Journal Created from the Ashes of PPA Gets Name, Editor-In-Chief (updated)
In May, the executive, associate, and advisory editors and all of the editorial board members of the influential journal, Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA), resigned and in June PPA’s editor-in-chief, Anna Stilz (Berkeley) also left.
Now, the editors are launching a new journal which will be called Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.
The Free & Equal wordmark
The editorial team formerly in place at PPA will take up the same positions at Free & Equal, with Anna Stilz as editor-in-chief.
The journal will have a website in September and will begin accepting submissions then.
Anna Stilz writes:
On behalf of the former Editors of Philosophy and Public Affairs, I am pleased to announce the name of our newly founded journal, Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs, slated to launch for submissions in September 2024.
I am also excited to announce that I will serve as Free & Equal’s Editor-in-Chief. I look forward with enthusiasm to working once again with my distinguished Co-Editors, and to leading our diamond open-access journal. Hence the masthead of Free & Equal (listed below) is exactly same as the old masthead for Philosophy and Public Affairs prior to our resignation. Please note that no one on this masthead has any further involvement with Philosophy and Public Affairs, which is now entirely run by Wiley.
The name Free & Equal symbolizes our new journal’s aspiration to be free and equally accessible to all. Our ongoing mission remains the same: to publish work of the highest caliber that provides philosophical reflections on issues of public concern. I encourage everyone in the philosophy, law, and political theory communities to send us your best work, which we look forward to receiving.
Anna Stilz
Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
Free & Equal Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Anna Stilz, University of California, Berkeley
Associate Editors
Arash Abizadeh, McGill University
Nico Cornell, University of Michigan
Garrett Cullity, Australian National University
Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics
Johann Frick, University of California, Berkeley
Joe Horton, University College London
Sophia Moreau, New York University Law School
Kristi Olson, Bowdoin College
Jonathan Quong, University of Southern California
Japa Pallikkathayil, University of Pittsburgh
Gina Schouten, Harvard University
Zofia Stemplowska, University of Oxford
Adam Swift, University College London
Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick
Advisory Editors
Charles R. Beitz, Princeton University
Joshua Cohen, University of California, Berkeley and Apple
Alan Patten, Princeton University
Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto
Seana Shiffrin, University of California, Los Angeles
R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley
Editorial Board
Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan
Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University
David Estlund, Brown University
Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School
Barbara Herman, University of California, Los Angeles
Pamela Hieronymi, University of California, Los Angeles
Frances Myrna Kamm, Rutgers University
Niko Kolodny, University of California, Berkeley
Jeff McMahan, Oxford University
Liam Murphy, New York University
Debra Satz, Stanford University
Samuel Scheffler, New York University
Amartya Sen, Harvard University
Tommie Shelby, Harvard University
Amia Srinivasan, Oxford University
Jeremy Waldron, New York University
Stuart White, Oxford University
Gideon Yaffe, Yale University
Free & Equal will be published by Open Library of Humanities (OLH).
UPDATE (8/13/24): In light of some comments on this post, Anna Stilz writes the following:
As I said in my public statement, the name Free & Equal refers to our new journal’s aspiration to be free and equally accessible to all, not to the topics or perspectives we will be publishing. We are open to submissions from a wide variety of ideological vantage points and traditions, reflecting the diversity in the political theory and philosophy communities.
While I very much applaud this effort I’m disappointed by the Free and Equal name. For a long time Philosophy and Public Affairs had, or at least was widely thought to have, a strong bias in the work it published, at least in political philosophy. (My nickname for it was The Journal of Rawlsian Studies.) That may have been less the case more recently, but the choice, for the new name, of a phrase so strongly associated with Rawls — see e.g. the title of Daniel Chandler’s recent book — or with liberal-egalitarianism more generally, doesn’t suggest a journal equally open to all views in political philosophy. Maybe the journal will be equally open, but then why a name that’s a piece of partisan jargon?.
I had a similar thought. The title makes it sound like it’s focused on papers about freedom and equality rather than political philosophy more broadly. It also makes it sound like the journal wouldn’t entertain papers that challenge those concepts.
I’m a Rawlsian (of sorts) so I may be biased in this respect, but I think the name is great. It is creative insofar as it reflects substantive content rather than a generic description of the area.
It is surely a condition of plausibility for a view in political philosophy that it regards people as in some way free and in some way equal. So the *concepts* are not essentially Rawlsian, of course. Nor (regarding your objection) is the *phrase* a piece of Rawlsian intellectual property. Consider the UDHR: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Far from being partisan, I can’t think of any phrase that incorporates any substantive values that are more inclusive of plausible views in the field.
I don’t disagree with the substantive view. Still, I don’t think it’s a condition of plausibility on publishable views, nor that having a title that reflects substantive content rather than a generic descriptor is a virtue. In their defense, they might end up welcoming dissenting views. UTILITAS, for instance, is not restricted to pro-consequentialist arguments.
I am struggling to imagine what a plausible view that does not incorporate some idea of freedom or some idea of equality would be like. Such a view would be light years away from anything that is currently on the table — liberal egalitarianism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, perfectionism, etc. I’m very happy to regard a defence of divinely ordained slavery in hierarchical societies as implausible.
I’m also happy to regard such a view as implausible, but that’s an extreme example. You can’t use the worst version of a range of views as your test.
These are not views I endorse, but you can find plausible (i.e. worth giving a fair hearing) defenses of hierarchy in e.g. Confucianism, Burkean conservativism, Nietzsche, and Plato.
I think we mean different things by “plausible.” I did not introduce the term earlier as a criterion for whether a paper should be given a fair hearing — there are lots of totally wacky views that should be published because of their clever arguments, etc. I introduced the term above to indicate that the concepts of freedom and equality are not distinctively Rawlsian, but are rather very widely shared. They are no more Rawlsian than libertarian or utilitarian, etc.
