Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars [1st ed.] 9783030571061, 9783030571078

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Freedom of Enquiry (Piers Benn)....Pages 1-27
Taking Offence (Piers Benn)....Pages 29-54
Subjective Authority and Unwelcome Facts (Piers Benn)....Pages 55-79
Power, Privilege, and Identity (Piers Benn)....Pages 81-114
‘Friending’ the Enemy (Piers Benn)....Pages 115-140
The Sleep of Reason (Piers Benn)....Pages 141-156
Back Matter ....Pages 157-158

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars Piers Benn

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors David F. Hardwick Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15722

Piers Benn

Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars

Piers Benn London, UK

ISSN 2662-6470     ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-030-57106-1    ISBN 978-3-030-57107-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of June Mary Benn (d. 2006) and David Julian Wedgwood Benn (d. 2017)

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Leslie Marsh, Mo Lovatt and an anonymous reader for their helpful comments, and to my editors Brendan George and Lauriane Piette for their encouragement and great patience throughout.

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Contents

1 Freedom of Enquiry  1 2 Taking Offence 29 3 Subjective Authority and Unwelcome Facts 55 4 Power, Privilege, and Identity 81 5 ‘Friending’ the Enemy115 6 The Sleep of Reason141 Index157

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1 Freedom of Enquiry

The themes I shall tackle in this book are closely related, but do not form a single thread of argument. The idea that unites them is intellectual freedom, but this must be understood broadly. I am concerned to defend a kind of freedom that bears on a range of topics that have come to the fore in public debate, especially since the millennium and intensified by the spread of social media. Many commentators of widely varying persuasions have noted a rise in tribal thinking, shunning, shaming and a decline of civility of discourse. Disagreements about free speech, identity politics, equality, nationalism, and religion have become ever more acrimonious and are played out in institutions that have traditionally been held up as guardians of free expression and open debate. In certain quarters, civility and tolerance are in decline and people are cautious about expressing their true opinions or expressing reservations about those of others, for fear of social censure of even of losing their jobs. To worry about these things is not necessarily to pin one colours to one political mast; people can disagree profoundly about many political questions yet be committed to freedom of enquiry and civil debate. Yet there are people who apparently think that concern about threats to intellectual freedom is itself part of an objectionable right-wing political stance. © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_1

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For example, on the matter of the real or alleged decline of free enquiry and speech in universities, there are those who think either that the problem is grossly exaggerated, or that even if the facts are as claimed, they are to be welcomed  – that it is about time that the freedom of speech of certain privileged classes is now being challenged. Here, they part company with those who are substantially on their side when it comes to (for example) matters of race, gender or sexuality but strongly defend the right of their opponents to state their views without being vilified, silenced or denied their chosen employment. I wish to make a case, often implicitly, for intellectual freedom, while being sensitive to the ways this may sometimes need to be qualified, and receptive to counter-arguments. This will not be an easy task: the philosophical issues are difficult, and we all have biases. No doubt mine will become apparent to readers who are not guilty of them. Moreover, intellectual freedom covers a loose array of things. It overlaps with the familiar problem of free speech, but it also concerns separate questions about free enquiry, and whether there should be a right to announce the outcomes of such enquiry, or not. To stimulate a lively sense of the problem, I shall deliberately begin in an impressionistic manner. Intellectual freedom fosters the ability to think, speak and act without being stifled by an atmosphere of taboo, whether this is legally, institutionally, or socially enforced. It enables one to live one’s life without the burden of self-censorship, without always having to second-guess the surrounding opinions and qualify one’s ideas to make them acceptable. To breathe the atmosphere of freedom is to live in a world where facts can be admitted, good reasons can be accepted and bad ones exposed; where people do not assume the worst about others and are willing to forgive them their errors and misdeeds; where people can admit to uncertainty and past mistakes without being thought weak or morally deficient; where humour, nuance, eccentricity, complexity, beauty and the erotic can thrive. This atmosphere of freedom, this general liberality, is a fundamental condition of individual and social flourishing.

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The Overall Strategy These sentiments – platitudes, some might think – will work in the background as my arguments develop throughout the book. The chapters, though partly self-contained, all discuss related themes that often crop up in the culture wars. The structure is as follows. In this first chapter, I try to reinvigorate the case for free inquiry and discussion about any topic, guided by a desire for truth. The reader will see my indebtedness to John Stuart Mill, whose ideas on liberty are widely accepted, at least nominally, in academic circles but in practice not always enacted as enthusiastically as they might be. This will lead, in Chap. 2, to a discussion of contemporary arguments about the proper limits on free expression, especially in the light of recent events, some of which raise the matter of power differentials between speakers and those spoken to or about. Again, in the spirit of Mill, I shall reiterate his implicit distinction between causing offence and causing harm, using some recent examples of speaker disinvitations on campuses to illustrate a disturbing tendency, in some cases, towards prioritising offended sensibilities over allowing controversial ideas to be aired and debated, with the result that even private thoughts become more timid and ideologically policed than they should be, sometimes even risking a serious detachment from reality. In Chap. 3 I discuss a seductive way to sidestep the apparent obligation to allow possible truth to be aired, which is to deny that there is such a thing as truth (or objective truth) and so nothing worth protecting or arguing over. I eventually apply this idea, no doubt controversially, to recent arguments about the philosophical status of gender identity, conceived as arising not from observable biological facts but from something irreducibly subjective such as an ‘internal sense’ of being male or female. I then proceed, in Chap. 4, to address some questions and prevailing assumptions relevant to determining the nature and extent of ‘male privilege’ and ‘white privilege’ and conclude with a brief philosophical analysis of ‘identity politics’ in general, arguing for a traditionally liberal position on these things. In Chap. 5 I note the acrimonious divisions over the issues I have discussed and ask whether, or when, we may reasonably end

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friendships or initiate enmity with people we disagree with, pointing out the reasons why friendship can exist with ideological opponents. In Chap. 6 I bring various ideas together, looking at the informal fallacies and ‘intellectual black holes’1 that bedevil the contemporary culture wars between what may be called identity politics, old-fashioned liberalism, and the cultural right. I outline various rhetorical tropes and modes of distorted thinking that are ubiquitous and contribute to a contemporary spiritual malaise. The reader may have already decided that I am a ‘friend’, or an ‘enemy’. I hope, in some cases, that both judgements will be revealed as at least partly false. While I do have a general view, which may be defined as a qualified traditional liberalism, I try throughout to show the drawbacks and the questionable arguments found on all sides. As implied by the rest of this chapter, I value an old-fashioned Socratic Method in philosophy, a method of using questions, answers, counterexamples, and refinements of initial positions, not unlike legal cross examination to reach reasonable judgements. This method is remarkably effective in bringing out hidden and perhaps false assumptions in arguments found on all sides of the culture wars. It is needed to counteract lazy assumptions and over-­ emotional thinking, which all too often lead to needless hostility and demonisation of supposed enemies.

Conformity, the Goal of Truth and J. S. Mill Back, then, to my opening impressions. These need to be explicated and sometimes qualified. The liberal atmosphere I advocate does not entail the absence of rational constraints on our thinking. When trying to find out the truth about something, we need to exercise duties and virtues concerned with forming beliefs – in philosophical jargon, epistemic duties and virtues - such as the duty to weigh evidence impartially and the virtue of open mindedness. How we think is important; there are better and worse ways of thinking. But rather than tell against a presumption of intellectual freedom, thinking well requires it; an environment of intellectual freedom is the best soil for the flourishing of epistemic virtues. Moreover, we are more likely to have warranted confidence in our beliefs

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if we can look back on how they were formed and judge that we were free to form them as we saw fit, and were not subject to distorting influences such as the fear of censure or of not ‘fitting in’. Those trying to form the outlooks of others, especially the young, might try to justify their attempts to enforce conformity by saying that this is the best way to ensure that people end up believing what is true. If people of school age read the ‘wrong’ books or have the ‘wrong’ conversations, they will be unduly influenced and will end up believing things that are false and dangerous. Yet even on its own terms, such an argument is dubious. Some people come to ask themselves why they believe what they do, and if they recall their formative years as a time when they were expected to hold certain views and were told off or punished if they did not, they might conclude that they were indoctrinated and that their belief-forming mechanisms were thus warped. As a result of seeing this, they might reject what they were taught and even feel angry with those who taught them, eventually disavowing not only what was silly in their education but also what was sound. We should want to form our beliefs, especially those that are central to the meaning of our lives, using truth sensitive methods such as careful observation and reasoning, rather than using other methods which happen to lead to true beliefs in certain environments but could as easily lead to false or absurd beliefs, in other environments. If socially approved beliefs happen to be true, then social pressure to embrace these beliefs is probably effective in producing true beliefs. But individuals with conformist tendencies are more likely to embrace false beliefs if the beliefs there is social pressure to adopt are false. Since many widely accepted beliefs are false, exaggerated, or incomplete, we should be wary of accepting socially prescribed beliefs just because they are socially prescribed. We should cultivate the desire to work out what is likely to be true, and what attitudes and emotions it is appropriate to have, whatever pressures we are under to conform. This is obviously not to say that we should disregard the opinions of others, since they may have good reasons for their beliefs. Nor is it to say that there are no authorities concerning what is true. A great many of our beliefs are taken on authority, and this is both rational and inevitable in practice. But supposed authorities are reliable only if they have good

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reasons for what they hold true. Investigation often reveals that these supposed authorities got their opinions from other authorities, which in turn got them from yet other authorities, which got their opinions from sources that careful research can show to be unreliable. Often, the false beliefs persisted because of an atmosphere of intellectual conformity, or even their enforcement by totalitarian states. If you value intellectual freedom, you will be keenly aware of this, and suspicious of attempts to prevent discussion of ideas that go against the prevailing consensus, especially in such contentious areas as ethics, politics, and religion. Many beliefs widely thought to be unquestionably true are probably false, and many reasons given for believing them are unsound. In societies where independent thought is discouraged and where conformity is rewarded, false beliefs’ chances of survival are considerably increased, compared with their chance of survival in more open societies. Much of what I say in this book is in the spirit of the liberal view forcefully defended by J. S. Mill in his famous essay On Liberty in 1859 (Mill, in Gray and Smith 1991) which is generally seen as the classic defence of freedom of thought and discussion. But the last thing Mill would have wanted was for people to agree with his view, as he puts it, ‘in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds’ (Mill, in Gray and Smith, 1991:70). He would not have wanted commitment to intellectual freedom to become ‘a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience’ (Mill, in Gray and Smith 1991: 70). When the belief in intellectual freedom itself becomes ‘a mere formal profession’, it is casually expressed by people who have no ‘heartfelt conviction’ of it and are all too ready to compromise it. This, I shall argue, is happening in many spheres, including academic disciplines, where it is having a deleterious effect on the intellectual and ethical culture of the academy. Mill’s defence of liberty of thought and discussion belongs to a tradition whose earlier exponents include the seventeenth century poet and essayist John Milton, who argues for a free press in his essay Areopagitica (Milton, ed. Poole, 2014, first published 1644) and the philosopher John Locke (Locke 2016, first published 1689) who argues for a somewhat limited religious toleration. I shall return to religious themes from time to time, for

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although Western nations have been mostly secularised (despite a highly religious culture in parts of the United States) we should not forget countries where religious dissent can still cost people their lives. Mill, too, addresses religious matters, as he tries to show that his arguments for liberty should appeal to Christians, if only they can be persuaded that that there is no real conflict between his case for freedom and Christian devotion, properly understood. Mill was writing in socially conservative mid-Victorian England, and it is doubtful that he believed that intellectual freedom and orthodox Christianity were entirely reconcilable. But he shared Locke’s view that there was something of a contradiction in the notion of enforced religion. You can march someone to Church at gunpoint, but you cannot make them truly pray – and no doubt he thought he had arguments that devout people could accept, without diluting their religious devotion.

‘Crimestop’ Before looking at Mill’s main arguments, I shall elaborate on the motivation for my enquiry mentioned earlier. This has largely to do with the effects on people with non-conformist tendencies of a culture in which one is expected to hold rigidly prescribed beliefs on certain subjects. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell [Orwell 1949] inserts into his narrative passages from a book supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the hidden arch enemy of the Party and the originator of all the most wicked heresies. This book within a book – titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - turns out to have been written by the Party itself, but O’Brien, the Party intellectual and interrogator, explains to Winston that as description, it is true. In it, Goldstein explains how the Party member learns the practice of doublethink: The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of

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thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. (Orwell 1949:167)

In the novel, the practice of crimestop presents something of a paradox. To stop at the threshold of a heretical thought, the Party member must know what that thought is and so must, in some sense, have already entertained it. However, the practice satirically described in the novel need not exactly correspond with any thought processes that can really occur. Self-­ deception, for instance, is a common enough phenomenon and covers a range of loosely related processes – motivated forgetfulness, direction of attention away from uncomfortable facts, engaging in practices that are likely to reinforce one’s view, avoiding those that might challenge it, and entertaining unnecessary doubt about one’s intellectual abilities whenever a forbidden conclusion looks inevitable. We need not suppose that the self-deceiver ever simultaneously holds two contradictory opinions while being equally conscious of both. The most successful self-deceivers are those who are never aware that they are self-deceivers. It does not occur to them to wonder whether their beliefs came about in this way and confronting such people with the evidence of their self-deception often elicits angry denial. But not all self-­ deceivers are as successful as this. You can fluctuate between holding a belief comfortably and being uncomfortably aware that it may be dubiously motivated. I suggest that certain social pressures to hold certain political or religious views (to take two familiar examples) produce the uncomfortable sense of dissonance just described. You find your train of thought leading in a certain direction yet sense the pressure to resist going there, because you suspect that most people around you regard it as dangerous. The conclusion your reasoning leads to is blocked by the fear that it is unorthodox. You might also wonder whether you are qualified to question the assumptions of everyone around you, who probably know what they are talking about better than you do. Hence you internalise a practicable equivalent of crimestop. You cannot say what is wrong with your reasoning but conclude it might be defective because of the pressure to reject it. This might not be a problem if crimestop is genuinely required and if you can perfectly use the technique when necessary. Suppose, despite the

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initial evidence provided by your own reasoning and observation, you have access to higher order evidence that the group exerting pressure on you has a superior grasp of things and that you should conform to its conclusions and assumptions. In that case, the better you are at stifling your doubts and moulding your beliefs to those of the group, the happier and more rational you will be. However, it is hard to know how often we are in this situation. There may well be evidence, of an even higher order, that the group itself is mistaken. Perhaps its beliefs were inspired by a charismatic but flawed thinker who attracted a critical mass of followers, who were able to spread the word and thus create exponential levels of conformity among its new followers. Many religious and political movements began this way. Academic movements, too, can have similar origins. Given this, a reasonable person under pressure to stifle their reasoning will also know that this may lead away from, not towards, the truth. There remains, of course, the cynic’s option: even if the group might be wrong, it would be better for oneself to believe it is right, and if the crimestop can be perfected, that is what should be done. Such clear-headed intellectual contortionism may be rare, but at a less conscious level, this is what many people do if they are entrenched in comfortable careers that require them to promote certain views and consistently ignore the evidence against those views. It is people who attach great value to honesty and integrity who feel most oppressed by an atmosphere of conformity. If their honesty is combined with open-mindedness, they will sometimes wonder whether they themselves are wrong and will therefore, at least partially, internalise the pressure to engage in crimestop. This will be partly out of epistemic humility – the awareness that they might be mistaken – and partly out of fear of disapproval.

Conformity, Discomfort and Exit Routes It is uncomfortable to live in an atmosphere of socially enforced intellectual conformity, at least if you are somewhat nonconformist by temperament. It is in the assumptions you are expected to share that the conformity is at its worst, and the assumptions might never be stated.

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You might, of course, share them and feel under no pressure to do so, because they seem reasonable anyway. Academic disciplines, of course, can make progress only if certain assumptions are made, and people who have no difficulty making them can then happily participate in discussion with their peers. For instance, most theologians are theists, and the flow of their discussions would be unproductively interrupted if atheists kept challenging their belief in God. Most scholars who pursue feminist philosophy are feminists of some variety, and someone sceptical of the core assumptions of feminism, for example that women in Western liberal democracies suffer systematic oppression because they are female, would be embarrassingly out of place at a feminist conference, and her interventions would be annoying. However, problems arise when people enter a movement or field of enquiry in an open-minded way, but find that once they are in, they must shut down any thought processes that might lead them away from it. In these cases, reason was the entry route but may not be used to get out. The committed insider, of course, believes that reason supports continued involvement with the movement and that there is therefore no need for significant doubt. She might – rightly – think that continued doubt about one’s stance can be perverse, an epistemic vice (that of perverse doubt) cunningly posing as an epistemic virtue (that of open-­mindedness). However, doubt can also come from realising that the stance is vulnerable to powerful criticism. If this is true but you are incapable of seeing it, something has gone wrong. The problem is not conviction but closed-­ mindedness. It is hard not to become closed-minded to some extent, if you associate mostly with people who agree with you – especially if the members of your in-group indulge in mutual congratulation, there is a siege mentality and outsiders are demonised. Such an environment encourages confirmation bias, causing you to notice only things that confirm your way of thinking and to ignore or explain away things that go against it. Ironically, many people who are well instructed in the problem of confirmation bias tend to notice it mostly in people who disagree with them on certain issues and not in those whose opinions they share. Having deemed that opponents are subject to confirmation bias (which no doubt they sometimes are) they see this bias in them all the time! In

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other words, they suffer from confirmation bias about confirmation bias – confirmation meta-bias, if you like. Nevertheless, we have not entirely seen why this is a problem. So far, I have mentioned the discomfort endured by non-conformists in intellectually conformist environments, and this is certainly an important consideration, not only because most of us wish to avoid discomfort but also because it inhibits us from speaking our minds when we ought. However, if we ought not to speak our minds, because we shall spout falsehood and muddle if we do, and mislead others, then the discomfort serves a useful purpose. Even when it is not a question of speaking our minds (a question I shall deal with in Chap. 2) but pursuing a private line of enquiry, it may be better to inhibit rather than pursue the enquiry if truth is unlikely to emerge from it. Why then should we not be deterred by a group, or some other authority, from pursuing such investigations? The answer I shall defend is essentially that given by Mill. Not only does he produce a substantially sound case for freedom of enquiry, discussion and public speech (subject to what has become known as the Harm Principle) but he anticipates and replies to many objections that continue to be aired to this day. But, of course, it remains to be seen whether his answers are good ones. Maybe he is over-optimistic about the emergence of truth in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ (a term coined by H. G. Wells), maybe he naively underestimates how persuasive misleading propaganda can be, especially when spread by efficient and well-­ funded lobbies. In other words, maybe he overestimates the good and underestimates the harm that a climate of free discussion can bring about. This is a serious concern, because it does not depend on rejecting his general principle – that the only justification for suppressing discussion and speech is that it is harmful to others. If these things can be shown to be sufficiently harmful, then suppression might be justified even within the framework Mill sets out. This is exactly what has been argued concerning – to take three topical controversies - anti-vaccination campaigns, ‘climate denial’ and sensitive claims about transgender identity.

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Free Enquiry and Epistemic Virtue I suggest that we might find answers to these problems rather obliquely. It is worth turning again to the concepts of epistemic virtue and vice to shed light on the merits of Mill’s arguments for free enquiry and discussion. Epistemic virtue is virtue with respect to the formation of belief and hence the acquisition of knowledge. It is distinct from epistemic competence, which is shown in understanding, digesting, and retaining complex information and drawing correct inferences from it. Someone might have impressive cognitive ability yet be guilty of epistemic vices such as closed-­ mindedness or prejudice. (Interestingly and ironically, there is evidence of bias among social psychologists who research bias. [NPR 2011]). The epistemically virtuous person cares about having true beliefs, which pre-­ supposes that she believes in the existence of truth and the possibility of attaining it. Given this concern, she directs her cognitive abilities, however high they happen to be, to the discovery of truth and the avoidance of falsehood. It follows that she also tries to avoid falling into epistemic vice, such as (to quote a comprehensive list suggested by Linda Zagzebski) ‘intellectual pride, negligence, idleness, cowardice, conformity, carelessness, rigidity, prejudice, wishful thinking, closed-mindedness, insensitivity to detail, obtuseness, and lack of thoroughness’ [Zagzebski 1996]. Intellectual vice in general is characterised by Quassim Cassam [Cassam 2019] who quotes Zagzebski’s list of vices, as systematically obstructive of knowledge. According to Cassam, epistemic vices obstruct the acquisition, retention, and transmission of knowledge by impeding effective enquiry (Cassam 2019: 7). For instance, the arrogant person ‘has an intellectual superiority complex and is dismissive of the views and perspectives of other people. In the real world inquiry is rarely a solitary activity…This means being willing to defer to others and acknowledge that one doesn’t know it all’. (Cassam 2019: 8). I would add that the arrogance can be collective as well as individual. If I am a member of a group that thinks it has superior insights, perhaps due to education or socio-economic status, I shall very probably underestimate the insights of those who are not members of my group. I may, consciously or not, give less credence to the opinions and experience of anyone who is not ‘one of

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us’ than to anyone who is. In this case, the vice of arrogance can lead to another vice: that of epistemic injustice, as discussed by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007), in this case, the injustice of not listening to people because they belong to groups whose testimony is perceived as being relatively unworthy of credence. Consideration of epistemic injustice is an important part of consideration of epistemic vice in general, because of the harm it does its victims. Much writing about epistemic injustice comes, broadly speaking, from the political left. For example, feminist writers like Fricker highlight how some women are not believed when they report sexual harassment, assault, and rape. But there is nothing either left or right per se about concern to eliminate epistemic injustice. The same complaint is made on the right (again, broadly speaking) when it is claimed that that too much weight is given nowadays to what is said by historically disadvantaged groups, to rectify past injustice. There are people who claim to be oppressed by ‘political correctness’ and say that their perspectives are dismissed because they are white or male. Whatever the merits of this complaint, it too is about epistemic injustice. There is certainly a discussion to be had about who suffers most from epistemic injustice, at least in particular environments, and this controversy is an important part of the ‘culture wars’ of the present day. But sincere concern about epistemic injustice (here, ‘testimonial injustice’, the injustice of having one’s testimony unfairly doubted) directs itself to the problem regardless of who its perpetrators and victims are. It is one thing to say that testimonial injustice is suffered more often by group X than group Y. It is an entirely different thing to say that it matters more when it is suffered by one group rather than the other. Epistemic injustice clearly obstructs the acquisition of knowledge. Of course, if the testimony that is not believed happens to be worthless anyway, then epistemic injustice helps us, by chance, to avoid believing falsehoods. But if we tend to discount what is said by the members of a certain group because (consciously or not) we hold that group in low esteem, then we have a reduced chance of believing what they say when they are speaking the truth. Since epistemic injustice and other ‘vices of the mind’ (in Cassam’s phrasing) tend systematically to obstruct the gaining of

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knowledge, they should be guarded against by anyone who cares about having true beliefs and not having false ones. At the same time, it is not enough merely to listen to underprivileged groups, aware of the bias we may already have against taking their testimony seriously. We should also exercise the same critical judgement about what they say as we would about what anyone else says. The epistemic injustice that is facilitated by our biases consists in failing to take sound testimony and argument seriously. That is its major problem. By reducing epistemic injustice, we become more sensitive to good reasons when they are offered. But we should not become credulous of bad reasons. The goal should be to make a correct appraisal of what is said, not to reverse one’s biases. It is hard to strike this balance, but we must do so if we want to maintain a proper contact with reality. I shall have more to say about this later, especially in Chap. 4 when I shall try to answer some objections to the idea that (allegedly) privileged people can be in a position to assess the testimony of (allegedly) underprivileged people. One such objection is that anyone from a privileged group who tries to assess objectively the testimony of the underprivileged is being disingenuous, since any attempt at objectivity is inevitably undermined by entrenched biases. What is important for the moment is to see how our brief discussion of epistemic virtue and vice can be woven into a vision of free enquiry and discussion.

 ow a Lack of Freedom Inhibits H Epistemic Virtue A social atmosphere of intellectual freedom is essential to the flourishing of epistemic virtue. The absence of this freedom impedes both the motivation to pursue the epistemic virtues and the effectiveness of these virtues when there is an attempt to practise them. The motivation to pursue open-minded enquiry is easily weakened if one is afraid of what one might find or how it might be received. Moreover, the attempt to practice epistemic virtue by pursuing such enquiry is largely ineffective if there is a lack of information and expressed opinions to consider.

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Consider how the motivation to pursue epistemic virtue can be undermined by an absence of intellectual freedom: for example, freedom to pursue academic enquiries wherever they lead. One of the epistemic virtues is intellectual honesty. One should be honest enough to consider perspectives that one expects to find uncomfortable and that might change one’s mind. For myself, I sometimes put off reading things that might unsettle me. If I were entirely confident in my views, I would probably not be disturbed by reading this material and would only want to know the exact mistakes an author makes, so I can refute them more effectively. In that case, it would remain to be seen whether I have the virtue of appropriate confidence or the vice of closed-mindedness. But if I avoid reading the material because I am not entirely confident in my views, then the epistemically honest thing to do is to read it to reach a better judgement of whether I was right or not. But now suppose, on top of that, that most of my peers think the book I am afraid of reading is a terrible book and that its author is ignorant, prejudiced and intellectually incompetent. (They may not have read the work, but they have heard that it is dreadful – perhaps some academic star they admire has given it a scathing review). In that case, I may be afraid that if I praise the book or its author, my reputation will suffer, or I shall lose friends. This, too, could act as a disincentive to acquire the epistemic honesty I need to consider changing my mind, as well as the more straightforward moral courage to admit that I have done so. Interestingly, it might be argued that despite this, a sense of peer pressure at least provides an opportunity to show the virtue of epistemic courage – courage to go against the grain. This is true: courage is exactly what is needed in many difficult situations. But some difficult situations should not arise in the first place and come about only because of others’ faults. The disincentive is not against courage, except in the sense that any difficult situation provides a temptation not to be courageous. The disincentive works against something that should not require courage in the first place – namely, open mindedness and concern for truth. This is what an atmosphere of intellectual conformity attacks. It also facilitates several other epistemic vices listed by Zagzebski, especially negligence, idleness, carelessness, and lack of thoroughness. If you succumb to the temptation to conform to prevailing opinions when you should not, these vices will

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probably not be detected by the people whose opinions you echo and will hence be allowed to grow and fester. Worse, you may sense career opportunities promoting the favoured view, and if you work hard and are reasonably intelligent, your efforts may be rewarded. If they are, the vices are likely to become more entrenched, since few people want to admit that their life’s work is founded on error. At least as great a problem created by intellectual conformity is that the effectiveness of the epistemic virtues is considerably hindered. You may passionately desire to nurture these virtues, taking care to notice and try to correct your prejudices, to be thorough and fair, yet have little material for these virtues to work on. In the former Soviet Union, students had to study and profess belief in ‘scientific communism’ but had little or no access to any serious critique of it. They might have encountered official caricatures of such critiques, but serious critics were given no chance to present their arguments in their own words. In Saudi Arabia, the veracity of the Quran may not be challenged, and ‘blasphemy’ is a capital offence, as it is in Pakistan, Iran, and several other countries. These are extreme examples, and there are many other less extreme ones. They illustrate that if a Soviet citizen wanted to find out whether communism truly is scientific, or if a Saudi citizen wants to know whether the Quran is the infallible word of God, it was, or is, very difficult to do so. Admittedly, the internet enables many people living in repressive countries to encounter opinions from outside. Richard Dawkins’ atheist polemic The God Delusion has had an impressive number of internet downloads in Saudi Arabia. But the power of the internet has clearly alarmed the Saudi authorities, as shown in the sentencing of the blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and a thousand lashes, for defending secular liberal values.  (Haidar, 2015). The authorities are desperate to silence challenges to the Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam and maintain a society where it is impossible to encounter any material that challenges the prescribed religious beliefs and hence, in effect, to practise epistemic virtue with respect to these teachings.

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Authoritarian Counterarguments But what might authoritarian governments say in response? In most cases, no doubt, the repression they engage in is cynical – they are afraid of losing power and know that intellectual freedom emboldens people to challenge that power. The Saudi regime depends on the support of the Wahhabi imams, who officially legitimise the extraordinary wealth and power of the rulers. If the religion is challenged, then so is the basis of the status quo. Hence, dissidents like Badawi must not be answered (since that would only open an intellectual dialogue that they might win) but silenced, and potential followers terrorised. However, as we saw earlier, it is possible, if rare, for repression to be defended in good faith. ‘We know the truth’, it may be said, ‘and free enquiry and discussion risks leading people away from it. Reason entirely supports our view, but many people cannot follow good arguments and are easily misled by bad ones. We are therefore justified in suppressing the plausible but sophistical arguments used to support opinions that are both false and dangerous.’ This familiar approach, which Mill attributes to the Catholic Church of his day, is alive and well today in both religious and secular contexts and it is important to see its strengths and weaknesses. It is not anti-­ intellectual per se and is supported by people who passionately believe in defending truth. Hence it does not see itself as opposed to epistemic virtue  – rather, it sees epistemic virtue (at least in unsophisticated, ‘low information’ people) as showing itself in deference to the proper authorities, rather than in open minded enquiry. The value of epistemic virtue is not in question; what is in question is how epistemic virtue manifests itself. In popular debates, many people who think in this way, overtly or implicitly, are accused of elitism. They are charged with showing contempt for ordinary people and their ability to judge such matters for themselves. However, ‘elitism’ is an emotive word and people who use it in heated debate tend to ignore the question of whether elitism might sometimes be justified. Suppose we take elitism to be a neutral term for the view that some people are better qualified to make judgements about certain matters

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than others. For example, doctors are usually better qualified than their patients to make medical diagnoses. Engineers are better than laymen at judging whether bridges can take the weight of heavy traffic. Although no expert is infallible, there is such a thing as expertise. It is harmless enough if people believe in horoscopes or Feng Shui. But what if they deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change or the necessity to vaccinate children against measles? Should people be encouraged to ‘make their own minds up’ about these things when there is already a deluge of disinformation on ‘contrarian’ or outright conspiracist websites? These are hard questions. There is no reasonable doubt that climate change does require decisive action, and that the herd immunity of children is dangerously compromised if more than a small percentage of children are not vaccinated. The consequences of certain sorts of false information being widely believed, especially by powerful or influential individuals, can be dire. There is also little doubt that some people are much better at processing complex information than others, or much more concerned get at a complex truth than others. It is therefore especially important to see if a recognisably Mill-inspired approach to these things can be rescued. Mill, like Alexis de Toqueville from whom he borrows the idea, is fearful of ‘the tyranny of the majority’ (Mill, in Gray and Smith, 1991: 25-6]. Since he is concerned about social as well as legal sanctions against non-­ conformists, this is inseparable from the ‘tyranny of opinion’ in moral, social, or religious matters. As Russell Blackford (who has aptly chosen this phrase as the title of his recent book) interprets Mill, what is at stake is individual spontaneity, which is valuable both to the individual and to society in the long term, in giving rise to beneficial new ideas. (Blackford 2019: 16-17). But as we have seen, critics will always argue that the costs of this spontaneity can outweigh the benefits – indeed, that if Mill is to be a consistent utilitarian (he published Utilitarianism at around the same time as On Liberty) he should take this on board more seriously than he does. In fact, I doubt that the conclusions of the one essay are entirely reconcilable with those of the other. Nevertheless, we should take the arguments of On Liberty seriously in their own right, without worrying too much about Mill’s overall consistency.

