Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy, And A Real and Relevant Alternative, #7–Eminent Identitarians: Social Justice Theory, Identitarian Multiculturalism, and Moral Fanaticism.
By Robert Hanna
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There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates…. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. (Thoreau, 1957: p. 9)
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ABSTRACT
Contemporary professional academic philosophy is careerist, conformist, coercive-&-authoritarian within its own social-institutional sphere, dogmatic, esoteric, hyper-specialized, and above all, irrelevant to the true needs of the rest of humanity outside the professional academy, even to the point of being fundamentally at odds with those needs. Although, as Kant, Schopenhauer, Thoreau, and Dewey all pointed out, these problems have been perennial since the emergence of professional academic philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries–“there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers” (Thoreau)–they have currently reached their final crisis stage. To demonstrate this, I present six short studies in the decline and fall of 20th and 21st century professional academic philosophy, describing the going-down of post-classical Analytic philosophy–together with its social-institutional Other, so-called “Continental philosophy”–into the ash-heap of history, with social justice theorists and identitarian multiculturalists coercively-&-moralistically presiding over its cognitive collapse and suicide. But all is not lost. I also present an alternative model of philosophy–which I call “life-shaping philosophy”–that’s (i) real, i.e., authentic and serious, pursuing and practicing philosophy as a full-time, lifetime calling, as sharply opposed to its being job-oriented, half-hearted, and Scholastically superficial, (ii) fully relevant-to-humanity by virtue of its being intellectually, morally, and politically autonomous, critical, collaborative, and creative, and that (iii) not only can but should be pursued and practiced outside the professional academy.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. On the Meaning and Use of the Terms “Analytic Philosophy” and “Continental Philosophy”
III. The Question That Quine Refused To Answer
IV. Analytic Metaphysics as a Copernican Devolution in Philosophy
V. Conceptual Engineering Debunked and Replaced
VI. Social Justice Theory and The Paradox of Distributive Social Justice
VII. Eminent Identitarians: Social Justice Theory, Identitarian Multiculturalism, and Moral Fanaticism
VIII. A Real and Relevant Alternative: Life-Shaping Philosophy
IX. Conclusion
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You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of this essay HERE.
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VII. Eminent Identitarians: Social Justice Theory, Identitarian Multiculturalism, and Moral Fanaticism
In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey brilliantly and irreverently exposed the moral extremism and incoherence — including hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and implicit self-contradiction and self-stultification — of the Victorian era (Strachey, 1918/1948). In this section, with much narrower scope, and neither by means of biography nor attempting to mimic Strachey’s legendary Mandarin literary style, I want to do essentially the same thing for social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism inside contemporary professional academic philosophy.
The psychological, moral, and sociopolitical doctrine of identitarian multiculturalism presupposes social justice theory, as I’ve spelled it out and criticized it in section VI; but more specifically and on its own, identitarian multiculturalism says (i) that people are defined primarily in terms of their falling under a certain social group-type and/or their social group-allegiance (for example, race, ethnicity, gender-&/or-sex, sexual preference, national origin or citizenship, language, economic class, social roles of all kinds, social institutions of all kinds especially including religions, and so-on), (ii) that special moral virtues and special positive moral value, or goodness, are attributed to all members of that social group and to that social group itself, call it The WE, aka The US, (iii) that there is a set of identity-based social groups that are special targets of distributive social justice, precisely because these groups have historically been and/or are currently are being oppressed, and therefore they are also to be included among those to whom special moral virtues and special positive moral value, or goodness, are attributed, and (iv) that special moral vices and special negative moral disvalue, or badness, are attributed to members of certain other social groups and to those groups themselves, as the historical or current oppressors of one or more of those oppressed groups, who are then collectively intensely distrusted, or even excoriated-and-vilified, as The OTHER, aka The THEM. A made-to-order, real-world example of this is the late-1960s Black Power group US, led by Ron Karenga, which explicitly counter-identified Whites (especially, but by no means exclusively, White supremacists) as The THEM, and also engaged in a struggle-to-the-death with the Black Panthers (see, for example, Davis and Wiener, 2020: esp. chs. 15–17). Referring to another Black power group, Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King Jr very correctly and courageously pointed out in 1959 that Black supremacy is as bad as White supremacy (Davis and Wiener, 2020: p. 67); but that didn’t (and still doesn’t, 63 years later) make MLK any friends on either side of the catastrophic and tragic identitarian Black/White race divide in the USA: on the contrary.