Tom’s objection is not to the concepts, of course, but the phrase. But I don’t think the phrase is distinctively Rawlsian either, despite its prominence in the Rawlsian literature. There are lots of phrases that can be associated with Rawls (“distributive justice,” “equality of opportunity,” etc.), but this is primarily because discussion of the relevant concepts has been profoundly affected by the dominance of his theory in the field over the last five decades. That doesn’t in itself make them “partisan jargon” — at least within the set of people who endorse distributive justice and equality of opportunity in some form. Moreover, the phrase is often used *outside* discussion of justice as fairness, as in the UDHR. It differs in this respect from phrases that I would think of as distinctively Rawlsian: “the veil of ignorance,” “the well-ordered society,” etc.
More generally, this type of hyper-sensitivity to phraseology will lead to a situation where different viewpoints are deprived of a common vocabulary to engage with one another. If we can’t discuss how free and equal people should live together because some think that language biases the conversation to the Rawlsian position, then we’re not going to be able to discuss much at all.
If you agree that “wacky” views—including those that deny that all human beings are fundamentally free and equal in all the senses that matter morally and politically—deserve a fair hearing at Free and Equal, then we don’t disagree. I took your point about plausibility to suggest the opposite, but I must have misunderstood you.
I did not engage with the point about Rawls and will let others belabor it if they desire.
It is certainly not the case that all human beings *are* free (even if any plausible theory would maintain they should be)
I never meant this in a descriptive sense. Of course you know it and are just trading on an ambiguity.
One *might* read a comment like this as a prime example of the myopia of the rawlsian tradition in political philosophy!
One might also read it as a recipe for chanterelle risotto, but that too would be a mistake.
And now the dismissive attitude that has long fuelled the wilful ignorance of mainstream analytic philosophy!
Well, I struggle to imagine what a plausible view that does not incorporate some idea of hierarchy or some idea of control would be like. But if someone were to start a journal with the title “Hierarchy and Control”, then……okay, wait…I have an announcement to write…
I agree with Tom. Imagine they’d named it “Labor and Ideology: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.” Those are perfectly important concepts in political philosophy, but the naming could make you think that the journal has a Marxist bent or bias.
(a) There’s a profound difference between the centrality to contemporary political philosophy of freedom and equality, on the one hand, and of labor and ideology on the other.
(b) Some phrases, while perhaps uncontroversial in themselves, can function as dog-whistles given the history of their use. (“Law and order” can be like this when it is used by reactionaries to mean something like “legal impunity for people who employ unconstrained violence against undesirables.”) I take Tom’s objection to be something like this dog-whistle point re: “free and equal.” But not every phrase with a more extensive history of use in one group rather than another is ipso facto a dog-whistle.
I, for one, can’t wait to be desk-rejected by this new version of the journal. I’m sure not having your papers read is so much better in open access.
I love this name for an open access journal! I hope editors and authors keep it going for many years to come.
I am sure that, upon reflection, we all want to prioritize heartily thanking the good folks associated with this journal for not yielding to the unreasonable demands of the publisher but going through the no doubt significant work to recreate this excellent journal elsewhere. And no doubt we all want to thank them and the many others at other journals who volunteer their time in this way to do the often thankless but crucial task of assessing papers for publication.
Amen.
Yes, what David said! (I don’t like the “free and equal” name either, but it seems like the wrong thing to focus on here… this is such a great precedent and we should be applauding everyone involved, I think.)
I hope, at the very least, that we can agree that the retention of the oversized ampersand is a very good thing (and not an implicit endorsement of comprehensive, holistic, or syncretic approaches to political philosophy, i.e., “Big Conjunction”).
Echoing David, I think we should be grateful to the editors for creating Free & Equal and all the extra work involved, for moving relatively quickly to get the journal started, and for giving the journal liberation movement in philosophy some more momentum (as the creators of Political Philosophy did earlier). I hope Free & Equal is around for a long time, and I hope we can all agree it should be abbreviated “FrEq”. Let your FrEq flag fly, folks.
When the previous editors of Philosophy and Public Affairs resigned en masse, I assumed that they were doing a very similar thing to what had been done at the Journal of Political Philosophy—moving a journal from one place (under Wiley, for profit, closed access) to another (not, not, not). With the Journal of Political Philosophy, this interpretation of what was being done was reinforced both by the actions of the particular people and by the choice of the name for the new journal: Political Philosophy, signaling a clear intention to just carry on as before. This was further reinforced by the very significant fact that the founding editor of JPP was also the new editor of Political Philosophy.
With Philosophy and Public Affairs, I (and I think many others) assumed that much of the same thing was being done.
The choice of the name “Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs” suggests otherwise. Instead of just moving PPA, it now seems that the previous editors of PPA effectively abandoned PPA and are together creating a wholly new journal, Free & Equal. (I was not paid by their lawyers to say this!)
Some reasons to think this.
Philosophy and Public Affairs is a descriptive, neutral name; Free & Equal is a substantive and ideologically committed one. (That some contemporary political philosophers might not see or own this strikes me as evidence of a problem.)
The substantive name also suggests a significantly narrower remit. Rather than being just one of the best general journals in political philosophy and ethics, it now seems like a journal for papers that are up to a certain kind of substantive project. Would papers arguing in favor of Millian plural voting, Daniel Bell style meritocratic government, against free will, against egalitarianism, against one person one vote, against political liberalism, or in favor of abortion or immigration restrictions seem natural or appropriate there?
Less jarringly, but still concerning: would a paper about trust, or cultural appropriation, or moral understanding seem appropriate there? The new name naturally suggests “not really” (none of these are framed to have anything to do with freedom or equality, let us imagine) even though PPA recently published papers on all of those topics.
I am sure the official policy is that yes, all these and more topics would be welcome, but given how hard it is to get anything in any journal these days, will people really believe that? I can easily see a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more, would someone want their “against egalitarianism” paper published in a journal newly named “Free & Equal”? Was the big problem in political philosophy that things didn’t seem ideologically slanted enough? (I would be curious to hear more about what went into the choice of name, and whether issues of this kind were raised.)