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J. S. Mill’s Case for Free Enquiry How then does Mill argue against the suppression of free inquiry and unpopular ideas? He proposes four main arguments, stated at length and then succinctly recapitulated. His most cogent and influential argument is the one he begins with: ‘First, the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible.’ (Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 37]. Crucially, he goes on, even if you are certain that the opinion you want to suppress is false, you have no right to decide that question on behalf of others. To do so is to assume your own infallibility. Feeling certain of something is no guarantee that you are right. Even if common opinion agrees with you, much of the common opinion of today is contrary to the common opinion of other places and times. Too many people are implicitly confident of their own infallibility, even if they verbally admit to being fallible. Furthermore, the best chance truth has of eventually getting out, is when all opinions have a fair chance of being aired. Interestingly, Mill anticipates a counterargument to this, and then answers it. The counterargument is that if we followed his reasoning, we would prohibit nothing at all. Often, we are justified in claiming certainty for a view (after due consideration of the case for and against it) even though we know we are fallible. But then, Mill powerfully answers this objection as follows: There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation [my italics]. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for the purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. (Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 39)

In other words, people who advocate censorship or discourage enquiry may be justified in claiming certainty for their own opinions, if they have rigorously scrutinised them in the light of all counterarguments. However, the would-be censors propose to deny to others the right of scrutiny that

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they have exercised themselves. There is no justification for this denial. Nowadays, we could express this point in terms of democratic rights. If I should have a right to investigate something, then so should you. It is irrelevant that I might exercise this right more competently than you, for it is also possible that you will exercise it better than me. I, of course, will disagree with that – and I may be correct. But even if I am, this alone cannot decide the question of who should be allowed to consider the question at hand. Mill’s second argument is that, in any dispute, there is usually some truth on both sides. Popular opinions are often true, but only a part of the truth. For example, in politics ‘it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life…’ (Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 65). He is apparently suggesting that there is some truth in what both political parties say, and that good governance requires the merits of each to be given consideration. His third argument is that even if the received opinions are the whole truth, they become dead dogmas unless they can be challenged. They are ‘held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds’. Nor is the problem removed if people are taught the grounds for their beliefs or told to defer to authorities who are themselves allowed to know the other side (as the Catholic Church advocated in Mill’s day). For example, Christianity, has, for most people, become a matter of nominal adherence rather than living faith, since it is not vigorously challenged. Mill adds a fourth argument, saying that the meaning of a doctrine may be lost or enfeebled if it isn’t challenged; the dogma may become ‘a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience’. (Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 70). Mill’s third and fourth arguments are related; there is a connection between beliefs held in the manner of a prejudice (mentioned in the third argument) and held as a mere ‘formal profession’ whose meaning has been lost (as in the fourth argument). Perhaps he adds them partly as a sop to the devout, to persuade them that there are religious reasons for allowing faith to be challenged. Of more significance, however, are the

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first two arguments, and especially the first. The main thrust of his first argument, which is easily lost in current debate, is that if the beliefs that are officially enforced are known for certain to be true (which may not be the case) anyone should have the right to investigate them  – not only a trusted elite. Anyone who disputes this faces the question: what gives the trusted elite the right to investigate the claims in depth, but not others? The elite will answer that it is because they are better able than ordinary people to determine what is true; they are better fitted in some way – morally or intellectually, perhaps  – to do the necessary impartial weighing of evidence and arguments. And they could be right. But the ordinary person will want to know on what grounds the elite makes this lofty claim on its own behalf. Anyone can claim superior insight into important matters, and the mere fact that they claim it is a feeble ground for others to believe it. Certainly, many supposed authorities that claimed important insights have been demonstrated to be wrong, like the Catholic Church at the time of Galileo. If the elite is in good faith when it claims to have investigated fairly everything that can be said for and against the view it favours, if it is in good faith when it says it values truth and believes that it should be reached rigorously, why shouldn’t ordinary people be encouraged to examine the claims for themselves? It is only by investigating the matter for themselves that they can determine whether the views of the elite really are true. The point is not that ordinary people (a phrase sometimes used with ‘populist’ overtones) have some special insight, some essential common sense that intellectuals lack. It is that we cannot, without pre-supposing the very thing that needs argument, assume that elites are right just because they say they are. Mill’s second argument is also important, especially because it goes some way (though admittedly not the whole way) towards countering a worry I have already admitted concerning the dangers of ‘expertise denial’, sometimes cynically promoted by self-serving politicians. Mill says that in many disputes, it is relatively common that ‘…the conflicting doctrines, instead of one being true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a

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part. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth’ (Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 63). The world would certainly be a better place if this were more often recognised by today’s conflicting political tribes. But there is one way in which Mill’s argument can be modified to ameliorate the conflict between experts (real or supposed) and people who angrily deny what they say. For example, in the cases of climate change and vaccines, we should say both that science unequivocally shows the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the necessity of vaccines to prevent serious diseases, and that people’s rejection of these claims may not be entirely morally disreputable. For example, although they are entirely wrong if they believe pseudo-­ scientific claims such as that vaccines cause autism and/or do not prevent disease, they are obviously right to be concerned about autism, and are not reacting in a morally reprehensible way if they also worry about ‘unnatural’ foreign bodies being injected into their children. Although they are wrong if they deny that carbon emissions are having a potentially catastrophic effect on the earth’s climate, their concerns – for example, about the rising food and fuel prices and major adjustments to their way of life that seem to be required to combat climate change - are perfectly reasonable concerns per se, and should be considered when we work out what to do. In other words, many irrational beliefs have motivations that are not entirely culpable. I shall discuss this general idea with reference to the Brexit dispute, in Chap. 5. Much of the tribalistic conflict between ‘experts’ and ‘ordinary people’ comes from a sense that experts talk to the public de haut en bas, and that they often confuse scientific questions about the causes of things, with ethical questions about how we should live our lives in the light of the science. This is how I propose to adjust Mill’s second argument about truth being found on both sides. Here, it is not a question of the science being in serious doubt, but a question of listening to evaluative considerations that cannot be wholly subsumed by scientific ones. One of the causes of ‘populism’ (which as the scare quotes suggest, I do not try to define precisely) is many people’s sense that they are not being listened to respectfully by the ‘elite’ (as they conceive it) and that they are regarded with contempt just because they have doubts about expert opinion and are afraid of the adjustments to their lives that the ‘elite’ dictates.2

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They sense that they are regarded as wholly bad people, just because they have relatively conservative social views. Perhaps there is an element of projection in this – they regard the ‘elite’ as contemptible, and this causes them to believe that the elite takes the same view of them. But it should be possible for people to disagree profoundly with others, without regarding them as bad people. This point is analogous to Mill’s argument about truth being found on all sides of many political debates and it reinforces my earlier point about the need for a culture in which there is no need to exercise Orwell’s crimestop when it comes to lines of honest enquiry.

 ruth-Sensitive Methods and the Marketplace T of Ideas My points so far can be summarised as follows. We should be concerned to maintain a culture in which epistemic virtue thrives. Epistemic virtue pre-supposes a belief in the existence of truth and the desirability of reaching it (i.e. attaining knowledge) while avoiding falsehood. There are, so far, stipulations – there is room for debate about the very existence of (objective) truth, the possibility of objective enquiry and indeed whether truth should always be paramount when we work out what to believe. There is also an interesting question (raised, for example, by Frederick Shauer) of whether the rational processes whose efficacy Mill takes for granted really do lead us to truth. (Schauer 1982, 15-34). But if I am on the right lines, we also need to cultivate truth-sensitive methods of enquiry – methods that of their nature lead to truth and away from error, even if in practice they do not always do so. Following Mill, I have suggested that an atmosphere conducive to free enquiry is the best possible one for fostering these truth-sensitive methods. As Stephen Law (Law 2006) observes, while powerfully arguing for liberal over authoritarian educational methods, sound reasoning using truth-sensitive methods does not always filter out false beliefs. But it is not an accident that it usually does. We might say that it is necessarily typical that such methods weed out falsehood and incoherence. As Law puts it: ‘Try…to construct a strong, well-reasoned case capable of

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withstanding critical scrutiny for believing that the Antarctic is populated by crab-­people or that the Earth’s core is made of cheese. You’re not going to find it easy’ (Law 2006: 32). This helps to alleviate a worry I have referred to several times, which is that truth does not always prevail in the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ On the contrary, goes the worry, all kinds of nonsense, lies and ‘fake news’ flourish in this marketplace; intellectual snake oil salesmen gather millions of followers on social media platforms and You Tube. Ideas that are soundly based are submerged and ridiculed under a barrage of fury, tribalism, hatred, and intellectual incoherence. At the same time, the complete, unvarnished truth is often quite boring, and incapable of acting as ‘clickbait’ for people wanting their prejudices confirmed, or to be outraged. All this is, of course, true. But Mill is more prescient of this than he is sometimes given credit for. In fact, he even admits: But indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.’ [Mill, in Gray & Smith 1991: 47]

He goes on cite numerous instances of religious persecution, mentioning that the Reformation ‘broke out at least twenty times before Luther.’ (ibid: 47). But he proceeds to make his main point thus: The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. [ibid. 48]

But perhaps even here Mill is over-optimistic, despite having warned against a more simplistic optimism earlier. For example, might we not be hard-wired to believe in false notions, so that even if a few people discover their falsity, they rarely persuade anyone else? This has been

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suggested about belief in God, which according to some cognitive scientists of religion is an evolutionary adaptation that disposes us to ‘see’ hidden agency where there is none. However, even if certain beliefs can be explained in this sort of way, these explanations would not have been suggested had people not been able to come up with them. And their influence does spread, even if slowly, and without ever persuading many people. Sometimes beliefs are discovered to be false because they have undeniably false implications, and a few people notice this and publish their findings. Moreover, however irrational we can all be, most of us have quite reliable truth-detecting mechanisms that work for our everyday lives. But what about the many people who have clearly false beliefs, for example that the universe is only about six thousand years old, yet are highly intelligent and educated in their chosen fields? No doubt many such people keep beliefs like this in a separate epistemic compartment from their knowledge of other things because nothing in either compartment obviously contradicts anything in the other. Nevertheless, at least with some such people, their truth-detecting capacities in one area eventually leak into other areas. Our capacity for knowledge has a porous tendency, even if social and psychological forces can inhibit its operation. Provided we are, and feel, free to investigate new possibilities and change our beliefs, new knowledge and better thinking often reaches a critical mass in the educated population and the beliefs of most people slowly change. Of course, if old beliefs are protected by law or stern social reinforcement, the change is slow if it occurs at all. Mill accepts that the forces of conformity are indeed powerful. But his argument is for unfettered free enquiry, and there is good reason to think he is right about the general conduciveness to truth of the appropriate modes of enquiry, especially if they are free to operate. Finally, someone might object that Mill has a rather old-fashioned, ill-­defined notion of what those truth-sensitive modes of enquiry are. His talk of ‘reason’ seems crude. But in our discussion of free enquiry, we do not need to take a stand on the nature of the truth-sensitive methods we should adopt. In religion, for example, there is no need to rule out the possibility of a ‘divine sense’ that yields direct knowledge of God or his will. All that is important is that some methods are better

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than others for finding things out. My argument, which reflects Mill’s, is that whatever those methods are, they are better protected by an atmosphere of free enquiry than by authoritarian attempts to suppress thought.

Summary I have argued, then, that there are such things as epistemic virtue and vice, that epistemic virtue is guided by a conviction of the value of knowledge, and that legal or social taboos against nonconformist beliefs and attitudes militate against epistemic virtue. They do this by inhibiting the motivation to pursue knowledge (for example, by making people afraid to go where their thinking leads them or to speak their minds) and by stymying the effectiveness of their pursuit of knowledge, depriving them of access to the full and honestly worked out views of others. I have not argued that the notions of truth or knowledge are without their problems and have assumed, rather than argued, that knowledge is a prima facie good thing to possess. These issues will arise later. But for now, I shall investigate the related issue of free speech and expression, which is clearly connected to that of free enquiry, but which raises separate problems of its own, especially when it comes to the problems of offence and harm.

Notes 1. A term derived from Stephen Law’s book ‘Believing Bullshit, How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole’, Prometheus Books 2011. 2. The most obvious example of clashes between ‘expert’ and ‘common person’ opinion, as I write, is about the legitimacy of restrictions on liberties normally taken for granted to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

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Bibliography Blackford, Russell. 2019. The Tyranny of Opinion. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cassam, Quassim. 2019. Vices of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haidar, Ensar. 19th June 2015. My Family’s Torture – Dealing with Raif Badawi’s Flogging. Amnesty International UK/Blogs: Global Voices. https:// www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/global-voices/ensaf-raif-badawi-wifeflogged-blogger-saudi-arabia Law, Stephen. 2006. The War for Children’s Minds. London/New York: Routledge. Locke, John. 2016 (First Published 1689). A Letter Concerning Toleration. New York: LG Classics. www.books.com.co. Mill, J.S. 1991. On Liberty. In J. S. Mill On Liberty in focus, ed. John Gray and G.W. Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Milton, John. 2014 (First Published 1644). Areopagitica. In Areopagitica and Other Writings, ed. William Poole. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. NPR (National Public Radio). 15th February 2011. Expert Finds Bias – Among Bias Researchers. Heard on Talk of the Nation. https://www.npr. org/2011/02/15/133782908/Expert-Finds-Bias-Among-Bias-Researcher s?t=1594491381094 Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. Schauer, Frederick. 1982. Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagzebski, Linda. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Taking Offence

Most of us know people who are skilled at dominating conversations. They talk incessantly and often loudly. They interrupt a lot, having mastered the art of being uninterruptible themselves, with long drawn out sentences full of subordinate clauses and dramatic pauses. They are full of confidence and use this confidence to undermine the confidence of others. You wonder: if such a person is so fluent and sure of him or herself, how can what I say be of any worth? People like this can be charismatic, with a way of generating interest in what they are going to say next. More often, though, they are tedious, self-involved, and not nearly as interesting as they think. Sensible people soon learn to avoid them. But there is another, more subtle way in which people can dominate conversations. This is by indicating, often tacitly, that they find many views or even subjects offensive. By signalling that they have strong opinions, perhaps by badmouthing others or by announcing their own vulnerabilities (which may be genuine) they teach those who hear them to stay clear of certain topics – sometimes, of almost any real topic at all. They inhibit genuine engagement, not necessarily by incessant talk and interruption but by signalling boundaries to discussion. Often, the decent © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_2

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thing is to respect those boundaries. There is usually no justification for upsetting people, if no good will come of it. But the cost is that it is hard to engage with them as epistemic equals. There can be no doubt that many people do say things that cause others to feel offended, whether the feeling is reasonable or not. This is brought out especially clearly when we look at the state of discourse in the online world. During recent years there has been an accelerating decline in civility and respect, with angry or sadistic individuals targeting insults and abuse at people they have never met, often under cloak of anonymity. Public figures learn to expect this, and although there is rarely (if ever) any justification for personal insults, most public figures realise that some people, who might have legitimate grievances, are unable or unwilling to engage in intellectual debate and find that intemperate language is their only way of making their views heard. Nevertheless, politicians or other well-known individuals have reported being intimidated by such online behaviour and have even closed their social media accounts for this reason. The problem is probably worse when it comes to private individuals who, for some reason, have come to public attention. Online anonymity unleashes cruel instincts. Strangers make remarks online that they would never make face to face. Moreover, women tend to face a worse problem than men, largely because much abuse directed towards women is sexualised. Whether the targets of such abuse are admirable or not, sexualised insults (and, worse, threats of rape and assault) add an especially sinister dimension to the problem. Hence, if we are to defend a presumption in favour of free expression, as I shall do (though with certain generally agreed exceptions) we should not deny that some of the contested expressions are indeed unpleasant, badly motivated, and morally repugnant. But the heart of the matter is the extent to which such expressions should be allowed, whether by law, or institutions such as universities and the media. Some bad things should be allowed, such as marital infidelity or malicious gossip between acquaintances. It would be nearly impossible to enforce restrictions on these things, and even if the attempt to do so were successful, it would constitute an unacceptable breach of privacy. But expressions of attitudes and opinions often are successfully restricted, and this is often backed up by

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moral arguments. It is important to see under what circumstances such arguments are sound. There is a familiar case, largely inspired by Mill, though there are stirrings of it in Spinoza, Milton and Locke, for holding to a presumption in favour of the free expression of controversial views about, for example, politics, ethics or religion. I have already expounded part of this case when defending a presumption in favour of free enquiry – namely, that attempts to restrict enquiry run the risk of preventing the discovery of important truths. Nevertheless, some people accept the risk of limiting both enquiry and the expression of opinions. In their view, even if suppressing enquiry or speech sometimes does restrict the dissemination of truth, this is justified in terms of the bad consequences of certain ideas being aired. Hence – importantly – those who make this argument can appeal to Mill himself, who accepted that harm to others can justify restriction of individual liberty in general. Whether it is ever right for a would-be censor to suppress something that he believes to be true, because significant harm might result from this truth being known, is largely dependent on circumstances. The UK Ministry of Defence presumably is entitled to prevent the publication of military secrets. Other cases, as we shall see, can be more difficult. However, all but the most ardent ‘free speech libertarians’ accept that we should not be allowed to say just anything we want, in public. It is widely accepted, for example, that incitement to violence, credible threats to cause serious harm to individuals, the revelation of state secrets, libel and certain invasions of privacy should not claim the protection of the law.

‘Words Are Harmless’: Incitement, Threats, and Privacy Some extreme free speech libertarians like to claim that words cannot harm (as in the adage ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’) but this is clearly misleading. A tweet from an influential trouble-maker publicising someone’s home address and telling his followers to attack him is not, literally, an act of violence. But if violence

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results, the tweet originates a causal chain that leads to the violence and its author can rightly be held responsible. I have heard it said, in response, that the responsibility for the violence rests entirely with those who act on the tweet, and that they can choose not to do so. But all this shows is that anyone who acts on the instruction shares responsibility for the bad outcome. If the tweeter’s purpose is for the harm to be done, and he broadcasts the message intending that the harm be done as a result, then (if someone does act on it) the tweeter shares responsibility for it because he initiates a causal sequence that he intends will result in a violent attack. The attack might have occurred without the incitement, and the incitement might have failed to persuade anyone to act. But in this case, the incitement does have this effect, and this is enough to impute responsibility to the author of the tweet, as well as to those who follow the instruction. Credible threats to cause serious harm present us with a slightly more difficult problem, since it can be argued that a threat that never materialises does not in itself cause harm, or at least the kind of harm with which the law should be concerned. Threats of violence, or threats by a blackmailer to expose an embarrassing secret, can certainly cause distress severe enough to impair the victim’s professional or social functioning or even cause genuine mental health problems. Yet many legitimate warnings can also cause distress, such as a letter from a creditor warning of further action if money genuinely owed is not paid, or a formal warning from an employer threatening dismissal if the employee does not improve his or her performance. However, the creditor’s or employer’s warning is a provisional threat to do something if and only if some reasonable condition is not met (which is not to deny that some such warnings might impose unreasonable conditions). Of course, someone who threatens violence or exposure might also offer ways to avoid these unpleasant things – in fact, the blackmailer does offer a straightforward way to avoid exposure: pay up! But in these latter cases, the conditions are clearly not reasonable; the issuer of the threat has no right to impose the conditions, since he has no right to make the threat in the first place. In these cases of illegitimate threats, the distress caused to the victim is a large part of the reason why such threats should not be allowed, along with the wrongful restrictions on the victim’s options.

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In other words, distress cannot always be a decisive ground for restricting speech in the form of threats or warnings. All depends on whether the person issuing the warning has a right to make the threat and therefore a right to do the thing threatened, provided due process is observed. Whether, all things considered, they are morally justified in carrying out the threat is a further question. No doubt a principle of proportionality should also be followed. But the distress caused cannot per se render the threat illegitimate. Russell Blackford (Blackford 2019: 62–69) discusses other cases such as defamation or invasion of privacy. It is quite easy to see how defamation can harm its victims, and quite apart from the harm it causes, it is clearly unjust. Invasion of privacy, however, is more complex. Blackford expounds a Mill-inspired case for worrying about this, largely because it can impede the flourishing of their victims’ individuality. For example, when male homosexual activity was against the law and homosexuality in general attracted strong social disapproval, most gay people felt the need to keep their sexual desires or activities secret, except perhaps from a few trusted friends. They were also vulnerable to blackmail. In the UK, it was not until the 1980s that Members of Parliament felt they could be openly gay. One of the most high profile criminal trials of the 1970s was that of the former leader of the UK Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, for conspiracy and incitement to murder Norman Scott, who (it was alleged) Thorpe feared was going to reveal an affair they had in the early 1960s. Thorpe was acquitted, but it was widely believed both that the affair had taken place and that Thorpe had plotted with some associates to have Scott murdered. If the affair did take place, the alleged conspiracy was to prevent exposure of the truth, not a slanderous falsehood. Blackford highlights how the threat of true revelations can greatly harm reputations and prevent people from pursuing their chosen career or generally ‘be themselves’ to others, when what is revealed is properly private. How to weigh press freedom against the legitimate interest of both ‘public’ and ‘private’ individuals in maintaining their privacy is a notoriously difficult question. There is no consensus on how this balance is to be achieved. Press freedom entails the ability to conduct important investigations, in the public interest, which may cause people embarrassment or even harm. At the same time, people have a legitimate interest in

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maintaining privacy concerning certain areas of their lives, partly for the Mill-inspired reasons highlighted by Blackford. For this reason, it is often said that press revelations should be curtailed unless they serve some genuine public interest, as opposed to satisfying public curiosity. At the same time there is a great danger that the definition of public interest will be dictated by powerful people or corporations with something to hide.

‘Words Are Violence’: The Expression of Views that Offend The general question about the proper limits of free expression clearly needs to be broken down into more specific kinds of expression and circumstances of expression. However, in the most acrimonious debates about free speech, the usual bone of contention is the expression of opinions about explosive matters such as race, gender, sexuality, and religion. I have noted that the simple defence of free expression (here, verbal expression) contained in the phrase ‘words are harmless’ can be misleading, but on the other side of the debate we sometimes hear it said that ‘words are violence’. This, too, must be looked at carefully, since on any normally accepted definition of violence, it is literally false. Words can be used to threaten or incite violence, but they do not in themselves constitute violence. However, we might interpret the claim more charitably, as meaning not that words are literally violence, but that the damage done by words can be comparable to the damage done by violence. On this view, if we rightly forbid violence and expressions that incite violence, it is not clear why we should not limit expressions that result in violence, even if that was not the intention. More to the point, if we take the harm done by violence as serious enough to forbid violence, and if other harms – even if not literally due to violence – are serious enough to invite comparison with the harms done by violence, why should we not also limit expressions that cause these kinds of harm? This charitable interpretation deserves a fair hearing. It can be applied, for example, to bullying. No doubt some people over-use the term,

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claiming to be bullied merely because others assertively disagree with them or criticise their behaviour. Furthermore, children need to learn gradually that the adult world they will enter is not an entirely pleasant place and that it helps to learn resilience from quite an early age. This means that some ‘playground banter’, squabbles and childhood alliances that exclude other children should be tolerated with a watchful eye. Nevertheless, many claims of victimisation by bullying, which often includes verbal denigration, are disturbing. It can be practised in subtle ways. Bullying is an attempt to make the victims feel unworthy of respect and undeserving of help or sympathy. It is often arbitrary, with no reasons given for it – or at least, no reasons susceptible to rational discussion – and with nothing victims can do to regain sympathy and respect. The new-fangled concept of ‘microaggression’, though easily over-used, captures something of this: being arbitrarily ignored, or being subjected to gestures, questions and comments that are snide in minor ways (such that complaining about them would mark you out as petty-minded) can make their recipients feel uncomfortable without there being any way to rectify the discomfort. The world contains bullies, and educational institutions and places of work need agreed ways to identify and clamp down on their behaviour, once identified as such, always remembering that formulating policies cannot be an exact science. But the underlying questions are of the kind of harm such behaviour might cause, and of delineating the boundaries between harms that should be tolerated and those that should not. This brings us to the focus of our discussion, which is the expression of opinions, especially about things that are now seen as at the centre of ‘identity politics.’ I shall tackle some specific questions about identity politics (a term that some will regard as tendentious) later. But numerous examples have arisen, especially during the second decade of the present century, of campus protests about controversial speakers delivering their views on sensitive issues. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt [Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 6] note that by 2013 these incidents were on the increase, since when there have been numerous well-documented cases of disinvitations and protests ensuing when these speakers have been announced. These occasions have been documented by numerous commentators (such as Murray 2019, Lukianoff and Haidt 2018 and

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Blackford 2019), some of whom denounce what Lukianoff and Haidt describe as the culture of safetyism – of presenting certain speakers not only as expressing supposedly objectionable views but of threatening the safety of those who might hear them, or merely know of the speakers’ presence. There is room for debate about how pervasive this culture is, and it is always important not accumulate anecdotes to give the impression that a part of the truth is a greater proportion of the whole truth than it really is. Many, especially on the left, believe the problem of disinvitations and the culture of safetyism have been talked up by the right. However, whatever the proper perspective to take on this, there can be no doubt that the rhetoric of safety, together with the promotion of ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’, have been on the rise and that this has led to many calls for certain opinions not to be aired, whether at universities or elsewhere. Talk of safety being jeopardised pre-supposes a danger. We should therefore ask about the nature and extent of the supposed danger. This will also help us resolve the question of how to balance the purported right of individuals not to be prevented from airing their views, with the purported right of hearers to be protected from danger.

Offensiveness Many moves to ban speakers, books, films, or other media focus on claiming that they are offensive. Understood in one way, offensiveness is a dispositional property, the property of being disposed to offend certain people who attend the speeches, watch the films and so on. On this understanding, it is easy to determine whether something is offensive: we need only ask whether anyone is offended by it. People might be insincere when they report being offended, or they might claim to be offended when another word would do better, but we should assume that they are best placed to report their own reactions. However, offended sensibilities hardly settle the question of whether the thing that causes the offence should be banned, for the following reasons. Firstly, the fact that someone is offended by something does not show that the offence taken is reasonable. Some people have unreasonable

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sensitivities – a fact that would surely be admitted by almost everyone in this debate. A feminist who takes offence at an advertisement that she regards as supporting a negative stereotype of women is unlikely to take offence at the sight of a gay couple kissing in public. She would probably dismiss as ridiculous a conservative Christian’s offence at the gay couple’s behaviour, even if she acknowledges that the Christian is sincerely reporting her intense discomfort. The reason she would give for wanting the advertisement banned (if she does) but not wanting the gay couple’s kissing in public banned would presumably be that she regards the offence she takes as reasonable, but the offence taken by the conservative Christian as unreasonable. Secondly, more importantly, there is a familiar Mill-­ inspired case for distinguishing offence from harm. Being offended does not show that you are harmed – that some interest you have has been successfully attacked. Often, when people report feeling offended, for instance by the airing of some opinion, they explain this, at least to begin with, in terms of their strong disagreement with that opinion. But the mere fact that someone strongly disagrees with a point of view is clearly a poor ground for prohibiting others from expressing that point of view. That way, there would be a shortage of productive discussion of anything of significance. Vigorous debate on matters that arouse strong emotions is the lifeblood of democracy as well as interesting conversation. In a similar way, when people report that they are offended by others’ behaviour, they start by explaining this in terms of their strong disapproval of that behaviour. The offence taken by some social conservatives at public displays of affection by gay couples comes from their strong disapproval and possibly revulsion upon witnessing it. But again, this is a weak ground for prohibiting it. Of course, we should be sensitive to how our behaviour affects others’ feelings and it is often desirable to refrain from it in the presence of people who are upset by it. But it is arbitrary and unjust to give a strong priority to the offence taken by some people, over the interest others have in leading lives that express their individuality without imposing it on others. If the offence taken is derived from the offended person’s view that the opinion expressed is false or the behaviour exhibited is wrong, it is worth asking why those who want these expressions banned do not simply state this instead. I suspect that this is because in many cases, they recognise

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that putting their objections this way would put them on weak ground. After all, as I noted earlier, many who want quite extensive restrictions also claim to be passionate supporters of free speech and a liberal view of the law. Let us assume they are sincere – that they do not see any contradiction between favouring the freedom to express opinions but, in effect, wanting the expression of some such opinions restricted, even if they do not see it this way. When challenged, they might justify this by saying (for example) that although they strongly believe in ‘free speech’, they do not want to permit ‘fighting words’ or ‘hate speech’. ‘Is this [some utterance] a case of free speech or a case of hate speech?’ is a question we often hear asked, especially in heated media discussions. But the utterance could be both those things – at least in the sense that it is speech freely uttered which also expresses, encourages, or has the effect of legitimising hate. Once we unpick the confusion, we can better see the real questions. Is the speech hate speech, in the sense(s) above, or at least speech which is significantly harmful? And if it isn’t, but still causes distress or anger, is that a reason to ban it? We have already seen that there is good reason to prohibit incitement to violence, even if we agree with Mill’s enthusiasm for freedom of enquiry and discussion. As Nadine Strossen points out, even in the United States, where free speech is protected by the First Amendment: ‘…government may restrict some speech with a hateful, discriminatory message…if, in context, it directly causes specific imminent serious harm, thus satisfying the emergency test’. (Strossen 2018: xxi). Strossen points out that in the United States, the term ‘hate speech’ has no single legal definition, but its ‘generally understood core meaning is speech that expresses hateful or discriminatory views about certain groups that historically have been subject to discrimination…or about certain personal characteristics that have been the basis of discrimination (such as race, religion, gender and sexual orientation).’ (Strossen 2018: xxiii). We need not go into the complexities of American legal interpretations to see that Strossen’s account captures much of what people have in mind when they find the content of a speech, article, film (et al.) offensive. The contexts in which the word is used most often are precisely those in which they fear the rise of hate speech, thus understood. And concern about this kind of speech, or at least about its effects, is well-founded, especially at

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present. As several ‘Enlightenment liberals’ such as Blackford, who hold elements of the left partly responsible for the decline of free speech, point out, there has also been an alarming rise in right-wing outrage, ‘fake news’ and intimidation, much of which is aimed at women and minorities. One of the most disturbing recent events was the alt-right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. A mob chanting white supremacist slogans attacked a black man, causing him serious injuries. One of the marchers then sped his car into a group of counter protesters, injuring at least nineteen of them and killing Heather Heyer, a paralegal, whose mother received threats soon afterwards (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 91]. In the light of this and similar events in the US, and the rise in general of right-wing rhetoric on news channels and websites, especially around the time Donald Trump was elected President, it is not surprising that some people on the left regard the defence of free speech on campuses as being at best a pedantic distraction from more important concerns, and at worst collusion with violence. We need not doubt that incitement to violence like that which occurred in Charlottesville, can be a causal contributor to such violence. Some free speech advocates do doubt it, arguing, as we saw, that no amount of incitement compels anyone to act on it, and regard this concern as patronising to ‘ordinary people’, seeing them as dim-witted and easily led by inflammatory rhetoric. But I can see no reason to doubt that a minority of hearers are prodded to violent action by such rhetoric. The question we must return to is the relationship between offensiveness and the tendency to produce or endorse such violence. If the taking of offence (and offence is sometimes taken on others’ behalf ) amounts in practice to strong disagreement with something that is said, then it is a weak ground for banning the speaker. If the complaint of being offended is then bolstered by a subjective account of how upset one is by the content of an address, then, again, this is a weak reason to restrict the speech; as we saw, it can be flatly unreasonable to feel this hurt. Besides, truth can be hurtful, but it can be good for people to hear it: some students do not like being told their essay has not got an A grade but being told this can help them improve. (This is not to say that people should be forced to hear hurtful opinions, whether true or not – for as Mill notes, those who expect to dislike what is said are entitled to stop

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their ears). If on the other hand the claim to be offended is a way of saying that the speech in question is genuinely harmful  – and the most obvious example of this is its being an incitement to cause serious harm to another person – then we may have a legitimate harmbased account of why the expression should be restricted that accords with Mill’s harm principle. But what kinds of speech are covered by this objection?

The Case of Germaine Greer A spate of recent controversies, some of them on university campuses, show the challenges faced by many attempts to uphold the objection. Let us look at some of them, from both sides of the Atlantic. In the Autumn of 2015, headlines were made when the veteran feminist writer Germaine Greer was disinvited from a speaking engagement at the University of Cardiff in the UK. Greer was due to give a talk titled ‘Women and Power: the Lessons of the Twentieth Century’, but it came to light that she had previously denied that trans women were genuinely women. These remarks had nothing to do with the subject of her talk, but she was considered dangerous enough to be barred from speaking. A petition demanding her disinvitation, signed by more than 300 people, declared that: Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in feminism or society. Such attitudes contribute to the high levels of stigma, hatred and violence towards trans people  – particularly trans women  – both in the UK and across the world. While debate in a university should be encouraged, hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous. Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate. [The Guardian, 2015, October 23rd].