That social justice theory, as per section VI above, and identitarian multiculturalism, which presupposes social justice theory, jointly constitute a hegemonic ideology inside contemporary professional academic philosophy can be easily confirmed by reading, on any given day of the year, any one of several online announcement or event list feeds for professional academic philosophers. For an example taken almost at random, in the 24 hour period running from 6pm GMT on 31 January 2022 to 6pm GMT on 1 February 2022, the widely disseminated Philosophy in Europe announcement list, run by the University of Liverpool Department of Philosophy, contained the five items reproduced immediately below (PHILOS-L, 2022). Above all, however, it should be noted that since this is a European list, it also demonstrates that the hegemonic ideology of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism not only obtains in North American contemporary professional academic philosophy, but also has been exported from North America to professional academic philosophy in Europe and indeed worldwide. Since the purpose of quoting these is only to provide evidence for my general claim that the social institution of contemporary professional academic philosophy, not only in North America but also in Europe and indeed worldwide, is ideologically pervaded and indeed dominated by social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism, I’ve replaced all living individuals’ names with “XYZ.”
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Reminder Call for Abstracts: Workshop on Injustice, Resistance and Complicity
Deadline for abstracts 11th February 2022
Organised by the department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, University of Groningen, 15th June 2022.
Injustice is often difficult to pin down. It manifests not only in one group using their power to inflict physical or psychological harm on another, or to limit another group’s options, choices or possibilities through overt policies or political means. Recent developments in philosophy have highlighted that injustice can take more insidious forms. It can manifest at an epistemic level: depriving agents of the ability to conceptualise the harms done to them, or blocking their ability to articulate the ways in which they have been wronged. Injustice often functions structurally, in the absence of any identifiable oppressing agent. Frequently, unjust social structures have a deceptive nature, making systemic issues appear to be individual failings; thus, effectively identifying and resisting these diverse sites of injustice requires careful attention to the interplay between structural and interpersonal forces, and questions of individual, collective and vicarious responsibility and agency. These matters are further complicated by issues of complicity: the way in which agents can play a role in upholding or reinforcing their own subordination and the subordination of others. Complicity manifests itself in the ‘grey zone’ of agency, responsibility and choice in situations of injustice, where strategic negotiations with oppressive social structures need to be disentangled from adaptive preferences and internalised oppression, or affective mechanisms that inure agents against acknowledging, resisting and combating injustice. Epistemic and structural injustice, and our complicity in both, raise difficult questions for the possibility of resistance.
This workshop invites papers that seek to explore issues of injustice, resistance and complicity from a range of philosophical perspectives. We invite work that builds on traditions including, but not limited to, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, global justice and disability studies, as well as work on responsibility, autonomy, agency and epistemic and structural injustice. Papers may address one or more themes from the workshop, and conceptual and applied approaches from both the analytic and continental traditions are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions from early career researchers and members of groups currently underrepresented in academic philosophy.
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Submissions
If you would like to present at the workshop please submit an abstract of max. 500 words. Abstracts should be prepared for blind review and submissions should include a separate document with the title of your paper, your name, affiliation, career stage and contact details.
Final papers should be 30 minutes long, leaving 25 minutes discussion for each paper.
The deadline for submissions is 11th February 2022.
We expect to communicate decisions in early March 2022.
This workshop is being planned as an in-person event, COVID restrictions permitting.
Please send your abstracts to injusticeworkshop@gmail.com
With the subject heading ‘Injustice, Resistance and Complicity Abstract’
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The DRL Reading Group Blueprints have finally landed!
