When does philosophical inquiry cross an ethical line? In this Heterodox Academy virtual colloquium, Rebecca Tuvel, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College, offers an answer. She opens with the backlash when her department hosted Peter Singer for a 2021 webinar on pandemic ethics, and with other philosophers whose work drew calls for retraction or cancellation, including her own 2017 article “In Defense of Transracialism.” Some critics say such views should be silenced because of the harm they might do; others accept that academic freedom protects them but say advancing them is still wrong.
Tuvel lays out the Institutional Model she developed with Eric Sampson of Purdue University: academic philosophy is a legitimate institution, and its members may advance views that turn out to be mistaken, or even unintentionally harmful, in service of its core aim of advancing philosophical understanding. She compares it with the adversarial legal system, investigative journalism, and markets, and answers three objections: that the model overgeneralizes, that philosophy is a non-ideal institution, and that it permits too much harm to marginalized groups. Her conclusion: silence a view on harm grounds only when there is excellent evidence of imminent harm. A transcript of Tuvel’s talk follows below.
Dylan Selterman: Now I’d like to nominate Rebecca Tuvel. She is an associate professor of philosophy at Rhodes College. She works on the philosophy of race, sex, and gender, the ethics of identity, and the ethics of academic inquiry. She’s here to talk with us about how addressing controversial topics in academic philosophy can be kept in balance with our other values. In this case, she poses the question, what are the ethical limits of philosophical inquiry? So without further ado, I’m going to hand things off to Rebecca. She is going to give her presentation, after which we’ll switch gears to discussion and live audience Q&A. So please use the hand-raised feature on Zoom to speak up when we get to the Q&A portion. If you must stay off camera and microphone, then you have the option to type questions into the chat. All right, Rebecca, take it away.
Rebecca Tuvel: Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone, for being here. It’s encouraging to see so many people. So, okay, so I can no longer see what you’re seeing, but I think that this is going to be better. So, “Ethical Limits of Philosophical Inquiry.” And this is a co-authored project.
So I started to write on the ethical limits of philosophical inquiry when there was an event at my college with my then-postdoctoral fellow in philosophy, Eric Sampson. So Eric Sampson is now at Purdue University. But what happened in 2021 when I was chairing the department sparked our interest in this topic.
So we had a bunch of different moving parts at the college. Some folks from poli sci came into philosophy. We basically rebranded our department, built a new curriculum, and we thought, wouldn’t it be great to launch our new department with some sort of exciting event, 2021, like right in the wake of the pandemic. We thought, what if we could get Peter Singer, you know, the world’s most famous ethicist, to come and talk about pandemic ethics? And he kindly agreed. And so we had a webinar on pandemic ethics with Singer.
We thought that we would be praised for this, but in fact, there was quite a bit of faculty blowback. So it started with one faculty member at Rhodes kind of expressing his extreme displeasure and offense that we organized this event. That followed with faculty, angry faculty emails. There was a student protest on campus, calls for us to cancel the event. I was called into the interim president’s office at the time. So this was a big to-do. And it led us to start thinking about these questions of the appropriate limits of philosophical inquiry.
I’ll just note that this is, as many people in this room are no doubt familiar, very much not a one-off case. So there are all kinds of cases wherein a philosopher makes an argument on some morally serious topic, and there are people who experience, you know, extreme offense or might make claims about being harmed in response to that work.
So I won’t go through every single one of these, but we probably are all familiar with the gender-critical philosophers, Kathleen Stock, Alex Byrne, and Holly Lawford-Smith, who have argued variously that women are adult human females, who have been accused of causing harm to transgender people. Nathan Cofnas, which is a name that’s been in the news recently over the whole Jason Arday affair, but he’s familiar to those of us in philosophy previously for defending the idea that research on group differences in intelligence should be freely pursued. Jonny Anomaly. I mentioned Peter Singer.
Worth noting that, you know, Singer’s views are controversial and, you know, we understand how, you know, if you are, you know, a person with a disability or a member of the disability community, Singer’s argument that it can be permissible in some cases to euthanize a severely disabled newborn when doing so leads to a better outcome for all affected, with parental consent, would, you know, be an upsetting, threatening view to hear. Steve Kershnar, controversial views about adult-child sex, has been said to threaten the safety of people who were victims of sexual abuse. Richard Swinburne has argued that homosexuality is a kind of disability.