Of course, there is nothing wrong with creating a new journal that is different from past journals. But it does mean that, unless people step up to salvage and rebuild PPA, an elite reputation broad journal will have been killed, with only a new possibly quirky start up journal to replace it.
This is seriously consequential for those who work in political philosophy and ethics, particularly for those still making their careers, needing to publish in places with excellent reputations, etc. My own view is that none of the reputational power of PPA will naturally carry over to Free & Equal. It feels very different than the JPP —> PP case.
I very much respect and am friends with many of the editors of Free & Equal, and I expect that they will create a very good journal. But I don’t feel like I could honestly say in a tenure letter that Free & Equal is a leading journal in the field. Maybe in 5-10 years? But also maybe not. Reputations are hard and slow to build. And I think the name will affect how the journal is perceived.
Younger scholars might have hoped that they wouldn’t *have* to wait for the first 5 years of issues to build a new reputation for a new journal. If they’d just named it Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs or even Politics, Ethics, and Public Affairs or pretty much anything similar and similarly neutral, I think that would be much more likely to have been the case.
This will be more controversial, perhaps, but I also think this makes the case for someone stepping in to rebuild Philosophy and Public Affairs very strong. (I would absolutely not have said this had the current editors of Free & Equal gone with a different name.) Sure, the for-profit journal model is non-ideal. I expect there will continue to be many changes on that front. But given the current journal crisis in terms of publishing expectations, journal submissions, referee shortages, and the rest, the last thing we need is to eliminate high reputation broad journals and replace them with interesting new question mark start ups. It seems better to build those alongside what we already have, and to also work to make those existing journals better in ways that matter to all of us.
I should add that editing journals is time-consuming, somewhat thankless work. (It is, of course, also a significant amount of power and professional influence that comes with significant responsibility.) I think these editors are very much to be commended and thanked for the work they’ve put in to make this change (thank you!), and I think it is likely that efforts of this kind will help drag the for-profit journal world (which I expect will continue to make up a large part of the journal ecosystem) in a generally good direction. And I say all of this as someone who has recently stepped down from editing a Wiley journal myself. I just think it is worth noting the serious implications of these particular choices.
Just to be clear, I stepped down from editing a Wiley journal, but not for any of these kinds of reasons. I’d just been doing it for a long time! It seemed worth being transparent about the fact that I’d been working with and for a Wiley journal for many years.
What are some essay topics you think this journal wouldn’t accept in virtue of its name? I think it’s a lame title but otherwise it’s totally anodyne given the background assumptions of pretty much all respectable essays in political philosophy. Would PPA have ever published something presuming racial or gender moral hierarchy (i.e., justifying the claim that some people are morally inferior because of race or gender), or presuming an Aristotelian conception of natural authority? I understand that it also might not publish an article *arguing* for such views, but then again if someone argued for such views they very well might be hounded from the profession.
As I said in my public statement, the name Free & Equal refers to our new journal’s aspiration to be free and equally accessible to all, not to the topics or perspectives we will be publishing. We are open to submissions from a wide variety of ideological vantage points and traditions, reflecting the diversity in the political theory and philosophy communities.
Yes I saw what your wrote and totally endorse it! But your message is not appended to the title of the journal, and people are responding to just the title. I do not think these are bad faith responses.
Hi Annie, yes, thanks, I saw that, too. But names of academic journals almost always indicate the content of the journal, not the publishing values or publishing commitments of the journal. (‘Constellations’ and ‘Theory and Event’ stand out as stark exceptions that I would not have thought it was your aim to emulate.) Something like the “Open Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs” would have seemed to satisfy both desiderata without causing these other problems.
Was there discussion about the worry that “Free and Equal” would signify that the journal was substantively focused on freedom and equality, implicitly/explicitly committed to an ideology on which people are “free and equal,” and perhaps also (as others have pointed out) that all of this should be understood in a kind of Rawlsian direction? I mean, Daniel Chandler’s book was just published and splashing about for the past several months!
You can want “Free and Equal” to refer to the journal’s aspiration but you can’t make it refer only to that when the phrase already has a well-established usage and associations, e.g. the Rawlsian ones Chandler invokes in the title of his book. (And no, he isn’t highlighting how Rawls shares some anodyne political ideas with libertarians, perfectionists, desert theorists, etc. He’s referring to Rawls’s specific substantive ideas.) Speakers don’t in general get to decide what their words refer to; that depends on public meanings and public usage. All that said, I (again) applaud the general effort to found this journal and don’t have serious worries about its likely content (or no more serious ones than there were about PAPA). I just think the chosen name is unfortunate.
Repectfully, if the “about” page of Utilitas read “The name refers to the utility of philosophical scholarship about ethics and politics, and not utilitarianism” I think a lot would still imagine it was a utilitarian weighted journal. I think if a journal is called “Free & Equal” and its about page says “the name Free & Equal refers to our new journal’s aspiration to be free and equally accessible to all” I would still guess it is primarily a liberal political philosophy journal…even if I had been told otherwise by the journal and its more career-secure authors.
Thanks for the thoughts Alex.
Just in case it is not already clear to people reading this, I am in no way associated with the new journal. I published twice in P&PA, and one of those papers might certainly be regarded as “Rawls Studies” — but I am actually sympathetic to the criticism that the journal, and political philosophy more generally, was too focused on Rawlsiana.
That said:
Hi Simon. I think your #2 does reveal part of the problem. I don’t want the journal name to signal a view about what “plausible views” are on substantive philosophical topics. Why do that? Are there other prominent journals that do that? Why start this? I also disagree with you about whether it is exclusionary of plausible substantive views. There are many plausible substantive views that deny the importance of equality, many that deny the importance of freedom, and many that deny the importance of both.