If you’ve not followed the development of this project, here’s some background: we’ve conducted some research on the state of UK curricula and have identified topics that are systematically under-taught. To remedy this, we’ve asked our wonderful volunteers to create “blueprints” so that students anywhere can take matters into their own hands and set up their own reading groups.
On our website, you’ll now find you find carefully selected readings, videos, and podcasts, all arranged into a consistent narrative and accompanied by comments and questions to guide your reading and discussion on the following topics:
– Feminist Philosophy
– Postcolonial Theory, Race and Caste
– Native North American Ethics
– Sex, What is it Good For?
– The Wartime Quartet
– Reclaiming the System: New Visions for a Future of Work
– Race, Disability, and Gender in Bioethics
– Philosopher Queens: Women in Philosophy and the History of Exclusion
… And with more to come!
We would be grateful if you could share this new DRL project with your community.
And whether you are someone potentially interested in taking up one of these groups, or a scholar interested in creating your own blueprint, do not hesitate to get in touch!
Proudly, The DRL Team
Blueprints this way: https://diversityreadinglist.org/blueprints/
Research on UK curricula this way: https://diversityreadinglist.org/blueprints/what-is-taught/
Contact: contact@diversityreadinglist.org
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New issue of EJPE now available
Dear list members,
The latest issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) is now available online at http://ejpe.org/. It includes an article symposium on XYZ and XYZ’s “Narrow Identities”, an interview with XYZ, our new Critical Comments section, and more. Please see below for an overview — with links — of the issue.
EJPE is a peer-reviewed bi-annual academic journal supported by the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. EJPE publishes research on the methodology, history, ethics, and interdisciplinary relations of economics, and welcomes contributions from all scholars with an interest in any of its research domains. EJPE is an Open Access Journal: all the content is permanently available online without subscription or payment.
**OVERVIEW OF EJPE ISSUE 2, VOLUME 14, 2021**
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ARTICLE SYMPOSIUM on “Narrow Identities”
The Paths to Narrow Identities by XYZ
Deepening and Widening Social Identity Analysis in Economics by XYZ
Social Identities: Narrow and Broad, Exclusive and Inclusive, Firm and Fuzzy by XYZ
Group Membership or Identity? by XYZ
Narrow Identities Revisited by XYZ and XYZ
INTERVIEW
Grounding Equal Freedom: An Interview with XYZ
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‘Upcoming Conference — Decolonization and Poststructuralism’
23rd February 2022 (Online)
Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Final Program:
0930–0935: Introductory Remarks
XYZ and XYZ (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
0940–1110: Apertures
Decolonizing the Syllabus: The Name and End of Deconstruction
XYZ (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Ethics, Agency and Deconstructing Subjectivity in Indian Buddhist Philosophy: Rethinking Poststructuralism from an Intercultural-philosophical Perspective
XYZ (University of Kassel, Germany)
Decolonizing Eurocentric Affect: Subaltern Affect at the Limit of Species Alterity
XYZ (Independent Scholar, India)
1115–1245: Empirical Considerations
Repurposing the Postmodern: On the Viability of Post-structures in the Postcolonial
XYZ (University of Delhi, India)
Decolonisation and Postructuralism?: A Pedagogical Case Study
XYZ (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, England)
African Philosophy in an African Language: Some Considerations
XYZ (University of Western Cape, South Africa)
1250–1350: Edouard Glissant
Glissant and Derrida: Deconstructing Colonial Imaginary from Within and from Without
XYZ (École Normale Supérieure, France)
Glissant on the (de)colonization of Time
XYZ (Royal Holloway, University of London, England)
1355–1455: Deleuze
Knowledge Production and Intellectual Instruction in Colonial Quito: An Imbricated Rhizomatic Network
XYZ (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Italy)
Anthropophagy and Deleuze and Guattari through the eyes of XYZ
XYZ (Independent Scholar, Colombia)
1500–1600: Ethics
Can Poststructuralism Critique itself? Developing Foucauldian Ethics to Supersede the Eurocentrism of Biopolitics
XYZ (University of Kent, England)
Keeping Impurity Impure: Ethical Responses to Epistemic Impasses
XYZ (Linköping University, Sweden)
1605–1735: Derrida
Unacknowledged Agency: Derrida’s Postcolonial Subject
XYZ (Indiana University, USA)
“The Crisis of the Crisis”: Deconstruction and Decolonization
XYZ (Northwestern University/Sarah Lawrence College, USA)
The Uninvited Guest: Hospitality, Responsibility, and Possibility
XYZ (Regis University, USA)
1740–1910: Moving Forward
“The Ripple and the Two-Tide Movement”: The Metaphorical Language of Contingent Foundations
XYZ (École Normale Supérieure, France)
If decolonization is not a metaphor, what is it then?
