To the editors of the Journal of Political Philosophy,
First, a primer: the idea ‘black lives matter’ and the political movement bearing that phrase represent something expansive but specific. The idea ‘black lives matter’ is an ethical demand calling for an end to the erasure of black lives and presence by systems of racist power anchored in a history of white supremacy. The movement puts this ethical demand into action by seeking to influence city, state, and federal policies through acts of protest and civil disobedience. In our current moment, both the idea and the movement are aligned against the notion that black experiences are irrelevant or negligible for organizing our collective view of civil society.
So, if you might – please do – try to imagine my distaste when it was brought to my attention that your journal published a philosophical symposium on ‘black lives matter’ with not one philosopher of color represented, without one philosopher of color to convey her or his contextualized sense of a movement that is urgently and justifiably about context. It certainly cannot be said there was no one to ask. I should know. I just published a book on the philosophical foundations of black lives matter.
Now, it might be the case that this particular symposium is merely unfortunate –the journal asked every black philosopher and political theorist it could find and was turned down. (Disclosure: I was not asked.) From an outside point of view, someone desiring to take on this more generous stance but not wanting to do so on blind faith would have only to do something simple: revisit the journal’s publication record and if it turns out that the topic of race or at least black philosophers, no matter the subject of their work, were decently represented in the journal’s pages, then we have some grounds to extend good faith. But things don’t look very good on this front, either.
Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in the early months of 2012 and it was his shooting and the subsequent exoneration of Zimmerman in the summer of 2012 that sparked the movement. But we all know that. Right? Yes. So we are now five years on from that event, and since what is at issue is what appears to be a problematic mishandling of a symposium on the movement for black lives we can ask whether the journal has in these five years taken the political problem of race seriously as philosophically worthy. One might (or might not) be surprised to learn that at four issues a year, making a total of nearly twenty issues (including a special issue titled “Philosophy, Politics, and Society”), the Journal of Political Philosophy has not published a single article on the philosophy of race: voting, elections, immigration, global markets, and animals have gotten their time in the journal’s sun. But as black Americans, and the philosophers who study racial inequality – a political philosophical problem – have directly engaged one of our era’s most sinister moral and political quandaries, the journal has failed to represent race in its pages. Maybe more damning, so far as I can tell, not one black philosopher has seen her or his work appear in the pages of your respected journal, on race or any other topic.
You can see, then, how at this point the generous reading of the mishandling of the symposium comes under significant pressure. So much pressure, in fact, that it becomes compressed into something else: strained hope. The hope that intelligent and imaginative people can see the landscape of morality in its complexity and be sensitive to life-worlds beyond their range of experience. And the way we do this is to diversity the voices to which we listen. You see? – diversity really is an ethically important ideal. To be clear, I welcome the participation of non-brown voices in a symposium on black lives matter. It is important that there be a range of viewpoints on a matter that is democratically urgent – we are all involved in this problem. So my issue is not in the least with those authors whose papers were appropriated for the symposium. Rather I am directly challenging the editorial staff to account for their offense against a movement and community.
....And this is especially important as what we do – when we write and publish – contributes to the historical record. What is so deflating about the journal’s misstep here is that this contribution to the historical record is in fact a kind of replaying of history that the movement for black lives has dedicated itself to eliminating from a society struggling to be decent – the erasure of black presence when and where it counts and is needed.
With regret,
Chris Lebron@Philosopher
When we understand the production and scrutiny of argument as the characteristic practice of philosophy, we may well come to believe that the form can be separated from the person engaged in and evaluation of argument.+ That is, while it is a sociological and professional (and, thus, economic) matter who gets credit for originating or advancing an argument and its refinements (and who does the drudgery of refereeing and editing arguments), one may come to hold that it is not a properly philosophical concern to worry about who has a seat at the argumentative table except in so far as the participants are good at the argumentative stuff.+
In what follows, let's stipulate, for the sake of (ahh) argument, that being competent at the argumentative stuff is a necessary condition for participation in philosophy. While, as feminists have shown (see this piece by Lisa Shapiro), this necessary condition rules out quite a few (potentially truth-apt) practices from philosophy and may well exclude people who share certain characteristics (being a woman, being born outside of Europe, etc.), this may be a price to pay in order to talk of a practice -- philosophy -- as a particular unity.
A nice feature of this argument-centric understanding of the nature of philosophy is that it is potentially emancipatory in two important ways: First, the barriers to entry are relatively low and even powerful social boundaries (of religion, class, gender) can, thereby, be overcome. For example, it is a remarkable fact that the early analytic, Lvov-Warsaw school of logic included lots of women and Jews (when this was extremely rare). Second, it allows for a very wide ranges of concepts and topics (say, from modal arguments for the existence of God to new conceptualizations of social ontology) to become subject of philosophical inquiry. This, too, makes philosophical practice, in principle, welcoming to people from all kinds of walk of life. So, (recall) while the argumentative conception of philosophy is compatible with turning philosophy over to disembodied machines, in practice it means many different kinds of embodied thinkers can participate in the practice (until a corporation marketing deep learning program manages to put us out of business).
