John Protevi's Blog

Open Letter in support of Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla

We stand in solidarity with Jason Stanley and Rebecca Kukla. They have unjustly been subjected to waves of online harassment produced by twisting their meaning and feeding their names to legions of online haters. Their support of colleagues, pointing out that civility should not excuse brutal and dangerous ideas, do not deserve the anonymous third-party abuse they have received. They are valued members of our profession and we sign to make public our defense of their right to live free of such attempts at intimidation.

Should you wish to co-sign this letter, you may do so by commenting below with your name and institutional affiliation. As with these signatories, affiliations are given for identification purposes only.

Eric Brown, Philosophy, Washington University, St Louis

Taylor Carman, Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University

Jon Cogburn, Philosophy, Louisiana State University

John Collins, Philosophy, Columbia University

Keith DeRose, Philosophy, Yale University

John Drabinski, Black Studies, Amherst College

Richard Drayton, History, Kings College London

Tom Eyers, Philosophy, Duquesne University

Branden Fitelson, Philosophy, Northeastern University

Leigh M Johnson, Philosophy, Christian Brothers University

Ed Kazarian, Philosophy, Rowan University

Jonathan Kramnick, English, Yale University

Sally Haslanger, Philosophy, MIT

Bonnie Honig, Political Science, Brown University

Bryce Huebner, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Chad Kautzer, Philosophy, Lehigh University

Mark Lance, Philosophy, Georgetown University

Utz McKnight, Political Science, University of Alabama

Joshua Miller, Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore

Donna Murch, History, Rutgers University

Kathryn Norlock, Philosophy, Trent University

Kathryn Pogin, Philosophy, Northwestern University

John Protevi, French Studies and Philosophy, Louisiana State University

Carl B Sachs, Philosophy, Marymount University, Virginia

Eric Schliesser, Political Science, University of Amsterdam

John Schwenkler, Philosophy, Florida State University

David Livingston Smith, Philosophy, University of New England

Mark Steen, Philosophy, Boğaziçi University

Lynne Tirrell, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Adriel Trott, Philosophy, Wabash College

Eric Winsberg, Philosophy, University of South Florida

ON THE ALT-RIGHTING OF PHILOSOPHY BY RC

Let's distinguish doxxing from signal-boosting, as the RC people would like us to do. Doxxing is two-fold: 1) revealing the real identity of someone using an anonymous or pseudonymous screen name, or 2) making public what is private. Signal-boosting is taking what was public in a small sphere and broadcasting it to a wider audience. Critics of RC claim they doxxed our colleagues, while the RC people say it was signal-boosting. 

Let's accept it was signal-boosting, even though there is a strong argument to be made that some instances really are doxxing.

IN ANY EVENT, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE SIGNAL-BOOSTING WAS ETHICALLY WRONG BECAUSE IT EXPOSED OUR COLLEAGUES TO STOCHASTIC HARASSMENT. 

Stochastic harassment occurs when someone is exposed to mass vitriol by 3rd parties. The exposer initiates and mediates the harassment but does not directly conduct it. Having the RC story picked up by Dreher, Washington Times, and so on exposed our colleagues to vastly larger audiences and thereby predictably exposed them to harassment. (It seems plausible that the first move, from RC to Dreher, occurred via backchannel emails, though the idea that Dreher was simply a reader, while implausible, is not impossible.)

[EDITED] The real problem here is that our colleagues were falsely portrayed as hating traditional Christianity and Christians, when in fact the real target of their anger was 1) those who made a queer colleague's professional life miserable because of beliefs about sexual orientation similar to Swinburne's, and 2) people who were acting like cursing was less civil than Swinburne's disability claim.

WHEN YOU FALSELY PORTRAY JEWS AS HATERS OF CHRISTIANS IN 2016 AMERICA YOU EXPOSE THEM TO HARASSMENT AND INCREASED CHANCES OF PHYSICAL HARM.

Corollaries: 

1) Swinburne suffered no comparable harm by having his "disability" claim cursed out on Facebook to that suffered by our colleagues. So RC can't be said to be evening the score. 

2) Even if one were to say our colleagues acted imprudently by not taking sufficient notice of the danger of RC exposing them to stochastic harassment, that has no bearing on the ethical evaluation of RC's behavior. 

Swinburne and his "disability" claim

This piece, entitled "Homophobia and the Limits of Scientific Philosophy" by Martin Pleitz is a fine paper on Swinburne's "disability" claim.

It's relevant, because if Swinburne had stuck to a claim about the immorality of homosexuality, none of this controversy would have happened. My sense of the sociology of the profession is that a great number of philosophers would a) have never heard of it, or b) if they did hear of it they would have shrugged it off as "dog bites man" level stuff, or c) they would have thought that there are resources within Christian moral philosophy to combat the claim, and if pressed, would have expressed solidarity with those using those resources to combat Swinburne's claim. 

But, once it became known that "disability" language was being used, then anger and obscenity were among the reactions. FWIW, I'm in favor of obscenity directed at people using "disability" in the manner in which Swinburne uses it. But if in addition you want a cold dissection of the claim, Pleitz's paper is a good start: 

Some excerpts from Pleitz's paper:

Abstract: To criticize Richard Swinburne’s recent argument for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured, I show that it rests on implausible premises about the concepts of love and of disability, and that the endorsement of its conclusion would lead to grave consequences for homosexuals. I conclude that Swinburne in his argument against homosexuality has moved beyond the limits of scientific philosophy, and into the realm of homophobia.

1 Introduction
Richard Swinburne argues for the thesis that homosexuality is a disability that should be prevented and cured where possible (R 303ff.). The purpose of my talk is to criticize this argument against homosexuality. After giving you an outline of Swinburne’s argument, I will criticize its premises, concentrating on the concepts of love and disability (section 2). In a second step, I will outline some negative consequences for homosexuals living in Western societies that would emerge if the conclusion was widely accepted (section 3). After this discussion of homosexuality, I will change the stance and apply the sociological concept of homophobia to Swinburne’s text (section 4). 

My presentation will be different in character from the other contributions at this conference. At Münstersche Vorlesungen, we usually try to offer internal and mostly constructive criticism to our guest philosopher. My criticism of Swinburne’s arguments will be neither internal nor constructive. I will rely on considerations external to Swinburne’s philosophy, e.g. on different concepts of love and disability and on the sociological concept of homophobia. And my criticism will not be constructive in spirit because I do not intend to help Swinburne improve his argument against homosexuality.