XYZ (Universidad Católica San Paolo, Peru)
Already Existing Decolonial Poststructuralism?
XYZ (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile)
1910–1915: Closing Remarks
All times are Madrid, Spain (UTC + 1)
All welcome! The registration link and abstracts are available at the conference website: https://www.ucm.es/decolonization-and-poststructuralism/
Organizers: XYZ and XYZ
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Funding: This conference forms part of the activities for the following research projects: (1) “Agency and Society: An Inquiry through Poststructuralism” (PR108/20–26), funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid–Banco Santander; (2) “Differential Ontology and the Politics Of Reason,” funded by the Government of the Region of Madrid, as part of line 3 of the multi-year agreement with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid: V PRICIT Excellence Program for University Professors (Fifth Regional Plan for Scientific Investigation and Technological Innovation); and (3) “The Politics of Reason” (PID2020–117386GA-I00), financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain.
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Announcing the next event in the 2021/22 Feminist Political Philosophy Speaker Series, hosted on Zoom by the University of Hamburg:
XYZ, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
“U.S. Latina/x Abolitionist Feminism: Nuevos y viejos caminos/New and old pathways”
Mon., February 7, 18:15–20:00 Central Europe Time / 12:15–2:00pm Eastern
To register: https://www.limesurvey.uni-hamburg.de/index.php/133536
Abstract:
In this presentation, XYZ turns to sources within Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms to develop a framing of prison abolitionism from within these feminist trajectories. In particular, XYZ examines archival sources that demonstrate Chicana feminist involvement in prisoners’ rights organizing during the 1970s and 1980s, with such work foregrounding activist and scholarly contributions in later decades among Latina/x and Chicana/x feminists. Regarding the continued relevance of such a critical praxis, the second half of the presentation poses the early 2000s writings of transnational Argentine feminist María Lugones, and specifically her conceptions of active subjectivity and streetwalker theorizing as providing a novel Latina/x feminist framing of agency that supports prison abolitionist efforts today.
Organized by:
XYZ, University of Hamburg Philosophisches Seminar
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Speaker Series website: https://www.philosophie.uni-hamburg.de/philosophisches-seminar/veranstaltungen/rvl-fem-pol-phil.html
Future events in the speaker series:
Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free!
2021/22 Feminist Political Philosophy Speaker Series
XYZ (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
“U.S. Latina/x Abolitionist Feminism: Nuevos y viejos caminos/New and Old Pathways”
Mon Feb. 7, 2022, 18.15–20.00 CET
XYZ (Northeastern University)
Book Talk: No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis
With commentary by XYZ (Universität Hamburg)
Mon Feb. 21, 2022, 16.15–19.00 CET
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Now, it’s well-known that social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism emerged from the factionalization and fragmentation of the American Left during the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968 (see, e.g., Kazin, 2011: chs. 6–7). By 1994, that ideological 1–2 punch jointly constituted the entrenched and ubiquitous moral and political framework inside the professional academy in general and professional academic philosophy in particular (Rorty, 1994). In the particular case of the latter, this framework was subsequently professionally and academically codified after the mid-90s, and not only consistently has been, but also is ever more increasingly being, tightly monitored and policed by college and university administrations everywhere and by — as the paradigmatic example — the American Philosophical Association (APA, 2022). But how could philosophers, who individually pride themselves on being, and publicly present themselves as, models of precise, rigorous critical thinking, intellectual autonomy, and practical autonomy, have allowed themselves to be herded into a single coercive-moralist orthodoxy, flowing essentially from a set of sociocultural and sociopolitical contingencies in the turbulent history of the American Left, whereby, since at least the mid-1990s, they’ve been told and are still being told, in no uncertain terms, what to think, what to teach, and how to conduct their working and personal lives?