The weak philosophical link in this self-understanding of philosophy, is the input of the argumentative machinery: the source of our premises. Depending on the population of philosophers, there may well be biases (in the methodological sense) that prevent the full possibility space of premises to be searched, mapped, and evaluated. Starting points may be thought intuitive, when they are really biased (the trope of X-PHI), and objections may be missed because folk are unaware. (Recall my post on how reading Barnes on disability made me change my idea of what a human is.) Reflection on this weak link is one reason why epistemologists, philosophers of science, and political epistemologists/philosophers have become increasingly welcoming of epistemic diversity (for a nuanced discussion see Solomon) and sensitive to inductive risk (Heather Douglas), epistemic injustice (e.g., Miranda Fricker) and (Spivak's notion) of epistemic violence (Dotson) in knowledge production and, when reflexive, in philosophical practice. I made some such point in one of my responses to the Hypatia debacle.
These issues can be discerned in one strain of argument in Lebron's open letter:* it's the one focused on having "black experiences" present in the professional discussion. Lebron (who may not embrace a conception of philosophy as focused on arguments) calls attention to the fact that one professional conduit for having such experience be part of the collective professional evaluation of argument, "philosophy of race," is absent in one of the leading journals in political philosophy.** Of course, Lebron's ambitions are wider because he is not merely concerned with the profession, but also with the construction of the "collective view of civil society." There are, in fact, complex questions to be asked about the relationship between philosophical discussion and the collective view of civil society, but let's stipulate that philosophy can contribute to this view (this matters in what follows next).
It is a peculiar fact about the state of the profession that when these themes are applied to professional philosophy, there is a willingness to dismiss attention to social identity of existing members of the profession (and the excluded ones) either as identity politics or as facilitating entrenchment of a pernicious status quo (Brian Leiter has been posting about this). While the charge is often made by the same people (with a fondness for a kind of masculine Marxism or Nietzscheanism), it is important to see that the two charges actually pull in different directions. For, one can recognize that one may safely downplay (social) identity when society is fully just (so that epistemic lack of diversity need not reinforce existing or create new forms of moral and political harms). But to insist that one should organize the epistemic norms of the profession as if one already inhabits a just world (while one does not do so) generates a peculiar practical contradiction whereby the practice that is intended to contribute to some improvement of the world actually generates more harms (cf. my former colleague, José Bermudez @IHE). That is, part of the charge of identity politics only makes sense in contexts radically different from reality.
The folk that argue that identity politics entrenches a bad social order (by making it seem more just, by reducing friction, by increasing number of stake-holders in it, etc), accept that the world is less than ideal and also accept that professional philosophy has some role in improving it (recall this post on Nancy Fraser). And, in fact, let's stipulate for the sake of argument (what is really a complex empirical question) that they are correct that if (what they call) identity politics in professional philosophy were successful (first in philosophy and then in influencing the construction of civil society) the political (neoliberal, unfair, etc.) status quo would be further entrenched. That is, it prevents other forms of social/political revolution. (Of course, for some preventing revolution and the bloodshed that accompanies it may well be a noble goal.)
Now, it strikes me as completely legitimate to remind others that their otherwise worthy efforts may hinder other valuable causes. (I have noted that European animal rights activists have by focusing on the harms of ritual slaughter, tended to entrench further discrimination of Muslims in Jews; and I have expressed misgivings about the presentation of the institution of marriage in Obergefell vs Hodges.) But it is another to demand that informed others, especially subordinated others, agree with you on means and ends and then to go on to say to them 'do not engage in your potentially emancipatory participation in, say, the construction of a better view of civil society because I reject that as a proper end for us.' Then one edges remarkably close to treating others as objects for one's own ends and to demand from them that they embrace their own subordination until some higher end is achieved.
As it happens, the risk of objectification, and as I'll suggest, commodification is also intrinsic to contemporary professional philosophy. To be sure, the objectification and commodification of others in philosophical research is a complicated matter and involves lots of contextual judgment. Yet, what matters here is that the argument-centric conception of philosophy always runs the risk of some such objectification in virtue of the epistemically and socially useful fact that arguments can be decoupled (as epistemic objects) from the persons and experiences that initially gives rise to them or which they purport to represent.++
Even if one thinks that there is no problem with arguments as such (after all one may think there is a useful division of labor between, say, activists and those that argue about activism), arguments are not just a means to philosophical truth but they are also means to social status and credit, in part, through publication in journals. They then enter a complex credit economy that translates into jobs, promotion, and social recognition. The absence of such recognition and, worse, the erasure of a certain presence -- the "when and where it counts" -- is not merely an instance of commodification of other people's experience(s), but, when noted, also becomes a potent symbolic representation of the ways in which our epistemic practices can entrench a harmful social status quo.++
I am glad to read that the editor of JPP (in response to a letter by Melvin Lee Rogers) is treating this as an opportunity of "how to learn" from the situation. And I am curious to learn how the journal responds, and learns.
Let me close with a reflection, I don't think it is a surprise that analytic philosophy is confronting these issues right now (while allowing that social media amplifies their intensity and rapidity). Its methods and practices were developed and calibrated on the study of logic/mathematics/physics and extended to natural languages and meta-ethics. The methods work well in casuistry in which lots of background commitments are givens.*** (Even in so-called 'core' areas it's been an age of meta-philosophy for a while now.) The increasing, sustained interest in social ontology, political philosophy, and social amelioration are relatively recent phenomena, and how to think about the relationship between our professional practices and research ethics has not been -- outside standpoint epistemology and philosophy of race, perhaps -- a subject of central concern (as it is, say, in anthropology or medicine). Some may recoil from socially and policy relevant philosophy (under the rubric of risk-aversion to controversy and social justice warriors). Others, I hope our best lights, may develop a better understanding of and improvements in research ethics and methods.
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