may be true, but it’s a reading that obscures an arguably more important divide in left opinion that some feel has distorted public debate. Which brings us back to McMahan’s gripe about being seen as a rightwinger. He locates himself on what might be called the materialist left, in which economic power and class interests are the key social drivers. But many of the new generation of leftwing academics come from the postmodern left, which is steeped in identity politics. Put crudely, they tend to focus more on culture than economics. And it seems to be questions of identity – gender, race, religion – that often inspire the most intemperate reactions.
[...] McMahan ... believes that in focusing on culture wars and identity issues, the left has allowed the right to pursue an agenda of commercial and environmental exploitation that is hastening climate change towards global catastrophe. “What matters to the Koch brothers and other funders of Republican party candidates in the United States is getting rid of environmental regulations,” he explains. “So to the extent that students are distracted from thinking about climate change by worrying about what pronouns people are using, they’re helping out the really powerful people on the right by failing to take them head-on.”
Of course, it could be argued that it’s possible to worry about [both] pronouns and climate change, but it does seem that it’s the pronoun area of debate that excites the most aggressive protests....
MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018...y-politics
EXCERPT: Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina [...] Four centuries on, we in Britain live in a more open and tolerant society ... But the modern dangers that academics face don’t need to be state-sanctioned, or indeed lethal, to have an effect on their work. According to McMahan, and a number of his colleagues, there is a new climate of intellectual caution developing as a result of intimidation from both outside and within the academy.
McMahan has spent most of his career doing what moral philosophers do: thinking and writing about often recondite ethical questions. ... Recently, however, he has put aside his own academic concerns to announce that he is helping to set up a new journal to combat what he sees as an encroaching intolerance of free expression. Called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, the publication promises to include articles by anonymous writers – that is by writers whose ideas are deemed so controversial that it is unsafe for them to reveal their identity.
There is going to be one issue a year and the criteria for selection, says McMahan, are that the articles “give plausible arguments, good reasons and verifiable evidence in support of a position that is controversial, in the sense that is likely to arouse anger and hostility in some people, and that these arguments should be presented in an unpolitical non-ad hominem manner. That is, we’re not going to accept papers that are designed to antagonise people. We want to protect the authors not their ideas, so I certainly think that the journal should welcome the publication of replies.”
Although its first issue is unlikely to appear for at least a year, the journal has lived up to its name by already attracting controversy. The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik derided it as an irresponsible “safe space” that was “thin-skinned, elitist, coddled, unable to engage in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace of ideas”.
The Observer columnist Kenan Malik suggested that the very idea of anonymous articles should be “anathema to anyone who cherishes free speech and academic debate”. Ideas, he argued, “become ‘controversial’ only in a social context. Not because they are published in a journal that calls itself ‘controversial’”.
What brought their attention to the proposed journal was a Radio 4 programme entitled University Unchallenged, which examined the thesis that there is currently a lack of viewpoint diversity within British and American universities. Several academic contributors voiced the opinion that a fear of attacks by students, colleagues and social media activists had hobbled academic research in certain sensitive areas, particularly those that deal with issues of race, gender and colonialism. As McMahan put it: “There is, I think, a greater inhibition on university campuses about certain views, for fear of what will happen. Threats from outside university tend to be more from the right. The threats that come from within university tend to be more from the left.”
[...] the historian ... and anthropologist, Gemma Angel ... tweeted that the programme was “basically an opportunity for white male rightwing politically motivated researchers to whine on about how unpopular their abhorrent ideas are.” It was, she said, “disgusting”.
What seems beyond doubt is that there is a growing debate about whether academic freedom is quite as free as we like to imagine. But ... for some observers, such as Nesrine Malik, free speech defenders are concealing their real interests behind misleading language. She claims that freedom of speech is being “used as a demand for ‘freedom from consequence’ for the speaker”.
McMahan is what philosophers call a consequentialist, which means that, morally speaking, one judges conduct by its consequences. I ask him what he thinks about Malik’s implication that he’s seeking freedom from consequence. “Let her get 50 death threats in three days and see what she thinks,” he says, before quickly apologising for the uncharacteristic outburst.
A mild-mannered vegan, McMahan is not given to shoot-from-the-hip reactions. His preference is to mull over issues, do the research, and then give a measured, rational response. But he clearly feels angered by what he sees as two major misconceptions. The first is that he and his journal co-founders have not faced any real danger, and the second is that they are rightwingers.
By far the most celebrated figure behind the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton. He is renowned for his work on animal liberation, and is seen by many as the godfather of animal rights as well as the intellectual force behind the growth of veganism. A plain-speaking Australian, Singer has experienced many death threats as a result of his philosophical writings on euthanasia, abortion and newborn infanticide. He was also once physically attacked on stage while trying to give a lecture in Germany. [...] Yet both Singer and McMahan at are pains to point out that they are senior tenured academics and therefore their careers are largely safe from the kinds of censoring pressures they say are exerted on less established colleagues.
The idea for the journal came from the third and most junior member of the founding triumvirate, Francesca Minerva, after she received numerous death threats. Minerva is a bioethicist at the University of Ghent. In 2012 she co-authored a paper on the moral viability of newborn infanticide. She argued, as have several others, that there is no moral difference between a late abortion and ending the life of an extremely premature baby, and that therefore, at least in principle, both should be allowed.....
[...] But are the threats academics face worse now than in the past? Singer has been writing about academic censorship at least since the early 90s, so why does he believe that the point has been reached at which there is a need for authorial anonymity? “There are certainly more obstacles to freedom of speech,” he says. “I’m not exactly sure why. People have become sensitive to things being said, and it’s clear that people have suffered personally from saying them. So the situation has got worse for freedom of speech in that respect.”
Many academics dispute that proposition ... As one historian told me: “A lot of people who think we need this are the people who scoff at the idea of safe space for students. If we’re realistic, we’re talking about a handful of death threats. I would defend colleagues’ rights to make arguments that I profoundly disagree with on academic and political and moral grounds, but I don’t think we need a journal that allows people to do that anonymously.” Unfortunately this academic wanted to remain anonymous himself, because, he said, he didn’t believe the issues were “best pursued in newspapers”. Several others also refused to speak.
One academic who is on record as opposing the idea that academia suffers from a lack of intellectual diversity is Jon Wilson, a historian at King’s College London. He accepts that there are more leftwing than rightwing academics [...] But as Wilson told University Unchallenged, that’s because academics are naturally left-leaning, in the same way that the military is naturally right-leaning.
That may be true, but it’s a reading that obscures an arguably more important divide in left opinion that some feel has distorted public debate. Which brings us back to McMahan’s gripe about being seen as a rightwinger. He locates himself on what might be called the materialist left, in which economic power and class interests are the key social drivers. But many of the new generation of leftwing academics come from the postmodern left, which is steeped in identity politics. Put crudely, they tend to focus more on culture than economics. And it seems to be questions of identity – gender, race, religion – that often inspire the most intemperate reactions.
[...] McMahan ... believes that in focusing on culture wars and identity issues, the left has allowed the right to pursue an agenda of commercial and environmental exploitation that is hastening climate change towards global catastrophe. “What matters to the Koch brothers and other funders of Republican party candidates in the United States is getting rid of environmental regulations,” he explains. “So to the extent that students are distracted from thinking about climate change by worrying about what pronouns people are using, they’re helping out the really powerful people on the right by failing to take them head-on.”
Of course, it could be argued that it’s possible to worry about [both] pronouns and climate change, but it does seem that it’s the pronoun area of debate that excites the most aggressive protests....
MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018...y-politics