Granting the entrenchment and ubiquity of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism inside contemporary professional academic philosophy, nevertheless, from a broadly and radically Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral point of view (Hanna, 2018c, 2021), it’s self-evidently a violation of sufficient respect for human dignity to regard and treat yourself and others as mere individual tokens under group-types, since you thereby regard and treat human persons as mere things under that group-type. In that connection, a fundamental pathology of identitarianism occurs when the creation of the OTHER/THEM leads to intense or even obsessive fears that the WE/US will be corrupted, infiltrated, and miscegenated by the OTHER/THEM culture, members of which are then perceived to exist both covertly inside (as potential or actual carriers of disease, impurities, or sedition) and also overtly outside (as potential or actual invasive threats) the WE/US culture. Relatedly, identitarian social relationships are often originally created, and can also be especially strengthened, by the actions of people belonging to a WE/US-group who systematically discriminate against and oppress innocent people who belong to an OTHER/THEM-group, simply by virtue of the latter’s possessing more-or-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social identity-attributes such as sex, gender, sexual preference, skin pigmentation, ethnicity or national origin, language, religious affiliation, class origins, and so-on and so forth, almost ad infinitum. But although such identity-attribute-based discrimination and oppression is always and inherently false, bad, and wrong, and always and inherently a direct violation of sufficient respect for universal human dignity, nevertheless it doesn’t follow that the innocent identitarian victims of such discrimination and oppression possess any special moral value or special moral virtues merely because of their being discriminated against and oppressed — although, of course, not only are they to be pitied by us, but also they fully deserve our moral protection and sufficient respect for their human dignity.
In a contemporary context, whether inside the professional academy or outside it, this fallacious attribution of special moral value and special moral virtues to innocent identitarian victims of discrimination and oppression, in turn, leads to what Anthony Appiah has correctly identified as a fallacious source of identitarian moral authority (Appiah, 2018a, 2018b), which, again in turn, can easily turn into a coercive moralism that’s also a special case of coercive authoritarianism. And in this way, paradoxically but also tragically, the fallacious identitarian multiculturalist belief that the victims of identity-attribute-based discrimination and oppression possess special moral value or special moral virtues merely because of their victimhood, inevitably contributes non-trivially to a spiralling increase in conflict, tension, and coercive authoritarian/ moralist violence between members of the WE/US-group and members of the OTHER/THEM-group (and sometimes also members of different sub-groups of the larger WE/US group). Race relations in the USA, from the collective original sin of slavery, through the John Brown Rebellion, the Civil War, and Emancipation, through the Jim Crow era, through the two World Wars, the new Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights era, through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century, via “structural racism,” aka “systemic racism,” “mass incarceration,” and “White rage,” right up to the latest brutal police homicide/lynching and its righteous Black Lives Matter pushback protest — i.e., right up to 6am this morning — are not only an exceptionally immoral history of virulent racist oppression and violence against Black people, but also a particularly tragic example of this identitarian paradox.
Against that conceptual and critical backdrop, in the rest of this section, I’ll develop a critical argument against a certain moral theory and its traditional and contemporary proponents. As far as the moral theory itself is concerned, many others have criticized it before me; my only claim to originality is to have identified precisely what is profoundly mistaken and misguided about this particular moral theory and those who act according to to it, especially including the social justice theorists and identitarian multiculturalists inside contemporary professional academic philosophy.