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Eventually the invitation was reinstated, but the incident raised the crucial questions: was there any good reason to think her presence on campus was dangerous, and if so what kind of danger was this? After the controversy erupted, Greer explained her position as follows: ‘I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissible view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome’ (The Guardian, 2015, October 23rd).

Now it is easy to see why trans women might feel insulted or misrepresented by her insinuation that they are men who ‘impersonate’ women, given that, in their own eyes, they are not perpetrating a deliberate deception but are living authentically, as the women they consider themselves to be. But the petitioners clearly regarded Greer’s remarks about trans women as hate speech. Greer is well-known for being outspoken, and she said at one point that trans women did not look or sound like women. She was unrepentant about these remarks when questioned about them on the BBC’s Newsnight programme, soon after the row at Cardiff. Perhaps Greer should have been more sensitive to the feelings of trans women. But if she should be more careful with her words, so should some of her critics. To describe her views as ‘hateful’ and, by implication, her remarks as hate speech goes well beyond criticising her for insensitivity. It is a considerable leap to interpret her as hating trans women, just because she denies their claim to be women. Moreover, Greer says she has never incited anyone to violence and there is no reason to disbelieve her; even in her early days as an outspoken, controversial feminist she certainly annoyed people but never, to my knowledge, suggested that women violently attack men. However, this might miss the point: the petition claimed that attitudes like hers ‘contribute to the high levels of…violence towards trans people…’ [My italics]. This looks like a causal claim, implying that if someone publicly expresses such attitudes, there is a danger that hearers will

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violently attack trans people as a result. This can be understood as meaning that regardless of the speaker’s intent, there is a danger of the speech having an appalling impact, and this alone is enough to justify a ban on the speaker. Trans people have indeed been violently attacked because of being transgender, and all violent attacks must be unequivocally condemned, as should any incitement to violence. The harder question is of how we should balance the possible impact of any speech, or indeed film or work of art, against the wider interest society may have in the free publication of controversial material. If a widely viewed film contains images of violence, a small minority of viewers may be tipped over into copying that violence. A documentary about an incurable fatal disease might tip a few viewers with the disease into depression or even suicide. In an age of mass communication, with millions of people viewing the same media content, we should expect some material to have a bad causal impact on a few individuals, regardless of how reasonable people would judge the content. The problem of impact also concerns the formulation of laws and regulations in general. No doubt road traffic deaths would be reduced if speed limits were brought down to ten miles per hour on all roads. Yet legislators need to balance this against drivers’ interest in getting to their destinations with reasonable speed. In the same way, even if some controversial speech has the unintended consequence that a few criminally-­ disposed individuals are prompted to criminal acts upon hearing it, we cannot forget the importance of the free flow of ideas, especially about questions about which it is essential to form well-informed policies. In any case, no ground was given for supposing that Greer’s presence would have escalated violence against trans people, and no objection was raised to the speech she was invited to give. The protest was about other things she had said. But even if she had been invited to discuss transgender issues, the main question would have concerned whether she would have incited hearers to commit serious harm. Since there is no reason to believe that she has ever done this, or would do it, the protest was entirely misplaced  – an instance of a kind of ‘catastrophizing’ (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 84–5) in line with the insidious idea that ‘words are violence’. In summary, some people are offended by things said by controversial speakers, whether on the explosive transgender issue or a host of other

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things. The claim to be offended can be broken down into three possible complaints: that the view expressed is false, that it causes subjective hurt and that it causes serious harm. Hearing views you disagree with is simply part of rational debate. Having hurt feelings is undesirable and decent people take reasonable steps not to cause hurt, but sometimes it is an unavoidable corollary of hearing things you disagree with. Causing harm is a serious issue but intent must be separated from impact. Even when impact is considered, we should be wary of it being used to shut down controversial debate.

The Case of Maryam Namazie However, perhaps we are ignoring something else lurking behind these controversies – that certain expressions, even if they do not literally cause violence, somehow pose an existential threat to a group. This, in fact, is one way the Greer controversy can be interpreted. But perhaps we can see this more clearly if we look at another British campus controversy, this time concerning an invitation to a prominent ex-Muslim to address a student society. In the Autumn of 2015, around the same time as the controversy surrounding Greer, the secularist campaigner Maryam Namazie was invited to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists (WASH) group to talk about secularism to Warwick University’s Student Union. As happened in Cardiff to Greer, the Union initially barred her from giving the talk, claiming she had written inflammatory articles and could incite hatred on campus. Namazie is a secularist, feminist and – crucially here – an ex-Muslim who fled Iran with her family in 1980, the year after that country’s theocratic Islamic Revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. She said in her defence: They’re basically labelling me a racist and an extremist for speaking out against Islam and Islamism. If people like me who fled an Islamist regime can’t speak out about my opposition to the far-right Islamic movement, if I can’t criticise Islam…

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that leaves very [few] options for me as a dissenter because the only thing I have is my freedom of expression. If anyone is inciting hatred, it’s the Islamists who are threatening people like me just for deciding we want to be atheist, just because we don’t want to toe the line. (The Independent, 25th September 2015a).

The invitation was eventually reinstated, as it was for Greer, and her address went ahead. But this was not the end of her troubles. Shortly afterwards, at Goldsmith’s University in London, she gave a talk in defence of secularism and free speech, in the course of which she displayed a highly controversial ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon, featuring the Prophet Mohammed sharing a joke with Jesus. She showed the cartoon so that the audience could judge the controversy for themselves. A video of the talk appeared online (The Independent, 4th December 2015b) which shows determined attempts by a few members of the audience to disrupt her talk by repeatedly interrupting her, chanting ‘safe space, safe space’, walking around in front of her and turning off the projector. It is hard to miss the irony of one middle-aged woman being intimidated by a group of young men claiming that she was intimidating them. Like the imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, Maryam Namazie believes in secular government – that is, not anti-religious government but a separation of religion from the state. She advocates the right to criticise any religion, even if this offends believers, and says that all religions, not only Islam, have intolerant tendencies. In her view, Islamic Sharia law has an unjust and cruel dimension, especially in the second-­ class status she believes it accords to women and non-Muslims. Although, as an atheist, she rejects Islam altogether, she recognises a distinction between Islam per se and Islamist movements that advocate and use violence to establish Islamic government. She accepts that most Muslims, at least in the West, reject Islamism and she has never advocated violence or discrimination. Her ‘inflammatory’ work is largely directed against militant Islamism, and against those elements in the Western left (sometimes called the ‘Regressive Left’) that are reluctant to criticise either Islam or Islamism, because they think this would amount to collusion with Western imperialism. Though she is of the left herself  – indeed, she describes herself on Twitter as a communist  – she sees this version of

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left-­wing politics as profoundly harmful and hypocritical: it makes much of its concern for women and minorities in Western societies, but has nothing to say about their oppression in many Muslim-majority countries, and sometimes within Muslim communities in the West. Namazie’s presence at Warwick and Goldsmiths was particularly sensitive because she is an avowed ex-Muslim, rather than a mere critic of Islam. This is significant, because apostasy is a serious matter in Islam and some interpreters of Sharia law declare that people who leave the faith, and cannot be persuaded to return to it, should be killed. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, of which Namazie is a leading member, campaigns for recognition of the plight of apostates around the world, many of whom are shunned by their families and even fear they may be murdered. She features in a documentary about the plight of ex-Muslims in various countries, especially in Bangladesh where atheist bloggers have recently been hacked to death. (Exposure: Islam’s Non-Believers 2016 [documentary]). https://www.ex-muslim.org.uk/islams-non-believers/ It is worth pausing to consider these recent murders. Imagine the sense of the surreal we would experience if the Pope declared that anyone who leaves the Catholic faith must be publicly hanged in St. Peter’s Square. This sense would be somewhat like that initially felt in Britain when, on 14th February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa calling on faithful Muslims to kill the author Salman Rushdie for publishing his magic realist novel The Satanic Verses, even if he subsequently became the most pious Muslim in the world. It is often correctly pointed out that much of the history of Christianity is one of Christians persecuting heretics and unbelievers and that there have been periods when Islam showed more tolerance than Christianity (O’Grady 2019). But the point is not that Islam is a uniquely persecuting religion, but that there is an alarming dissonance between the secular government almost everyone in the West take for granted, and which allows many different faiths to thrive, and the current rise of violent Islamism in many parts of the world. Namazie points out that in these places, rights to free speech and worship (and non-worship) are being denied – a fact that those who tried to disrupt her address at Goldsmiths clearly did not want to hear and wanted to prevent others from hearing.

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Furthermore, in a bizarre twist, the Goldsmiths Feminist Society came out in support of the Islamic Society, which had condemned the invitation to Namazie. A statement from the Feminist Society read: ‘Hosting known islamophobes [sic] at our university creates a climate of hatred. We showed our support on our Facebook page by sharing ISOC’s [the Islamic Society] post with a message of solidarity… We reserve the right to remove comments that contribute to the marginalisation of students.’ (The Independent, 4th December 2015b). It is significant that Namazie was cast as an ‘Islamophobe’ and therefore held to be a channel of hate speech. The term ‘Islamophobia’ is often criticised for confusing criticism or hostility towards Islam with hatred or contempt towards Muslims. And there is an important distinction here: you can obviously dislike a person’s beliefs without wishing any harm on that person. Nevertheless, one can always argue that in practice, the two can be hard to separate. If you regard certain religious claims as not only false but harmful and absurd, this could affect your judgement of the people who believe them. So, as with Germaine Greer, we need to take the most charitable view possible of the protesters and ask what the substance of their complaint really was. Since Namazie was obviously not inciting violence or discrimination against Muslims, the only potentially credible objection to her giving her talk was that, nevertheless, serious harm to Muslims might result from it. If one already views Muslims living in the West as an oppressed minority, one might view people like Namazie as a threat to their very existence, in some sense. For example, many elements in the far right1 are fanatically hostile to Islam and Muslims, and perhaps they are further emboldened to commit harmful acts against Muslims by speakers like Namazie. Insults and physical attacks on Muslims are a serious problem in the UK and elsewhere, and it is impossible to show that they are never causally linked to expressed opinions that criticise Islam. But like Germaine Greer, Namazie explicitly denounces all violence. She is unequivocally anti-­ racist and has no wish to stop Muslims from living as Muslims, provided they respect the liberty of others. Furthermore, she is trying to reduce violence both by Islamists and their enemies by making strong ethical arguments against it, and in arguing for free speech about religion, she aims to make the world a better place for everyone  – believers and

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non-­believers alike. Perhaps most important, she is part of a necessary dialogue about religion and its effects and does not wish to stop those who disagree with her from participating in that dialogue.

The Need for Dialogue about Religion The importance of dialogue about religion cannot be over-emphasised, especially as most Western nations are multi-cultural and multi-religious. Religions demand things of their followers and sometimes encourage their adherents to regard outsiders in ways that make sense only if their doctrines are true. There is, of course, far more to religion than doctrines: many people of faith are far more interested in religious practices and charitable works and are often quite vague about the doctrines they are supposed to accept. (Crane 2017: 5–18). But there is usually some doctrinal core to religion, and Islam is no exception. It makes certain factual claims about the way the cosmos is ordered and our place in it. Suppose that the Prophet Mohammed really was the final messenger of God, that the Quran is infallible and that, correctly interpreted, it declares that apostates who cannot be persuaded to return to the fold should be killed. In that case, apostates should be killed. Many Muslim scholars offer different interpretations of the passages in question or emphasise instead the Quranic passages that preach tolerance. But if the Islamic texts – however they should be understood – really are divinely inspired, it is important that we all know it, for it is only thus that we can know the right way to live, worship and enter Paradise. On the other hand, suppose the Prophet Mohammed was not divinely inspired at all, but merely one among numerous supposed messengers of a divine being. In that case, living life as a Muslim entails a fundamental error, even if there are ethical, social, or psychological benefits to it. Persecuting apostates inflicts ostracism, terror, and death, to no good purpose. This applies, of course, to any all-encompassing theological or political belief system. The stakes are exceptionally high. If a proselytising faith that aims at universal conversion is true, then its practitioners have a compelling reason to spread the word. On the other hand, if it isn’t true, then it may be undesirable for anyone to believe it – for we should not

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assume that, just because a system is religious, it must therefore be good. But we now face the obvious question: how can we know whether to follow it or not? Thinkers who follow the Enlightenment believe that we should use reason – construed broadly enough not to rule out revelation or some kind of direct knowledge – to examine the doctrines in question, without ruling out the possibility of discovering incoherence, contradiction, weak arguments and historical claims at odds with what is independently known. This is not to say that any doctrinal system can be conclusively shown to be true or false; indeed, there is much room for disagreement about what it would be to show such a thing. Nor is it to say there will ever be a consensus. Given the history of such disputes, it is extremely unlikely even that highly sophisticated ‘epistemic peers’ – people who have roughly similar competence to assess the claims in question – will ever agree, even if they roughly share all their evidence. (In fact, there are no perfect epistemic peers and evidence is never perfectly shared, in any case). But an enquiring approach to religion is essential to understanding it and deciding whether to embrace it. Reason and argument can get us somewhere, even if the most scrupulous rational enquirers will never feel the matter has been settled. The experience of many ex-Muslims is especially pertinent here. Many of them grew up in conservative Muslim communities but came across Western science and philosophy and began to doubt the faith they had been told to accept without question. Ironically, their critics might describe them as being ‘radicalised’ online, by science and philosophy, just as some converts to militant Islamism are radicalised by inflammatory online preachers. Yet we do not hear much about them. Some of them are shunned by their own communities – which themselves may be subject to discrimination for being Muslim  – and they do not attract much sympathy from those elements in the Western left which are more concerned with promoting a narrative of Western oppression than one of Enlightenment reason.

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Punching up and Punching Down However, whether about religion or other sensitive things, some people will say that my comments about free speech miss the point. They will protest that, whatever the merits of free speech considered in the abstract, these comments fail to recognise the power dynamics beneath the surface of this debate. The idea has gained currency that the notion of free speech has been ‘weaponised’ – that it is used by powerful individuals or groups to subordinate historically oppressed people. According to Kate Manne and Jason Stanley (Manne and Stanley 2015): The notion of freedom of speech is being co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized. All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, "Quiet!"

The background to Manne and Stanley’s article is various student protests across American campuses, specifically an incident at Yale University, once again in the Autumn of 2015. Erica Christakis, an associate master of Silliman College (one of Yale’s residential colleges) sent an email to students expressing doubt about whether administrators at Yale should have offered guidance to students about what Halloween costumes were appropriate. Such advice had been offered by the college dean’s office. Christakis suggested that instead of students being guided from on high concerning what to wear, they should discuss the matter among themselves, and that ‘free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society’. (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 56). Christakis’ email provoked an angry response from some students, with about 150 of them gathering in the courtyard outside her home within the college. When Erica’s husband, Nicholas Christakis, appeared in the courtyard, students demanded that he renounce his wife’s email. He refused but apologised for causing them pain. Students then turned up the heat, accusing him and Erica of being racist and of enabling violence. (The issue of Halloween costumes was about costumes that might demonstrate racism, perhaps in the form of ‘blackface’, although this had not been worn for several years). Some also said they wanted Nicholas to

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lose his job. (Fuller accounts of the episode, from different perspectives, are in Manne and Stanley 2015; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 55–7; Blackford 2019: 142–9). The Yale controversy does not seem to have been straightforwardly about free speech, but some of the other ones were. But in the Yale case, one can see possible indirect connections. Suppose students had wanted to wear costumes that people would have considered racist. In that case, the issue would have been of whether they should have been allowed to do so, despite any offence or harm caused by it. This would not have been literally about speech, but about expression – but the same questions are raised. More pertinent, though, was probably Erica Christakis’ advice quoted above, that free speech and the ability to tolerate offence should be encouraged. This advice was issued before the confrontations, but Manne and Stanley find it questionable that the students’ angry reaction was really an attempt to suppress speech. They begin by referring to the wave of student protests in general: Frequently… the students protesting are being misrepresented and belittled in the news media as childish and coddled. More worryingly still, they are held to be attacking freedom of speech rather than exercising it to call for institutional reform — political action of the very kind this freedom aims at protecting.

Here, the authors do not notice that these protests might have been both an attack on the free speech of others and an exercise in free speech for the protesters. Manne and Stanley rightly note that a request that someone should not say something does not amount to an attempt to prevent them from saying it. Nor does such a request amount to stating that they should not be allowed to say it. (This is important, since some fervent free speech enthusiasts are prone to misconstrue such requests in these ways, generating a pointless escalation of acrimonious misunderstandings). There certainly is an important distinction between angrily objecting to what someone says, and trying to prevent them from saying it, or saying that they should not be allowed to say it. Nevertheless, Manne and Stanley underplay (at least in this article) the many occasions when protesters have gone beyond passionately objecting to what speakers say and

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have tried to prevent them from speaking – for example, by prolonged heckling, demanding disinvitations and even threatening violence. This is precisely not political action of the kind the free speech ideal aims to protect. In a subsequent debate (Intelligence Squared Debates 2016) Stanley claims that attempts to shut down speech are not occurring, or at least that their occurrence is wildly exaggerated. This simply ignores the facts. Moreover, as to the claim that students are being misrepresented as childish and coddled, when in reality they are exercising their freedom of speech by means of passionate protest, it is hard to construe the behaviour of some students during the Yale Halloween incident as anything other than childish at best, and chillingly authoritarian at worst. After all, the provocation was a mild, perhaps naïve email from Erica Christakis advocating polite discussion of what costumes to wear. But there are deeper undercurrents here and it would be unfair not to mention them. We can leave aside the likelihood that, as students at an Ivy League university, the protesters were ipso facto now privileged; presumably, some came from historically underprivileged groups and even those who did not saw themselves as allies of those who did. The general concern is that members of privileged and powerful groups have hitherto taken their right to say what they like for granted and are outraged when they were challenged. They of course, say that they never try to silence anyone, but only want their right to speak respected, which student protesters are failing to do. However, the narrative with which Manne and Stanley sympathise may be roughly expressed as follows: the confident speech of the powerful is an act of ‘illocutionary silencing’ of the relatively powerless: it consists of speech acts that muffle others’ voices. The prestige of the speaker serves to silence or diminish the impact of what less powerful or prestigious people say. For example, rich and privately educated people have learned how to express themselves in an eloquent and intellectually sophisticated manner and therefore have the upper hand over less educated and articulate people, especially when the latter are drawing attention to genuine injustices they suffer. Moreover, when underprivileged groups are repeatedly ignored or silenced, their frustration eventually boils over into overt anger, at which point they are criticised for being unwilling to conduct a civil conversation. On this account,

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those advocating for underprivileged groups to be able to express themselves are the real advocates of free speech. These ideas form an important part of the debate and tend to be somewhat overlooked by the angrier and more tin-eared traditional free speech enthusiasts. However, they are somewhat abstract and present a very broad-brush solution to the question of whether disinvitations or censorship are appropriate. To get a proper sense of context, we need to know what is likely to be said by (allegedly) powerful advocates whose free speech it is proposed to limit. For all we know, they may be defending ‘unfashionable’ underprivileged people, and some believe that poor white people fall into this category. They might be more than willing to engage in dialogue with opponents, as the Christakis couple clearly were. They might be saying things that are true and important to know. They might be speaking in a highly liberal environment where they are unpopular. In any case, as I suggested earlier, it is somewhat disingenuous to condone attempts to shout people down as really attempts to promote freedom of speech. Even if they are, the means used to do this have often been attempts to silence other people with bans, disinvitations and disruptions, and there are surely other ways to increase the freedom to speak of underprivileged groups. To be sure, there needs to be diversity of opinion in various environments, which implies that not only conservative but also underprivileged perspectives must be heard. This is the guiding idea behind the Heterodox Academy2 founded by Jonathan Haidt, whom Manne and Stanley criticise in the article I quoted, for co-writing an article critical of student protests. Student and other protests come from a sense that the right is winning the culture wars and is the real threat to free speech. Surprisingly, perhaps, I agree that in Western societies, the right is a greater threat to traditionally liberal values than the left. But the left has a significant power base in the academy, and unless it is challenged by robust disagreement in those comfort zones, ideological bubbles will become solidified and political polarisation will get worse.

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Notes 1. It is unclear in what sense the ‘far right’ is right wing – it certainly has nothing to do with conservatism. But I use the term, as has become common, to refer roughly to racists who campaign aggressively and sometimes violently against various minorities. Many have a particular hatred of Muslims, which they sometimes dress up as objections to Islam itself. 2. The Heterodox Academy is a traditionally liberal project designed to promote free speech and diversity of opinion, especially in academic institutions. https://heterodoxacademy.org/

Bibliography Blackford, Russell. 2019. The Tyranny of Opinion. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Crane, Tim. 2017. The Meaning of Belief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Exposure: Islam’s Non-Believers. 2016. [Documentary]. https://www.ex-muslim.org.uk/islams-non-believers/ Intelligence Squared Debates. 1st March 2016. Free Speech Is Threatened on Campus. https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/ free-speech-threatened-campus Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin Press. Manne, Kate, and Jason Stanley. 13th November 2015. When Free Speech Becomes a Political Weapon. Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www. chronicle.com/article/When-Free-Speech-Becomes-a/234207 Murray, Douglas. 2019. The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity. London: Bloomsbury Continuum. O’Grady, Selina. 2019. In the Name of God, A History of Christian & Muslim Intolerance. London: Atlantic Books. Strossen, Nadine. 2018. Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Guardian. 23rd October 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/23/petition-urges-cardiff-university-to-cancel-germain-greerlecture. Accessed 9 Oct 2019.

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The Independent. 25th September 2015a. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/home-news/maryam-namazie-secular-activist-barred-from-speaking-at-warwick-university-over-fears-of-inciting-10517296.html ———. 4th December 2015b. Muslim Students from Goldsmith’s University’s Islamic Society ‘Heckle and Aggressively Interrupt’ Maryam Namazie talk. https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/muslim-students-from-goldsmiths-university-s-islamic-society-heckle-and-aggressively-interrupt-a6760306.html

3 Subjective Authority and Unwelcome Facts

So far, the assumption has been that free enquiry and free expression are essential to the discovery of truth, and that truth is a worthy goal to pursue. But in our polarised times, there are cynics who wonder whether we ever have access to truth, especially in the present age of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ - the latter phrase made notorious by Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s special counsellor. In the current atmosphere of propaganda and outrage, and with a multiplicity of social media outlets feeding us ‘news’ of doubtful veracity, it is tempting to wonder whether anything official bodies say to us is true, and whether we can know how to find reliable sources of truth, especially about socially or politically divisive issues. All kinds of sources claim to be reliable, but we cannot take this on their own authority, any more than we can always trust that computer programmes that are supposed to detect malware are not installing malware themselves. Clever deceivers can gain trust by exposing the deceit of others. A sober and moderate tone is no guarantee of honesty. Big lies can gain credence by means of strategic doses of truth. Sometimes, the grand strategy of deceivers seems to be to undermine our belief that truth is attainable at all, and having done that, gain acceptance of their stories not on the ground that they are true, but for some other reason. © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_3

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We have not reached that point yet; most of us read the news, look at our favourite social media sites and listen to other people because we trust that what is being said is mostly true, or at least is not full of deliberate falsehoods or other kinds of deception. This assumption is the basis of trust and the very point of making assertions. Indeed, the moral requirement not to tell lies is probably the best-known application of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. In its first formulation this tells us that ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I can will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (Kant, trans. Paton, 1964). According to Kant, someone who wills the principle ‘Let me tell lies’ (and Kant’s example is of someone who obtains a loan by falsely promising to repay it) to be adopted universally wills a world in which no one is believed, and hence undermines his own reason for lying, which is to gain some advantage through others believing his lies. A world where everyone lies is a world where there is no trust and hence no benefit from lying. That is why Kant says that the liar’s ‘maxim’ – the principle on which he acts annuls itself. It is, of course, questionable whether Kant has shown that it is always wrong to lie. For example, in a notorious essay (Kant, trans. Beck, 1949) he says that it is wrong to lie, even to a murderer who is asking you where his next intended victim is. Trust would not be undermined if everyone told lies only in unusual circumstances, for example, if lying was the only way to stop something terrible from happening. If I know that others would lie only to stop someone committing a murder, I can still trust that they are telling the truth to me, if they do not believe I am about to commit a murder. I can, in fact, accept that they should lie to me if they believe I am about to commit a murder. But Kant’s general point is powerful: if we knew that others – especially those in the business of forming people’s opinions – told lies whenever it suited some agenda they were promoting, we would no longer trust them and would not believe them even when they were telling the truth. Moreover, as Simon Blackburn notes (Blackburn 2019), once trust has declined, people feel less shame when they are caught out. This problem has been greatly exacerbated by the proliferation of internet troll factories. If you believe that lying is widespread, you may come to believe you are justified in using dishonest tactics yourself. As Blackburn puts it:

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‘…as society grows and becomes more anonymous, we get the rise of a character David Hume called a “sensible knave”: a person who seizes the advantage gained by dishonesty when they suppose they can avoid being caught out and thus avoid suffering any penalty…. Quite possibly serial, brazen, astonishing liars such as Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin think that their reputations for honesty are no lower than those of other public figures, and this is a self-deception which it may be difficult to shift, especially in the light of the serious competition now flourishing in London’. (Blackburn 2019)

However, there is a deeper point here. Much as a political culture of lying is to be deplored, Blackburn’s main purpose is to warn against a decline of trust in objective enquiry. Once previously respected sources of information or methods of enquiry are wrongly perceived as irredeemably discredited, all kinds of nonsense fill the void. There are at least three issues here: firstly, about the existence of truth, secondly about the value of truth as the proper object of enquiry and belief, and thirdly about how we might determine what the truth is. If scepticism can be induced about any of these things, we are in danger of losing our intellectual and moral defences against the ‘post-truth’ world, where any claim is as good as any other and there is no point in careful determination of facts. In our current polarised political world, this problem is worsened when one of the warring political tribes warns of the dangers of ‘post-truth’ but refuses to see its own role in creating the problem. This may be deliberately deceptive, or it may simply result from confusion. In Donald Trump’s case, I suspect it is often the former. He knows that the news outlets that endorse him are frequently accused of peddling ‘fake news’, so he has turned the tables on his accusers, repeatedly claiming that he is the victim of the ‘fake news media’. Here and frequently elsewhere, he uses the classic propagandist’s tactics of wearing down opposition by brazenly repeating unverifiable and often outlandish claims, denouncing all criticism as lies, refusing to answer pertinent questions or to allow his answers to be properly followed up, engaging in aggressive character assassination and impugning the motives of anyone who attacks him.

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These tactics, however inflammatory, pay some lip service to the importance of truth; to denounce all opposition as lies and fake news is to imply that truth exists, and that his opponents ought to be telling it. Yet his outpourings undermine confidence that any political or ethical proposal can be anchored to reality. Perhaps this is not Trump’s intention, and perhaps he is not sophisticated enough to promote it consciously. But political arguments that concentrate on where the other side is ‘coming from’ – and Trump’s supporters are keen on claiming, for example, that hostility towards him comes from a metropolitan liberal elite that hates ordinary people – encourage us to sidestep the importance of objective truth and objective enquiry. We are directed away from asking where the evidence and arguments point and told to concentrate only on the alleged interests and biases of those who make the contested claims. Some commentators have recognised these manoeuvres as falling on fertile soil, due to the influence of a way of thinking that one might expect right-wingers to deplore, namely, an approach to truth and knowledge known as ‘postmodernist’, which casts doubt on the very existence of objective truth and enquiry. This has had considerable influence within certain sections of the academy, although it may be in decline. It is hard to define this movement precisely since it discourages clear and explicit formulations. But once people have the idea, however vaguely conceived, that truth and knowledge do not really exist, they are ripe for seduction by absurd claims and less likely to be concerned with argument or evidence. ‘Alternative facts’ – or more prosaically, brazen lies - come to seem legitimate and even profound. Presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway’s claim to be defending ‘alternative facts’ rather than falsehoods might almost have been designed to appeal to people who already wonder whether mind-independent facts exist at all. (The Independent, 22nd January 2017). If you think that there is no objective truth, but only ‘X’s truth’ or ‘Y’s truth’, it is easy to be persuaded that an ‘official’ account, based on such boring and traditional methods as scientific enquiry or impartial analysis, is arbitrary; that the rational or scientific methods used to reach it yield truth merely ‘from a rational or scientific point of view’ and that other methods, no less valid, can yield different truths. In addition, if the methods of enquiry in question can also be associated with the interests of a dominant class – and both the left and right

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can plausibly point to such associations  – the ‘truths’ yielded come to seem even more tainted. According to many right-wingers, the West is run by a liberal establishment which promotes its interests by spreading propaganda against the nation, the traditional family, religion, and personal responsibility. Conversely, for many on the left, there is a different establishment, bent on maintaining the privileges of historically dominant groups such as white men, and it too promotes myths, often dressed up as the conclusions of science and reason, whose purpose is to maintain the subordination of historically oppressed groups. Such strategies are, in Marxist language, ideological – they are narratives dressed up as objective and unalterable truths (perhaps ‘truths of nature’) and designed to be believed by the oppressed as much as the oppressors, whose real purpose is to maintain unjust hegemonies. Jason Stanley relates this idea to a critique of unjust social arrangements in general, arguing that ‘societies with flawed social structures tend to give rise to flawed ideological beliefs, in a similar…way to the manner in which Hume takes our flawed psychology to lead to what he thinks of as our flawed ideological belief in external things’. (Stanley 2015: 179–80).

Relativism: General Remarks These remarks illustrate the first problem I identified above, in the light of Blackburn’s worries: the problem of whether truth exists at all, or more precisely here, the problem of whether there are any ‘absolute’ truths which are not in some way ‘relative’ to some local standpoint. There is a cluster of relativistic stances, which hold that truth is relative to the standpoint of the judge. It is found in Greek philosophy, it gained credence after nineteenth century anthropological discoveries, and it has roots in certain interpretations of the ‘perspectivism’ of Friedrich Nietzsche (though see Williams 2002: 16–18) which influenced much postmodernist thinking. More significantly, there is a relativistic air in much everyday discourse, far removed from academic philosophy. Often, people say things like ‘I believe p, but that’s only my point of view’, or ‘X defends such and such a position, but that’s only the truth according to him’, as if that somehow cast doubt on what is being said. Sometimes

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people try to cast doubt on a claim merely by saying ‘That’s only your opinion!’ Often, it emerges that these locutions are attempts to be polite and undogmatic, and often these are laudable aims. The dangers arise when we forget the distinction between claiming that some statement is true just because it is someone’s opinion, and these worthy attempts to be tolerant and open-minded. After all, tolerance is about putting up with things we do not like or agree with; it is not a matter of uncertainty or indifference. One of the problems of our age is that the appeal of relativism, or at least a relativistic air or mood, contributes to a lack of appropriate rigour and scepticism about a wide range of controversial assumptions. At the same time there is something of an ‘anti-relativism industry’, loosely associated with the ‘cultural right’, and the issue is easily mixed up with the question of liberalism. As Stephen Law notes in his defence of liberal educational methods (Law 2006: 90–98) many commentators think that liberals (who in this context are those who defend open-minded and unconstrained enquiry) must all be relativists, and that since relativism is one of the scourges of our times, liberalism must also be rejected. This is clearly a mistake: even if some liberals are relativists, not all are, and there is no logical connection between thinking we should open-mindedly pursue truth, and thinking that truth, if it exists at all, exists only relative to some judging subject. In fact, there is an obvious tension between these two views. There is little point in the open-minded and bold pursuit of truth if you already believe that the truth is whatever you think it is. But even leaving aside the popular confusion of liberalism with relativism, some critiques of relativism, even though on the right lines, need fine-tuning. To see this, we should briefly look at the question of relativism in general. In some contexts, relativism, whether true or not, is not a woolly ‘anything goes’ doctrine; there is an intellectually respectable case to be made for it and it has a respectable intellectual heritage. Its best versions generate ideas and arguments that are intellectually demanding, requiring of those who seek to understand them a sophisticated ability to make fine distinctions, draw complex inferences and hold back from reaching conclusions unless complex and often convoluted arguments justify them. It is when half-baked and badly digested versions of them seep, at tenth

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hand, into a much wider culture, that we end up with widespread confusion. When that confusion gets into highly divisive and toxic political debates, careful intellectual argument has little hope of immediately rescuing us from it.