And it’s not, you know, only people on the left who have been upset by various views. Tommy Curry argued that Black people have a right to lethal self-defense against racial violence and this kind of caused a huge negative reaction from corners of the right. And then myself, as you may or may not know, I published an article in 2017 called “In Defense of Transracialism,” which I argued that considerations in support of transgender identities extend to transracial identities. And, you know, there was an open letter calling for the retraction of my article. It ultimately wasn’t retracted, but, you know, I was stated to have done harm to trans individuals and to Black people.
So in all of these cases, basically, we have instances of philosophers who are working on, talking about some, you know, radioactive moral, political topic and said to be kind of doing harm in doing so.
All kinds of reactions, so from disinvitations to article retractions or calls for retraction, book contracts rescinded. This happened with the gender-critical folks, like OUP had invited Alex Byrne and then ultimately, you know, denied his book contract. Calls to fire people, refusals to hire people. There have been academic publications kind of defending the idea that we should try to institutionally delegitimize certain views that are harmful or taken to be harmful. Others who’ve argued that maybe we need something like IRB oversight of philosophical research. So the same way that we have institutional review boards in the sciences, maybe we could have something like that in philosophy. Moral condemnation of speakers, banning speakers from campus. Interestingly, Kershnar was actually banned from his own campus. It was claimed that it was also for his own safety. No-platforming, moral condemnation on professional blogs. So lots of different kinds of reactions here.
And I really want to emphasize that my co-author and I take these reactions seriously. And we just think that they lead to a genuine puzzle. So I do want to emphasize that again, we think it makes sense that some find, say, Singer’s views on disability deeply upsetting. It makes sense that such views are experienced as harmful or deeply distressing, especially to people with disabilities. And yet we ultimately think that all of the above listed reactions are misguided. And so this led to the puzzle of our paper and to our attempt to defend a position on the ethical limits of philosophical inquiry.
Okay, so just quickly, we want to say that we think that there are two kind of common extreme responses that people have to these various kinds of cases, and we think both are mistaken.
So the first one is something like keep quiet. Philosophers just morally should avoid publishing or speaking publicly on complex, high-stakes topics to just avoid the risk of serious harm. Just, you know, it’s too risky, just don’t do it. We think that this response is misguided for a few reasons. The main one is that if the mere risk of harm were sufficient to, you know, leave philosophers to stop publishing or speaking on complex topics for moral reasons, that would also mean that basically every interesting moral, political, and religious question would be off-limits, because you can’t really discuss, you know, the ethics of immigration, abortion, gun control, distributive justice, whatever it may be, without incurring some risk of harm, right? Like these topics are interesting and difficult in part because they are morally risky, right? If you get it wrong, there could be bad effects.
Also, we think, you know, if the thought is, well, philosophers shouldn’t weigh in, then we wonder who should weigh in, right? Somebody will weigh in. And we think, why not the people who are trained to, you know, analyze and assess better and worse arguments in the realm of moral and political philosophy?
Second extreme response is something very permissive. Like, anything goes. Philosophers are just permitted to say whatever they like, however harmful or risky, as they perform their characteristic professional duties. And, you know, we think that the truth is important or philosophical understanding is important. And yet this view goes too far because certainly it’s not the only thing that matters, right? So morality doesn’t just magically cease to apply in the academic context or any context just because, you know, we also value the truth. So it can’t just be that there’s no weight whatsoever to give to the moral views.
So for instance, if we were to have received credible evidence that having this Peter Singer webinar on campus was going to actually lead to some disabled students being seriously harmed in some way, we would have been the first ones to shut it down. You know, so morality doesn’t cease to exist. So those are the two extreme responses.
And what we propose is an institutional model that we think walks a line kind of somewhere between these, not quite as extreme as anything goes, although it is, you know, certainly more permissive than keep quiet. So our goal is we just defend a general theory on the ethical limits of philosophical inquiry called the institutional model. And I think that the core idea will probably strike you as pretty intuitive. What do we do? We got to think first and foremost about an institution’s legitimate goal. And that is what sets the bounds for permissible or impermissible activity within that institution.
So on our view, it follows that none of the philosophers discussed above have done anything morally wrong by publicly defending their views. So there’s little to be said in favor of silencing them, you know, by, you know, trying to block or prevent or otherwise their academic publications, colloquia, keynotes, or whatever.