Morality is primarily about actual choices and actions, and not primarily about attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, opinions, or speech. To be sure, one can have attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or express opinions or speech, whose meaningful contents are morally false and bad, such that it would be morally impermissible and morally wrong actually to choose and act according to those attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, or opinions or speech. But, even if intentionally merely having these attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely expressing these opinions or speech, does have some salient effect on one’s overall moral character, thereby contributing something salient to the overall viciousness of that moral character, nevertheless it’s not morally impermissible and morally wrong merely to have those attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely to express those opinions or speech, whether intentionally or unintentionally — say, through ignorance, or simply adventitiously, as when various stupid or unwanted things simply “pop into one’s head” or “pop out of one’s mouth.” Otherwise, if it were morally impermissible and morally wrong merely to have those attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely to express those opinions or speech, whether intentionally or unintentionally, given the natural flow of our attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and speech, a great many of which have meaningful contents that are morally false and bad, or at the very least a great many of which have meaningful contents that fall very far short of being ideally morally true and good, then almost every moment of our lives, we’d all be in mental and/or speech-act states that are morally impermissible and morally wrong, no matter how we actually chose or acted, and no matter how we actually treated other people. Indeed, then, whether we were awake or asleep — and especially during dreaming, when our moral conscience is most likely to be off-duty — we’d all almost constantly be committing “attitude-crimes” and “attitude-sins,” “belief-crimes” and “belief-sins,” “thought-crimes” and “thought-sins,” “opinion-crimes” and “opinion-sins,” and “speech-crimes” and “speech-sins,” no matter how actually we chose and acted, and no matter how we actually treated other people, in real waking life.
And that’s a profoundly absurd and pernicious doctrine, characteristic only of moral fanatics: for example, those former supporters of the Thirty Tyrants who condemned, tried, and executed Socrates for irreverence towards the Athenian gods and corrupting the youth, the Catholic Inquisition, the Protestant sect of Puritans, Stalinist communists, Nazis, McCarthyites and HUAC, and Maoists. So correspondingly, in view of the real-world historical examples I just mentioned, moral fanatics can also be quite correctly — with only a little poetic license — called moral tyrants, moral inquisitionists, moral puritans, moral stalinists, moral nazis, moral mccarthyites, or moral maoists.
In any case, I think it’s now self-evident that the moral doctrine — let’s call it moral fanaticism — which says that it’s morally impermissible and morally wrong merely to have attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely to express opinions or speech, whether intentionally or unintentionally, whose meaningful contents are morally false and bad, such that it would be morally impermissible and wrong actually to choose and act according to those attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or opinions or speech, is itself a morally false and bad doctrine.
Now, unfortunately, proponents of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism, especially inside contemporary professional academic philosophy, are moral fanatics, since they hold that anyone who merely has, for example, some racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely expresses some racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., opinions or speech, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is thereby doing something that’s as morally impermissible and morally wrong as people who are actually treating other people in racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., ways, even if the former set of people don’t actually treat other people in racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., ways, as the latter set of people do.
Notice particularly, that I’m assuming and also asserting that actually treating other people in racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., ways, is indeed morally impermissible and morally wrong, precisely because in all such cases other people are actually being treated as mere means or mere things, especially via coercion, or are otherwise actually being treated in ways that systematically prevent them from satisfying their true human needs, hence we’re not only failing to respect their innate rational human dignity, but also violating it; and insofar as people are actually being treated in these ways, then they’re being morally oppressed. So too, I’m assuming and also asserting that some special acts of speech, in and of themselves, do actually treat other people in racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., ways — for example, coercing someone or some people by threatening them with harm, for specifically racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., reasons; or encouraging or ordering others to coerce or otherwise harm someone or some people, for specifically racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., reasons; or character-assassination or slander directed at someone or some people, for specifically racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., reasons — and are therefore morally impermissible and morally wrong, for the reasons laid out in the first sentence of this paragraph; and insofar as people are actually being treated in these ways via these special acts of speech — let’s call them, collectively, aggressive speech — then they’re also being morally oppressed.