Moral Relativism What, then, might be the more reasonable versions of relativism, or at least the more reasonable arguments for it? It is useful here to see how the debate about a version of moral relativism that we can call ‘meta-ethical cultural relativism’ proceeds, since students of philosophy often have their first encounter with relativism when they study this topic. We often hear moral relativism defended, at least implicitly, on the ground that since different cultures hold, or have held, different moral codes, it follows that any culture’s moral codes are merely ‘true for that culture’ and not true absolutely. Furthermore, since our own culture is only one among many, we should not morally judge other cultures: to do so is to commit a philosophical error. This is why the doctrine is ‘meta-­ ethical’ – it is not the normative claim that it is morally wrong to judge other cultures (though that conclusion is often drawn from it) but the philosophical claim that there are no absolute moral standards in relation to which any cultural practice or attitude is right or wrong, or better or worse than another one. In response to this popular argument, many introductory textbooks on philosophical ethics (such as Rachels, ed. Rachels, 2010: 18–20] point out that it contains a non-sequitur: just because a practice is approved of within one culture but disapproved of within another, it does not follow that neither culture’s practices are absolutely right or wrong. No doubt we could make the argument valid – i.e. making its conclusion follow from its premises - by adding a premise such as ‘Whenever two opinions conflict with each other, neither opinion is better than the other’, but such a premise is obviously dubious: we could mount an argument with the same structure about countless other differences of belief, and in these cases the relativist conclusion looks palpably untenable, as the following case should make clear.

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For example, a Gallup survey (Gallup, 2nd June 2014) found that 42% of the American population thinks that God created humans in their present form about ten thousand years ago. Yet we should obviously not shrug our shoulders and rest content with saying this is ‘true for them’, if this implies that young-earth creationism is no less true than the Darwinian view of human origins accepted by mainstream biology. It is ‘true for them’ only in the trivial sense that they believe it is true, which we already know. The important question is whether it really is true, regardless of what anyone thinks. The same thing can be said of the moral permissions and prohibitions of any culture. It is one thing to say, correctly but trivially, that in some societies it is considered morally permissible for a fifty-year-old man to marry a fourteen-year-old girl, but quite another thing to say that it really is permissible and hence should not be condemned. So much for a familiar and clearly bad argument for relativism. It is echoed in the vague idea that whatever anyone thinks about anything deserves some respect, or is even made true, just because they think it. But the story does not end there, because relativism can be defended in more subtle ways than this. For example, the more sophisticated defenders of moral relativism (for example, Levy 2002: 32–54) point out that if there were absolute moral standards whose binding force no one can escape, regardless of the culture or epoch in which they live, it is surprising that there is not more cross-cultural agreement about what these absolute standards are. A common reply to this is that there is more similarity between cultures than relativists make out – for example, all cultures have some concept of murder and theft, and all have some form of marriage. But this does not deal with cases of seemingly intractable cultural differences, for example about human rights, the role of the sexes or the way to deal with offenders against societal norms. Moreover, although all cultures regard some killings as murder, they disagree over the circumstances in which killing is murder. For example, some cultures take the death penalty for granted, whereas in most liberal democracies there is far more disagreement about it. All societies have some form of marriage, but some allow a man to have more than one wife at the same time. Since these differences exist, we still have the problem of explaining them on the

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hypothesis of moral absolutism. Is it not more sensible to suppose that cultural differences are explained, not in terms of the greater moral clear sightedness of some cultures compared with others, but in terms of the different ways in which societal moral codes developed and the different needs of different societies? In other words, if the only credible possibilities with respect to the question of moral truth are absolutism and relativism, and if absolutism lacks credibility for the reason just given, then we are left with relativism, even if relativism still presents us with questions that need to be answered. Opponents of moral relativism will point out, I suspect rightly, that these important points do not demonstrate its truth – which can now be re-stated as the claim that there is more than one true moral code, and that the term ‘moral truth’ can only mean ‘truth for a culture’ (in the cultural version) or ‘truth for an individual’ (in the version known as individual relativism). At most, they show either that there are no moral truths at all (or at least, not in the ‘realist’ sense of there being truths about moral properties that exist ‘out there’, whatever that might mean) or that there are absolute moral truths, whose correct application varies according to the circumstances. The second possibility is certainly worth taking seriously, though it is easily confused with relativism. Take the example of infanticide. It might be absolutely, non-relatively true both that infanticide is wrong when new-borns can be properly cared for, and permissible when the environment makes caring for all new-borns impossible. It is easy to multiply examples of this kind. My brief survey only shows that the question needs to be discussed at quite a high level and that the theory can be both supported and attacked in intellectually respectable ways. The same point may be made about relativism in other spheres than morality. In some of the areas, relativism, or at least something that resembles it, is credible – for example, for the grass to be green simply is for it to seem green to normal observers under normal conditions; in other words, greenness is a dispositional property. To have a certain colour just is to look a certain way. Colours are not part of the ‘fabric of the world’ in the way that size or mass are, but this does not make them any less real. Other qualities like subjective pleasantness are even more clearly dispositional – if I like Marmite but you hate it, neither of us is objectively right. We simply react in different ways to the same taste (or

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perhaps experience a different taste). The taste of Marmite is pleasant for me and unpleasant for you, and that is all that can be said of the matter. However, the moral and political debates of our times do not concern relative truths in this simple way. When we defend a moral position, we tend to adopt a negative attitude towards opposing positions – we think they are worse than ours, that people who hold them ought to change their mind, or even should be viewed with suspicion. If I think child marriage is wrong, then I cannot be indifferent to your opinion that it is a wonderful thing that should be celebrated. I cannot shrug my shoulders, saying that this is your view and I do not judge it. I might refrain from expressing my view, out of politeness or a desire to avoid a row, but I cannot remain indifferent to the view itself. I might conceivably (though implausibly) make a concession to cultural relativism, allowing that if you come from a very different culture then different standards apply to you, but I would not make this concession to someone raised in the same culture as myself. This much is built into the very idea of making moral judgements. It is for this reason that a doctrine sometimes called ‘individual relativism’ (though few if any contemporary philosophers defend it) is less believable than cultural relativism. An individual relativist holds that a moral view is true ‘for an individual’ simply because she holds it – that moral truth is entirely relative to the standards of individuals, and hence that if child marriage is ‘right for me’ then it is simply right and there is no more to be said; all criticism comes from a philosophical error about what it is for a moral judgement to be true. On this view, moral debate between individuals is limited only to the correction of factual mistakes that might underpin the moral views in question and cannot legitimately touch on the moral views themselves. It is possible, of course, to ‘bite the bullet’ on this matter and others like it, but the fact that it has this implication makes nonsense of the very possibility of meaningful moral dialogue. The upshot of this survey is that moral relativism, both in its cultural and individual versions, should probably be rejected (I add ‘probably’ because it is conceivable that some more sophisticated, cogent defence may be available) but that the best arguments for it are not foolish – they point to a real difficulty for the belief in absolute, non-relative values.

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Clearly, merely pointing to disagreements does not establish the case for relativism, but it does raise an epistemological difficulty – that of explaining fundamental, intractable disagreement. If the truth is knowable, what best explains the fact that some people know it (if they do) but others do not? Or could it be that no one knows what they claim to, or at least that is hard to tell who does have this knowledge, whether in the sphere of morality or much besides?

Scepticism It is not only relativism that provides fertile soil for distrust in objective enquiry and reliable sources of information. One might believe that there is such a thing as objective truth which exists independent of anyone’s beliefs, but still worry that we can never know what the truth is about certain important matters. There can, in theory, be philosophical reasons for this, such as a worry about how the familiar epistemological bogeyman, the ‘sceptic’, can be refuted. Philosophical scepticism of this ‘Cartesian’ kind is sometimes taken as the starting point of epistemology – the theory of knowledge – and it has long been debated whether, or how, it can be dealt with. René Descartes, in his First Meditation (Descartes, transl. Lafleur, 1960: 75–80) considers that he might be dreaming when he thinks he is awake, and wonders how he can know this isn’t the case, given that the sense of reality we all experience when we are awake can be reproduced in dreams: perhaps an evil demon has tricked him into all kinds of false beliefs, including the belief in an external world or the existence of other minds. No one, of course, really doubts that there is an external world or seriously wonders whether other people are zombies (to adapt the Cartesian examples) and it is an interesting question in itself why we persist in these ‘common sense’ beliefs even if we admit that we are not certain whether, or how, we can answer the Cartesian sceptic. I do not explore these issues here, but merely note them. Nevertheless, there are many reasonable grounds to doubt the veracity of certain specific beliefs, especially in matters of personal importance such as politics, ethics, and religion. Only a moderate degree of reflection is needed to notice that many of our beliefs about these things are those

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that prevail in our culture or sub-culture, or in what we were brought up to believe; had we been reared in different circumstances, we would almost certainly have different beliefs and attitudes. It is small step from this observation, to wondering how many of our personally important beliefs are true or warranted, given that it would be suspiciously lucky if most of what we were brought up to believe, in the particular historical and cultural situation we are in, were true. We can try to reassure ourselves by giving rational grounds for those beliefs, but the same problem recurs. If we had been brought up differently, we would not find these reasons persuasive but would be convinced by reasons that support views quite different to our present ones. The human capacity for rationalisation is boundless. Once we realise the problem, it is hard to see a way out of the trap it puts us in. This worry is not the radical, Cartesian kind. It is useful to note its similarity to another problem that has recently received considerable philosophical attention: the ‘peer disagreement problem’ (for example, Feldman 2007 and Oppy 2010). If I find that someone who is no less intellectually or emotionally competent as I am to reach an opinion about (say) a political question, and who also knows of all the relevant arguments and evidence that I am acquainted with, nevertheless disagrees with me, I face the problem of how I should react. Should I adjust my beliefs so that they more closely align with his? If so, how much should I adjust them? Or should I remain steadfast, seeing nothing surprising in intelligent, well-informed people getting things wrong, and reassuring myself that as long as I can see nothing wrong with the arguments that led me to my position, having acquainted myself with my opponent’s arguments, I should stick by my position? Different thinkers hold different views on this, showing that there is plenty of peer disagreement about the peer disagreement problem itself! My own reaction is often to lose some confidence in my stance when I encounter opposition that seems genuinely well thought through, but I am also prepared to regain confidence if, on reflection, my case seems to survive the criticisms – always remembering that I have been wrong in the past. That is, I think some degree of initial conciliation to opposing views is reasonable, but not so much that I entirely lose confidence.

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Nevertheless, there are still many things we can reasonably doubt. In a polarised political climate, we are often right to doubt the reliability of the information used to persuade us. If we already distrust the source because of its political stance, or the class interest it seems to represent, such scepticism is easy and often automatic. There is, of course, an unfortunate corollary to this: we can be too inclined to believe information that comes from a source that we trust too readily. Such sources can establish credibility by first stating true but emotionally appealing things, and then, having gained our trust, catch us off guard by making far more dubious claims. This is a warning to anyone who claims to be expert in detecting bias, for it is usually other people’s biases that they are good at detecting. But the fact remains that we are often justified in wondering what we truly know, given our knowledge of the dishonesty of many sources of information and of the difficulty of recognising our own biases, wherever we stand on the political spectrum. The ‘relativistic air’ mentioned earlier explains why many people, without rigorously formulating the thought, doubt that there is such a thing as ‘absolute truth’ and end up believing that all ‘truth’ is ‘X’s truth’ or ‘Y’s truth’. This is one worry behind recent attacks on ‘cultural Marxism’, that have been polemically articulated by critics such as the psychologist Jordan Peterson and his fans. (Peterson 2018: 306–17). I shall say more later about this debate, and some of the confusions that infect all ‘sides’. But the main issue for now is the possibility of knowledge, or at least reasonable claims to it, in the light of the distorting influences on us all, both of a general kind (the influence of culture and ideology, of whatever political stripe) and the particular problems posed by the ‘post-­ truth’ world of fake news and hyperventilating commentary. One extreme reaction is to deny that truth exists at all, let alone the absolute truth that is rejected by relativists within various domains. This is tempting for those who are impatient with hard investigations and anxious to get on with ‘deconstructing’ the power relations lying behind all claims to truth. Leaving aside the different philosophical theories of truth, the denial of truth simpliciter leaves us with the age-old problem of whether it is true to say that there is no such thing as truth. I shall assume it to be obvious that there are true and false propositions, because otherwise no assertions could be made about anything.

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 he Sceptical Attitude and the Quest T for Knowledge It is time now to see that reasonable scepticism, so far from being the enemy of belief in truth, pre-supposes such a belief. If I doubt some claim to knowledge, then, very often, I am doubting whether what is claimed is true. There is no point in seeking knowledge, at least of a propositional kind, if we do not hope to end up with the truth. We know that the quest for knowledge is often difficult, if not impossible, because we know that many confident claims to knowledge are sorely mistaken. But this leads us to two conclusions, both relevant to the current culture wars. The first is that in any serious investigation, we must at least hope to get close to the truth. The second is that we are good at getting things wrong, for all kinds of reasons – including ideological ones, in the Marxist sense. The fact that we get many things wrong for various reasons, including self-deception, conformism, epistemic negligence, emotional reasoning, the influence of ideological thinking (and so on) is a good reason to cultivate a generally sceptical attitude. This is not cynicism – the conviction that we are surrounded mostly by liars and fools – and it is not despair of ever getting things right. It is the recognition that things are a certain way, whatever our beliefs or desires, and that all kinds of obstacles make it hard to see how things are. I shall consider certain examples in the next chapter, but it should be obvious that many persuasive-seeming claims, made from across the left-right spectrum, are founded in something other than reason and evidence. One notable, and often irrational way in which we arrive at questionable beliefs is due to the (often false) assumption that anyone who denies them must have dubious normative views. We see this when someone who challenges such a belief is assumed to be ‘really’ defending something outrageous. We often hear the rhetorical put-down: ‘Ah, so you are really saying X!’ The claim that supposedly implies, or is a cover for ‘X’ might be some claim about the average behavioural differences between men and women, or a claim about carbon emissions, or a claim about the number of false allegations of sexual assault, or any number of currently contentious things. Someone who says that the finding that women are,

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on average, more agreeable than men can be partly explained biologically, is easily assumed to be ‘really saying’ that women should be discouraged from being more disagreeable – that female agreeableness is ‘natural’ and therefore good.1 Warnings about the alarming effects of carbon emissions on the climate are often interpreted as ‘really saying’ that we should de-­ industrialise and go back to the ‘Dark Ages’, giving up all belief in human progress. Pointing out that there are probably more false rape allegations than are reflected in widely circulated statistics (because these statistics only report prosecutions or convictions for making false allegations (Gittos 2015: 27–9)) is often interpreted as ‘really saying’ that women complainants should be disbelieved. If the reader is sceptical of these examples, she can no doubt come with her own. The speed and anger with which such accusations are made is frequently a symptom both of a failure to ask whether X does follow from what is said, and perhaps an inarticulate belief that the way things are is likely to conform to the way we would wish them to be. Of course, pointing out unwelcome facts can be cold, pompous, insensitive, or simply unnecessary. When clinicians must break bad news, they must also choose the place, the timing, and the manner of delivery appropriately and they should allow the news to sink in slowly. A mean should be observed between rubbing it in and failing to communicate it clearly. But the sceptical attitude I recommend requires trying to keep a firm, unsentimental eye on reality. Facts, unfortunately, do not always respect feelings.

The Transgender Conflict One of the most explosive conflicts to emerge in recent years is the one concerning transgender rights. It is often inaccurate to call this a debate, since even in academic circles the issue has acquired a peculiar toxicity, with ‘blockings’ on social media, attempts to ‘no-platform’ speakers and personal abuse being commonplace. I have already noted how the ‘gender-­critical’ view has been subjected to protests and speaker disinvitations, and since the petition to prevent Germaine Greer from addressing an audience at Cardiff University in 2015, there have been several other protests – notably against Selina Todd, an Oxford historian and Kathleen

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Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University in the UK. Stock has faced calls for her to be fired, and other unpleasantness, and her responses have mostly been a model of courtesy and reason. None of this, however, takes away from the fact that transgender individuals continue to be abused and violently attacked. In the light of this, it is important to examine the questions raised by the  concept of gender identity, since this underpins the idea that one might have a body that has never been aligned with one’s real gender identity. We also need to discuss how people who present with ‘gender dysphoria’ or whatever term we should use, may be helped by health care professionals, should they request such help, or how society should regard them. The questions, some of which are clearly philosophical, are by no means easy to answer. But the present climate of mutual hostility between different camps and a raft of proposed legislative measures and codes to deal with the issue necessitate as honest and rigorous a discussion as possible. I believe that philosophical analysis can get us somewhere, at least in spelling out the problems, though philosophers should not flatter themselves that they have the last word, or that their conclusions will carry much weight in policy making. Let us begin with a practical example that increasingly requires urgent resolution in policy. Imagine an adult with a biologically male body – someone who would normally be assumed to be a man because of their physical appearance – who presents themself (I use the admittedly awkward ‘themself ’ to avoid begging any crucial questions) at a women’s changing room at a health club. On being challenged, they say they are a woman and so should be admitted, just like the other women there. But they are told they have no right to be there, on the grounds of having a have a clearly male physique and therefore not being a woman. How might the conversation, assuming it can remain civil, be teased out? It is conceivable that the visitor believes themself to be a biological female. If they have had the relevant surgery and have formally transitioned, complete with certification, the claim would not be obviously false, especially if the transition is of many years’ standing. But most trans women have not had surgery; in some cases, their claim to be a woman is based on self-identification (self-ID) as a woman. The current acrimonious conflict is about whether self-identification alone should be a ground

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for granting trans women access to ‘women’s spaces’, and it came to particular prominence in the UK in 2018, with a proposed amendment to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 that would allow self-ID alone to be sufficient for the access in question. I suspect that the idea that self-ID should be sufficient has been inadvertently encouraged by the fact that, in much official and everyday parlance, the word ‘sex’, referring to someone’s being male or female, has been almost entirely replaced with the word ‘gender’. For instance, if you apply for a job nowadays, you will probably be asked to state your ‘gender’, not your ‘sex’, and may be asked whether your gender is the gender you were ‘assigned at birth’ – a question which may be puzzling to the untutored, who had hitherto assumed that they were not ‘assigned a gender’ at birth but were discovered to be male or female (apart from some very rare intersex cases). It would not matter much if the word ‘gender’ had simply replaced the word ‘sex’, with no change in meaning; this happens all the time as language evolves. But the current practice concerning these terms is somewhat more complicated. The word ‘gender’ was originally used by second wave feminists to mean something clearly distinct from the word ‘sex’, which they were happy to retain: sex was a biological term, whereas ‘gender’ referred to psychosocial characteristics believed by these feminists, and indeed most feminists since then, to have been socialised into them, because of their sex. Whether they were right to think such characteristics are mostly or entirely explained in terms of socialisation is another matter. But at least there was a clear thesis. Masculinity, as opposed to biological maleness, was the cluster of psychological and behavioural characteristics that had been socialised into biological males, such as competitiveness, dominance, emotional distance, and an enthusiasm for multiple sexual partners. Femininity, as opposed to biological femaleness, was the set of characteristics that had been socialised into biological females, such as passivity, agreeableness, emotionality, sexual hesitancy, and empathy. A central aim of second wave feminism was to challenge society’s views about the proper relations between sex and gender. Hence, being biologically female was no good reason for being encouraged to be nurturing, passive, gentle, sexually modest, and so on. But since all known present societies overtly or covertly rear females to have feminine characteristics,

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that is, to conform to a feminine gender role, the job of feminism was to liberate them from these constraints, pointing out how subtly they can operate and liberating women from the false consciousness that encourages them to believe that this is what is good for them or what they naturally desire. These claims generate controversy, but for the moment the task is to see how the recent history of the word ‘gender’ has influenced thinking about transgender issues. The important point for now is that the claim that gender – masculine and feminine social traits – is socialised rather than innate should always have been understood as an empirical, causal claim, a claim that most contemporary feminists believe is true, but which might – at least conceptually speaking, be false. That is, there is no reason why we should not continue to use the term ‘gender’ to refer to behavioural and psychological traits usually associated with biological maleness or femaleness, while leaving the question of why men and women possess these traits (when they do) an open one. It should not be regarded as a conceptual matter that gendered traits are socialised; it should be treated as an empirical issue. This is, I think, is the clearest articulation of the second wave feminist claim, and once we understand it in this way, we should be able to have an empirically informed discussion about whether it is true. However, certain things happened that made this difficult. First, the claim was transformed from a debatable empirical observation into an article of faith: nowadays it is held as a dogma, especially in the academy and influential parts of the media, that these traits are entirely or mostly explained in terms of socialisation. In those circles, the very suggestion that these traits may have biological causes is met with groans and eye-­ rolls  – it can only come from crude sexist assumptions! Secondly, the dogma of socialisation led to ‘gender’ coming to mean something like ‘socialised traits related to being male or female’ and is almost entirely used nowadays on that assumption. In other words, there has been a shift from making the factual claim that socialisation accounts for the psychological and behavioural differences (i.e. gender differences) to the use of the term ‘gender’ with that very assumption built into it. If a trait is ‘gendered’ (in the current jargon) it is a conceptual truth that it is not innate.

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But return to the earlier observation about the use of the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The virtual abolition of the term ‘sex’ (except when referring to sexual activity) has left little room for the idea that the differences between men and women have much to do with biology. This is a cause for concern both for today’s gender-critical feminists and for social conservatives, though for different reasons. Gender-critical feminists like Kathleen Stock, who has published many articles on the subject (for example, Stock 2020) are greatly concerned that the category of biological femaleness – of being female-bodied – is being ignored by some transgender activists, to the detriment of natal women. According to gender-critical feminists, the right of female-bodied people to separate spaces, for example in changing rooms, prisons, hospital wards and women’s refuges is being overlooked. This is a practical concern that deserves attention, though it has drawn a hostile response from some militant transgender activists. But there is a theoretical concern too, for it is a quite a small psychological step from saying that society forms us to be male-gendered or female-gendered, to claiming that individuals can do this for themselves.

Gender Identity and Inner Sense To illustrate this, consider the idea that I am a woman, not because of the kind of body I have, but because I feel I am a woman; that I have a longstanding ‘inner sense’ (though perhaps that is not the right phrase) that I am female. I do not know whether most women have this feeling – it could be the topic of interesting research  – but I am sure that most women do not ground their belief that they are women on such a feeling. They base it on their biology. But many natal biological males who feel they are female, and perhaps wish to ‘transition’, have a sense, often experienced since childhood, that they are trapped in the wrong kind of body. They feel as though their essence is female and some of them desire to get as close as they can to having a body that matches this inner sense. We are now on extremely sensitive territory, but certain questions unavoidably present themselves. Given the reality of this persistent feeling, it must be a further question what it demonstrates. Sceptics remark, sometimes insensitively, that it is absurd to suppose that someone with a

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biologically male body could possibly be a woman, however genuine their feelings. Treating the idea in a dismissive tone rarely aids constructive dialogue. But we cannot avoid asking whether these feelings make true the claim that they are a woman. Suppose I harbour an intense inner sense that I am twenty-eight years old and six feet tall, rather than the somewhat older and shorter man that I am. Would having this invincible feeling make it true? If not, then exactly why is the transgender claim any more credible? The question this presses upon us is that of what it is to be male or female. Traditionally this has been assumed to be a purely biological matter, and that even if we cannot come up with a precise set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient biological conditions for being male or female, the question is still a biological one. But the transgender movement invites us to re-think whether biological considerations are necessary at all. An interesting possibility is as follows: that although biological attributes, such as the possession of a uterus or the XX chromosome, are usually reliable criteria for deciding whether someone is female, such criteria are still distinct from the underlying reality they point to. By way of comparison, consider the ‘definition’ of death. Before the advent of EEG scans, death was assumed to occur when heartbeat and/or breathing ceased. This was a good, usable criterion of death, since people whose hearts and breathing had stopped were clearly dead shortly afterwards. But technological advances in detecting brain activity led to a new ‘definition’ of death based on brain-stem functioning. This was certainly useful for the purpose of declaring the death of a patient whose organs could be artificially sustained so they could be transplanted, but it was doubtful that even these newer tests gave us insight into the metaphysical nature of death. If we don’t know what death is, then we don’t know what ‘brain death’ is. Perhaps this remains an unsolved philosophical conundrum, or perhaps, as the Catholic Church maintains, the moment of death, metaphysically speaking, is the moment when the soul and body are separated. On this view, biological criteria of death are no more than rough indicators of when this occurs. A similar idea might apply to what (if anything) maleness and femaleness essentially consist in. This opens up the possibility that some

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biological males (for now, let us not argue about whether they are biologically male) have a longstanding veridical subjective sense of being female – a sense that corresponds with reality  - and that this sense is a better pointer to their essential ‘gender identity’ than their biological maleness. Hence, on this understanding (and there may be other ways to defend the idea) trans women are correct to sense themselves as female, despite having biologically male bodies. And although the discussion has so far, perhaps a little arbitrarily, been about trans women, there is no reason why the same arguments should not apply to biological females who have an inner sense that they are male. Even allowing for this possibility, however, there are still some unanswered questions. How reliable is the inner sense of being female, as a pointer to the essential gender identity of trans women? Should we take this as being, if not literally infallible, as being at least reliable, and possibly the best authority on the matter? Perhaps more importantly, if being a girl or woman is essentially a matter of having a directly introspectable female gender identity, why is it so important to many trans women to adjust their bodies, and why do they have the sense (when they do) that their bodies are misaligned with their true gender? The question of first-person authority is reminiscent of a position rarely defended nowadays, which is often called ‘Cartesian’. But here, we need not argue that a trans woman (or trans man) does not have ‘privileged access’ to the experience that they call ‘being a woman/man’, since the real question is of what the existence of this feeling tells us. This question is two-fold: there is the question of why the feeling in question should be called the feeling of ‘being a woman/man’, and there is the question of whether, on the basis of this feeling, one should conclude that one really is a woman/man. Impatience with the first question is understandable: if you have had this feeling since childhood, it appears impertinent to question its subjective interpretation. There is no need to do so here, since the interesting question is the second. Critics of this view will immediately pounce on it, saying that since it is obvious that maleness or femaleness is biological, there is no need to consider any subjective experiences that suggest that one’s sex (or gender, if the critics are prepared to use this word) is other than that shown by the biological reality. But this only gives us a stand-off, at least, in so far as

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only two possible positions have so far been articulated. It is possible to argue, as we have seen, that the fundamental sexual division is really a matter of gender identity, and that this can come apart from biological sex. This idea is complicated by the fact that many people claim that there are not only two genders, but a much larger or even indeterminate number – a development that the untutored see as a reductio ad absurdum of all such gender-talk. But for the moment, let us not challenge the view that there are only two genders; to do otherwise would over-complicate the argument. The question, again, is whether the felt sense of gender identity should be regarded as more reliable an indicator of whether one is male or female (and note the danger of framing the issue in a question-­ begging way) than biological sex. And so far, we have only seen it asserted that the sense of gender identity is indeed more reliable. Some philosophers who are also trans women have offered answers to this. For example, L. Mollica (Mollica 2018) attacks Stock for producing ‘a bunch of morally outrageous and intellectually inane drivel’ when she argues that trans women are not women but eventually articulates what is probably a crucial consideration: that many trans people do not (or not only) experience body dysphoria (the clinical term often used) but also social dysphoria. Speaking personally, she says she is not interested in appearing to be a woman (for example, by dressing in feminine clothes) but rather desires to be treated as a woman. The intriguing question, now, is what this means. It is presumably not a matter of being treated in ways that many people would now regard as sexist, and against which feminists always argued. Indeed, feminists, whether gender-critical or not, regard it as their central mission to abolish many or most of the ways women have traditionally been treated because they were women. And they can obviously reiterate their feminist view that biological sex should (at least in many contexts) not constrain how one is treated: being biologically male or female should not constrain one’s social behaviour or role. If a trans woman wants to behave in traditionally non-masculine ways or be treated in ways that do not pre-suppose that they either are, or ought to be, ‘masculine’, feminists can hardly disapprove. What else, then, might the desire to be treated as a woman amount to?

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I can only speculate here, but maybe this is, at least partly, about being treated as if they had a female body. If this is true, it may be at least part of what explains the desire to make a physical transition. I have already mentioned the puzzle of why so many trans women feel their bodies are misaligned with their gender identity, if biology really has nothing to do with gender identity. One could, perhaps fruitfully, argue that the sense of misalignment really comes from the desire not to be treated in ways that male-bodied people are often treated, on account of their biological maleness, and that the physical transition is seen as the best way accomplish this. This would make physical transition more of a means to the goal and less integral to the goal itself. This certainly should be considered, and perhaps some gender-critical feminists have not taken account of it. Nevertheless, we should also consider whether society is considerably less traditionally sexist than it was and that it is far easier, at least in Western societies, to live in accordance with non-traditional gender roles. More importantly, there is an awkward problem when it comes to sexual relationships. Some gender-critical feminists, some of whom (including Stock) are also lesbians, voice concern that some trans women also identify as lesbians and hope, or even expect, to have sexual relationships with lesbian ‘cis-women’. This encounters the obvious problem that generally speaking, lesbians do not sexually desire male-bodied people, whatever their self-declared gender identity or sexuality. This is a minefield on its own, and I do not have space to go into it. It generates mutual and often intemperate accusations of exaggeration and misrepresentation, some of which are probably justified. But it does bring us back to the central theme of this chapter – that although there is much room for discussion of what the reality is when it comes to gender (and all such discussion should be civil and rational) reality itself has no respect for our beliefs or our feelings. Enquiry in general, and especially about politically explosive subjects, should aim to conform our beliefs to reality, not to invent a reality that conforms to our beliefs. Of course, notions like knowledge and reality are philosophically rich and difficult. But that should not be an excuse to ignore this simple, general point.

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Note 1. This misunderstanding came out in a discussion on Channel Four News in the UK, between Jordan Peterson and news anchor Cathy Newman, in January 2018. Peterson said that one reason why women were paid less than men was that they were more agreeable than men, hence less assertive in asking for pay rises. Newman initially read Peterson as celebrating the greater agreeableness of women. This discussion soon went viral.

Bibliography Blackburn, Simon. 18th February 2019. How Can We Teach Objectivity in a Post-Truth Era? New Statesman. Descartes, René. 1960. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. Feldman, Richard. 2007. Reasonable Religious Disagreement. In Philosophers without Gods, ed. Louise Antony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallup. 2nd June 2014. In US., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins. https://news.gallup.com/rpoll/170822/believe-creationist-viewhuman-origins.aspx Gittos, Luke. 2015. Why Rape Culture Is a Dangerous Myth. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Kant, Immanuel. 1949. On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives. In Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. Lewis White Beck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1964. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H.  J. Paton. London: Harper & Row. Law, Stephen. 2006. The War for Children’s Minds. London/New York: Routledge. Levy, Neil. 2002. Moral Relativism, A Short Introduction. Oxford: Oneworld. Mollica, L. 26th May 2018. Why Trans Philosophers Are Angry at Stock. Medium. Oppy, Graham. 2010. Disagreement. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68: 183–199. Peterson, Jordan. 2018. 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos. New York: Random House Canada. Rachels, James. 2010. The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ed. Stuart Rachels, 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc.