On #3, of course the name of the journal matters. I mean, it might eventually become some kind of cipher or idiomatic thing, I suppose, but “Free and Equal” strongly suggests that the papers will be about things relating to freedom and equality. I know Annie says this is (just? plausibly not just) about it being an open access and not for profit journal, but that small note is not going to make it in front of random humanities tenure and promotion committees and fellowship committees and whatever else might encounter “Free and Equal” on the CV line. Anyone who sees the name will quite reasonably assume it’s a journal that is about freedom and equality and has a kind of substantive ideological take, much as is the case with, say, Utilitas. You can’t name your journal “Cats and Dogs” and then expect people to know it’s also of course fine to send in work on computer programming and silver mining in Argentina. The subtitle helps, of course, but subtitles aren’t easily able to expand the meaning of the main title. “Cats and Dogs: A Journal of Creatures” will still lead people to expect things about dogs and cats (in addition to being a bit bewildered). Telling people ‘oh sure you can send your paper on anteaters to us, too, it’s all creatures,’ isn’t all that effective. And it will be reasonable for a random outsider to ask, “why did you publish your ‘Natural History of the Giant Anteater” in the journal “Cats and Dogs”?” If you have a paper on egalitarianism, it will seem kind of like home field advantage to send it there. If you have a paper on cruel and unusual punishment or the paradox of voting, it will just seem like not the right place to send it. Just as the person working out Kant’s categorical imperative for the 867th time won’t send their paper to Utilitas.
It is true that people might eventually just treat “Free & Equal” as essentially contentless, as is now the case with PPR. But I will say this is made much harder by the fact that this name was just chosen as the name for a new journal. I think it’s very hard to know what the perception of this new journal will be. Reputations are funny things.
To me, beyond our commitment to open access, the name “Free & Equal” signifies adherence to the basic values of democracy, which is the ethos we want our new journal to embody. We would certainly be open to publishing papers that advocate for immigration restrictions, plural voting, meritocratic government, and so forth (and at PPA, we did publish papers that advocated some of these substantive positions). These are all important contributions to democratic debate.
To respond to the community’s reasonable concern that the new journal should not carry any sectarian mission, we will place the following statement on the journal’s website:
“Free & Equal aims to make available to all on an equal basis, by being free to readers and authors alike, the best philosophical reflection on matters of public concern. The journal’s mission is broad, and it welcomes submission of work defending or supporting any philosophical, moral, or political position whatever, reflective of our special interest on work bearing, directly or indirectly, on practical matters of social and political life. Our selection criteria will be to apply high standards of argument, originality, and scholarship to the best ability of the editors and referees upon whose work the character of the journal ultimately must rest.”
Thanks, Annie. I posted my comment above before seeing this comment of yours.
I guess I remain troubled by what we are to take from the “adherence to the basic values of democracy.” I am perhaps more concerned than most (ha ha) about how exactly that will be understood and interpreted. I myself have been accused–obviously in a misguided way!–by many of advocating undemocratic or anti-democratic views… But I am thinking also of all the very interesting work challenging our understanding of and commitment to democracy, democratic values, etc.
I think the quoted language for the website suggests much less of any kind of ideological commitment that what you have just said about adherence to the basic values of democracy (whatever those are), and that seems much better. But I worry that the name itself will affect the perception of what you are actually open to in ways that you can’t control with language on the website.
The title represents a commitment to embracing democratic values in the journal’s institutional ethos and practices, not about using a specific set of values or specific interpretation of those values as a filter on what we publish.
Genuinely a clarification question: what is the worry about humanities tenure committees, fellowship committees, and the like? That this title will sound like “The Journal of Liberal Ideology” to people who are suspicious of that?
There’s that worry, yes. But that’s pretty small given the liberal tilt of the academy.
A different worry is that it will seem to outsiders like it must be pushing downhill to get certain papers in. I mean, we kind of think that, right, with papers on utilitarianism stuff that get into Utilitas? (The total number of papers is just much smaller when we restrict focus to papers that constitute “high quality research in all aspects of the development of utilitarian thought and in all areas in which utilitarianism has made a contribution.”)
There’s also the worry of odd fit: why is this paper on the paradox of voting or the permissibility of self-defense against innocent threats in a journal called “Free & Equal”? Is there some kind of special freedom/equality angle to it? No? Could they not get it into a journal where the fit is better?
But maybe more than that it will just sound like a kind of niche/ideological journal, not a major general journal in the field. Major journals sound boringly similar in their boring area descriptiveness: Nature, Science, Cell, American Political Science Review, Journal of American History, Comparative Literature, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Sociological Review, Classical Philology, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Ethics, etc.
“Free & Equal” just does sound like some kind of advocacy/ideology publication, like Jacobin or First Things or something. I mean, at least it does to my ear. Those are great, for what they are. But obviously that’s a very different thing than what Philosophy and Public Affairs was. And it’s clear that resonance isn’t intended or wanted by the editors. (I’m genuinely surprised they weren’t more worried about it, since I feel like it’s the main distinctive thing about the name.)
Thanks Alex.
Re: #2, I mentioned the point about plausibility to substantiate the claim that freedom and equality are not distinctively Rawlsian or partisan values. That’s my (non-idiosyncratic) view. It says nothing about what the journal’s title conveys about plausible views. What the title conveys to me is that the two concepts are (non-exclusively) the kind of fundamental political values that the philosophy they wish to attract might engage with. (Moreover, I dispute your claim that there are plausible views that deny the importance of freedom or equality. Libertarianism, e.g., certainly does not, even as it might have a very *thin* theory of the equality that justice demands, i.e. only of negative liberty rights, not equality of opportunity, etc. That doesn’t make the equality unimportant.)