For example, by a striking coincidence, on the very same day that the five items from the Philosophy in Europe announcement list that I quoted earlier in this section were posted — 1 February 2022 — a recently-dismissed Black male post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in philosophy at UCLA was arrested by the police, more than a thousand miles away from Los Angeles, for aggressive speech aimed at several White female California-based philosophy professors (LA Times, 2022; Guardian, 2022), including death threats.
But if you don’t actually treat other people in dignity-violating these ways, then you’re not doing anything that’s morally impermissible and morally wrong, even if the moral fanatics of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism claim that you are. In this connection, arguments like (i) “if you’re not part of the solution, therefore you’re part of the problem,” (ii) “if you’re passively complicit in a sociopolitical system that’s racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., therefore you’re guilty of something that’s morally impermissible and morally wrong,” and (iii) “if you ever have some racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or ever expresssome racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., opinions or speech, whether intentionally or unintentionally, therefore that’s tantamount to actually treating other people in racist, sexist, patriarchical, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., ways,” are all self-evidently fallacious and sophistical, precisely because they’re morally fanatical to the core.
Contemporary moral fanaticism is widely professed and practiced by defenders of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism inside professional academic philosophy, and therefore these moral fanatics nowadays control various means of sociopolitical coercive moralist power, including various administrative command-hierarchies, mandates, policies, rules, and laws, and also their enforcement by various forms of professional and/or public punishment. The American Philosophical Association, as I’ve mentioned above, is a paradigmatic example (APA, 2022). To be sure, other more traditional kinds of moral fanaticism also obtain in most if not all contemporary not-so-liberal-or-not-so-neoliberal and not-so-democratic States across the world today. But, moral fanaticism is moral fanaticism, whether traditional or contemporary, and it’s a morally false and bad doctrine; therefore it’s also morally impermissible and morally wrong actually to treat other people in morally fanatical ways, even if it’s not morally impermissible and morally wrong merely to have morally fanatical attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely to express morally fanatical opinions or speech.
Two extremely important consequences of what I’ve just argued, contrary to the widely prevalent contemporary moral conventional wisdom or moral orthodoxy of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism, are (i) that it’s not morally impermissible and morally wrong merely to have some racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely to express some racist, sexist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, white-privileged, xenophobic, etc., etc., opinions or speech (except in the special case of aggressive speech, in which case it is indeed morally impermissible and morally wrong), whether intentionally or unintentionally, and (ii) that no one is actually being morally oppressed by anyone else’s merely having racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc., etc., attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts, or merely expressing, racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. etc., opinions or speech (again, except in the special case of aggressive speech), whether intentionally or unintentionally, no matter how offended some people might be by other people’s having or expressing such attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, or opinions or speech.
Correspondingly, the profoundly wrongheaded doctrine which says that being offended is the same as being morally oppressed — whereas in fact, as we saw above, moral oppression is when and only when people are actually being treated as mere means or mere things, especially via coercion, or are otherwise actually being treated in ways that systematically prevent them from satisfying their true human needs, hence we’re not only failing to respect their innate rational human dignity, but also violating it — is a manifestation of the contemporary moral fanaticism of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism. In a closely related way, whenever, by a hyper-inflation of language, someone calls something that offends them “violence,” this does not magically convert their being offended into their being morally oppressed. Even being deeply offended, perhaps to the point of emotional anguish and suffering, does not bring about this magical conversion, since as we all know, it’s entirely possible for someone to be deeply offended by X, even to the point of emotional anguish and suffering about X, without X’s in fact objectively justifying such a reaction.
To be sure, it’s entirely possible actually to be morally oppressed by X — and the special case of aggressive speech fully counts under this possibility — and also deeply offended by X even to the point of emotional anguish and suffering, whereby X does in fact objectively justify such a reaction; but it’s also entirely possible to be morally oppressed by X and not also offended by X, as in cases of false consciousness and self-deception. Therefore, being offended, as an important emotional fact, and being oppressed, as an important moral fact, are consistent with one another, but also logically independent of one another. Nevertheless, the moral fanatics of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism inside contemporary professional academic philosophy systematically overlook or outright deny the applicability of this important distinction to those who belong to the identity-groups specifically designated as “victims of oppression,” except in the special cases of false consciousness or self-deception, for which the required therapy is vigorous consciousness-raising, thereby licensing again the magical conversion of being offended into being oppressed. As a consequence, this entire domain of moral and sociopolitical phenomena is pervaded with moral-fanatical confusion, fallacy, and dilemma.