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Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Stock, Kathleen. 19th June 2020. Of course sex materially exists. Medium. The Independent. 22nd January 2017. Donald Trump’s Presidential Counsellor Kellyanne Conway Says Sean Spicer Gave ‘Alternative Facts’ at First Press Briefing. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kellyanneconway-sean-spicer-alternative-facts-lies-press-briefing-donald-trumpadministration-a7540441.html Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

4 Power, Privilege, and Identity

The themes discussed so far touch on the importance of what is loosely known as Enlightenment reason in trying to reach true beliefs and reasonable behaviour when it comes to some of the most contentious issues of today. In Chap. 1, I outlined the centrality of free, uninhibited enquiry as epistemically virtuous and better than other methods in uncovering important realities. In Chap. 2, I discussed more specifically the problem of offensive and harmful expressions, concluding that while there is a strong presumption in favour of being allowed to make known, when appropriate, the fruits of enquiry, the possibility of serious harm to others resulting from such speech must be taken into account. How best to do this is a difficult question and different views are held even among those who, like me, adopt a broadly Mill-inspired approach to the issue. One reason which has especially come to the fore in twenty-first century conflicts concerns power imbalances between speakers and those spoken to (or about). As we saw, Stanley and Manne analyse the disturbances at Yale University over Halloween costumes as rooted in the frustration of underprivileged minority groups at their inability to get their voices heard by the powerful. When their protests became disorderly, this was criticised as infantile and unreasonable behaviour, rather than an understandable © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_4

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reaction to being historically ignored. This example is illustrative of what lies behind a great many free speech debates. Those who defend the freedom to state certain unpopular views regard opponents as ‘snowflakes’ who cannot handle being upset by words that may be true. Those who want greater restrictions on speech regard defenders of free speech, in these contexts, as people who wallow in their own privilege, or at least are culpably unaware of it, and hypocritically attack their critics for wanting expression and debate closed down, without realising that this is exactly what they have been doing for centuries to underprivileged groups, and continue to do when they criticise those groups for exercising their right to protest. This is a broad-brush way to characterise the conflict, but it will do for the present purpose. For the principal focus of the present culture wars is power and privilege – about who has them, who does not, and about how relevant this is to questions about free speech and objective truth. Both questions are profoundly polarising and find their way into many seemingly minute problems.

Male Privilege But let us begin with an increasingly polarising element of the culture wars – the position of women in twenty-first century western societies. Feminism is the movement whose defining purpose is to highlight the injustices suffered by women, because they are women, to analyse their causes and propose political solutions. The often-unstated assumption is that women systematically suffer more, or worse, injustices than men do because they are men; otherwise the movement should be called ‘equalism’  – a term that is generally rejected by feminists because it fails to register that women are systematically discriminated against in numerous ways whereas men are not, or at least not nearly as much. There are different varieties of feminism and differences among feminists as to what the most important issues are. These differences of emphasis and ideological heritage attract labels that seem obscure to the uninitiated. Historically there have been disputes between liberal, radical, socialist, and libertarian currents within feminism, and more recently

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there have been clashes between those who stress ‘intersectionality’ and those who are ‘gender-critical’. Partly cutting across these categories, there is also a distinction, made explicit by (for example) the host of the ‘Factual Feminist’ webcasts, Christina Hoff Sommers (Sommers 1994) between classical ‘equity feminists’ and the more contemporary ‘gender feminists’, the former stressing the importance of equal rights for men and women, and the latter tending to see all the structures of society as pervaded by an often invisible force of gender hierarchy. The task of feminism, especially on the second view, is to expose and perhaps ‘deconstruct’ this hierarchy and demonstrate that even the most trivial-seeming assumptions and practices exhibit patriarchal values and power. The two approaches, of course, are not logically incompatible, but the first does not entail the second, and need have no view about the exact extent to which current practices do constitute a gender hierarchy. Moreover, many feminists ideas, some of which originated in the academy, are now widely found in popular culture. Parts of the mainstream media make frequent references to ‘male privilege’, ‘toxic masculinity’ ‘rape culture’ and ‘internalised misogyny’. News items referring to the latest examples of the gender pay gap are frequently highlighted, even by the more conservative news outlets. For those who take an interest in these matters (and I suspect that most people do not) such currents have given rise, broadly speaking, to two reactions. One is the cementing and reinvigorating of feminist sympathies and a desire to lead feminism into new territories, with proclamations that although the position of women has greatly improved over the last century, there is still a great deal to be done: male violence against women is still rife, men still earn more, women are still underrepresented in the top echelons of business and politics, men still dominate the arts and sport, and so on. The other reaction is to highlight and often celebrate the many improvements but conclude that there is not much more for feminism to do. Commentators who take this view argue that contemporary feminism (sometimes described as ‘third’ or ‘fourth wave’, but the differences between the more recent ‘waves’ have become nebulous) has become obsessed with obscure or trivial matters, and, ironically, disempowers women by encouraging them to think of themselves as fragile. For example, the online libertarian magazine Spiked has a whole section of

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articles devoted to debunking contemporary feminism. In the view of writers for this magazine, such as Ella Whelan and Joanna Williams, women living in Western liberal democracies have little to complain about nowadays. For sure, they once really did have important fights on their hands – for example, for the vote, education, entry to the professions, equal pay with men doing the same work, the right not to depend on men for social status, reproductive liberty, child care and freedom from domestic drudgery – but those fights have mostly been won. These commentators emphasise the astounding success of earlier generations of feminists in mostly achieving these things, and they compare these pioneering feminists favourably to the ones whose voices are heard today, who have (in their view) been reduced to raising hyperbolic objections to ‘mansplaining’ (the male practice of explaining something to a woman in a patronising way), misplaced compliments, a virtually non-existent ‘pay gap’, the over-enthusiastic male pursuit of women for sex and all kinds of ‘stereotyping’ of women. As Douglas Murray puts it in his polemic The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity, (Murray 2019: 94) the success of first and second wave feminism has led the movement to suffer ‘severe symptoms of St. George in retirement syndrome’: having slain the dragon, St. George has to hunt for smaller and eventually imaginary dragons. Commentators on both sides have little difficulty writing persuasively, since there is no shortage of anecdotes available to back up both positions. It is not hard to find many ways in which women are arguably not granted the same respect or opportunities as men. For example, Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl, the Logic of Misogyny (Manne 2018) applies her analysis of misogyny, which she sees as manifested more in ingrained societal structures than in conscious hatred of women, to a range of wrongs perpetrated against women, including the horrific Isla Vista massacre by Elliot Rodger in May 2014. (Manne, 2018: 34–41). This episode is worth noting because to many feminists, it was a confirmation of the culture of male privilege that still pervades society. Rodger was a twenty-two-year-old man who was angry that women were never attracted to him, despite his being a ‘supreme gentleman’. Instead, women threw themselves at ‘obnoxious brutes’. In a video, he announced that there would be a Day of Retribution. The bloody retribution began when

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he stabbed three men to death in his apartment and attempted to conduct a massacre in a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara. When this plan was foiled, he went on a killing spree of both men and women, before shooting himself dead in his car. These events led to both a wave of feminist commentary to the effect that Rodger’s resentful, self-entitled misogyny was only the tip of the iceberg, and to angry counter-commentary that ‘not all men’ were like this – indeed, this phrase became a hashtag on Twitter. Manne, of course, does not think that most men go on killing sprees or are as overtly misogynistic as Rodger, but she takes his vengeful act as symptomatic of a misogynistic culture of male entitlement (the pathologically narcissistic Rodger seems to have thought his rejection by women was a denial of his rights) and female subordination. Manne’s aim is to provide a theoretical analysis of misogyny and its explanatory power, and she provides many examples of the unjust male-female power relations she thinks it explains. But we can accept the veracity of her concrete accounts of horrors perpetrated against women without endorsing all her complex, scholarly, theoretical ideas. The point here is that the contemporary feminist side of these debates have no difficulty in providing evidence of wrongs done to women, because they are women. In the same way, thinkers who are deeply sceptical of contemporary feminism and the concept of male privilege can also provide anecdotes that illustrate the absurdity of some claims doing the rounds. In her polemical but amply researched book Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars, Joanna Williams (Williams 2017) provides numerous examples of feminist complaints that she regards as overblown or guilty of misleading omissions. One example she gives from the UK is of an office receptionist, Nicola Thorp, who in 2016 was sent home for not wearing high-heeled shoes. This generated a petition and subsequent report from Members of Parliament that recommended that such discriminatory practices be outlawed. Williams counters that even if Thorp was mistreated, there is not much feminist mileage in the case: both men and women are often expected to wear restrictive clothing to work (Williams, 2017: 96). Another example is a report that women were being overcharged for everyday necessities such as razor blades and clothes. Williams counters that men too might be overcharged for things

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mostly bought by men, such as replica football stripes and video games. Williams’ book contains many more examples of how feminist complaints have counterparts in complaints that men too can justifiably make. And if she is right, this is relevant to the debate about feminism in general. Feminism claims that women suffer systematic discrimination and bad treatment, because they are women, in a way that men do not suffer discrimination (or at least, suffer it less) because they are men. To be a feminist, it is clearly not enough to believe that many unfair or bad things happen to women, since bad things happen to most people. The question is whether a significant number of the bad things that happen to women, happen due to unjust discrimination against women and significantly outweigh, in the overall picture, any unjust discrimination men suffer because they are men. People from both sides of this dispute about the state of contemporary feminism write books and articles containing these kinds of anecdotes. But they tend to distract us from the philosophical interest of feminism. The movement has certainly been influential, even if some do not think it is influential enough. But what are the central moral concerns at its heart, and what kind of empirical evidence do we need, if any, to reach conclusions about its merits?

The Basics I propose that we start from a relatively old-fashioned and simple understanding of feminism, famously championed by J.  S. Mill in his The Subjection of Women (Mill 1996). Some of Mill’s central arguments are reiterated especially well by Janet Radcliffe Richards in her classic 1980 book The Sceptical Feminist (Radcliffe Richards 1980/1994) and subsequent shorter works. The contributions of Radcliffe Richards and other writers of her generation are underestimated in the current climate. This is partly because her book is now relatively old and some of the examples she discusses are obviously dated. But I suspect it is mainly because today’s feminists regard her liberal framework with suspicion, either because it does not get us far enough, or because it should be rejected altogether.

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But it is an especially useful place to start and there is a refreshing clarity, rigour, and lack of dogmatism in her treatment of the subject. Should we be feminists at all? Even if this seems an outrageous question, it should be asked. In 2016 a Fawcett Society survey1 found that only 9 percent of British women call themselves feminists. If women are oppressed, and if feminism is the solution, then one would expect far more women to embrace it. The usual response is that women do not realise they are oppressed and need their consciousness raised. Yet according to the same survey, most men and women believe in gender equality. In that case, either they are feminists without realising it  – probably because they conceive of feminism as ‘extreme’, bigoted or man-hating – or there really is a distinction between feminism, at least as it is now, and belief in gender equality. The feminism advocated by Mill was wonderfully economical, in that it made no a priori assumptions about the real nature of the sexes, or the choices women would make if freed from social conditioning. Mill was talking about oppressive laws and social constraints in mid-Victorian England, for example concerning the vote, marriage, and property, and for that reason his feminism (if it can even be called that on today’s understanding) may seem dated and irrelevant. The essential idea inspired by Mill is that being a woman is, in most contexts in which women are discriminated against, no proper ground for being treated differently to a man. That someone is a woman is no reason for barring her entry into a profession, or for paying her less than a man doing work of equal value, or in any way considering her interests as having less moral weight than a man’s interests. Furthermore, Mill made the devastatingly effective point that if the different spheres occupied by men and women were natural – freely chosen according to their innate inclination – there should be no need to enforce divisions of role. That there is a felt need to ensure that men occupy one sphere and women another, is evidence that men and women are not so naturally different after all. Radcliffe Richards refers to a discussion of a now dated example of a bus company refusing to hire women drivers, allegedly because women would not be up to the job. (Radcliffe Richards 1980/1994: 137). The fact that it was necessary to come up with such an implausible ground for refusing to hire women was evidence of a tacit admission that ‘because they are women’ was a

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hopeless ground for exclusion. But the solution is not to insist indignantly and a priori that women are up to the job (though there is no reason to doubt this!) but to subject both male and female applicants to the same capability tests. If it turns out that no women pass fair tests, then they would be excluded for failing the tests, and not because they are women. No less important, even if hardly any women pass the tests, this would be no reason for not hiring women who do pass them – to do that would be to allow statistical facts about women’s capability to count against individual women who qualify. It is, of course, possible to reject even this simple case against sex discrimination on highly conservative grounds. One might take a neo-­ Aristotelian view of the nature of males and females, arguing that men and women have essentially different natures, despite there being men and women whose individual characteristics are a-typical of their kind, and that it is membership of a kind with a certain defining nature that should determine social role. No doubt this argument would stress that only women give birth, that bearing and rearing children are essential to the continuation of society, and that women are naturally suited to nurturing children. Various conclusions would then be drawn about the proper division of labour (no pun intended) between men and women, with men being naturally suited to the world of work outside the home and women to a primarily domestic role. I merely note this argument as an aside. It is something that is legitimately discussible and should not be shouted down or dismissed a priori, though it will be an uphill struggle to show that women who do not have children should be pressurised into a particular social role, or that professionally unambitious men who love looking after children should be pressurised into another role.

Feminism and Evolutionary Biology In any case, neo-Aristotelian arguments like this have long fallen out of favour, largely due to the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. In the Aristotelian world view, the whole of nature was a teleological system and everything within it had a natural purpose. The

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eyes were for seeing, rain was for watering plants, eating was for nourishment, and so on. Although the implications of Darwinian biology are still debated2 (Radcliffe Richards 2000) the theory of evolution by natural selection poses a serious challenge to teleological views, at least in the realm of biology. It is much harder now to argue that men and women have natural ends, at least in a normative sense, still less different natural ends. Moreover, those influenced by David Hume’s famous claim that ‘ought’ statements cannot logically be derived from descriptive claims about how things are, frequently use this to counter any normative claims based on what is ‘natural’. The soundness of Hume’s argument continues to be debated, but I shall not discuss this further. In the light of the Darwinian assault on the Aristotelian world view and its threat to traditional views of the ‘natural’ social roles that should be occupied by men and women, it is ironic that Darwinian ideas are nowadays considered more of a threat than a help to feminism. This is, in my view, unfortunate. No doubt it comes partly from the historical misuse of Darwinian biology to support ideas that Darwin would certainly have rejected, and which are not entailed by any of his discoveries. For example, the ‘Social Darwinist’ movement of the early twentieth century promoted the idea that the ‘survival of the fittest’ should be politically encouraged, and its most appalling fruits were manifested in Nazi Germany (Glover 2001: 317). But the suspicion also comes from the fear that Darwinian biology, and especially its offshoots such as evolutionary psychology, undermine the view that all (or most) of the average psychological and behavioural differences between men and women are due to culture rather than nature. The view that they are socialised and not ‘hard-wired’ by nature is orthodox in the academic humanities and feminist commentary. Indeed, challenging it can produce a shocked response: ‘So you are really saying that it is right, natural and inevitable that we should live in a sexist society!’ I have already referred to this rhetorical move, and it is also found in respect of other flashpoints of the culture wars. The proper rebuttal is to stress that, although beliefs of this kind may be evidence of sexism (or racism, dislike of gay people and so on) in the speaker – after all, sexists and racists do sometimes appeal to science to justify their opinions – it is a further question whether these beliefs are constitutive of sexism or some

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other bad attitude. The Principle of Charity, not known for its observance in the culture wars, requires that we do not assume the worst about a speaker, but try to put the best possible construction on what is said before criticising it. Just because an innocent-seeming belief that p often goes with, or is a rationalisation for, a not-so-innocent belief that q, it does not follow that no one can believe p without believing q. The psychologist Steven Pinker has tried to debunk both the assumption that the average differences between male and female psychology are caused entirely (or mostly) by social conditioning, and the assumption that to be a feminist one must believe this (Pinker 2003, 2016: 337–71). As part of his attempt to demolish the general ‘blank slate’ view of human nature, he proposes about a dozen scientific grounds for his view. One ground refers to evolutionary biology: ‘Many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what an evolutionary biologist who knew only their physical differences would predict. Throughout the animal kingdom, when the female has to invest more calories and risk in each offspring… she also invests more in nurturing the offspring after birth, since it is more costly for a female to replace a child than for a male to replace one.’ (Pinker 2003, 2016: 346). He also refers to the influence of testosterone on behaviour: ‘Variation in the level of testosterone among different men, and in the same man in different seasons or at different times of day, correlates with libido, self-confidence, and the drive for dominance’ (Pinker 2003, 2016: 347) and ‘When women preparing for a sex-change operation are given androgens, they improve on tests of mental rotation and get worse on tests of verbal fluency.’ (Pinker 2003, 2016: 348). The overall message is that biological factors contribute significantly to the psychological differences between men and women. These arguments are easily interpreted as concealing a sinister, anti-­ feminist agenda. The first one can be offered as an explanation for why women are more nurturing of their offspring than men and why it may be ‘natural’ (in the sense of having biological causes) for women with small children to choose not to work, or to take part-time or relatively stress-free work, if they can. It also highlights the fact that, historically and pre-historically, pregnancy was significantly risky for women and in many environments still is. Only a century ago it was quite common for women even in relatively advanced nations to die in childbirth. Advances

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in medicine, and in the availability of contraception and abortion, have greatly lessened this and other risks, but in evolutionary time, these advances are extremely recent; it was only in the 1960s that contraception was made widely available to unmarried women, something that many people thought scandalous back then. Furthermore, arguments like these are also used to explain why men appear keener than women on multiple sexual partners and pornography. Some women enjoy these things, of course, and may be more ashamed than men to admit it. Nevertheless, on the general view promoted by Pinker and evolutionary psychologists, the physical differences between the sexes predict that women will be choosier and more careful in their (heterosexual) sex lives than men: men can often walk away from an unwanted pregnancy they have caused, whereas women are left to deal with it. Besides (on this contested view) natural selection predicts relative male polygamy, from the point of view of spreading their ‘selfish genes’, in Richard Dawkins’ metaphor (Dawkins 1976). To maximise his reproductive success, a man needs to have as many women as possible bearing his children, whereas a woman has little to gain reproductively from having multiple male partners. The other argument from Pinker that I highlighted, about the effect of androgens on women, touches on similarly controversial territory. The suggestion that men are naturally better at visuo-spatial tasks and that women are naturally more verbally fluent provokes much feminist irritation; after all, this is the reason sometimes given for why more men than women study STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Medicine) subjects at university and are more likely to proceed to careers in these fields. Most feminists regard this as due to unjust discrimination arising from gender-biased stereotyping. Indeed, when Google engineer James Damore circulated a memo3 to his colleagues in August 2017, claiming that natural average differences between men and women were part of the reason why fewer women than men worked in computer coding, he was instantly fired. Whatever the merits of his arguments, it was scandalous that he was dismissed from his job for raising the issue – especially since he never said that women who were naturally good at this work should face any discrimination within the field. If it is a serious problem that more men than women work in these fields (and even this needs to be

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argued) we need an open, civilised debate about what causes this situation; after all, if sustained efforts to encourage women to enter these fields are failing to acknowledge a significant cause of the disparity, women may benefit less than they might. A vexing question is of how laypeople and policy makers are to know the truth about the views of Pinker, Damore and scientists of their persuasion. These views have increasingly trenchant supporters and critics. Among critics, Cordelia Fine (Fine 2010) argues that most gender differences arise within cultural environments that influence what hormones we produce and how our genes work. She also points to the plasticity of the brain, which suggests considerable influence of environmental factors on how the brain develops. She mentions peer pressure during childhood, which can make boys afraid of seeming feminine, and claims that girls perform better on a test of mechanical ability when they are told it is a test of sewing ability. She also points out that many people who pride themselves on their lack of bias persist in making stereotypical associations and claims that ideological bias can affect the outcomes of scientific investigation. The last point is no doubt true. But bias affects us all and can work in support of all kinds of opinions. If some people believe that science refutes ‘blank slate’ theories of human nature and sex differences, because that is what they want to believe, then it is likely that ideological bias also affects those who, like Fine, hold the opposite view. Contemporary feminists generally do not welcome evidence that psychological sex differences are explained in biological terms. For most of them, it is axiomatic that gender is an oppressive social construction. Perhaps their reaction would be lessened if they could be persuaded that the case for a kind of feminism does not depend on these empirical assumptions. Pinker, for his part, is adamant that his explanations for the differences between men and women are consistent with the  equity feminism defended by Christina Hoff Sommers and many other writers widely (and often wrongly) regarded as right-wing. Moreover, Pinker lists several women4 (Pinker, 342) who are working on the biological basis of sex differences and in evolutionary psychology and who agree with him on where the science points; he presumably regards these women as feminists, at least of the ‘equity’ variety. But his own statement on this matter

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is succinct: ‘…equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.’5 (Pinker, 340).

The Burden of Justification There are many popular books that argue on either side of the debate about the influence of biology on sex differences. The great problem we face when reading these works is that most of us are not scientific experts. I am certainly not. But a crucial question here is of the burden of justification. When we encounter two different views, both of which have emotionally laden political implications, how do we know whether one side carries a greater burden of justification than the other? Within the academic humanities, it seems to me (from conversations and commentaries, which are admittedly anecdotal) to be commonly assumed that it is Pinker’s side rather than the social constructionist view that must make its case. This assumption needs to be scrutinised. Questions about the burden of justification occur in a variety of contexts. In philosophy of religion there is the question of whether theists or atheists have a greater burden to discharge. Should we be atheists unless theists can produce a sound case for theism? This is not the place to enter that debate, but we should see that answers to ‘burden of justification’ questions are generally dependent on background information. If I am shown a closed wardrobe and am asked to estimate the likelihood that it contains a white shirt, it would be absurd to estimate the chance as near zero just because I cannot now see any white shirts in it. Wardrobes sometimes contain white shirts and sometimes do not, so I should estimate the chance of this wardrobe containing white shirts accordingly. If the wardrobe is then opened and inspection reveals no shirts, then it would clearly be unreasonable to suspend judgement, on the ground that my vision might be impaired, or the wardrobe might have a hidden compartment, unless I have independent evidence that these are serious possibilities. When judging the likelihood of the ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ thesis being closer to the truth about male-female psychological differences, I suggest

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that the burden of justification is with both sides, since we have good independent evidence that in other areas, both biological and social factors play a significant role in influencing outcomes. In particular, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is widely confirmed, has great explanatory simplicity, and predicts certain human drives. How these drives show themselves in behaviour depends on extraordinarily complex environmental factors. Likewise, if there were no social influences on our behaviour, education would be pointless. How we turn out results from interactions between what are genetically given and the environment. Partly for this reason, there is a great need for tolerant and even-handed discussion of this issue. Unfortunately, there is currently a shortage of this. In some circles, the very mention of evolutionary psychology brings forth irritation and derision. But the real significance of the issue is its relevance to feminism. If I am right to suspect that most of today’s feminists take social constructionism for granted, we need to see how strong the ethical case for feminism can be if we suspend this assumption.

Sexual Justice The central moral concern of feminism is sexual justice. It should not be assumed that unequal outcomes – for example, with respect to average take-home pay for men and women – demonstrate injustice, though no doubt they sometimes do. However, it is important that outcomes are not skewed by sexual injustice. The possibility of non-social causes of unequal outcomes complicates the question of whether the inequalities thus caused are unjust. However, to quell any fears that I am about to defend an objectionable status quo, I should emphasise that even if certain inequalities, such as of average take-home pay, are partly accounted for by ‘natural’ (here, non-socialised) differences between the sexes  – and an interesting one is that women are more agreeable than men and less go-­ getting in the world of competitive work6 - it does not follow that this situation is desirable or that nothing should be done about it. What this possibility suggests is that if there is a problem, it is not obviously one of injustice. This is because women who choose to do less competitive work

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might be making this choice authentically, or at least, as authentically as any choice can be. The causes of this choice would be partly genetic, but it is not clear why such causes should take away from authenticity. If they would, we need some account of what truly authentic choices would be, and it is hard to give a clear answer to this, unless we (implausibly) try to define authenticity of choice in terms of the absence of any causal influences at all. This is why Mill was wise to be agnostic about what women would choose if social pressures were removed. The feminist objection to socialisation into the ways of a male-dominated society is, at root, that it channels women into roles that they do not authentically choose. Mill, of course, agreed that this was likely to be true, but did not rule out a priori that some of the choices women were expected to make, might also be choices they would make if the pressures were removed. At the same time, there could still be a case for trying to mitigate these natural differences, perhaps by deliberately socialising men and women in ways that counter the natural inequalities, given that the results of ‘natural’ causes are not entirely immutable. This would raise a host of interesting questions about the intrinsic desirability of men and women having similar characteristics, as well as the role of different kinds of causes in promoting or inhibiting personal autonomy and authenticity. There is a further point to be made in assessing the merits of the current rhetoric of ‘male privilege’ and the cogency of the contemporary feminist project. As remarked earlier, the movement that opposes this privilege is called feminist because it holds that women, and not men, are systematically discriminated against due to their sex. But the basic principle of equality, at least as outlined by Mill, would also condemn female privilege. So, to assess the state of play, it is important to take a wide perspective and ask whether the case for feminism, rather than simple equalism, is weakened by the existence of injustices (as opposed to misfortunes) suffered by men because they are men. Here, it is relevant to mention some ills that men appear to suffer more than women do, stressing that this leaves open the question of whether these misfortunes arise from sexual injustice. It is well known that more men commit suicide than women, and men’s welfare advocates7 add that men are more likely than women to be victims of a number of ills, including street violence, prison rape, homelessness, workplace injury, loss of

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custody of children and alcoholism. It is also claimed that boys now perform worse than girls at school8 and that domestic abuse perpetrated by women against men is underreported. Unfortunately, some feminists groan when they hear these things, lamenting that men are yet again deflecting attention from the injustices suffered by women, to whinge about their own woes. No doubt some men who make these complaints are doing these things, perhaps even seeing feminism as a conspiracy against them. But the facts, whatever they are, need to openly be acknowledged and their causes openly scrutinised. It may turn out that the ills suffered disproportionately by men do not result from systemic injustice but arise from chance misfortune or personal fault. The fact that far more men than women are in prison is strong evidence that most of the worst criminals are men. Feminists point to socialised masculinity as a large factor in this, and evolutionary psychologists claim that some of this behaviour, or at least behaviour that can lead to it, has been an adaptive trait for millions of years. Whatever the reality, it is likely to be nuanced, with no one explanation holding a monopoly of truth. Sadly, arguments about feminism have become tribal and divisive, with angry young women (who might be quite socially privileged) believing they are victims, and angry young men believing there is a conspiracy against them. Indeed, a small minority of these young men have taken to declaring themselves ‘Incels’ (‘Involuntary celibates’) and trolling women from basements. But I am optimistic enough to believe that men and women are not natural enemies and that respectful, factual analysis and the toning down of rhetoric could eventually diminish the toxicity of this dimension of the culture wars. The essential thing to remember, when discussing whether either male or female advantage is evidence of injustice, is that justice is not a divisible resource, like a cake. Reflection on justice requires us to find the right principles to govern how burdens and benefits should be distributed in the first place. It is decidedly not a zero-sum game, whereby justice requires giving ‘more justice’ to women and ‘less justice’ to men, because men have had ‘too much justice’ in the past and women have had ‘not enough justice’. The notion of too much justice is incoherent – a situation is either just or it is not, though injustices certainly vary in their severity. This does not in principle rule out ‘affirmative action’ or ‘reverse

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discrimination’ policies, provided that their moral purpose and intended effects are properly considered and efforts are made to monitor their effectiveness, as well as due consideration given to the multiplicity of possible causes of the inequalities they seek to remedy. The purpose of policies such as actively encouraging women and minorities to apply for jobs, or to give preference to them in hiring when other candidates are equally qualified, is not to ‘give more justice’ to these groups but to rectify an existing injustice. It is to neutralise the effects of injustices already supposed to exist and should not be allowed to treat hitherto allegedly privileged groups unjustly. But now we should return to the underlying issue. Do we, in the twenty-first century West, live in a society of ‘male privilege’, pervaded by ‘toxic masculinity’ and often invisible gender bias? Those who hold that we no longer do point to the huge advances feminism has made over the past century, such that almost no one in Western democracies would now seriously advocate that women should not have the vote or should be paid less than men for work of equal value. But contemporary feminists can, equally, point out that their critics start from the wrong point of comparison. Of course, we can all agree that feminism has made huge strides, but that is because the position of women for almost all of history was so outrageously bad. The removal of some obvious injustices does not show that there is not still far more to be done. If we concentrate on comparing the present situation in the West to the situation even fifty years ago, we can be lured into a false sense that all is well now. To some extent, today’s feminists are right. They are certainly right to say that, at least with respect to certain things such as domestic violence perpetrated by men against women, all is not well. At the same time, as social movements gather momentum and bureaucracies are created to ensure gender equality – often simplistically defined in terms of straightforward equality of outcome – people will be tempted automatically to deny that change has gone far enough. Few people want to believe that their job promoting equality and diversity is less important than it once was. The only solution, hard to put into practice, is to have a sound idea in respect of what equality is desirable. A reasonable liberal view is that this is, at root, respect for autonomy – for the capacity to run one’s life in accordance with desires and values that are sufficiently self-chosen,

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accepting that all our desires and values have powerful external influences. There also needs to be a coherent idea of how to measure progress. This means looking at the facts as objectively as possible and finding out what solutions are both fair and feasible. No doubt there is progress still to be made. But the current rhetoric of male privilege, the simplistic tropes about toxic masculinity (is there such a thing as toxic femininity?) and a pre-occupation with the dark and dangerous side of being a woman  – encouraged by initially justified concerns about male sexual violence and abuse of power, shown in movements like Me Too – have come to dominate the discussion, with some disempowering and divisive effects. Whatever we say about the evils and the incidence of sexual assault, due process for accused men should never be compromised. However much we want to encourage women to reach their potential, we should be sensitive to all the possible reasons why some do not, and not merely the ones at the top of the feminist agenda. No less important, we need to do these things without succumbing to the paranoia of recent manifestations of anti-feminism, which sees men as the new victim class and women – especially feminists – as the enemy.