Your response re: #3 seems to me to be making a mountain out of a molehill. I don’t think random humanities P&T committees are confused by publications in, say, Res Publica that aren’t about the abolition of the British monarchy. This is because the letter writers will say something about the quality of the journal, and no one outside philosophy will *ever* give a damn about its name (even granting that random humanities P&T committees are exactly where predictions about rational human behaviour go to die). As for whether the name will dissuade people from submitting papers on topics other than freedom and equality, we only need to look at the fifty years of P&PA to see how the prestige of the journal very quickly dominated the applied focus suggested by “Public Affairs.” People will submit to the journal on topics to do with political philosophy very broadly, with precisely zero regard to its name, because they will recognise that it’s the continuation of a great journal in the field. I do not believe for a moment, for instance, that you will ever have a paper that you would have submitted to Annie & Co. as P&PA but that you would not submit to Annie & Co. as F&E. I agree that reputations are funny things, and certainly the reputation of the journal might change for quite separate reasons. But we need not indulge the worry that the sky is falling here.
despite your assurance, I *would* take the name of the journal as a reason against sending papers arguing certain positions to F&E instead of P&PA. It might simply look odd on a cv for a paper with a certain title to be in a journal called ‘Free & Equal’
If you were to write a really great paper with, say, the title “Against Freedom and Equality,” and you wanted to place it in a top journal, after months of hard work, and with the pressures of the job market and tenure, and so on, then the *last* thing on your mind will be the thought that it might look odd on your CV if it were accepted in Free & Equal. You would be celebrating a major achievement with your friends! And if one of them turned to you and said, “I don’t know GS, well done and all, but maybe you should have published it somewhere else,” then you’d be a tad peeved at their take, and very justifiably so.
Dear Alex, you are right that the editors see ourselves as doing something similar to what was done by the editors of Political Philosophy. Although the concerns you raise about the journal’s name are ones that the editors also shared, unfortunately for legal reasons it was not possible to choose a name like the ones you are suggesting. F&E was chosen as a nod to the new journal’s aspiration to be free and to be equally accessible to everyone, not intended as a projection of substantive positions or topics in normative theory. We hope that the range of papers we publish will demonstrate that and quell the worries you express here.
Dear Arash, I have a hard time believing that there were not names that could have been in the same general style that would have been completely fine. (Is there litigation against Political Philosophy on this score?) Surely something like “Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy” or “Philosophy and Practical Affairs” or even the journal’s subtitle “Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs” would have been fine. There are so many journals with similar names!
I agree with the general points you make about the name. With the greater difference in name, people who aren’t totally tuned in to the disciplinary politics will need a bit longer to learn of the status associated with the new name, rather than being able to inherit the status from the old name. And as several have pointed out, the new name is suggestive of some substantive features of what work it intends to publish.
That said, with a few years, the substance of the name can be overcome. Not many people are confused about what gets published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (or its subtitle saying that it “ranges across the full breadth of philosophy and its history. No particular methodology is required.”)
For those thinking of stepping in to edit Philosophy and Public Affairs, I would note that Wiley has faced a total of 7 editorial resignations in 2023-4: https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-mass-resignations-list/
I don’t think our concerns about their business practices are idiosyncratic.
It seems like the consensus is to prefer just the subtitle, a journal of ethics and public affairs. Maybe it’s not too late to phase out the free and equal part of the name
There is no consensus, nor should there be. There are some vocal opponents to the name here and elsewhere, just as there are other people who think it’s so obviously a total non-issue that they’re not going to bother wading in (as has been made clear to me over the course of today).
You are right that there is no consensus but wrong that there should not be. All the reasons people cite in this thread are compelling enough to instead pick a generic name. And the only reason given in favour of Free & Equal is that it symbolises the commitment to accessibility. This connotation was missed by almost everyone and will anyway be forgotten in the coming years if the journal is successful. Unless there is a logistical reason for not changing the name now (which there might be) I see no real reason not to take the balance of arguments made here into account and conclude that the Free and Equal part of the name could usefully be dropped.
It is very clearly not a criterion of a good decision procedure for a new journal name that there be a consensus in the comments section at Daily Nous. First, there is never a consensus in the comments section at Daily Nous about anything. Second, the comments in the comments section at Daily Nous are skewed towards objections, Daily Nous being a philosophy blog of philosophers, and philosophers generally being somewhat better at raising objections to things than at passing over non-issues without comment.
The editors can take up the objections that have been raised as they wish, but the phrase “storm in a teacup” comes to mind.
For a deep cut, that should read: “… there is never a consensus (even a new one) in the comments section …”
In saying that there *should* be a consensus I meant only that the arguments favour changing the name, it was a facetious way of putting it. obviously i don’t think that a consensus at daily nous is a good criterion
I see good news here that others, who are tied up in the prestige economy of academic philosophy, perhaps miss. PPA was a very elitist journal run by a small cadre of elite philosophers at elite institutions who were mostly American and British. They ran the journal in an elitist way with the narrow tastes of people with their background. But, because of the prestige economy in philosophy, PPA held an exalted position. According to the standard wisdom, Ethics and PPA stood out as the two super-prestigious places to publish moral and political philosophy. One publication in one of these journals was considered superior to virtually any number of publications in the other, less prestigious journals that were more eclectic and less elite in their operation and leadership. Even those who wanted to reject this unhealthy concentration of power and status often felt compelled to acknowledge it when hiring and promotion decisions were made. This is not a healthy situation for a discipline to be in and philosophy stands out from other academic disciplines in terms of how elitist, stratified, and Anglo-American it is.
The good news then is that the status of PPA is now gone. The old journal has obviously lost its elite status. But, as Alex Guerrero comments above, the new journal does not automatically get to take all of the prestige and status that the old journal previously had. The new journal will need to earn a reputation over a period of time (Alex suggests 5-10 years) before philosophers can say that publishing in it is very prestigious. Now, given that the Journal of Political Philosophy also faces the same situation as PPA, and that it had also become a kind of elite journal with concentrated power (it was considered a step behind Ethics and PPA, but a step above all the rest), we can see a much improved situation. Now only Ethics stands out as the super-elite venue that marks a moral/political philosopher CV as superior in the prestige economy. Given the demise of PPA and JPP, what comes next is now much less clear and there seems to be a dozen or so journals that all stand out as solid places to publish work in moral and political philosophy without any clearly being superior in their prestige to the others. In this situation there is more diversity, and less elite power concentration, which is healthier for our discipline. Let’s hope that (1) things stay this way in moral and political philosophy in the years ahead (i.e., the successors to PPA and JPP don’t quickly gain the super-elite status that their predecessors carried), and (2) something similar happens to generalist journals in philosophy, which also suffer from elite power concentration.
