Thread by @johnschwenkler

Hey, let me tell you a story. (Thread.)

Scene: Oxford, UK. 1956.

"The women are up to something in Convocation", a don at St John's was heard to say to his colleagues; "we have to go and vote them down."

The women, in this case, were led by a tutor from Somerville College named Elizabeth Anscombe -- that student of Wittgenstein's who as an Oxford undergraduate had converted to Catholicism and then co-written a pamphlet opposing Britain's entry into the war against /

/ the Axis powers, arguing among other things that if the conduct of the war was going to involve taking civilians as targets of military action, then to wage it would be unjust, and it would therefore be wrong to do so, no matter the consequences of refraining.

What Anscombe and her colleagues were up to now concerned the aftermath of a war in which hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians had been massacred in just the way she anticipated would happen back in 1939.

For having seen that war won by these means, the University of Oxford was now prepared to bestow an honorary degree on the man who was responsible for the worst of it, former US President Harry Truman.

Anscombe opposed these honors. In a speech that she gave to the University Senate and later published as a pamphlet, she argued that Truman's conduct in the Second World War had made him a *murderer*, and "murder is one of the worst of human actions".

That pamphlet contained a good amount of fairly cutting mockery, too, and closed by suggesting that the situation was due in part to her Oxford colleagues' incorrect views in moral philosophy.

This cannot have been well received by those colleagues, many of whom had interrupted their philosophical work to go and fight in the very war that Anscombe was calling unjust.

Yet she refused to drop the argument: she answered the question of a radio address given to the BBC the next year, "Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?", that no, it did not corrupt the youth at all, but only reinforced the incorrect views that they held anyway; /

/ and then in her paper "Modern Moral Philosophy" Anscombe took the wood from everyone from Hume ("sophistical") to Kant ("useless") to Mill ("stupid") to Sidgwick ("dull"), and characterized the work of her Oxford colleagues as "shallow", "provincial", "corrupt", and so on.

THIS CANNOT HAVE GONE OVER WELL. For example, here is her colleague R.M. Hare, in a letter to The Listener, complaining about Anscombe's characterization of Oxford moral philosophy, kicking off an exchange that continued for several cycles before the editors cut it off.

If Twitter had been a thing, there is a fair chance that Anscombe would have broken it. And note well: all this unfolded BEFORE she started giving talks and writing essays in defense of traditional principles of Christian and Jewish sexual ethics.

Okay, so fast forward to the present, where the women are up to something again.

This time, their opposition is having the categories "girl" and "woman", and the rights and special protections that these categories are supposed to guarantee, appropriated by people who lack the biological characteristics in virtue of which human females /

/ share a common identity -- an identity which includes a vulnerability to oppression and exploitation that the rights guaranteed to girls and women are supposed to redress and protect against.

Most of the women who are causing a stir about this are not opposed to *every* instance of this appropriation.

They accept that the categories "girl" and "woman" can be extended to include male people in some cases, and for some purposes.

Their opposition is to having these categories, & the rights & protections that come with them, extended to include male people WITHOUT qualification & for ALL purposes -- especially when the basis of this extension has to do w the internal "gender identity" of an individual: /

/ a concept that many of these women are skeptical of, since they take their identity as women to consist in the characteristics of their sexed bodies; & they regard gender, not as a feature of a person's internal psychology, but rather as an external structure of social norms /

/ and expectations that limits the possibilities of outlook, lifestyle, and expression for women and men alike, and is among the chief mechanisms of the aforementioned oppression and exploitation of females across human history.

These women are causing a stir, then, and not just by explaining themselves carefully in lengthy blog posts: medium.com/@kathleenstock…

-- but also on Twitter & other social media, where time is short, brevity is demanded (sometimes ...), snark is the norm, & patience runs thin over the course of countless overlapping interactions with crowds of people who are thin on patience for just the same reason as you are.

In this latter context especially, some of these women have sometimes been RUDE or even MEAN.

Yes, this happens!

Sometimes the transgression is acknowledged and apologized for; other times, not so much.

And while usually the meanness is not QUITE at the level of comparing the speech of a colleague to the defense of war criminals at Nuremberg, no doubt it feels differently to some.

But, look, this is philosophy -- indeed, it is Philosophy TWITTER. And while I have long been an advocate of kindness as a demand of interpersonal interaction, really it is not the quantity or QUALITY of this particular meanness that accounts for why a fair number /

/ of my colleagues have eagerly shared posts (medium.com/@transphilosop…, mapforthegap.org.uk/post/statement…) calling on the discipline to improve the profession by doing things such as these:

That is, the push for measures like these ones has everything to do with WHAT these philosophers are arguing rather than HOW they are arguing for it -- a point that is acknowledged on occasion, but then usually slides back into complaints about rudeness and "insults", /

/ even from the same people who then go on to post things like this:

https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1154230431446736896

This point applies in spades to claims about the alleged "harms" of these feminist arguments: the extent of the harm itself is never documented carefully; there is no consideration of the countervailing benefits or the harms of other choices; and somehow it ALWAYS happens that /

/ the positions one opposes are harmful when expressed, while one's own positions are not.

https://twitter.com/johnschwenkler/status/1154101026389184513

(I'll note in passing that Elizabeth Anscombe had a few smart things to say about the difficulty in using "harm" as a metric of moral assessment.)

Now, look. I rather admire the moral certitude in which these arguments are advanced, even as I think it's a certitude in something false.

I also share the desire for more consistently charitable and collegial conversation about these and other sensitive topics.

But there is a reason why, in my estimation anyway, these calls for censure and deplatforming have been rejected or ignored by the majority of established philosophers: not because they (we) have lost our sense of injustice or willingness to stand for what is right, /

but rather because years of heated disagreement over matters that cut to the core of our being have shown us that this is what philosophy is ABOUT, really, and that when a colleague "questions our identity" or attempts to rebut our arguments, even in a manner that cuts /

/ or offends, she is almost always doing this because she wants to do us a FAVOR, as Socrates meant to do a favor to the Athenians even as he chose a means to this end that made him, well, something of a pain in the ass.

This is certainly the sort of thing that philosophers can do a worse or better job of -- and we should be in conversation with one another about how bad or good a job we are doing.

But this needs to be a conversation *between colleagues*, not one that centers on attempts to drive philosophers into professional exile over ill-defined charges of harmful or insulting speech. /fin

@threadreaderapp please unroll