Okay, so quick point before I say a little more about the view itself. Importantly, like, we are talking about the ethics of philosophical inquiry here. And that question is, does morality permit defending certain views in academic settings? Importantly, this question is distinct from standard questions about academic freedom. So academic freedom questions are more asking like, ought laws or institutions permit the defense of certain views?
So a common view, for instance, in academic freedom literature is something like, well, academics have a right to do wrong. In other words, like there’s institutional protection of their views, even if they’re morally mistaken, right? Our view is that, is stronger in that it’s saying defending radioactive views is actually not wrong at all. Also, it’s a moral argument, not a policy proposal. So just wanted to flag some distinctions there. We’re just denying that there’s even any wrong being done here.
All right, the institutional model. So take another institution, take the adversarial legal system, for instance. You can think about what its legitimate goal is. You might think justice is the legitimate goal of the adversarial legal system. Who plays roles in the adversarial legal system? We have defense attorneys and prosecutors, right? What are they trying to do? Well, they’re trying to, you know, convict guilty people and acquit innocent people, all with a view toward justice.
And this does involve harmful or dangerous behavior, right? I mean, there’s defense attorneys know, like, at some point in their career, they will defend rapists and murderers, and prosecutors know at some point in their career that we did, you know, prosecuting innocent people and all of that, right? So we don’t deny that there’s, you know, harm and risk of harm here. However, we understand that, you know, when these role players play their roles well within the larger system, we collectively with our coordinated behavior achieve justice better than any obvious feasible alternatives.
So if you could imagine a high school student going to watch a murder trial or something and being totally enraged, like, why is this person defending a murderer? This is a terrible thing to do. This is supposed to be a justice system. And we would say that they’re missing the larger picture. It’s actually this coordinated behavior that together serves this larger goal of justice.
So, of course, there are limits, and we argue that, you know, it’s helpful to understand the limits of what role players can do in any given institution by referring back to its goal. So what is it that lawyers can’t do? They can’t lie, fabricate evidence, intentionally elicit false confessions, prosecute all and only their political enemies, prosecute only if they’re guaranteed to win, you know? And the reason they can’t do those things is because doing so, you know, blocks our larger goal of justice.
So hopefully you get the idea here. For the sake of time, I won’t necessarily run through every institution, but, you know, we talk about how analogous cases with, like, investigative journalism, with airport security, where we have airport security agents doing all kinds of things, performing random searches on innocent passengers, but for the larger goal of security.
We talk also about markets. So what’s the legitimate goal of markets? Economic efficiency, wealth creation, waste minimization. Market participants are the role players. And there are harmful behaviors there, threatening livelihoods by out-competing rivals, putting them out of business, buying from the best merchant, not the neediest and all that. But again, the larger goal serves creating wealth, cutting waste better than any feasible alternative. But of course, again, there are limits. You can’t lobby competitors out of existence, dump radioactive chemicals in the river, even if it’s legal, falsely advertise or steal wages, right? So hopefully you get the idea there.
And so this is the same view that we should take when it comes to academic philosophy. Here’s a couple philosophy journals on the right-hand side. What is the goal? We think of it broadly in terms of, like, epistemic improvement or advancing philosophical understanding. You know, you could have a lot of different views about what it is that philosophy is doing, whether or not it’s, like, seeking the truth or knowledge, but we think advancing philosophical understanding kind of broadly captures the general epistemic enterprise. That’s the legitimate goal of this institution.
Who are the role players? Professional philosophers. And again, there are risky, harmful, and dangerous behaviors, right? Presenting the best arguments, theories, and objections as philosophers see them, even when those views are in fact morally heinous, right? And even when those views, you know, could, you know, lead people possibly to enact harm in the real world. Why is this justified? Because, again, with respect to the larger institution, when trained philosophers weigh in on difficult questions, including radioactive ones, we understand those questions better, can better judge which answers are true.
And yet there are still limits. You aren’t morally permitted to insult your interlocutors, misquote authors, call for physical attacks, accept or reject papers based on institutional affiliation, accept or reject papers based on age, race, sex, etc. Also may publish only Rawls content in political philosophy journals, ideological capture in general. So again, all of these limits or these things that we think that you’re, you know, morally not permitted to do as professional philosopher can be understood by reference back to the larger goal. So, you know, insulting your interlocutors doesn’t help advance philosophical understanding, for instance, and neither does any of the other things on this list.