Won’t this just increase the competition to get moral and (especially) political philosophy papers into those other ultra-prestigious journals, which already publish so few of them?
I’m not sure, maybe things look different elsewhere. But it seems to me that political philosophy is already undervalued in prestige analytic philosophy. Having PPA as a political philosophy-focused journal that everyone knew about and respected seemed to help mitigate that. It would be sad if it went away.
Thanks to Annie and all the editors for launching the journal!
Regarding prestige, I don’t think we have to wait several years. I think we already have good grounds to think that an arbitrary late-2024 Free and Equal paper is as good as an arbitrary early-2024 PPA paper. The new journal has the same editors, presumably using the same high standards for what to publish and providing the same high quality feedback on papers on their route to publication. Even if it receives fewer submissions because of the name, that would presumably just mean it publishes fewer papers (rather than lowering it standards). I realize that this doesn’t address the worry that the name will mean that it will tend to attract papers on some topics rather than others. If that happens initially, then that would be a shame because once a journal has a reputation for publishing certain types of papers, this reputation is likely to become self-fulfilling in light of authors’ choices about where to submit things.
Regarding paper quality, I guess I don’t think it works very much like that. We are both Associate Editors at Ethics. I feel like our process is mostly about giving a thumbs up to excellent work that comes in the door. If the quality is on average higher (a big, debatable ‘if’), it’s because people send us their very best stuff; we get to look at everyone’s best stuff before they send it (almost) anywhere else.
Papers improve a bit here and there through revision and referee feedback (of course, some papers are probably made a bit worse here and there), but I don’t think any of what we do as Associate Editors makes all that much difference. Referees do their thing for pretty much every journal in a fairly similar way. I don’t think we have any super special skill at finding diamonds that other journals miss. We do our best, muddle along, do what happens at a dozen other good journals, etc.
But bottom line, our quality is mostly just a matter of ‘in the door’ quality. I don’t think PPA was any different.
So, the question is: will people treat Free & Equal as they did Philosophy & Public Affairs in terms of where they send their very best stuff, the things they care most about, etc.?
Now, it’s of course true that the editors of Free & Equal might just decline to publish anything below the previous level. (They definitely felt there was a very precise level that meant they couldn’t easily publish, say, 40 papers a year, rather than their current 15-20, even despite their previous prestige and voluminous number of submissions.) And maybe it won’t be an issue, and people will treat them like PPA. But that seems far from obvious, particularly for people who are just starting out and for whom placement still really matters.
Thanks Alex. I had been assuming that the Free & Equal editors would just decline to publish anything below the previous level, as you put it. If that assumption is wrong, then I agree what I said doesn’t hold. But I think it’s reasonable to assume they will use the same standards for what to publish, especially given the nature of the dispute with Wiley. I agree about the importance of quality of submissions, and I agree that reputation influences submissions. It would be a real shame if Free and Equal receives worse submissions, whether the effect is that the journal uses lower standards or it publishes fewer papers.
I have slightly different worries about the Free & Equal name (though also love the preserved ampersand). I think it limits the journal’s ability to reach outside academia, because it will be perceived to carry a partisan slant.
Before I explain why, let me first echo what others have said and stress that my primary response is gratitude to the editorial team for the courage to escape the Wiley profit-monster and the dedication to put a new journal together. I especially appreciate their transparency about the need for it. (One small measure of the impact of that transparency: I recently declined an invitation to join the editorial team at a different Wiley journal largely because of what I have read about the experiences of PPA and JPP editors.)
But still, my worry: Free & Equal sounds left-coded. It sounds like a publication by and for partisan leftists. Of course it shouldn’t sound that way; those ought to be values available to everyone. But then ‘should’ and ‘does’ are not the same, and Free & Equal sounds left-coded just as Liberty & Tradition sounds right-coded like something out of the Heritage Foundation or Patrick Henry College. I do appreciate the cleverness of Free & Equal’s intended allusion to open access – but, like Alex Guerrero, I doubt this intention will be obvious to outsiders.
Why care whether the journal is perceived as partisan? Because the journal – presumably, in continuation of the original mission of PPA – aims to make an actual difference in the world. And most people in public life now have heavy filters against opposite partisan coding. Few people on the right, even the moderate centre-right, will read Mother Jones, just as few on the left will read the National Review. That’s just how things work. Partisan coding, even if unintentional, reduces the pool of potential readership.
Why care about readership outside the academy? Well, I suppose we don’t have to. Most philosophy journals don’t. But I think PPA, especially in its early years, did aim to matter in the real world, and I’d bet many of the current editors would hope for that too. Moving to open access is a fantastic opportunity to pursue greater relevance. The journal could now become something like Foreign Affairs, an intellectual meeting place for academics and policymakers.
Why care if right-wing readers are driven away? I suppose plenty of academic philosophers would be glad to have partisan purity. But I think this is wrong. Epistemic hygiene requires a good exfoliation now and then. And, again, you don’t affect real world politics by speaking to only half the polis.
I think this new open access incarnation of PPA really could be a bridge between academic philosophy and public life. I really want us to have that. Personally, when I’m contemplating an essay that I hope to have resonance in the real world, I think about places like the Atlantic or TLS. I don’t think about philosophy journals at all, because I don’t expect anyone but academics will read them. I wish we could change that.