White Privilege In line with the admittedly old-fashioned approach to sexual equality outlined above, we can make similar remarks about racism. This issue is more divisive, especially in the United States, which of course has a particularly distressing and pervasive history of racism. In that country, it has persisted even after many other egalitarian ideals gained widespread, though not universal, acceptance. For example, Mark Lilla (Lilla 2017: 33–5) writes of a new American liberal ‘catechism’ that emerged after the Great Depression and the Second World War and captured the hearts of most Americans. This focused on four universal freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But Lilla notes that African Americans were effectively disenfranchised from many of the programmes that arose from the new vision of American society that underpinned the catechism, due to resistance from the ‘Dixiecrats’ – the States’ Rights Democratic Party. Lilla remarks that this

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catechism, although class based, allowed into the ‘deserving class’ people from any walk of life – factory workers, farmers, Protestants and Catholics, Northerners and Southerners. But it did not include black people. Formal segregation existed until the 1960s. Moreover, naked anti-black racism has had an ugly recrudescence in the form of the ‘alt-right’, which comes from identity politics based on whiteness. Here is not the place to go into the history of racism, and resistance to it, in America, but most Americans, whether right or left leaning, are conscious of the issue, even if they divide on the best ways to tackle it or on how pervasive it still is. However, we cannot avoid the question of what racism is, which should be separated from that of what kinds of behaviour manifest it or who is best equipped to make pronouncements on it. This is urgent, since there are those who say only members of powerful groups can be racist. There is also a furious controversy about whether certain beliefs about the causes of average differences between groups are racist, or at least are strong evidence of racism in those who hold those beliefs. I suggest, as a starting point, that we should define racism in a similar way to sexism. Just as sexists believe that one sex is somehow superior to the other sex and that this justifies giving people sex-based advantages, so racism is roughly the view that some races are, in some way, superior to other races, on account of race; that being a person of a particular race – whatever that might mean - is a good reason for conferring advantages or disadvantages on that person, for treating that person with more or less respect than someone of another ethnicity. A racist, on this bare account, is someone who thinks that a person’s ethnicity is an indicator of the moral importance of their interests. However, some people do not recognise this as an adequate definition, or at least as so limited as to allow all kinds of racist attitudes and conduct while denying that it is racist. For example, people might be sincere when they deny that they are racist, even though what they say and do suggests otherwise. A landlord looking for tenants might select only white applicants from a pool of applicants of various ethnicities, claiming that ethnicity has nothing to do with his selection process. It is possible that he is sincere – perhaps there is some relevant criterion he is applying, such as likelihood of paying the rent – and here, of course, there will be important questions about the origins of wealth inequality between different

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ethnic populations, highlighting the economic impact down the generations of historic racism. But suppose that, despite his denial, there is no plausible explanation other than race that determines his choices. Here arises the concept of unconscious or ‘implicit’ bias, which we can reasonably suspect is operating when there is a clear pattern to someone’s preferences and no clear evidence of any relevant ground to explain these preferences. In these cases, the denial of the bias should not be taken at face value. However, while we should accept the reality of implicit bias (without necessarily agreeing with all attributions of it) this does not mean we should revise our initial definition of racism. All it tells us is that beliefs and attitudes need not be consciously held to be real. We constantly process information without being aware of it, but sometimes we can easily be made aware of it. As Ernest Gellner says in his critique of the psychoanalytic movement,9 unconscious beliefs and desires are much like conscious ones, except that we are only aware of the latter, at least at any given moment. On this understanding, racial prejudice might operate unconsciously to influence one’s appraisal of individuals from that group, which is then rationalised in a way that makes no reference to ethnicity. The unconscious attitude, here, would still be the one described by our initial definition of racism – a disposition to make a higher or lower estimation of an individual, or the importance of their interests, according to his or her race. The very concept of race is contentious, and some people regard it as a ‘social construct’. I have already brought forward objections to social constructionist views of gender, interpreted as the view that the non-­ physical characteristics associated with males and females are wholly (or mostly) socially caused. The social constructionist claim about race is somewhat different: it seems to be that ‘race’ is a pseudo-category with no objective basis, invented by oppressors to justify oppression. I shall not go into this question here, except to note that, for some people, the alternative to social constructionism is some kind of ‘essentialism’ about race, which entails that there are natural racial kinds or that racial membership is part of an individual’s intrinsic constitution. Against essentialism, it is obvious that the similarities between different ethnic groups are far greater than the differences and that the idea of an ethnically

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homogenous ancestry for any individual is clearly absurd. At the same time, it would be a mistake to think the physical characteristics associated with race (whatever race is) are socially constructed; there are inherited phenotypical properties such as skin colour or distribution of body fat that vary, on average, between populations. These noticeable yet superficial qualities are among the triggers of racism. Racism arises partly because these superficial differences are given a significance they do not deserve; to think these differences are a ground for according or withholding respect for individuals is obviously absurd, and morally wrong. I suggest that racism is, at root, a failure to have full regard for the humanity of certain groups of people, because of their race. We do not need a precise definition of ‘race’ to see what is wrong with racism. Like other vices, it comes in degrees, but it is a failure of respect, a failure to accord the right moral weight to interests, or perhaps to treat certain people as Kantian ‘ends in themselves’ or whatever theoretical ground for respect (if any) we might have, on the basis of perceived racial difference. In its more extreme forms, it is suspicion or hatred of racial ‘out groups’, for no morally coherent reason. It is socially divisive, poisons personal relations, creates scapegoats and has far-reaching social effects that last for generations. It is a further question whether racists are always bad people in other respects, or how significant a stain on someone’s character it is, when compared to that person’s positive qualities. But lack of respect for others for such an arbitrary reason is certainly a serious flaw. The questions that have bedevilled racial politics – as well as the politics of sexuality and gender – are not so much concerned with whether prejudice and discrimination are wrong, but with the best ways to understand what these things are, so as to assess the extent of injustice and tackle it where it exists. But there are also philosophical questions about ‘identity’, to which I now turn.

Identity Politics The term ‘identity politics’ has been widely used in recent years, often in a derogatory fashion. It is often remarked that the centre of gravity of political debates has shifted from an old-fashioned class politics, which

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focused on the conflicting interests of different social and economic classes, to a new politics based on ‘identity’. In the current culture wars, identity politics is focused largely on race, gender, and sexuality. There is no reason why identity politics must only concern these things: we can reframe the old class politics in terms of identity – and some people do talk of their class identity. But there has been a shift. Until around the late 1960s, the central political divisions were between privileged and underprivileged social and economic classes, with capitalism or class privilege blamed for the condition of the relatively poor and powerless. Nowadays, although this continues to be talked about, the flash points are more often to do with the new identity politics, which tends to focus on a wider range of concerns. But what is identity politics? It is not easy to define. Black identity politics is clearly rooted in the fight against racism against black people, but there is much more to it than opposition to racism as defined earlier. The old opposition to racism said that to be anti-racist you must be ‘colour-blind’ – colour being clumsy shorthand for race - in your treatment of people. But nowadays this is controversial – influential writers10 say that you should have a far-reaching awareness of race. The guiding idea is that every individual is a product of a history and social situation. In your interactions with members of historically oppressed groups, you should show awareness of this history of oppression. This obviously means you should take care to avoid language or behaviour that is historically associated with racism, often in ways that are not obvious, or to avoid making assumptions based on stereotypes. But perhaps you should also acknowledge the role of your own group in perpetrating the oppression, express a sense of personal guilt, and confess your own racism. No less important, you should often regard yourself as disqualified by your own membership of a privileged group from commenting on matters to do with oppression, except perhaps by agreeing with interpretations offered by those who are qualified to speak, on account of their own group’s history of being oppressed. Many people associated (rightly or wrongly) with the right, as well as traditional liberals, are strongly opposed to identity politics. Yet they would not necessarily object to the claim that racism can be pervasive and hidden or that people’s language and behaviour can reveal insensitivity to

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historic or present oppression. So why is identity politics opposed by so many thinkers with impeccable liberal credentials? After all, if identity politics is conceived as a collective effort by the members of an oppressed group to assert their rights and interests, then it does not seem objectionable. Yet many left-of-centre commentators, such as Russell Blackford, Helen Pluckrose11 and Mark Lilla, are alarmed by the rise of identity politics. Is this an irrational stance, or even one prompted by an unwillingness to admit the extent of historic oppression? Consider a recent defence of identity politics12 from Dan Melo, who clearly wishes to engage with opponents rather than silence them. Melo concedes that identity politics is not an end, but an inevitable stage in the journey towards the granting of universal human rights to all: ‘What the liberal criticism of identity politics seems to ignore, or at least downplay, is how significant a role identity plays in shaping our knowledge of problems and how necessary a level of identity-based empowerment is to create social advancement in the first place.’ A little later he continues: The Civil Rights Movement was able to promote the cause of people of color because it identified where they stood relative to whites. Gay Pride advanced the sexual freedoms of homosexuals by contrasting their identity with that of heterosexuals. They were not advocating for universal rights in a vacuum, free from the existence and promotion of any particular identity. The success of these movements was as much about how each identity group related to the other (white to black, gay to straight) as it was about how each group related to the rights at stake. There was and is no way to accomplish this without adding identity politics to the mix. There is no way to perceive and remedy problems without identifying them through comparison, even if that sometimes leads us to define them as if they were monoliths.

All the same, Melo does not quite tell us what identity politics is. He does not think that membership of an ‘identity group’ confers virtue or infallibility. Traditional liberals, who agree that discrimination against black or gay people is wrong, no doubt agree with Melo that to oppose discrimination you need to know who the victims of it are, and this may not be obvious. If you are not a victim yourself, such knowledge might take

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effort and imagination to acquire. Of course, you must first regard the relevant groups as within the scope of concern for rights and justice - as Melo remarks elsewhere in his essay, the otherwise liberal-minded Founding Fathers of the United States failed to see their black slaves as coming within this scope, because they did not regard them as fellow humans rather than property. One could argue here that a kind of identity politics eventually made white people aware that black slaves were indeed within that scope, because it gave them a voice – it let them articulate their own experience, thus cementing the authority of their perspective. If this is what identity politics amounts to – the insistence that certain groups are oppressed, and that listening to what they say on their own behalf is necessary for us to realise this  – then identity politics is obviously important for advancing their cause. But it is hard to see traditional liberals objecting to this. They will say that it only expresses what should have been obvious anyway – that black people, gay people et al. are human beings, and as such should be granted any rights that human beings as such ought to have. However, traditional liberals insist that more far-reaching versions of identity politics undermine our celebration of the shared humanity that was always the true reason to oppose discrimination. Illustrating these expanded versions, Mark Lilla13 (Lilla 2017: 59–60) remarks that since the Reagan era, American liberals have: ‘…lost themselves in the thickets of identity politics and developed a resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference to match it. You might have thought that, faced with Republicans’ steady acquisition of institutional power, they would have poured their energies into helping the Democratic Party win elections at every level of government and in every region of the country, reaching out especially to working-class Americans who used to vote for it. Instead, they became enthralled with social movements operating outside those institutions and developed disdain for the demos living between the coasts. You might have thought that…liberals would have used their positions in our educational institutions to teach young people that they share a destiny with all their fellow citizens and have duties towards them. Instead, they trained students to be spelunkers of their personal identities and left them incurious about the world outside their heads’.

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Lilla’s powerful critique makes the philosophical point that identity has been transformed, in some people’s minds, from a tool for recognising injustice, to part of the essence of every individual. We find identity politics attracting not only historically oppressed groups, but also historically dominant ones: the alt-right attracts people who think their whiteness is fundamental to who they are. Of course, anyone who is under attack because of something about them that is intrinsically unimportant, such as their ethnicity or sexual preference, will know that this is perceived by some people as being important enough to justify discrimination against them. This might force them to give far more thought to their race or sexuality than they otherwise would. But there is a great leap in jumping from a fair complaint about discrimination, to declaring – in effect – that their race or sexuality is after all fundamental to their ‘identity’ or ‘who they are’. This, I suggest, is where identity politics, at least as commonly understood, goes wrong. It will be objected that this bare, old-fashioned liberal approach fails to recognise that no one exists in a vacuum, that we are all historically and socially situated. This is obviously true, at least in that how we turn out depends on innumerable factors that we could not have chosen. But it does not follow from this that the aspects of us that concern advocates of identity politics, such as race, are themselves essential properties of individuals. And even if they were, it would not follow that they were our only, or most important, essential properties. But there are people who think otherwise. As a result, they engage in an increasingly heard rhetoric that has become a notable feature of the culture wars.

‘Who I am’ Take the oft-heard phrase ‘Who I am’. Imagine someone coming out as gay and declaring that he or she now intends to live as ‘who’ he or she is. We know roughly what this means: there is some fact about them, in this case their sexual orientation, that is important to them and that they wish to be publicly recognised and affirmed. This is straightforward enough in itself. But the phrase has an undercurrent  – their sexuality is not only something about them that they wish to be acknowledged and respected,

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but something fundamental that somehow ‘defines their identity’. Leaving aside metaphysical questions about what ‘identity’ amounts to in this context, we should note something else: that criticism or discrimination can now seem worse than merely false beliefs or unjust action – it is a kind of existential threat. In Chap. 2 I discussed how some trans activists objected to the presence on campuses of speakers who had called into question whether trans people were really of the sex (or gender) that they claimed. These speakers were not seen as mere irritants, who said things that were false. Rather, the speakers were launching an attack on the very core of their being, for want of a better phase. They were denying their right to exist. And that, surely, was a serious attack that justified the disinvitation of the speakers. Without doubt, there are bigots who are out to harm minority groups. At one extreme, that harm takes the form of physical violence, but as we saw in Chap. 2, there is non-violent behaviour that can cause harm, such as harassment and bullying. No one worth listening to in this debate condones these things. Yet we are sometimes told that the voicing of certain opinions constitutes an existential threat to their targets. Take homosexuality. If you are gay and regard this as the ‘core of your being’ or ‘who you are’ (the thought here is hard to phrase precisely) then you might see criticism of homosexuality as an attempt to deny gay people’s ‘right to exist’, which of course, taken in one literal way, is extremely sinister, reminding us of the Nazis’ literal belief that certain people such as Jews had no right to exist. Imagine a street preacher with sandwich boards displaying biblical verses that condemn homosexuality. Doubts may be raised about the right of such preachers to promote their opinions, because it is seen as an attack on the core identity of a marginalised group, and hence an attempt at a kind of annihilation. But we need to ask whether the street fundamentalist’s attack, if that is what it is, is successful – and what success might amount to. On the face of it, he wants nothing more than the repentance and conversion of actively gay people. That is what he would regard as success. He is unlikely to have much success with this; furthermore, if there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, he cannot make it wrong. If you want to have gay sex, the preacher cannot stop you. If there is no hell where the unrepentant will be punished, then his warnings are empty. If you do not like what he says, you can ignore

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him. His proselytising cannot ensure the success of his declared aims, let alone bring about the annihilation of gay people. Some people do regard their membership of a group, defined in terms of race, religion, nationality, language, gender identity or sexual preference, as something central to them or as signifying values they hold dear. This need not be a bad thing. The problems come when they see their membership of this group as far more central than their membership of the wider group known as humanity. Illustrating this, Lukianoff and Haidt draw a pivotal distinction between ‘common humanity identity politics’ and ‘common enemy identity politics’. (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 59–67). The former counts as identity politics in a sense that can be useful: it accepts that certain groups are wrongly excluded from the moral respect due to human beings, and that the remedy is to extend that respect. To do that, we need to know who is excluded and we are more likely to know this if we listen to the victims of it. The latter kind of identity politics, however  – common enemy identity politics  – encourages action not only against the oppression exercised by a powerful group, but against the group per se. The group with the power (it is always contestable how much power it really has, but that is another debate) is seen as nothing but oppressive. And if it is seen in this way, and if words are believed to be violence, it is all too easy to see how physical violence may seem legitimate when used against the members of oppressor groups. The result is a divisive kind of identity politics, which inspires an ‘Us versus Them’ Manichean mentality, and moreover, as Lilla notes, is incapable of effecting change.

The Epistemological Turn But we now face another problem, which also serves as a bridge between feminism and concerns now often subsumed under the umbrella of identity politics. This problem is that of whether the supposedly objective perspective needed to conduct dialogue to verify progress in combating injustice, is an illusion; that we should suspect that all attempts to assess situations objectively is a mask for power or privilege.

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According to some versions of this, reason is itself such a mask. Within the academy, new sub-disciplines have sprung up during the last few decades. Feminist epistemology, for example, purports that standard epistemology – which explores the nature and possibility of knowledge – is inadequate to the task of describing the experience and oppression of women because it is replete with unacknowledged patriarchal assumptions. Many who advocate such views stress that all knowledge is socially situated and that what has traditionally passed as knowledge has done so in conditions in which women were oppressed and their perspectives unheard (Anderson 2020). A similar approach to knowledge has gained a large following with respect to race, sexuality, and gender identity. The term ‘white privilege’ is frequently used both to draw attention to likely biases of white speakers and, more philosophically, to question any approach to knowledge that ignores the experience and testimony of non-white speakers. As we saw earlier, this way of thinking has become highly polarising. Attributions of ‘white privilege’ are often used to chastise a white person who speaks out of turn, especially on some issue of racial politics. This sometimes produces an angry reaction in the one being told off, which can cause that person to miss the possibly legitimate point being made. An example from the UK in January 2020 was a clash on the BBC television current affairs discussion programme Question Time, between the actor Laurence Fox and a member of the audience, who was soon identified as Rachel Boyle, an academic.14 The issue being discussed was press criticism of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. Boyle claimed that the press was racist against Markle, who is mixed-race. Fox responded, with obvious irritation, that it was easy to ‘throw the charge of racism against everybody’ and it was ‘starting to get boring.’ Boyle retorted that Fox was a privileged white male who had never experienced racism. Fox, now more impatient, said he could not help what he was and that it was racist to call him a white privileged male. Soon after this confrontation, some members of Equity, the UK Actors’ Union, called Fox a disgrace to his profession. This was a brief, frank verbal exchange, so it would be unreasonable to expect particularly rigorous arguments from either party. But it is useful

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to dissect the exchange since something like it has been replayed in countless debates. To start with, Boyle could have phrased her first point more tentatively, saying that the press coverage of Markle might have had a racist motivation rather than that it was certainly racist. That would not have been absurd: racism certainly exists and could have exacerbated any objections there already were to Markle’s behaviour. In turn, Fox’s first reply might have conceded this possibility rather than denied it outright, and his remark that accusations of racism were getting ‘boring’ ignored the possibility that such accusations might sometimes be justified. Boyle probably interpreted Fox’s attitude as defensive, showing ‘white fragility’: privileged people react like this because they have no arguments. Her next remark, about him being a white privileged male who had never experienced racism, no doubt came from a general – and perfectly reasonable – observation that people who have not been targets of racism tend to be worse at detecting it than people who have. However, she failed to back up her initial claim that the treatment of Markle was racist, and thus annoyed Fox still further. His next remark, that he could not help being a white man, failed to note that Boyle may not have been attacking him for this per se, but only pointing out that, as a white man, it was possible that he had certain biases. Indeed, whether he could help being a white man is irrelevant to whether his being a white man raised the likelihood of his being insensitive to racism. His parting shot, that calling him a white privileged male was itself racist, may have been justifiable if that was the accusation (and perhaps it was implicitly part of it) but not if pointing this out was meant only to highlight the increased likelihood that, as a result, he was insufficiently aware of racism. Analysing the debating moves in confrontations like this can be instructive. With time and patience, we can gain insight into the likely assumptions and mutual attributions of opinions and attitudes that underlie many such clashes. These rows often take place rapidly, angrily and with little time for proper listening or reflection. The hostile atmosphere provides little incentive for the parties to qualify or withdraw what they have said, or to apologise for misunderstandings. The argument is then side-tracked by a quarrel about who has a right to speak. In academic settings, someone will say that objective knowledge is not possible,

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that truth does not exist, that there are ‘multiple rationalities’, or will draw on ideas made popular by Michel Foucault (Foucault 1972) that claims to knowledge are a mask for power. The question of ‘where the speaker is coming from’ displaces that of whether what he or she says is true. The truth - that we all have biases, and that power and privilege can bias us against seeing things from the point of view of those without these advantages  – is imperceptibly replaced by the cruder claim that such biases make privileged people incapable of seeing important truths, or not worth listening to at all. There can also be failure to see that lack of power of privilege can itself lead to biases, even if in less harmful ways. Just as rich people might have ideological reasons (in the original Marxist sense) for voting for parties that will preserve their wealth, so poorer people might have ideological reasons for voting for parties that will redistribute wealth. Bias and self-interest are part of the human condition (though they do not sum it up) and membership of underprivileged groups confers neither sanctity nor infallibility. Non-standard epistemologies were introduced partly to expose and lessen the effects of ideological thinking, in the original sense of myths used to justify unjustly acquired power. There is nothing inherently wrong with this purpose. Right-wing commentators, many of whom are loud and insensitive culture warriors, often fail to see this. They are right to say that objective truth matters, but often fail to see that what we take to be true can be influenced by how powerful or privileged we are. On the other hand, any ‘new epistemology’ needs to clarify whether it is exposing weaknesses in traditional claims to knowledge (for example, by pointing out that most academic philosophy has been written by men, and reflects mostly male concerns, to the detriment of our recognition of important truths that women tend to have greater access to) or relativizing truth and knowledge altogether. As discussed in Chap. 3, the relativizing move serves to obfuscate debate. If we move from the claim that there are truths that women, gays or black people are often in a better position to see, to the entirely different claim that there are ‘women’s truths’, ‘gay truths’ or ‘black truths’, we move into territory that is both obscure and divisive. The move can seem innocent, since ‘women’s truth’, for example, might only be convenient shorthand for ‘truths that women tend to see better than men’. But the

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two claims are radically different. Talk of ‘X’s truth’ or ‘Y’s truth’ is obscure because relativism in general can be understood in different ways and considerable conceptual flexibility is needed to unpick the issues. It is also obscure how the claim is to be defended, or whether the very idea of defending it pre-supposes the validity of modes of justification – such as ‘male’ or ‘white’ modes of justification - that the theory itself rejects. If this is the idea, then one who defends the objectivity or truth, reason and knowledge cannot attack it without pre-supposing the very objectivity that is in question. But all this shows is that a stand-off has been reached. We certainly should not conclude that the relativist has won the argument. Maybe the standard epistemologist is right but has no way to defend her position against a radically perverse opponent. Moreover, the relativizing move is divisive. It shuts off the possibility of men and women, black and white people learning from each other and refining each other’s positions. Yet is clear that fruitful dialogue often does take place – men have become feminists and white people have come to recognise the evil of racism. On the other hand, some will say that when this happens, men have learned to shed their maleness and white people have learned to renounce their whiteness, bringing a change analogous to religious conversion, or being ‘born again’. This thinking has led to the divisive idea that maleness or whiteness are no longer to be considered empirically detectable properties of human beings, but more akin to world views, which are incapable of engaging with other world views. This idea underpins movements that are currently gaining ground, such as the campaign to purge ‘whiteness’ from the university curriculum. But to reiterate my earlier point: it is one thing to recognise that the academic canon reflects the thinking of historically dominant groups (though this is an oversimplification) but quite another to say that certain canonical works of literature or science are tainted, as if by original sin, by such associations.

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The Epistemological Genetic Fallacy This idea, of course, is rhetorically powerful and deserves a name: the epistemological genetic fallacy. It gains credence when people notice that what has long been regarded as knowledge was imposed by the powerful upon the powerless. As Ernest Gellner crisply points out (Gellner 1992), it is a historical truth that the intellectual accomplishments of Western thought were transmitted to much of the rest of the world through colonisation. That thinking contained racist ideas, among other bad ideas, that decent people now reject. But it does not follow from the cruelty and injustice of colonial rule, that everything thus transmitted was bad. It is one thing to say that Christianity was spread across much of the globe by colonial powers, but another thing to reject Christianity. Scientific methods and Enlightenment thinking in general were also spread in this way, but for all that, the insights obtained through those things may have been beneficial. Obviously enough, it is mere arrogance to suppose that the West had nothing to learn from the peoples it subjugated. But it is a mistake to think that all customs and claims to knowledge, that were acquired though unjust methods, must themselves be irredeemably tainted. To reject a way of thinking because it is Western or male is to confuse the way of thinking with the means of its transmission, transferring the objections to the way it was transmitted to the things that were transmitted. The Genetic Fallacy, as defined in logic textbooks, is the informal fallacy of confusing a thing with its origins. A classic example is the claim that humans are hairless apes because they are all descended from ape-like ancestors. In the case of identity-based epistemology, something akin to magical thinking is going on; the ideas transmitted by the historically powerful are thought tainted by their very association with the powerful. As a way of encouraging greater open-mindedness towards other ways of thinking, and less arrogance about one’s own, such epistemologies can do some good. But when reason and science are themselves thought thus tainted, the road to fruitful dialogue through their use is closed off. When that happens, we need to remind ourselves that it is only by using reason that we have concluded that many past beliefs and practices were unjust.

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And since many people, not only the descendants of the historically disadvantaged have come to see this through rational moral reflection, we can have hope that the capacity for these things is shared by all human beings, regardless of ‘who they are’.

Notes 1. Fawcett Society news and press releases 15th January 2016. https://www. fawcettsociety.org.uk/news/we-are-a-nation-of-hidden-feminists 2. For a wide-ranging and rigorous discussion of the implications of Darwinism, see Radcliffe Richards (2000). 3. See ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber 4. Steven Pinker, op. cit. p. 342. 5. Steven Pinker, op. cit. p. 340. 6. The issue of women being more agreeable than men and hence less assertive about getting what they want at work was raised in a discussion on the UK’s Channel Four News in January 2018, between the news anchor Cathy Newman and the psychologist Jordan Peterson. This controversial exchange soon went viral on the internet. 7. http://www.menandboyscoalition.org.uk/discrimination 8. See Christina Hoff Sommers. New and revised edition, 2013. The War Against Boys, How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 9. See  Ernest Gellner. Third edition, 2003.  The Psychoanalytic Movement, The Cunning of Unreason. Oxford: Blackwell. 10. For example, Afua Hirsch. 2018. Brit(ish), On Race, Identity and Belonging. Vintage Publishing (Paperback). 11. See several articles by Helen Pluckrose in Areo Magazine, for example. https://areomagazine.com 12. Dan Melo, The Case for Identity Politics. Areo Magazine, 23rd October 2018 https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/23/the-case-for-identity-politics/ 13. Mark Lilla, op. cit. pp. 59–60. 14. h t t p s : / / w w w . b b c . c o . u k / n e w s / a v / u k - 5 1 1 4 5 3 2 1 / actor-laurence-fox-s-question-time-clash-over-meghanmarkle?SThisFB=&fbclid=IwAR1mY_uIXlPjSLSuZA5gK8Bgp1uYurIAouYVywpF5rrFRYQWDEdHzEVaA8o

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Bibliography Anderson, Elizabeth. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/. Revised 13 Feb 2020. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New  York: Pantheon Books. Gellner, Ernest. 1992. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Glover, Jonathan. 2001. Humanity, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven/London: Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press. Lilla, Mark. 2017. The Once and Future Liberal, After Identity Politics. New York: Harper Collins. Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin Press. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny. London: Penguin Books. Mill, John Stuart. 1996. The Subjection of Women. In On Liberty & The Subjection of Women. (ed. with an introduction by Jane O’Grady). John Stuart Mill. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Murray, Douglas. 2019. The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity. London: Bloomsbury Continuum. Pinker, Steven. 2003, 2016. The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Penguin Books. Radcliffe Richards, Janet. 1980. The Sceptical Feminist, A Philosophical Enquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Reprinted with a new introduction and two new appendices, 1994. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2000. Human Nature after Darwin, A Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge. Sommers, Christina Hoff. 1994. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster. Williams, Joanna. 2017. Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

5 ‘Friending’ the Enemy

One of the most noticeable features of the culture wars is the readiness with which people are prepared to make enemies. Normally, people do not like making enemies and are unhappy if others want to make enemies of them. But we are seeing the ubiquitous ‘calling out’ or public shaming of individuals who are judged to be blameworthy in their deeds, words or supposed thoughts. These acts of public shaming attract much attention when done by influential people, on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Publicly shaming other people attracts followers, who express approval using the ‘like’, ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ buttons. Tweets spiral into an uncontrollable deluge of retweets, often along partisan lines. To their loyal followers, who grow in numbers with every retweet or share, the individuals who carry out this shaming are brave and righteous. They expose others who err in thought, word, or deed. But this, in turn, attracts the attention of rival tribes, who do the same thing in return. The allies of those being ‘called out’ dig deep into the social media profiles of those who expose them, finding supposed lies, absurdities, inconsistency, or hypocrisy. An influential tweeter, on either side of some acrimonious public debate, might find pithy ways of summing up the enemy mentality, declaring that what ‘really’ drives the enemy is some nefarious motive © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_5

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or some absurd belief. In the hands of skilled propagandists, this can be highly effective. Once an opposing view can be summed up as merely an expression of hatred, snobbery, narcissism, or stupidity, rational debate is closed. Followers will shoehorn everything their enemies say into one of these categories, noticing times when it fits the characterization and ignoring times when it does not. From small beginnings, we have a full-­ blown social media storm on our hands. Of course, people took pleasure in naming and shaming others, long before we could disseminate our feelings to countless other people at the touch of a button. But the tumultuous world events of the present century have combined with the sudden rise of digital communication to escalate a culture of animosity to dangerous proportions. For several years now, traditional print media have faced fierce competition from digital media in the form of blogs, online publications, You Tube channels and social media. People can easily find news sources that confirm what they already believe, or want to believe, and ignore everything else. This has been widely noted in discussions of echo chambers and their dangers to informed opinion  - the basis for properly functioning democracies. Moreover, even when they are aware of what their opponents say, their reactions to it are frequently dictated by the pressure to conform to their own tribe’s responses rather than to examine it carefully, on the lookout for what might be true and good in it. The spiraling of shaming and animosity, which has been facilitated by the new digital media, sharpens some perennial questions in ethics and moral psychology. Is it possible or desirable to be on friendly terms with people whose moral, political, or religious views we strongly disagree with? Is there anything to be said for ‘call-out culture’? Are some people’s opinions or attitudes so bad that we should refuse to associate or have civil discussions with them? On the face of it, there are indeed some people we ought not to want as friends. People will greatly disagree, of course, on who these people are, or where to draw the line between an opponent we may befriend or at least tolerate, and one we should want nothing to do with. Yet I would be disturbed if, after tweeting something, I found I had gained neo-Nazi followers, who were enthusiastically retweeting my comments. I would be wary of befriending attempts by people who think Stalin’s Gulag was

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a good idea or that everyone who refuses to convert to their religion should be killed. I shall look more closely into what the obstacles are to such friendships later on, but here only note that there seem to be ‘attitude thresholds’ for friendships and that people who complain about the intolerance of people who refuse to have certain individuals as friends, probably have their own thresholds themselves.

The Brexit Clash What, then, are the relevant questions? Take Brexit, which divided people almost along tribal lines. The Leave side won the June 2016 referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union, but the issue was even more acrimonious three years later, after several failed attempts to get an exit deal with the EU. The referendum campaign dominated the news for many weeks before the vote, full of endless factual assertions and counter-assertions made by Remainers and Leavers about the underlying principles and the consequences of leaving the EU. It was hard for the averagely well-informed citizen to judge the claims made. These assertions were often highly detailed, and to evaluate them seemed to require specialized knowledge of the purposes and operations of the many institutions of the EU. The claims made by both sides were confidently delivered but often hard to verify from impartial sources. Especially noticeable, however, were the tribal divisions, long present in the background, that were now reinforcing themselves in the debates. Although both positions had (in my view) reasonable and civil defenders, much of the rhetoric was about the character and motivations of those who argued for one view or the other. According to many influential Leave advocates,1 those who supported the Remain campaign spoke for a metropolitan elite, instinctively anti-democratic, out of touch with and contemptuous of ‘ordinary people’, as if ‘ordinary people’ were a monolith. But according to many Remain supporters, the Leavers were a disreputable crowd of racists, xenophobes, shady billionaires, and con men. Moreover, both Remainers and Leavers pointed to the way they were portrayed by the other side, as evidence of other side’s real nature. For example, Leavers were all too aware of many Remainers’ view of them as

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uneducated and racist, and were able to use it to their advantage, to show what they saw as the arrogance and snobbery of the Remain side, in characterizing them thus. Both sides, I think, had morally respectable arguments and some perfectly legitimate motivations. It was not disreputable for the Leavers to worry about whether the EU institutions were properly accountable to the electorates of the member states. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was reasonable to ask whether the EU could be reformed through democratic processes. Nor was it disreputable for Remainers to worry about the decline of UK influence on the decisions made by the EU, and especially the anti-immigrant sentiment that was facilitated, in part, by the Brexit campaign. But to invoke a metaphor used by Jonathan Haidt, (Haidt 2012: 52–60) this was a debate largely conducted by ‘elephants’ rather than ‘riders’ – the elephants being the emotional and intuitive part of our cognition, and the riders being the controlled, verbal part of it, and which in Haidt’s view usually play a much smaller role in attitude formation than the elephants. Many in both camps were viscerally contemptuous of what they thought the other side stood for and the kind of people they thought supported it. Even making a factual statement in support of either side could easily trigger the ‘So you are really saying that…’ move discussed earlier, with attributions of xenophobia from one side, and smug metropolitan elitism from the other. Friends and family members fell out over Brexit. Journalists Julie Burchill and Jane Robins even wrote a play2 illustrating these fallings out.

Opinions and Moral Character Why do people fall out over issues like Brexit and countless others, such as ‘social justice’ causes, feminism, race, and climate change? Partly, it is because opponents of certain opinions think those who hold those opinions are bad people – in extreme cases, not merely ordinarily flawed, but repellent, poisonous, and disgusting. We therefore face two questions. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of issues like Brexit, can anyone merit these descriptions just because they hold certain opinions? And if so, how should we interact with people who merit such descriptions?