Okay. Three objections. How am I doing on time? Sorry, I don’t have my little timer anymore.
Dylan Selterman: You’re good. Keep going.
Rebecca Tuvel: Okay, cool. Three objections. There’s Lionel Hutz: objections. I’m going to kind of talk about three major objections we think to the view. One is like the overgeneralization objection. The second is what we call the non-ideal institution objection. And the third is the moral emergency objection.
Overgeneralization, like it sounds, if this model is correct, it looks like it’s going to really overgeneralize. It’s going to be morally permissible to defend all kinds of heinous views, Nazism, chattel slavery, white supremacy, in academic research venues. So this person thinks, you know, you said before that, you know, you’re walking a kind of middle line between these views, but actually your view sounds super permissive. Looks like it would defend most, allow the defense of most anything, even the most heinous views. Second premise, plainly, it’s not permissible to defend those views in academic research contexts. Therefore, the institutional model is not correct, right? So that’s essentially how that objection would run. Something’s gone wrong here in the reasoning.
And, you know, our reply is, look, if there are good understanding-based reasons to hear philosophical defenses of those views, then it is permissible to publish them. Now we think in fact, there aren’t good understanding-based reasons to hear philosophical defenses of Nazism and chattel slavery. So you may exclude them, but it’s not because they’re immoral. It’s just because they are implausible.
So, you know, if you actually start to think about some of those views, like, you know, what would a philosophical defense of Nazism involve, right? So you would have to presumably identify some feature that all or most all Jews share, let’s say, to the exclusion of other groups, other favored groups. And then you would have to have some premise like justifying uniquely bad treatment for that group. So, you know, our thought is that it is difficult to really imagine what, like, a plausible argument for such a conclusion would look like.
Now, you might think, well, but what if someone finds an argument for Nazism, chattel slavery or whatever with plausible premises that leads to that conclusion that Nazism is correct or chattel slavery, you know, is morally defensible? Then we bite the bullet here. We say publish it, right? The moral truth is at stake, or philosophical understanding is at stake. Of course, we’re now in a thought experiment wherein, you know, we’re picturing views with, like, plausible premises that imply their conclusion for, you know, morally heinous things. So we don’t think we’re in that world, but we’re now imagining that we are in a world where you could actually establish such arguments.
You might also think, well, what if maybe it’s a bad argument, but it just gets judged plausible and published? Won’t that legitimize the bad thing? And we think that, you know, the institution at large relies on people refuting bad views. We think that, you know, philosophers will almost certainly reject bad views for the right reasons. And someone might think, well, what if philosophers are terrible at this? They can’t tell good arguments from bad ones. Our answer is they can’t be trusted to decide which views should be excluded then either, right? So either, you know, either you think that they can be trusted to figure out good from bad arguments, or they can’t, you know, be trusted to have any authority of any kind on what views should be published.
Second objection is the non-ideal institution objection, and that basically says, look, your model sounds great in an ideal world, but we’re not in an ideal world. Academic philosophy, as it’s currently practiced, excludes all kinds of important marginalized views, whether trans-affirming views or disability advocates’ views, views common among racial minorities. So airing more dominant views just takes us further away from the truth rather than toward the truth, because there are just people who are silenced. They’re not welcome in the room.
And, you know, I think this is a serious objection. We take seriously the concerns at the heart of this objection. But we hold that the best reply, the proper solution is not to just level down by blocking arguments from the better-represented side. It’s to level up. We have to remove barriers facing the wrongly excluded side, right? Again, the goal is philosophical understanding, and we don’t get any closer to that goal by blocking more views, right? In fact, philosophical understanding requires getting all the very best reasons for and against each view on the table, and if one side’s arguments have been unjustly blocked, the solution is not to block the other side. It is to unblock the side that’s been shut off, right?
So this means taking different measures to ensure that, like, views that have been previously excluded or marginalized in the profession have a place. And I think academic philosophy has certainly taken strides in the last 30 years to try to remedy some of these exclusions, you know, work on, like, race, sex, and gender, and decolonial thought, things that were, like, you know, considered laughable not that long ago, are now, like, part of the philosophical canon. So, you know, and we think that that is the right response.