A heuristic: when I imagine myself posting on Twitter about some new essay aimed at influencing real policy, can I see it catching the attention not only of leftish intellectuals, but also conscientious staffers working for Marco Rubio, Pierre Poilievre, Tom Tugendhat – or, for that matter, Yoon Suk Yeol or Amit Shah? Probably not in a venue with a left-coded title. But under a neutral heading like Ethics & Public Affairs? Maybe.
I hope it’s not overly clever for me to suggest that Free & Equal might turn out to be the Joe Biden of this journal-launching campaign. Venerable yet flawed. And there’s a perfectly good alternative waiting on the subtitular ticket.
For what it’s worth when I mentioned this controversy to my wife (who is not a philosopher), she immediately thought that the problem was that *Free & Equal* sounded *right-wing* coded, especially because of its resonance with “Fair and Balanced”…
That’s how it sounds to my ear, too. It reminds me of the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom
“We all want a great nation to be greater, a nation of free and equal Americans who stand together in the glow of fellowship and in the light of God.” Ronald Reagan, 26 July 1984 (and elsewhere).
It may well be that right-wingers will take the name as left-coded. But, if so, that is because they would be disposed to assume just about any academic political philosophy journal is left-wing, woke, etc. The rhetoric of freedom and equality itself is very broadly shared. This is how charges of reverse racism or discrimination against Christians, etc., are intelligible, even as many of us might find them lacking in cogency.
Something has prestige when people believe it has prestige. And it seems clear that, due to the choice of name, many do not believe that the new journal will inherit the prestige of PPA. It follows that the new journal will not inherit the same prestige, though perhaps it will eventually earn it. This is true even if you think the name should be a non-issue; the very fact that many see it as an issue makes it one. For this reason, if no other, I hope the editors will consider a different name.
For what it’s worth, I am not personally worried that the new title signals a narrower expectation about what the journal will publish, but “Free & Equal” obviously has Rawlsian connotations, and it is disingenuous for the editors or others in this thread to claim otherwise (especially given the widespread perception that PPA leaned heavily Rawlsian). Also, the discontinuity between the names in itself seems like an odd choice, if the goal is for the new journal to perceived as the reincarnation as the latter (rather than a new project by the same team). It is partly due to the continuity that I expect Political Philosophy to inherit the prestige of JPP.
The new name doesn’t sound particularly slanted to me. It just sounds kind of silly for an academic journal (doubly so if it’s intended to reflect the journal’s open access status rather than its thematic content).
I’m not sure I can quite put my finger on why. I guess it doesn’t quite lexicalize the way I expect a name (/a journal name) to? Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs would have worked for me.
But I’m not likely to contribute anything to it, so it’s not like my opinion counts for much/anything. Alex Guerrero mentioned cultural appropriation upthread, but that’s really not a debate that’s primarily taken place in the pages of ethics or political philosophy journals (or even generalist journals, really). PPA has one (very good!) paper forthcoming on the subject, but otherwise it hasn’t touched it in at least ten years (presumably longer, but I didn’t feel up to digging further back).
The title feels like a mistake not because of topical/perspective signalling but because it is not recognizable as a successor journal
When the board quit from “Journal of Political Philosophy” to found “Political Philosophy”, that journal, “Political Philosophy” is immediately intelligible as the current incarnation of the 1993-2023 “Journal of Political Philosophy”, with thirty years of history, recognition as the (distant) third most prestigeous venue for moral/political philosophy, and likely a lot of instant desk rejects with high rates of RR to acceptance rates.
If the post-2024 “Journal of Political Philosophy” owned by Wiley resumes publishing, it will seem like a reinanmated corpse exploiting the reputation of the prior journal which will have been largely transfered to “Political Philosophy.”
Losing Philosophy and Public Affairs is a much bigger loss for people looking for a high profile, credible venue with good editorial practices for their work, because it was hair’s breadth second best moral/political philosophy journal, with many of the most important articles in its field, and different but also excellent editorial practices.
That loss could have been recovered if its editors chose a name that made it clear that they were setting up a successor journal, like “*The* Journal of Philosophy & Public Affairs” or “Philosophy & Public Affairs Review” or something like that…
…but by choosing a name that has no imediately recognized relationship to PPA, it cannot expect the bulk of PPA’s reputation to transfer onto it. Much of it will for people really in the know, but will the hiring committees at political theory departments, law schools, small philosophy departments without a dedicated political philosopher, or students browsing for the cutting edge research, know that “Free & Equal” is PPA, or its closest current approximation? I worry not.
I also wonder if “Free & Equal”, even to everyone aware of its founding, will feel like it’s the current iteration of PPA. Pretty much everyone would rather publish in pre-2024 PPA than in, say, JESP, but I would need to be convinced that a publication in “Free & Equal” is clearly better placed than in JESP because I would be skeptical that people looking at my CV or article will think “this is PPA post-2024”.
Worse, Wiley looks like it is definitely committed to continuing to publish under PPA with a new board: they understand its brand enormous value. It’s reputation will be diminished compared to pre-2024 PPA since most people in the subfields covered wont regard it as the ‘real’ PPA…but with its board at “Free & Equal”, I suspect a lot of PPA’s remaining reputation will be divided between Wiley’s PPA and “Free & Equal”, and not necessarily in “Free & Equal”‘ favor, at least not for decades.
This will lead to ‘bad submissions’ of two types. First, people who are not inside these conversations enough that they publish in Wiley’s PPA without appreciating that it might have been a worse venue than, say, Social Theory and Practice, so they waste that article and signal to people more centrally placed in the profession that they have marginal awareness and don’t get that Wiley’s PPA isn’t the pre-2024 PPA. Second, people who inside these conversations enough to think to send their work to “Free & Equal” before, say, Journal of Moral Philosophy, but a small college department reading their CV would have thought much more of a Journal of Moral Philosophy placement than a Free & Equal placement (maybe even some large departments”.
Free & Equal’s status is simply very hard to parse in a way that “Political Philosophy”s is not.