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Should we refuse to associate with such people, or behave cordially towards them, for example by refusing to shake their hand or by ‘un-­ friending’ or blocking them on social media? We might answer the first question with ‘no’, because no one has control over their beliefs – beliefs are passive responses to the world, and we cannot change the way the world is. But this would be hasty. Although there is a sense in which beliefs are involuntary – I cannot will myself to believe that it is raining, when I can see that it is not – we can indirectly work on our beliefs, by directing our attention towards certain things and away from others and by deliberately allowing ourselves to be influenced in ways we desire. The charge against people with ‘bad’ beliefs often amounts to saying they have willfully ignored considerations that would have pointed them in a better direction. But this seems to amount only to a charge of epistemic vice (as discussed in Chap. 1) which does not seem enough to justify a refusal of friendship or cordiality. However, there is such a thing as moral stupidity, and this often consists in epistemic vice, such as epistemic carelessness or negligence, facilitated by a moral vice such as lack of compassion or concern for justice. It is vices like these that people attribute to their political opponents – serious character defects that help to produce false beliefs. One can always ask how they came to be that way, and here we risk getting into the metaphysical debate about our ultimate responsibility for our character and choices. But whatever we conclude about that, most people cannot avoid experiencing reactions like admiration, gratitude, blame and indignation, which are directed towards others’ character, as shown in their words and deeds. And if someone’s character looks bad enough and without redeeming qualities, it is natural to say that you would not seek friendship with that person or that, in some sense, you could not be a friend. This might be the right reaction towards someone whose political views cannot be traced to any admirable values. For example, if hatred is her dominant motive, with the targets of hatred chosen without any intelligible moral basis, then this could be a reason to avoid cordial association with her. Even in a case like this, there might be other personal qualities we can admire. She might be kind and honest towards someone she considers ‘one of us’ or show other virtues, and this should be factored into the overall assessment of her character. Nevertheless, her

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hateful views might carry overriding weight in this overall assessment, even taking her virtues into account. They might make it reasonable to regard her as an unpleasant enough individual to avoid getting too personally close to.

Disagreement and Shared Basic Values However, as I suggested when referring to the arguments about Brexit, there are often political (or ethical, social, or religious) disagreements where the opposing sides are inspired by genuinely admirable values that they share. Often, opposing sides have roughly the same fundamental values but either disagree on how to enact them, or assign different priorities to the agreed values, with respect to certain policy decisions. In an article in the New Statesman, Brian Weatherson (Weatherson 2019) illustrates this with reference to disagreement between people of the centre-­ left, and libertarians: The libertarian might end up disagreeing with them [those of the centre-­ left] on many of the issues that arise in day-to-day politics. But they would be making a mistake if they didn’t appreciate the values they share with the libertarian. They would be making a bigger mistake if they didn’t value the things, like freedom from state oppression, that underpin libertarians’ philosophy.

We can also apply this insight to some familiar moral disputes. One such, especially in the US, concerns abortion. In its usual formulation, the anti-abortion (‘pro-life’) position is that abortion is a variety of murder. This conclusion can be derived from three premises: it is always murder deliberately to take the life of any innocent human being, all human foetuses are innocent human beings, and abortion is the deliberate taking of the life of a human foetus. (This position can be modified to accommodate the different developmental stages of foetuses, with the conclusion that abortions after a certain stage of pregnancy are murders). An opponent of abortion therefore must regard those who believe abortion is morally permissible as condoning murder. Yet I know people who regard

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abortion as murder but have friends who strongly disagree, including doctors who refer patients for abortion. They discuss the issue respectfully and even socialize and joke with them. They would not enjoy such conviviality with people who think there is nothing wrong with killing ten-year-old children, still less with people who have done so. What explains this? Maybe, in some way, these ‘pro-life’ advocates do not fully believe what they say. Or they might believe that although abortion is morally wrong, it is not nearly as morally bad as killing children who have been born. (There clearly are actions which are wrong but not wicked, like stealing a cheap pen from your workplace). But more likely is that despite thinking their opponents are gravely mistaken, they appreciate that the considerations that motivate them, such as a desire to give due weight to women’s interest in deciding what happens in or to their own bodies and to determine the course of their own lives – are, in themselves, important moral concerns.3 They might appreciate that, if their opponents fail to see that a human foetus is a living human being, this may be an honest mistake. Making this mistake does not reveal you as a bad person, since it is not obvious that an entity in the womb, dependent on a woman for survival, is a human being that is merely at an earlier developmental stage than young children. Most pro-life advocates also believe that, when the life of an innocent human being is not at stake, it is indeed important to respect women’s choices. In both the political dispute between people of the centre-left (welfare liberals) and libertarians, and the argument about abortion, there can be a common moral ground. In neither case, of course, does this imply a relativist view that neither view is absolutely better than the other, and as the dispute deepens, we may find one side or the other seeing culpability in the weightings given by the opponent to the relevant moral concerns. But at least initially, the shared moral values should be sufficient for each to see that the other is not fundamentally corrupt for having the view that she does.

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F riendship with People Whose Values Are Fundamentally Immoral But this still leaves us with the question of how we should interact with people whose views we find appalling, with few if any redeeming features. Rebecca Roache (Roache 2015) tackles the question of social media unfriending, in an Oxford University Practical Ethics blog. Writing around the time of the 2015 General Election in the UK, she explains why she went through her Facebook friends and unfriended anyone who had expressed support for the Conservative Party. Roache (2015): So, unfriending. Is it okay? Well, the view that I have arrived at today is that openly supporting a political party that—in the name of austerity— withdraws support from the poor, the sick, the foreign, and the unemployed while rewarding those in society who are least in need of reward, that sells off our profitable public goods to private companies while keeping the loss-making ones in the public domain, that boasts about cleaning up the economy while creating more new debt than every Labour government combined, that wants to scrap the Human Rights Act and (via the TTIP) hand sovereignty over some of our most important public institutions to big business—to express one’s support for a political party that does these things is as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are not simply misguided views like any other views that we can hope to change through reasoned debate (although we can try to do that). They are offensive views. They are views that lose you friends and respect—and the fact that they are socially unacceptable views helps discourage people from holding (or at least expressing) them, even where reasoned debate fails. Sometimes the stick is more effective than the carrot.

These remarks do not explicitly address my first question above  – of whether holding certain opinions shows that you are a bad person  though it is a fair guess that Roache does have a low moral opinion of Conservative supporters. Her explicit point is that expressing support for a party that does seriously bad things is offensive, and that in this respect, it is like expressing support for other offensive views, such as racist ones.

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(Incidentally, she does not say that Conservatives are racists). If it is reasonable to unfriend people who make racist remarks, on grounds of the remarks’ offensiveness, then why, she asks, is it not reasonable to unfriend those who make other kinds of offensive remarks? This is a good question, sharply posed, and it is irrelevant whether she is right to dislike the Conservative Party. Her blog post attracted press attention and some people thought that her views on Conservatism were bigoted. However, the question is general and could have been asked about someone who unfriended socialists. It is particularly pertinent in these days of bite-sized social media commentary and the reactions they provoke. Although many people casually ‘friend’ people on Facebook whom they have never met or even previously heard of, ‘unfriending’ can have far more significance than the initial ‘friending’. Often it is a sharp statement that one no longer wishes to have any association with the person being unfriended. Real-world friendships can easily be ended by social media ‘unfriending’. It can be a hostile and deliberately hurtful act. That said, there is still the question of whether unfriending someone because they have expressed an offensive view can be reasonable. ‘An offensive view’ should be understood, as discussed in Chap. 2, as a view that would cause a reasonable person to be offended. To toughen the question, suppose the social media unfriending is not the unfriending of someone who was only casually ‘friended’ in the first place, but of someone who was reasonably well known to the one doing the unfriending, and with whom there was at least a cordial relationship. In this case, the social media unfriending is the ending of a relationship. It is a way of dropping someone. This means that the question is not only about social media unfriending but concerns the ending of minimally cordial relationships in general, of which social media unfriending is an example. I think we should accept Roache’s general point, regardless of whether she was reasonable to unfriend Conservatives. Some people’s views are so distasteful that it is reasonable to want as little as possible to do with those people. I would not want a cordial personal (as opposed to a professional) relationship with someone who thought, after reflection, that Islamic State or the genocidal Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia were wonderful things. But there are so many other things to consider when wondering whether to end a minimally cordial relationship, so many nuanced

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thoughts to entertain, that in practice we should think carefully before taking such action.

Friendship This brings us to examine the sort of relationships that are ended when people are dropped or unfriended for ideological reasons. For a wide range of relationships are jeopardised and it is hard to judge the ending of them until we know more about the nature of those relationships. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship – friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue (Aristotle 1996: Book Eight, iii, 207 ff.). Whether or not we agree with the way he classifies these different kinds or levels of friendship, it is a useful starting point. Of the first two kinds of friendship, he says: …friends whose affection is based on utility do not love each other in themselves, but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other. And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us…. And therefore these friendships are based on an accident, since the friend is not loved for being what he is, but as affording some pleasure or benefit as the case may be. Consequently friendships of this kind are easily broken off, in the event of the parties themselves changing, for if no longer pleasant or useful to each other, they cease to love one another. (Aristotle 1996: Book Eight, iii, 207–8)

These days, examples of friendships of utility include civil relationships forged in the workplace and interactions with people with whom one does business deals. These relationships may develop into something more intimate, but if so, they are no longer based on utility. Strictly speaking, colleagues one gets on with are not thereby friends; they are people one cooperates with. But we can recognise what Aristotle is describing here. Many people have civil professional relationships  – indeed, civility is a hallmark of professionalism  – geared toward a

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common purpose. Once you have said goodbye to the colleague at his or her leaving do, you may not have any further contact. If you did not like the colleague, perhaps because of their opinions, then their leaving party, however convivial, may be followed by a sigh of relief. However, more relevant to the relationships I am discussing are friendships of pleasure and virtue. Friendships of pleasure are with people whose company we enjoy but who may not be close friends. Aristotle somewhat misrepresents these associations when he says we enjoy their company ‘not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us’; surely, we may value what they are in themselves because their company is agreeable, even if we are not close to them. Perhaps what Aristotle means is that to the extent that they give us pleasure, these friends are replaceable – anyone who provides a similar pleasure will do. In that case, the distinction between these sorts of friends and the deeper sort is at least partly one of degree; there are many people whose company we enjoy and whom we value ‘for themselves’, but only a few of them are people with whom we forge closer and more lasting attachments. For Aristotle, the enduring and profound friendships are friendships of virtue: The perfect form of friendship is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends wish each other alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends for their friends’ sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. (Aristotle 1996: Book Eight, iii, 209)

Friends of virtue also take pleasure in each other: ‘the absolutely good is pleasant absolutely as well’. Such friendships are rare because there are few men capable of them (Aristotle is, of course talking about friendships between adult males). They also take a long time to develop, they usually endure and if they end, it is for a morally grave reason.

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Aristotle is right to say we take pleasure in our friendships: it is true by definition that we take pleasure in our friendships of pleasure, and it would be a strange friendship of virtue that involved no pleasure at all, but was more like an unbreakable bond between two men of similar virtue which must persist whether they like it or not. At the very least, we like our friends and enjoy their company, even if we occasionally find them annoying. This gives us a clue to the ending of such relationships, whether in the form of social media unfriending or in some more traditional way. To get a better grasp of this, we should ask how such friendships begin. Take friendships of pleasure. We form these friendships because we like our friends’ company, often because they are entertaining, as Aristotle says, but also because we find them agreeable and helpful. It also helps to have basically similar values, tastes, and sense of humour. In the bar after a heated public debate, speakers tend to surround themselves with their allies rather than opponents. They can discuss the confrontation without the need for self-censorship since what they want to say, often in unrestrained language, will be agreeable to their hearers. If they want to be civil with their opponents  – and this is usually desirable  – some self-­ censorship will be helpful. They will express their views with carefully chosen phrases and this will put some strain on the spontaneity of the interactions. With friends of pleasure there is a natural spontaneity – not complete candour (we don’t like people who keep pointing out our faults) but an openness about opinions, a readiness to tell certain jokes and pleasure in using language that would be out of place in front of people we profoundly disagree with, if we want to remain civil. This does not imply that we cannot become friends of pleasure with people with whom we have strong disagreements. Sometimes we find people interesting and even magnetic because they disagree with us, and we can certainly find such people attractive, often despite ourselves. But when we do become friends with people we strongly disagree with, there will probably be some deeper commonalities of values which allow for discussion starting from certain agreed premises. For example, there are certainly friendships of pleasure between devoutly religious people, and atheists. These friends most often avoid talking about religion altogether, but when they do discuss their differences on this subject, each usually

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respects the fairness and serious-mindedness of the other and their mutual aversion to cheap point-scoring. Each is likely to start from certain agreed values, with their disagreement perhaps being about how those values can have objective grounding or about what practical imperatives they entail. In saying this, I am repeating what was said earlier about how opponents can respect each other’s views without agreeing with them. Where such respect exists, friendships of pleasure can flourish; a practising Christian and an atheist can greatly enjoy high-level discussion of religious or philosophical topics and find the other pleasant company because they afford a chance for such conversations. Whether the friends we seek agree with us or not, then, we tend to seek them out because we enjoy being with them, and in the case of disagreements it is likely that there are deeper things in common. To return, then, to the question of whether we can be a friend of someone whose outlook we find appalling, without any shared values that make friendships between parties who disagree possible, the answer is that it is hard. There remains the question of whether the bad character shown by the opinions of the other is outweighed by other good, personal qualities, and this is possible. People are not summed up by their views. In addition, for many people the most important thing about others is not their moral or political views. They are not pre-occupied by these things in the way that certain intellectuals and campaigners are. But where the parties are absorbed by such things, deep disagreement without redeeming qualities is an obstacle to finding the other’s company congenial and hence an obstacle to seeking friendships of pleasure with them. What of Aristotle’s friendships of virtue? The important thing here is that the friendships are between two people who are good and who believe each other to be good. The language of the quoted translation is a little stilted, but the idea is that in these friendships, the friends ‘love each other for themselves and not accidentally’ (that is, they do not see each other as a mere means to something else, like pleasure or advancement) and in loving someone who is good, for his own sake, he loves the goodness in him (which is inseparable from him) and wishes to nourish it. If this is a correct interpretation, it seems impossible that a friendship of virtue could exist if either party does not consider the other to be good. This, if true, would explain why one cannot have a friendship with

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someone whose opinions one considers to be so bad that they greatly detract from the goodness of the person in question. At most, one could seek such a friendship in the hope that the other person will change, with any future friendship conditional upon such change, somewhat as a religious proselytiser seeks to enable others’ conversion to his faith. I have already hinted that the difference between friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue is partly one of the degrees of intimacy and mutual concern between the parties. If it is also a difference of kind, it is that in friendships of virtue, each party sees the virtue of the other as central to the relationship. Ordinary, everyday friendships combine pleasure, affection, and mutual concern and these in turn are difficult if the friends do not consider each other to be basically decent. If we also understand the difference between friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue to be partly a difference of degree, then I suggest the difference is in the degree of intimacy and affection. One would not normally seek or form a friendship with someone whom one considers to be significantly bad, but since such friendships can exist between people of widely differing ideological stances, it seems that the friends consider the ideological differences to be relatively unimportant compared with their good qualities. Yet we need to say more, since for friendships to be more than superficial they need to be resilient. Certain actions such as serious betrayals can suddenly turn deep friendships into enmity because the wrongs committed are direct assaults on the friendship itself. Divulging personal secrets or having an affair with the friend’s partner may, at least initially, be reasons for a radical change of attitude towards the friend who has done the wrong. But these are wrongs directly inflicted on the friend. When it comes to wrongs inflicted on others, it is less clear that there is a ground to end friendship. One can strongly disapprove of, even be shocked by, something a friend has done, but feel impelled by the friendship to try to understand the friend’s situation and offer advice, if asked. If a friendship can be ended by discovering that a friend has done something significantly bad, then it is doubtful that it was much of a friendship in the first place. If friends care about each other, they will try to help each other out of difficulties, including ones of their own making.

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This suggests an asymmetry between seeking someone’s friendship and ending a friendship, especially one that Aristotle would describe as a friendship of virtue. Knowing that someone has done some appalling things, for which she is not sorry, is a good reason not to seek her as a close friend (though one might be drawn to help such a person and hope that eventually friendship will be possible) but ending a friendship just because of some discovery about the friend, at least a discovery that does not threaten the friendship itself, suggests that the friendship had not already developed to the point when one could already see a great deal that was good and redeemable about the friend, which in turn suggests a certain shallowness in the friendship. But I must admit to some ambivalence about this. Certain people are held up as role models precisely because they are not only prepared to look for the good in people with serious flaws but persist in friendliness, at least, even when they have not found this good and wonder whether they ever will. They seek the good both in, and for, seriously flawed people and thus show the love known as agape or caritas – charity or ‘Christian love’ - though there is no reason why only Christians can show it. Jesus is described in the gospels as befriending sinners, and these were people whom, presumably, he himself regarded as sinners, though perhaps they included people to whose sins society attached too much importance, compared with the worse sins of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. St. Augustine of Hippo famously says that we should hate the sin but love the sinner4 (a paraphrase of the Latin original) and this implies that we should not close the door on the sinner or refuse to seek what is good for him. Perhaps the tension that generates my ambivalence can be lessened, at least partially, by the following considerations. Accepting that the serious flaws of another person can justify not seeking her as a friend, in either the ‘pleasure’ or ‘virtue’ sense (at least for the present) does not entail an attitude of positive enmity. This also applies when friendships are made difficult by the kind of ethical or political differences I have been talking about. Friends and romantic partners certainly do fall out over such differences, often when one of them significantly changes their views. I have suggested that the falling out comes from the apparent discovery that the former friend or partner is seriously flawed in some way that was not

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obvious before, or has acquired some flaw that makes it hard to continue the relationship as it was. In such cases, the situation can arise from one party’s preoccupation with ideological purity, which comes to dominate their view of the former friend. But when the conflict is not based on some notion of purity and we have a reasonable perspective, we do not have to turn the other into an enemy. It is one thing to say that we cannot enjoy their company or pursue shared ideals, but another to say that we should shun or denounce them.

Making Enemies and ‘Cancel Culture’ This helps us see that the most important thing to discuss, in the end, is not so much whether we can be friends (of some kind) with people with whom we have strong political disagreements, as whether we should ever make enemies of them. This brings us to the sorry current state of polarisation: in particular, the denunciations, ganging up, persecutions, and wilful misrepresentations of nuanced opinions that have been unleashed, made worse by social media. They foster self-righteousness, moralism, sentimentality, hypocrisy, rigidity, tribalism, hardness of heart, narcissism, and moral shallowness. They enable moral poseurs, absurdly lacking in self-awareness, to gather ‘likes’ and gain prestige. They can ruin livelihoods, especially when victims cannot defend themselves due to the silencing usually advocated by their persecutors. The whole ugly phenomenon has come to be known as ‘cancel culture’ – a loaded term, of course, because it seems to assume that the ‘cancelling’ is always wrong. But since it is very often wrong, this eye-catching term is useful. To see clearly why these character traits are dangerous vices, consider one important reason why we often dislike, as well as disagree with, our ideological opponents. It is not necessarily because we disagree with them (though it can be) but because of their intolerance, their hostility towards us, their refusal to listen, their deflection of argument by sarcasm, sneering and manufactured outrage. In academic circles, this is a fine art: these things are easily concealed behind snarky intellectual pedantry, shown in condescending exposure of (real or imagined) confused thinking or minor factual errors, deflecting attention from the matter at hand.

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The problem is complicated by the fact that recognising these truths brings its own dangers. We might be projecting our own vices onto our ideological enemies, thus giving them a reason to criticise us for the very things we criticise them for. I have sometimes held back from making some comment, face to face or on social media, because I feared a hostile reaction. I have imagined myself being disliked or thought idiotic by people I know. Yet sometimes I have realised that I had no solid evidence that they would react like this. Rather, I had to admit that I somewhat disliked those people myself, because of their opinions. My mild hostility towards them had caused me, through a process of projection, to believe that they would be hostile towards me. This adds a further, dangerous dimension to quarrels and shaming. Intolerant people expose, sometimes correctly, the intolerance of others. Narcissists notice the narcissism of others. Moralistic individuals deplore the moralism of others. Vindictive people spot the vindictiveness of others. The best thing one can do is to try to recognise one’s own tendencies towards these vices and resist the temptation to form instant judgements, still less to publicise them on social media, with the likelihood of repenting them at leisure. This puts fair minded and self-critical people at a disadvantage: before ‘calling out’ the emotional reasoning of others, they will wonder about their own. Before seizing on the faults of other people, they will wonder whether those people have counter-balancing virtues. Before pouncing on someone’s logical or factual errors, they will wonder whether the point being made could have been better defended. All these processes require an ability to hold several ideas in one’s head at once, to be aware of subtle counterarguments to one’s view even while formulating it. And to make things worse, while doing these things one must be aware of the opposite vice of indecision or excessive caution, of thinking that just because it is hard to reach sound judgements or to be sure of the motivations of the people we criticise for their intolerant behaviour, we can form no judgements at all. In the meantime, those who do the shaming and persecuting usually lack the self-awareness needed even to entertain these thoughts, let alone to care. The best thing for fair minded and self-critical people to do is to recognise the temptations to intolerance and self-righteousness that we are all subject to, but not hesitate to confront injustice when they are reasonably sure they have found it. To do

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otherwise is to leave the public arena to shallow, self-congratulatory bigots whose activities leave a trail of personal destruction. In today’s climate, many people are shamed for things concerning power, privilege, and identity, as discussed in the previous chapter. If someone has said something that is, justifiably or not, construed as racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic, this can trigger a campaign of outrage. It need not matter that the individual in question has impressive personal virtues and achievements – a single thing they have (allegedly) said is enough to undo them. In a febrile world of denunciation, there is no forgiveness, redemption, or mercy. Abject apologies are useless because they confirm guilt. The phenomenon is not confined to the left or the right. In past times, shaming by the socially conservative right (not the libertarian right) targeted people who criticised conventional religion or morality. Nowadays, the right is more likely to shame people whom they see as unpatriotic.

Scott McIntyre and Sir Roger Scruton As an example of shaming by the right, Russell Blackford (Blackford 2019: 175–77) describes the case of Scott McIntyre, a sports reporter with the Special Broadcasting Service in Australia. In April 2015 McIntyre was dismissed from his employment because of some tweets he had sent about Anzac Day, which commemorates the first military participation by soldiers from Australia and New Zealand in the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. He claimed in his tweets that Anzac Day celebrated executions, rape, theft and ‘an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with’. There followed an outcry on Twitter, and he was immediately fired – all because of his unpopular views. Another recent case, this time of shaming by the left, is that of the late Sir Roger Scruton, a well-known, exceptionally prolific, erudite conservative philosopher. He held some controversial opinions which he expressed in his broadcasts and copious journalism. He also wrote fifty-odd books on a wide range of philosophical and cultural subjects. In late 2018 he was invited to chair the British Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, partly on the strength of his writings on the

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aesthetics of architecture. At the time of his appointment, there were critics who thought his views on architecture and beauty were tendentious and outdated, and that he was the wrong person for the job. But the real trouble began when George Eaton, a journalist, interviewed him for the New Statesman magazine in March 2019 and published a grossly distorted account of the conversation, in which Scruton seemed to say that the Chinese people were robotic and that there was a ‘Soros empire’ in Hungary. The second reference was made to give the impression that Scruton thought that because George Soros (a wealthy philanthropist) is Jewish, the empire he was creating was an ‘empire of Jews’. In fact, as a statement5 jointly issued by Scruton and the New Statesman subsequently made clear after Scruton had complained, he had said that the Communist government of China was trying to make robots of its citizens and that it was nonsense that the Soros empire was an ‘empire of Jews’. But the interview’s publication, accompanied by a hostile Twitter campaign, did immediate damage. When the piece appeared online, in April 2019, Scruton was immediately dismissed from the commission, without the chance to give his side. He was reinstated after a campaign by supporters and an apology from the New Statesman, but by then he was ill with cancer and he died in January 2020. These two incidents – and there are numerous others – illustrate the unjust penalties people have suffered because of their political views. For many on the left, Scruton had been a figure of hate since the 1980s, largely because of his views on social issues like multi-culturalism, homosexuality and feminism, and Eaton clearly wanted to punish him by getting him fired from the commission. But one does not have to sympathise with the views of Scott McIntyre or Sir Roger Scruton to be concerned that they were hounded out of a job for obviously ideological reasons. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid asking how we should react when people in the public eye do say terrible things. In general, people should take responsibility for what they say, especially if they are known to the wider public. Moreover, there can be good grounds for dismissing people from their jobs if they are found to have said something  – perhaps even in private  - that casts serious doubt on their suitability for their employment. If a police chief says something that a reasonable person would regard as racist - and I would pay particular attention to the reactions of

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members of the targeted ethnic group(s) - that is a good reason to remove them from their post, after due process. This would not be a matter of ‘thought policing’, as some would have it, but a recognition that there are some opinions or attitudes that are evidence of an inability or unwillingness to do a job as required. People accused must have a right of reply and the risk of unfair dismissal must be taken seriously. But even if they are rightly dismissed, this should not be taken as proof that they are wholly bad or irredeemable.

Moralism In considering these things, we need to see a pivotal distinction between morality and moralism. Morality sometimes requires that we act against people who harm others. It may also be appropriate to point out their moral failings, provided the circumstances justify it and proportionality is observed. But public shaming and the making of private enemies often involve a more sinister temptation not to make moral judgements, but to moralise. Often, moralisers obsess about trivial or innocent things. But moralism is more insidious and harder to expose when moralisers are responding to a genuine evil. What is it to moralise? Rather than look for a precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions, it is better to point out a cluster of related phenomena. There are people who obsess over supposedly moral aspects of situations which are trivial or non-existent, who are keen to blame others, who exaggerate others’ blameworthiness even when some blame is justified, fail to recognise anything good about those they accuse, are unwilling to listen to their side of the story, are unwilling to allow for mitigation, refuse to forgive, and wallow in the unfavourable comparison of others with themselves. They promote an image of themselves as righteous. They are always on the lookout for bad people, to shame them, and are easily provoked to unassuageable anger. Moralistic individuals spend their lives on a moral high. The quest for this intoxication belies their apparent wish to rid the world of evil. They need the world to contain bad people, just so they can denounce them. They can be extremely hard to argue with,

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especially if they can provide examples of others’ wrongdoing that seem to justify their moral campaigns. Paul Russell offers an instructive diagnosis of moralism (Russell 2020) and makes a distinction between vain and cruel moralism. The kind I have just described are cruel. But many moralisers are predominantly vain. They use morality to inflate their own standing in the eyes of others. Of these, Russell says: One feature of vain moralism that is especially troubling is that an excessive or misplaced concern with our moral reputation and standing suggests that moralisers of this kind lack any deep or sincere commitment to the values, principles and ideals that they want others to believe animates their conduct and character. Moralisers of this kind are essentially superficial and fraudulent. We have, of course, countless examples of this sort of moral personality, ranging from Evangelical preachers caught in airport motels taking drugs with male prostitutes, to any number of highly paid professors wining and dining on the lecture circuit while explaining the need for social justice and advocating extreme forms of egalitarianism.

These characters are certainly recognisable types. Much criticism of people who advertise their social or political views on social media, especially of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ variety, is that they are narcissistic; they are in effect saying, ‘Look at me, burdened by the world’s injustices!’ If they are also cruel, they shame others, often with flimsy evidence, who do not have the right ideals. But one can be vain without being cruel, and here is where the contentious notion of ‘virtue signalling’ comes in. The journalist James Bartholomew describes and condemns it, in an article in The Spectator (Bartholomew 2015) [18th April 2015], though it is disputed whether he invented the term, which is now commonly used, often in scare quotes. It is interesting that accusations of virtue signalling are made mostly by the right against the left and the reasons for this would require a separate discussion. Those who make the accusation are saying that people, usually of the left, who complain about injustice do this to show off how virtuous they are.

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Moralism, ‘Virtue Signalling’ and Conformity However, it would certainly be odd if moral claims, in general, were mere virtue signalling, and this is why people who object to the term’s widespread use regard it as a cheap way to deflect attention from moral concerns that may be perfectly valid. The idea is that those who make certain claims are doing so, not because they believe them but because, as in Russell’s examples, they want to appear a certain way. But someone accusing another of virtue signalling then needs to make the case for this, especially given that, seemingly, one might both want to appear virtuous and believe what one says. One way to back up the accusation of virtue signalling would be to show that the alleged virtue signaller is not sincere, and that therefore the only plausible reason why she says what she does is to gain moral prestige. But then, the accuser would need to substantiate the accusation of insincerity. This might be done by pointing to a disparity between her behaviour and her proclamations, on the assumption that someone who does not practise what she preaches cannot believe what she preaches. However, though it might be possible to demonstrate the disparity, the assumption that the mismatch between preaching and practice proves insincerity, is false; sometimes we are weak-willed rather than straightforwardly hypocritical – we believe in certain ideals (at least to some degree) but succumb to temptation. But let us waive this point and assume that the speaker can be shown to be insincere, as she might be if she never lived up to her proclaimed ideals, rather than occasionally lapsed. In that case, the accusation of virtue signalling would have some substance, though it assumes (what might be questioned) that there are only two possible explanations for the moral proclamations being made  – that they are sincere, or that they are made for mere show. In seems obvious that some people do make moral proclamations only for appearances’ sake. This is a hallmark of hypocrisy, and the world contains many hypocrites. But again, it can be evasive to accuse ideological opponents of virtue signalling – the accusation can be used as a way of avoiding discussion of the moral claim being made. Furthermore, even if some people who express ‘social justice’ sentiments are signalling their

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virtue, there may be others who are not, but are perfectly sincere. They express moral concerns, and to accuse them of virtue signalling for doing so clearly fails to answer those concerns. Furthermore, the one accused of virtue signalling might happily accept the description but claim that it is often necessary to signal one’s virtue to be credible. Neil Levy (Levy, forthcoming) makes this important point and one example he gives is of members of a religious community who need to signal their allegiance to the community, for instance by being seen to make arduous sacrifices, in order to be trusted within it. So far, then, the commonly heard charge of virtue signalling does not seem to carry the decisive force it is often thought to have. However, on some occasions, the objections to it still have some merit. We can see this if we notice the difference between two things: (1) signalling a virtue that is genuinely possessed, because this is necessary to gain trust, and (2) signalling a virtue (whether genuinely possessed or not) primarily out of vanity, and only incidentally because it is necessary to gain trust. This, I think, is what Russell describes and what the critics of virtue signalling are complaining about. As mentioned earlier, there certainly are people like this. The real problem it points to, however, is the danger of conformity – of wanting to be  a member of an in-crowd, or even genuinely holding a moral view, without even being aware of the pressure towards conformity. This also explains much of the denunciation and unfriending of ideological enemies that takes place nowadays: although it can be an expression of outrage that results from independent, thorough reflection, it is all too often driven by a desire to maintain one’s standing within a certain group, perhaps a left wing group of ‘social justice warriors’ or a right wing group of ‘patriots’. Members of Twitter mobs denounce people because everyone else is doing so. This is what happens if the habits of independence of mind, defended by J. S. Mill, are not cultivated. My discussion of virtue signalling is relevant to moralism because the worse cases of it are manifestations of this vice. When moralism takes the form of hounding people because of something they may have said, the vain moraliser, who signals his or her ‘virtue’ by joining in the hounding, does this to be admired by the others going after the victims. He or she is like children who befriend playground bullies by joining in with the bullying and may be afraid that if they do not, they will be bullied

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themselves. This is different from wanting to be part of a collective action against something that one perceives as bad. If I want to be adopted as a parliamentary candidate, I would do well to signal my allegiance to my chosen party and gain its trust by denouncing the bad things the party opposes. In the best cases, at least, this is a matter of motivation by morality, not moralism. The vain moraliser, as described by Russell, wants mostly to be admired by a certain in-group, not primarily because of the moral principles the group stands for, but because the group is attractive in some other way – for example, it is cool or endorsed by glamorous people. Membership of that group will confer upon the vain moralist some of that glamour. He or she thus has a strong motive to conform to the group’s stated values, whether this is consciously recognised or not. One way to conform is to signal agreement with those values. Another, worse way is to join in the collective hounding of people who have fallen foul of the group. Vain moralism is not cruel per se, but it can certainly lead to cruelty. For it is obvious that the making of public enemies is often cruel and out of proportion to desert. The victims are often not able to defend themselves, especially if they were not in the public eye and have come to attention because of some casual remark they were foolish enough to publicise on social media. But if Russell is right, there is another kind of moraliser, the intrinsically cruel kind, more sinister than the vain kind. These moralisers may well believe what they preach. Moreover, and this makes it much harder to criticise, the people they go after may have done or said something genuinely objectionable. Russell goes on to give an example of a university faculty member who told a grossly offensive joke about slavery to a black student. The faculty member quickly realised that what he had said was wrong, but protests escalated unstoppably. No amount of contrition or new anti-racist policies were enough. The culprit was denounced in the strongest possible terms, making it hard to see, as Russell points out, what language might be left to describe monsters of depravity like Heinrich Himmler. The difficulty with cases like this, and they are common, is that decent people want both to come down harshly on this kind of behaviour, but also retain a sense of perspective: some things are very bad, but other things are far worse. And there is, of course, a problem with making this very

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remark; the advice to ‘get things in perspective’ itself appears, at best grossly insouciant of a real wrong and at worst a kind of collusion. But if we are to protect individuals from the cruelty that makes them into public enemies, we do need some notion of perspective, thoroughly and delicately worked out. In any event, while there can be justification for avoiding having as friends people whose moral views show them to have significant flaws, and even in extreme cases for ending friendships, the making of enemies is a significant further step. People should accept responsibility for what they say and, to an extent, for their attitudes and opinions. But the hounding and unfair treatment of people seen as transgressing particular boundaries – some would describe them as taboos – is one of the most unpleasant features of the culture wars, works against tolerance and charity, and is all too often the enemy of truth.