Indeed, as regards the equally bizarre, ironic, sad, and tragic recent real-world case I mentioned above (LA Times, 2022; Guardian, 2022), given only the news reports as evidence, and from a distanced moral and sociopolitical vantage point outside contemporary professional academic philosophy, it’s exceptionally difficult to disentangle the prima facie moral and legal fact of aggressive speech from the moral-fanatical collapse of the distinction between being morally oppressed and being offended. In any case, a counterfactual modal moral and sociopolitical critical question naturally flows from this tangle: If contemporary professional academic philosophy hadn’t been pervaded by social justice theory and indentitarian multiculturalism, would such a case ever have happened?
Whatever the actual and/or counterfactual modal facts about that case, other manifestations of the contemporary moral fanaticism of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism inside professional academic philosophy include the fully weaponized notions of “cultural appropriation” (Wikipedia, 2022a), “epistemic injustice” (Fricker, 2007), “ideological oppression” (Haslanger, 2019: pp. 5–6), “implicit bias” (Brownstein, 2019), and “microaggression” (Wikipedia, 2022b). Significantly, in each of these manifestations, individual perpetrators are found guilty of morally impermissible and morally wrong “appropriation,” “injustice,” “oppression,” “bias,” and “aggression,” even though, by hypothesis, they’re not self-consciously aware of their own transgressions, and therefore could not have freely prevented them. Indeed, that’s precisely why the transgressions are specifically identified as “cultural,” “epistemic” (in roughly Foucault’s sense of the theory of knowledge as a theory about various largely un-self-conscious social power-relations of authority and control over belief and speech), “ideological,” “implicit,” and “micro.” Even so, individual perpetrators are still held morally accountable and/or morally responsible for their transgressions, and duly punished, unless they take preemptive action and engage in the the exculpatory therapy of vigorous consciousness-raising and public apology, which, looking back at real-world history again, the Maoists called “cultural re-education,” and the McCarthyites called “clearing your name.”
More generally, whenever and wherever “attitude-crimes” and “attitude-sins,” “belief-crimes” and “belief-sins,” “thought-crimes” and “thought-sins,” “opinion-crimes” and “opinion sins,” and “speech-crimes” and “speech-sins,” can be found inside professional academic philosophy, then there will be contemporary moral fanatics of social justice theory and identitarian multiculturalism patrolling nearby, anxiously and yet also enthusiastically ready to pounce and then coerce the unfortunate “criminals” and “sinners” into compliance and obedience via cultural re-education and name-clearing, or else “they must face the consequences” of their noncompliance and disobedience: namely, public punishment by means of, for example, condemnation and shaming over the internet, blacklisting, secular excommunication, official reprimands, sanctions, fines, loss of employment, or even arrest-and-imprisonment.
— But it should also be self-evident by now, by an entirely ironic reversal of contemporary conventional moral wisdom or moral orthodoxy inside contemporary professional academic philosophy, that that’s morally impermissible and morally wrong, whereas “attitude-crimes” and “attitude-sins,” “belief-crimes” and “belief-sins,” “thought-crimes” and “thought-sins,” “opinion-crimes” and “opinion sins,” and “speech-crimes” and “speech-sins,” are not morally impermissible and morally wrong (except in the special case of aggressive speech, in which case, they are indeed morally impermissible and morally wrong) even if they also might saliently contribute to the overall viciousness of the moral characters of such “criminals” and “sinners.”
AGAINST PROFESSIONAL PHILOSOPHY REDUX 652
Mr Nemo, W, X, Y, & Z, Monday 4 April 2022
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