It would be nice if there were a news-of-the-profession site that didn’t involve snarkiness. I think what David and others are pointing out is that we thought that you were marketing your site as exactly that. Of course, it’s your site, so do what you want with it. But just a couple of points in favor of not making posts like this:

I think that Brian Leiter’s behaviour is reprehensible. But I also think that almost everyone in this public discussion has lost sight of the fact that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. I suspect that this partly has to do with the fact that the discussion is being conducted online. Many very good people I know have said things, e.g. on facebook or on blogs, that I think they would never say to someone in person whose behaviour resembled Leiter’s. Really, really unpleasant things. I am somewhat confused about the function of saying these things. When I try to imagine those people saying similar things to, say, one of their colleagues in their own department who behaved similarly reprehensibly, I simply cannot. When I try to think about what people are trying to accomplish by being so unpleasant, I really cannot come up with anything, except to reinforce a kind of “us against him” mentality that seems to me totally unnecessary in this case, or to exact revenge, which I think is deeply morally wrong, or simply to make themselves feel better, which I think in some sense is fine, but it would be better if people did that in ways that Leiter could not see, if the goal wasn’t also to exact revenge (e.g. in person to one another over drinks, or in a private online discussion).

Also, let me tell you that, as someone who, as a grad student, has been publicly compared to a four-year-old (by someone at another philosophy blog where people are supposedly nice to one another), this post is *not* just gentle humour. Granted, the claim was much less apt there than the thing about the ball/playground is here, but still. It was a horrible experience for me to be attacked in that way, especially given lots of facts about me at the time that no one in the public sphere would be aware of–for example, that I was suffering rather severely from a debilitating mental illness (not one which caused me to say anything in the public sphere that warranted comparison to a four-year-old, though). Why are we doing this? I genuinely don’t get what the point is of insulting this person by comparing him to a child, etc. It seems to me that the point is to harm the person you are insulting. But I can’t see how that is justified no matter how unbelievably bad we think his behaviour is.

Not to get all philosophical, and I don’t actually do moral philosophy, but I can’t see how this is the right thing to do on any reasonable, coherent moral theory. It reflects very badly on people’s characters, its consequences seem to me to be overwhelmingly negative, and it certainly violates some sort of Kantian maxim.

I also think that Leiter’s behaviour is so over-the-top, obviously reprehensible that strategically, the best thing philosophers can do even if they do want to harm him is to let it speak for itself.

Thanks for this Justin. I have to say that one of the primary reasons I prefer this blog over others is that it usually manages to stay above most of the drama (that, and the comments don’t as often read like those you’d find underneath a youtube video).