Notes 1. For example, see many articles defending Brexit by Brendan O’Neill in Spiked and elsewhere. https://www.spiked-online/author/brendan-oneill/ 2. Julie Burchill and Jane Robins, People Like Us, performed at the Union Theatre, London, in October 2018. 3. This consideration has been invoked by Mark Wicclair in a defence of doctors’ right to conscientious refusal to involve themselves in abortion. See Wicclair (2000). 4. St. Augustine, Letter 211 c424. 5. Press statement from Sir Roger Scruton in response to the apology from the New Statesman 8th Jul 2019 https://www.roger-scruton.com/ articles/20-latest/617-press-statement-from-sir-roger-scruton-inresponse-to-the-apology-from-the-new-statesman-8-jul-2019

Bibliography Aristotle. 1996. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. with Notes Harris Rackham. Ware/ Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Bartholomew, James. 18th April 2015. Easy Virtue. The Spectator.

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Blackford, Russell. 2019. The Tyranny of Opinion. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc. Levy, N. (forthcoming). Virtue Signalling Is Virtuous. Synthese 1–18. Roache, Rebecca. 8th May 2015. If You’re a Conservative, I’m not Your Friend. Practical Ethics (A University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog). http://blog. p r a c t i c a l e t h i c s . ox . a c . u k / 2 0 1 5 / 0 5 / i f - yo u re - a - c o n s e r va t i ve - i m not-your-friend/ Russell, Paul. 29th May 2020. Vice Dressed as Virtue. Aeon. https://aeon.co/ essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-to-disguise-his-horns Weatherson, Brian. 27th May 2019. How to Get on With Your Political Enemies. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/05/ how-get-your-political-enemies Wicclair, Mark. 2000. Conscientious Objection in Medicine. Bioethics 14 (3): 205–227.

6 The Sleep of Reason

I began this book by talking about intellectual freedom, and following J. S. Mill’s classic and mostly persuasive defence of liberty, I then distinguished freedom of enquiry and freedom of expression. I expressed concern at a phenomenon described satirically by George Orwell as crimestop, which he describes (in the words of the fictitious Goldstein) as the habit of stopping at the threshold of a dangerous thought, as if by instinct. My thoughts were deliberately impressionistic, leaving argument for later. While I do not believe that impressions, feelings or instincts are in any way infallible, they are often a useful starting point before embarking on an intellectual exercise of building up a case, scrutinising it in the light of counterarguments, refining it and quite possibly abandoning it. Philosophical enquiry is most productive when fired by a sense that there is something that matters deeply, even if the case is initially hard to build, and even accepting the possibility that the ideals deeply valued cannot be defended at all. I was motivated to write this book because there was something that mattered to me, that I felt was under attack from people at opposite ends of the social and political spectrum. This was that human wellbeing requires a moral atmosphere, inseparable from an intellectual atmosphere, © The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8_6

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in which tolerance, thoughtfulness, acceptance of one’s own fallibility, uncertainty, ambivalence, mercy, forgiveness and a desire to find the best in people, can flourish. To protect that atmosphere, we need to accept that many basically decent people have bad ideas. We should eschew moralism but understand that it can have benign roots. We should be willing to understand that there is often a complex personal history behind even the most difficult people we have to deal with and that moral or political convictions that seem thoroughly misguided or even odious can have origins in things we can admire. We should hold to a presumption against shaming people for what they say or trying to shut them up. We should encourage free and bold enquiry among the young, finding a way to foster critical thinking as something intrinsically valuable as well as a method of promoting tolerance. We should not succumb to the misguided notion that these vital intellectual skills are somehow dangerous, because they might cause people to question their identity or cause them to doubt the values of the groups they belong to. However, as we saw, people raise objections to the ideal described, or at least to traditionally liberal ways to promote it. It might seem fanciful, or merely obvious and platitudinous. More seriously, and prominently in the culture wars, the ideal may be attacked for being in some way supremacist: this ideal is all very well for the privileged. It is easy to defend this liberal atmosphere if the company is congenial to you. But it takes little account of people in vulnerable positions who must endure racist jokes, sexually demeaning remarks and bigoted comments in general. This issue is at the heart of the debate about the limits of what people ought to say or be allowed to say. But it has a legacy in the modish idea that concern about free expression is somehow ‘right wing’. Sadly, this view is becoming commonplace in academia. In the past, it would have been assumed – perhaps a little uncritically – that truth can be attained only by careful enquiry and debate, even if this incidentally offends some people. Nowadays, academia is increasingly dominated by people who produce apparently sophisticated attacks on the ideal of free enquiry itself, though they sometimes deny that they are doing this. Clearly, the moral atmosphere I yearn for requires civility. This means that you usually do not mock people or speak rudely about their beliefs unless this is necessary to shake people out of attitudes or beliefs that are

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seriously harmful. You do not pick arguments, unless the issue is genuinely important and there is some chance of making sense prevail. You listen, and interrupt only when the other person shows no inclination to shut up, or when the flow of talk contains so many doubtful assumptions that you will forget them unless they stop talking. Civility requires a degree of self-censorship based on consideration for others’ feelings. It is often not necessary to point out someone’s ignorance or likely bias, their dubious reasoning, or their over-emotionality. If people who worry about the free exchange of difficult ideas were worried only about incivility, it would be hard to disagree. However, as we saw, the problem goes deeper than this. With the rise of new epistemologies (which began in the rarefied atmosphere of academia but filtered out into the wider culture) came the view that no one has a right to speak or even to have an opinion on a matter pertaining to the collective experience of a  particular group, unless the opinion is authorized by the group itself. This raises the awkward question of whether the group in question – such as BAME people, women, or transgender people – should be trying to persuade outsiders to join their cause. That many outsiders do join in and become ‘allies’ is obvious from the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that are taking place as I write, and it has already been clear for decades. Large numbers of young white people are joining in and are being accepted by black demonstrators. Many are joining because they have become convinced, on being presented with arguments and evidence, that there continues to be a serious problem of racism in societies like Britain and the US. The arguments that persuade them are those that can appeal to anyone capable of rational thought, whatever their racial background. Whether or not we should agree with all the claims associated with the movement, apart from the obvious truths that racism exists and is bad, this is an example of reason at work, accessible to all. People use reason and appeal to evidence to reach conclusions that others find badly misguided or even profoundly offensive. But the only rational solution to this is to point out the errors of reasoning and failures of perception, which may very well be caused by biases of some kind, and try to get them to acquire better beliefs. But this brings us right back to

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the idea that belief in uninhibited enquiry and the dissemination of its fruits is itself dubious, or ‘right wing’.

Is the Concern to Promote Reason and Free Speech Right Wing? The obvious response is to ask left wingers if they take their own beliefs to be true, and if so, whether they hope to persuade others of them. If the answer is yes to both questions, the next and obvious question is of how they propose to persuade others. Revolutionary leftists may not be interested in persuasion, but only in seizing power. But most leftists are not revolutionary. They seek to persuade others and even win democratic elections, though they might be irritated by having to discuss profound injustices in a calm tone, as if they were matters of idle curiosity. But verbal persuasion must allow for dissent. Dogmatists of all stripes love talking. Sometimes they allow questions. But the real test of good faith is whether they allow follow-ups to their answers. Once there are follow-ups, discussion has got going and unexpected ideas may come up. Some of these ideas might be upsetting or seem outrageous. They may seem to be obviously the products of ignorance or prejudice. But these things are fully exposed only by patient explanation in ways that do not patronise or shame those proposing them. To see how sensitive this could be, take the intense media attention given to the Black Lives Matter marches that were rekindled in June 2020. No decent person denies that it is appalling that a black man, George Floyd, was killed by a police officer who pressed his knee on his neck for about nine minutes, causing him to die of asphyxiation. Nor can anyone reasonably deny that the US has a long and dreadful history of racism directed against black people. It is absurd to think this is all history and that the problem went away after the civil rights movement and the end of formal segregation. But in a calm discursive atmosphere, questions will be raised about some surrounding issues. Someone might ask whether we can be sure that the killing of George Floyd was a racist killing, i.e. that he was killed because he was black.1 To answer this, it would

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be relevant to find out whether the white officer who killed him had also brutalized white people. Again, someone else might ask what exactly ‘structural racism’ is, and whether its existence is proved by inequalities in various outcomes for white and black people. It will also be asked whether black people can be racist, or whether white people can be victims of racism. These questions will be shocking to some and clearly reasonable to others, but in probing investigations in which people feel entirely free to speak their minds, they will certainly be raised. No doubt, such questions will be raised by some people who hate or feel threatened by the Black Lives Matter movement and wish it would go away. But the questions themselves require reasoned responses. Such reasoned responses are often given. But for them to be given properly, there must be an atmosphere in which people are not deterred by a sense of taboo from following up the answers. Conservatives are sometimes pilloried because of their proneness to mutter remarks like: ‘Of course, you’re not allowed to say X or Y these days – it isn’t politically correct’, and the online readers’ comments sections of relatively conservative publications are full of remarks like this. But in a liberal democracy, people who react in this way have the same voting and participation rights as anyone else. If they feel they cannot speak because of real or imagined taboos, they will become resentful. The liberal moral atmosphere I advocate is necessary to defuse such resentment. If left wing opinions are true, they should be able to withstand rational scrutiny. We should invoke Mill again, especially his second main argument for free discussion, which I expounded in Chap. 1: that there is usually some truth on both sides of a dispute. The ‘populist’ idea that there is ‘truth in the crowd’ is also relevant here. When enough voices are heard, sensible ideas will emerge, even in an emotional atmosphere. If the ideals of open discussion and objective enquiry are not right wing, how do we explain the widespread belief that they are? Much of the problem is that elements within the left – certainly not the left as such have explicitly disavowed these ideals and been drawn to the worse varieties of identity politics and identity-based epistemologies, as discussed in the previous chapter. These movements have recently been denounced as ‘cultural Marxism’ by its most vocal critics, and there has been a vigorous campaign against them, spearheaded by recent cultural heroes (or

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villains) like the psychologist Jordan Peterson and promoted by large numbers of their online supporters. But unfortunately, the term is a misnomer. Originally, ‘cultural Marxism’ referred to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which was an attempt beginning in the 1920s and 30s to promote a version of Marxism that acknowledged the role of the culture and the  self-image of people in a historical period as a factor in social change. But Marxism itself is not a relativist theory. However, what critics like Peterson are really referring to is the association of ideas known under the umbrella term ‘postmodernism’, and they blame it for many of our cultural ills. Certainly, there are influential strands of postmodern relativism in intellectual left-wing movements, but there is no necessary connection between relativism and the left. Indeed, if one is a relativist and of the left, one will find it hard to say that left wing ideas are objectively any better than right wing ones, or that the reasoning the left uses to reach its conclusions is objectively more truth-­ conducive than the reasoning used by the right. But left wingers who denigrate traditionally liberal ideas of objective enquiry, science, free thought, and unfettered discussion often associate those ideals with the right. This is noticed by people on the right, who consequently think of themselves as the sole defenders of truth and reason. There was never any need for this. Central to the disagreements between left and right are differences relating to (for example) the intrinsic value of equality; state redistribution of wealth; the right to inherit social advantages; market regulation, and the value of traditional ideals such as marriage, religion, authority and loyalty to the nation. It should be possible to discuss the merits of these ideals in a rational way. Admittedly, this faces obstacles. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in his bestselling book The Righteous Mind (Haidt 2012: 131–49) political disagreements substantially correspond with different ‘moral taste buds’, such as those that detect unfairness and unkindness (vices especially detested by left-liberals and to a lesser extent by social conservatives) and those that detect disloyalty, disobedience and degradation (vices especially detested by social conservatives). Non-rational factors largely explain which moral taste buds are activated when we make moral judgements, and Haidt provocatively suggests that political views

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are partly explained by personality traits that have substantially genetic causes. Naturally risk-averse people, for example, are more conservative. Nevertheless, there is still some room for rational disagreement; people can and do change their moral or political views, even if their personalities remain stable. In any case, even if argument does not change people’s minds as much as we might hope or think, such arguments can still be rationally assessed for their soundness.

 bstacles to Sound Judgements O and Productive Conversations As Haidt shows, psychology provides fascinating insights into people’s moral personalities. But there are also branches of philosophy, especially epistemology and informal logic, that can help us to see obstacles to making good judgements in a wide of areas, including ethics and politics. There are many irrational tendencies that obfuscate the current culture wars debates. Many of the obstacles to forming sound judgements are succinctly described by Stephen Law, in his book Believing Bullshit (Law 2011). He tells how absurd beliefs are created or maintained by such strategies as appealing to mystery; confusing data that fit a hypothesis with data that confirm it; appealing to brute inner conviction (‘I Just Know!’); piling up anecdotes, and the manipulation of emotional vulnerabilities (‘Pressing Your Buttons’). Many of Law’s targets are beliefs associated with religion, but he sometimes uses examples from politics.

Anecdotal Evidence Following Law’s ideas, but not necessarily using examples he comes up with, we can see how anecdotal evidence is often used to support social or political stances, creating a false impression that the anecdotes, even if true, give an accurate impression of the overall picture. For example, the fact that there are people who start from humble beginnings and later

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become rich and successful is often used to ‘prove’ that people can become whatever they want, such as a CEO, a star athlete or even a country’s President, if they try hard enough and believe in themselves. The obvious flaw is that the anecdotes, even if true, tell us nothing about the many people who work hard and are full of self-belief, but do not achieve their dreams. Similarly, one might hope to show that there is a societal crisis – for example of misogyny – by accumulating numerous anecdotes about terrible things men to do women. Evidence like this is all too frequently regarded as ‘proof ’ in socio-political debates. But while the conclusions drawn may be true, the reliance on anecdotal evidence alone is insufficient to make the case. Regarding the prevalence of misogyny, we would also need to know how common it is for men to behave well towards women, in situations when they might easily conduct themselves badly. Sometimes, in fact, data are collected by researchers with an unshakeable belief, based on ‘just knowing’ something, who then notice only things that fit their initial hypothesis. But evidence confirms a hypothesis not only if it fits it but also if alternative hypotheses can be ruled less likely than the favoured one. To show this is often a complex and painstaking process. If the research is agenda-led, conducted by researchers who expect or desire a particular headline-grabbing conclusion to be true, and especially if it is funded by grant-giving bodies with the same preconceptions, these careful processes can easily go by the board.

Conformity Law’s chapter on ‘Pressing Your Buttons’ (Law 2011: 195–207) is largely about techniques of non-rational persuasion, including brainwashing, that are sometimes practised by religious or political cults. But the idea of ‘button-pressing’ can be applied to the forces of conformity that I have already briefly touched upon. Brainwashing is a rare and extreme example of inducing beliefs by non-rational means, and involves such pressures as isolation, repetition of slogans, rewarding ‘good’ responses and punishing ‘bad’ ones, imposing strenuous work, creating fear and uncertainty, and restricting information sources. But as Law notes, brainwashing and more everyday types of persuasion are on a continuum. If a

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certain ideological movement acquires an enthusiastic following among your peers, you may be afraid to challenge it openly for fear of becoming unpopular or being regarded as ignorant or stupid. Moreover, as discussed earlier, you may also come to doubt your own perceptions and internalize the expected disapproval of others if you find yourself thinking out of line. This will be worse if you experience shame or guilt, bearing in mind what I discussed in Chap. 5 about how beliefs and attitudes can manifest moral stupidity, an amalgam of moral and epistemic vice. Of course, we should bear in mind what others think when we form opinions and if there are independent reasons for supposing that others have a mostly good judgement, that is a reason to consider revising your own views if you disagree with the others. (The extreme opposite of the vice of conformity is contrarianism, the disposition to disbelieve received opinion, and like conformity, it is an epistemic vice. In Aristotelian fashion, epistemic virtue, in respect of taking account of others’ judgements, is a mean, flanked on either side by the vices of conformity and contrarianism). However, to take account of others’ views in an appropriate way, it is relevant to ask how they themselves acquired them. Are they too attentive to what others think, or not attentive enough? We should always remember that once the core assumptions of a traditional view are successfully challenged by a popular radical movement, it is likely that what was true, as well as what was false, in old assumptions will be dismissed or forgotten. Consequently, there is nothing inherently unlikely in large numbers of well-intentioned, educated, and reflective people having utterly absurd beliefs. The liberal moral atmosphere I defend allows this to be recognised. People with unpopular perspectives can sometimes see obvious flaws in widely shared assumptions and if they feel ashamed to point this out because of a social ‘mood’ that dictates that ‘you can’t say or even think that!’, they will feel, and probably resent, the consequent need to self-­ censor. Moreover, important truths may be lost. Elements within the contemporary left have contributed to this oppressive moral atmosphere and in Chap. 4 I illustrated this with reference to taboos against denying that differences between men’s and women’s psychology can only have socially oppressive causes. Yet if this point is unwelcome, we should

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recognise that many changes the left celebrates came about only because of the lifting of inhibitions about challenging assumptions and practices hitherto taken for granted. Take, as an illustration, the concept of ‘microaggression’. Many on the right despise the term. For them it only signals the hypersensitivity of minorities to perfectly harmless phrases, questions, or jokes. But although some people are hypersensitive, the term also describes something that is real and a proper cause for concern. For years, members of ethnic minorities, often born in the country where they lived, were expected not to object to questions like ‘Where do you come from?’ Some, no doubt, did not feel especially offended, but others found the regularity of this talk demeaning, seeming to insinuate that they did not really belong in the country of their birth. And for years, they put up with it, not wanting a reputation for hypersensitivity if they complained. Nowadays there is far more awareness of this problem. But the important point is that complaints about microaggressions were made possible by the liberal moral atmosphere I am recommending. The forces of conformity forbad the voicing of these concerns, but the conformity was eventually shattered by non-conformists speaking their minds. To Law’s account of non-rational forces that shape beliefs and can inhibit a liberal atmosphere, it is time to add some other common obstacles to truth-seeking and free discussion. These may not strictly amount to informal errors of logic or errors of scientific reasoning, but are often rhetorical moves designed to distract, shame, or induce us to lose perspective.

Guilt by Association One such is the tactic of attempting to discredit a view by associating it with people or opinions that most people agree are disreputable. It is the creation of guilt by association. Suppose someone expresses an opinion, only for someone else indignantly to point out that a known racist also says this, or a known communist. Hearers are invited, if not quite explicitly, to draw the conclusion that the viewpoint in question is racist or communist, and therefore should be rejected without further discussion. Indeed, the person proposing it should feel ashamed.

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Of course, the guilt by association move is often logically no better than the following textbook fallacy: ‘All dogs have tails, all cats have tails, therefore all dogs are cats.’2 The ridiculous conclusion makes it easy to see the fallacy: just because all dogs and all cats have something in common (and obviously, they have many things in common) it does not follow that there are no differences. For example, dogs bark but cats do not. Yet the tactic is frequently used to obfuscate discussions and smear opponents. When Jeremy Corbyn was Leader of the UK Labour Party, from 2015 to 2020, it was often alleged that he was a Marxist, and therefore obviously dangerous. People were alarmed at the prospect of a Marxist Prime Minister of a liberal democracy. I do not judge here whether Corbyn was either a Marxist or dangerous, but only make the point that if he shared some beliefs with Marxists, that did not per se make him a Marxist. Perhaps there was enough similarity between his views and the core doctrines of Marxism for the allegation to be defensible. But it was designed to close off discussion of whether there were also significant dissimilarities – something that certainly should have been addressed. Sometimes an issue is so sensitive or susceptible to misinterpretation that people avoid discussing it altogether, even if they privately admit uncertainty about it. Institutions have been driven to panic by the thought that their researchers are pursuing questions that might lead to conclusions that could seem to legitimate some obvious evil. In late 2018, a young social scientist, Noah Carl, was summarily dismissed, soon after a petition against him, from a prestigious research post at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He had said that the question of whether average differences in cognitive abilities between different population groups could be partly caused by genes, should be discussible (Quillette Magazine, May 28th, 2019). Those petitioning for his dismissal clearly thought that Carl was entertaining the possibility that racism might be scientifically justifiable; after all, there is a long history of racists appealing to (supposed) science to justify their racist ideas. But the fallacy in the thinking should be clear. Just because someone believes (or regards as legitimately discussible) that genes might have a role in explaining these small differences (assuming they exist), and just because racists also believe this, it does not follow that someone who holds this view is a racist. Carl said nothing that implies that discrimination on racial grounds is

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justified in any circumstances. In fact, something that amounts to this very point was succinctly stated by Peter Singer – hardly a racist or of the political right – more than forty years ago (Singer 1979: 23–8). Nor did Carl say, or imply, that cognitive ability has any relevance to a person’s worth. His abrupt dismissal was clearly unjust. It was the cowardly, dishonest appeasement of petitioners, most of whom were not experts in Carl’s field, based on a highly implausible case against him.

Ideological Hypervigilance A liberal atmosphere in which ideas may be pursued without fear of shaming is incompatible with what I call ideological hypervigilance. People will often remain silent rather than voice questions and opinions, or use language, that might be seized upon as evidence of some serious flaw of thinking or character. Whether a reaction is hypervigilant, rather than properly vigilant, is a moot question. Objections to certain terms that are nowadays commonly, and rightly, regarded as unjustly discriminatory would have been thought hypervigilant two or three decades ago. For example, in polite society nowadays we rarely see references to ‘spastics,’ ‘the mentally subnormal,’ or ‘illegitimate children.’ Certain ways of referring to people – especially women and minorities – were deemed to, and often genuinely did, reveal a contemptuous attitude towards them, and sometimes functioned to justify disrespectful treatment. Nevertheless, whether a form of words is denigrating or reasonable can be hard to tell. The hypervigilance shows itself in the unquestioning assumption that the words are harmful and leads to endless demands for corrections which can make it impossible to say what needs to be said. It also holds up the flow of discussion, re-­ directing it into unproductive tributaries that go nowhere, and from which there is no way back, since its original subject has been forgotten. The problem is one of combining a liberal atmosphere with the discouragement of language or ideas which are rightly found offensive or harmful. Well-meaning people might use the terms in question, without realising that they cause offence. It may take vigilant individuals to challenge such terms. When their objections persuade enough other people,

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the language in question slowly disappears by consensus. The problem of hypervigilance emerges when the vigilantes comes to see their own interpretations as unquestionable. Critics may regard the new terminology as euphemistic and unable to alter or cover up an underlying reality that needs to be dealt with. To determine whether the abolition of old terms would only lead to their replacement by euphemisms (which are unlikely to solve real problems) is obviously difficult. But problems require facing up to reality. When ideological hypervigilance takes over, the chances of solving these problems diminishes.

The Normalisation of Hyperbole An often-noted feature of the culture wars is Manicheanism, or as Lukianoff and Haidt (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018) diagnose it, the belief that the world is divided into good people and bad people (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 53–77). I have discussed this problem in Chap. 5. But it is associated with another problem, which I call the normalisation of hyperbole. People who hold certain views are regarded as evil rather than ordinarily flawed. Social problems are not just problems, but disasters. Shock-jock radio presenters and tabloid journalists trade in hyperbole – that is their job. But talk of ‘epidemics’ of such things as mental illness, sexism,  or ‘cultural Marxists’ dominating universities, is increasingly common and used by commentators of many different persuasions. Many people find it hard to admit that there are degrees of good and evil, perhaps because it is platitudinous to do so. It is also hard for many to accept that genuine evils such as racism come in degrees – that only a few people are virulently racist, and more people mildly so. However, the admission that evils come in degrees is easily misinterpreted as a denial of the evil’s existence or seriousness. Someone who admits that there is a societal problem of sexism, but thinks society is only mildly sexist, is readily interpreted as saying that sexism is not a problem anyone should worry about. There might, of course, be a conversational implicature to this effect, as when we are told ‘not to worry too much’ about some problem. But a grasp of reality requires us to see both good and evil as coming in degrees, and more importantly, people’s

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virtues and vices in the same way. It may take exaggeration to spur people to action. But truth is often less dramatic than it is portrayed as being. A Manichean mentality may be an effective force for social change, but it is also a force for social division. Radicals and conservatives, of course, will differ over whether divisiveness is really a problem. I think it is, especially bearing in mind the hounding of individuals for their ideological stances that I discussed in Chap. 5.

Conclusion: A Spiritual Malaise I conclude with a mere suggestion, which is that many aspects of the culture wars that I have discussed – the attempts to curb the expression of considered opinion, the sceptical attitudes to truth and objectivity and the rise of what Lukianoff and Haidt call ‘common enemy identity politics’ (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018: 62–77) are, in a way, spiritual malaises. By ‘spiritual’ is not meant anything implying the truth of traditional religious doctrines, though religion and spirituality are natural allies. Spirituality in a broader sense concerns love, gratitude, generosity of spirit, forgiveness, humility, and mercy. It tolerates fallibility and uncertainty and accepts the unavoidable fragility of the human endeavour. Sometimes it is contrasted with reason, but this is a mistake. Truth is the goal of reason, and the pursuit of truth, combined with scepticism about any claim to have found it for certain, is a moral necessity. One of the most helpful tools in the quest is the Socratic method of question and answer, the patient putting forward of propositions and then subjecting them to counterarguments, dealing with the counterarguments by seeing whether refined versions of the original propositions can survive. It would be an excellent thing if schools and universities made the Socratic method integral to their teaching methods. In this way, the emotional reactions generated by certain ideas and words, generated by what Daniel Kahnemann (Kahnemann 2011) calls ‘fast thinking’ could be tempered by slow and patient thinking, which allows the emergence of difficult and counterintuitive conclusions. Achieving this requires us to play a long game, and we are often deterred from admitting we have been wrong, because we suspect that our ideological opponents

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will not do likewise and forgive us our mistakes. But encouraging people to think of themselves as partaking of a shared humanity, with a shared capacity for virtue and reflection, might in time do some good.

Post-COVID-19 When the first draft of this book was well advanced, most of the world was struck by the unexpected disaster of the COVID-19 coronavirus. I wondered whether the concerns I was addressing were inconsequential, whether the culture wars, arguments about Brexit, identity politics and tribalism would be forgotten, or dimly remembered as the decadent prelude to a catastrophe. The anti-racism protests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd seem to give the lie to that. But early in the pandemic, there was much celebration of how we were all ‘coming together’, with individuals taking responsibility for others with acts of kindness. A terrible number of people are still dying or suffering bereavement due to the pandemic, tragedies they could not possibly have predicted only a few weeks previously. When the world recovers, which will be a slow and painful process, old enmities will probably reignite. But it is only to be hoped that our collective confrontation with a natural disaster will leave a memory of the cooperation that emerged and bequeath a lesson for the future.

Notes 1. In view of America’s long history of racism, I have little doubt that the police officer’s treatment of George Floyd was motivated by racism. But an exhaustive enquiry could raise the question. 2. Pedants will point out that Manx cats do not have tails. But let that pass.

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Bibliography Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New  York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc. Kahnemann, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Law, Stephen. 2011. Believing Bullshit, How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Amherst/New York: Prometheus Books. Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin Press. Quillette Magazine. 28th May 2019. Noah Carl: An Update on the Young Scholar Fired by a Cambridge College for Thoughtcrime. https://quillette. com/2019/05/28/noah-carl-an-update-on-the-young-scholar-firedby-a-cambridge-college-for-thoughtcrime/ Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index1

Anecdotal evidence, 147–148

Disinvitations, 3, 35, 36, 40, 51, 52, 69, 106

C

E

A

Character, 57, 101, 117–120, 127, 130, 135, 152 Conformity, 4–7, 9–12, 15, 16, 25, 136–139, 148–150 Cultural Marxism, 67, 145, 146 Culture wars, 3, 4, 13, 52, 68, 82, 89, 90, 96, 102, 105, 115, 142, 147, 153–155 D

Disagreement, 1, 52, 62, 65, 66, 120–121, 126, 127, 130, 146, 147

Epistemic virtue, 4, 10, 12–17, 23, 26, 149 Epistemology, standard and non-­ standard, 108, 110 Evolutionary psychology, 89, 92, 94 F

Fake news, 24, 39, 55, 57, 58, 67 Feminism, 10, 40, 71, 72, 82–97, 118, 133 Free enquiry, 2, 12–14, 17, 19–23, 25, 26, 31, 55, 142

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 P. Benn, Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57107-8

157

158 Index

Free speech, 1, 2, 26, 31, 34, 38, 39, 44–46, 49–52, 53n2, 82, 144–147 Friendship, 4, 117, 119, 122–130, 139 H

Harm, 3, 11, 13, 26, 31–35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 50, 81, 106, 134 I

Identity politics, 1, 3, 4, 35, 99, 101–105, 107, 145, 154, 155 Ideological hypervigilance, 152–153 Incitement, 31–34, 38–40, 42

R

Racism, 49, 89, 98–102, 108, 109, 111, 122, 143–145, 151, 153, 155, 155n1 Reason, 2, 4–6, 10, 14, 17, 20, 25, 30, 32, 34–39, 41, 42, 47, 48, 55, 56, 59, 63–66, 68, 70–73, 75, 81, 87, 88, 91, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 108, 110–112, 119, 124, 125, 128–131, 133–136, 141–155 Relativism, 59–65, 111, 146 S

Liberalism, 4, 60

Shaming, 1, 115, 116, 131, 132, 142, 152 Socratic Method, 4, 154

M

T

L

Manicheanism, 153 Moralism, 130, 131, 134–139, 142 O

Objective enquiry, 23, 57, 58, 65, 145, 146 Offence, 3, 16, 26, 29–52, 152

Threats, 1, 30–34, 39, 43, 46, 49, 52, 89, 106 Transgender conflict, 69–73 Truth, 3–7, 9, 11–13, 15, 17–26, 31, 33, 36, 39, 55–60, 63–65, 67, 68, 72, 82, 92, 93, 96, 110–112, 118, 131, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 154 Truth-sensitive, 23–26

P

Postmodernism, 146 Post-truth, 57, 67 Privilege, 3, 59, 81–113, 132

V

Virtue signalling, 135–139