Wiley will have just the same difficulty finding credible people to edit Philosophy & Public Affairs as they are having finding credible people to edit the Journal of Political Philosophy. Not everyone in the profession will be fully informed about recent developments, as you say, but anyone approached to take over the role of Bob & Co. or Annie & Co. will ask around and be brought up to speed by their colleagues. There will be a short period of time when cover letters and reference letters will need to explain how the new journal is the successor of the old, but I do not think this will be very difficult. There is quite a wide understanding that academic publishing is in something of an unstable situation, so it is not all that surprising that a journal like P&PA should make this kind of transition.
FWIW, I don’t think the difficulty will be “just the same.” The details with Goodin (the journal’s founder and central editor/referee/etc. being ousted) matter quite a bit to what happened at JPP. (I don’t think all the relevant details emerged, but let’s leave that aside.) And PP now is serving the exact role that JPP served.
There were definitely some worrying new things happening with Wiley and PPA (and with the for-profit journal ecosystem more generally), but I could imagine a new editorial team securing the right kind of promises about independence, volume, etc., to forestall some of the same problems that the previous editors encountered. I mean, perhaps not. Perhaps Wiley intends to only hire some kind of puppet who is up for publishing 250 articles a year. And if that’s the case, then yes, credible people will be and should be hard to find. But maybe (maybe!) Wiley will have learned something from these episodes, and will be better at clearly maintaining the relevant editorial lines and autonomy.
I wouldn’t blame Annie & Co. for not trusting those assurances. And Arash and others have eloquently argued that no one should be editing for any of these for-profit journals and we need a revolution. I am pretty persuaded by those arguments. But there are still a great many for-profit journals, and I could see someone seeing the value in helping to build a PPA 2.0 if the right assurances were in place.
Yes, I should say “much the same” rather than “just the same.” I grant that there are salient differences in what happened at each journal. My sense though is that the fundamental difficulty will be the same: no one should look at a pile of old lumber and pretend it is Theseus’s ship, no matter what the owners of the material call it.
“Pretty much everyone would rather publish in pre-2024 PPA than in, say, JESP…”
Since public pronouncements like these have a way of being self-reinforcing, it’s perhaps worth replying that I don’t think this is true. Maybe it was true about a decade ago. But since at least the eyebrow-raising publication of the “Rule Over None” epic, philosophers of my generation have viewed PPA as objectionably clubby and other journals like JESP as a breath of fresh air.
Seconded. Definitely true of JESP vs Fr&Eq, plausibly already true of JESP vs pre-2024 PP&A.
If one wanted to signal that the journal is open access and free for submissions from everyone, then one could have simply chosen a name along the lines of “Open Journal of …”.
Let’s hope not every new open access journal calls itself Free & Equal (or similar)!
I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the name of the new journal. I can appreciate some of the points made by Alex in the comments here, but in the end, they sound like rationalizations of a knee-jerk negative gut reaction, rather than actual reasons for preferring a different name. I doubt philosophy will face any of the dire consequences that Alex points to as a result of the name of the new journal; nevertheless, it does bother me enough to comment. 🙂
To me, the name is just super…embarrassing. Or cringe. And the explanation given for the name (that it is meant to signal its status as free and openly available to all) makes it *more* cringe, to me. it’s just too on the nose for a serious academic journal.
I suppose it worries me that a cadre of our best and brightest normative theorists wouldn’t have clued into something so basic. It suggests a troubling form of groupthink.
Of course, if I’m right, that groupthink was there all along. The new name just exemplifies it in a very obvious way.
This is a bit harsh, isn’t it? I agree the name isn’t ideal, largely for the reasons Alex raised, but you think it’s so obviously embarrassing that it exemplifies “a troubling form of groupthink” in a very obvious way?
Harsh? Maybe. But to be clear, I’m not saying that this embarrassing name change *demonstrates* that the journal evinces a troubling form of groupthink.
Instead, I was simply making an observation about this discussion in the comments: to me it seems like we have multiple smart philosophers who are valiantly searching for arguments to justify what looks to be a knee-jerk “yuck!” response to the new name. If, as the online discussion suggests, this yuck response is fairly common, then it is odd to me that people on the editorial team did not also feel this immediate aversion. Perhaps some did. And perhaps there was an open debate before settling on this name. I wasn’t in the room where it happened. However, from the back-and-forth between members of the editorial team and critics, it doesn’t seem to me like there was this discussion. The editorial team seem to be caught on the back foot here.
It is true that I think we have other grounds for thinking that the journal evinces a kind of groupthink. One can look at recent tables of contents and the intellectual biographies of the editorial team and judge for oneself.
I don’t think it is necessarily a terrible thing for a journal to have a clear point of view and shared intellectual commitments, but it does become troubling when a) the journal in question is one of the few “elite” journals in normative philosophy, and b) when the journal professes to be more openminded than, in practice, it turns out to be.
I just want to say thanks to Alex for his moral clarity on this issue. I don’t understand, genuinely and sincerely, why anyone would disagree with him. I can’t believe the people thinking of the new name were that naive to not see the glaring ambiguity.
I don’t understand, genuinely and sincerely, why anyone would disagree with him. I can’t believe the people thinking of the new name were that naive to not see the glaring ambiguity.
Another possibility is that, when it seems like some obviously very smart and experienced people are making an obvious mistake is that maybe they are not making an obvious mistake, but that in fact you are missing something. Maybe that’s not right here. Maybe the editors are making an obvious mistake. But, I think that perhaps you ought not be so sure or so quick to think so.
I think many are thinking about submitting, so it’ll be awesome if some pointers to the submission website could be found. So far google doesn’t know where it is.
The website is not up and running just yet. It will launch very soon — next week at the latest I understand. We’ll update via as many channels as we can once we have a web address to send you to.
What I find most surprising is that the reputation of P&PA survived the 2018 scandal when it was exposed as the “Oxford-Princeton-Harvard Nepotistic Journal of Reasonableness Studies” on Leiter Reports. I guess the prestige machine in philosophy is just invincible.