By analogy, going back to the other institution, you might think, you might hear people say, like, rich people get good lawyers and poor people get bad ones. And if someone were to say, well, let’s deny rich people good lawyers, we’d say, well, no, that’s not the right answer, right? Denying good lawyers to rich people will just make them worse off and nobody better off. That’s not going to serve justice. We should rather try to get good lawyers for poor people.
Okay. Final objection, moral emergency objection says, look, if we don’t prevent some philosophers from expressing their views on campus or in print, someone will be harmed, whether trans people, people with disabilities, racial minorities, young children. And these are all the kinds of different groups that have been said to be harmed when, in response to what these various philosophers have said.
And we think, first, you’ve got to unpack what kind of harm we’re talking about. There’s, like, at least three versions we can identify. One is imminent physical harm, one is severe psychological harm, and one is a sort of diffused downstream harm.
Imminent physical harm basically says, you know, as I noted, that having these views published or aired on campus could cause imminent physical harm. First off, you know, we grant the principle again. So I sort of mentioned this earlier, but imagine that critics credibly threatened to riot if a philosopher presented her research, making severe injury likely. It would be wrong for her to proceed and permissible for others to stop her, right? She can postpone, relocate, or publish instead. Again, morality doesn’t just cease to exist because the truth is at stake. We have to take seriously these sorts of concerns.
In practice, though, we think the evidence that imminent physical harm takes place on campuses or elsewhere in response to these sorts of views is exceedingly rare. So people like Singer, or Stock, Kershnar, maybe not Cofnas, I don’t know how much he’s spoken on campuses, but the other ones have spoken on campuses for years, some for decades. We know of no recorded incident of violence against any of the groups said to be endangered. Also, there’s just not often specificity about who would be, you know, committing the violent acts against whom, like it’s often just people expressing these concerns without adequate evidence.
Imminent psychological harm, I think, is much more commonly what people have in mind when they speak about harm, things like offense, betrayal, sadness, anger. And we think this gets something right, right? We think in ordinary settings, you know, it really can be wrong and sometimes is wrong to kind of casually debate race and IQ, adult-child sex, whether trans women are really women, right? In some contexts, it could be that that harm is gratuitous, and depending on where it is that you’re discussing this, this might very well be something that you ought not to do.
However, it doesn’t follow that philosophers act wrongly in doing this in a research context for a few reasons. One, because it’s not gratuitous. Research reliably advances philosophical understanding, so the harms kind of come with these real benefits. Also, we think that these kinds of harms are unintended and unavoidable. Like, silencing these views wouldn’t prevent the harm. It would just leave those questions to less careful voices. So responsible inquiry in general just can’t avoid hard questions.
It’s also unexceptional, right? So, you know, conservatives also will claim experiencing psychological distress, for instance, when people defend abortion or same-sex marriage, atheism or gender transition for children, for instance. People have very strong feelings about this, but few think that that makes anti-conservative philosophical defenses wrong. So we think the same applies when the harmed party is a member of a marginalized group, and for consistency’s sake, you have to tolerate this, again, for the larger sake of philosophical understanding.
So we think once philosophers take reasonable care to minimize needless harm, responsible inquiry into important questions is not morally wrong and is indeed morally permissible.
Final concern would be something like not, you know, immediate psychological or physical harm, but a more diffused distant harm. You know, down the line, this could have negative effects on, you know, whatever marginalized group is said to be at risk.
And our reply here is that, first, it’s really difficult to predict the long-term effects of academic expression. It’s highly speculative. Academics have really not been good at it in the past, and had past philosophers suppressed views that they thought were false and harmful, like atheism or interracial marriage or same-sex marriage, gender transition, none would have gained a hearing. And we don’t think we’re any less fallible, right? There’s no reason to think that, you know, we know nowadays, right, what views are, you know, morally correct and which ones are likely to actually lead to long-term harm as opposed to benefit.
Okay, upshot, big idea. Look to the institution’s legitimate goal to set the limits of what people may permissibly do within that institution. The goal of academic philosophy: advancing philosophical understanding. Defending radioactive views serves that goal. So none of the philosophers discussed did anything wrong. And again, we limit, look at the limits: reject a view because it’s implausible, not because it is immoral. Where views are wrongly excluded, we should level up and not level down. We should silence on harm grounds only when there’s, like, really excellent evidence of imminent harm. Okay, that is, that’s the gist of it. I hope I didn’t take too much time there. But thank you so much for listening.
