The Personal Value of Conversations Across Serious Disagreement (guest post)
“I know that people are reluctant to voice objections to things I’ve said, not because I’ve given a convincing argument, but because I’m a person with a disability making claims about disability, and it just feels uncomfortable to voice hard objections… I get this… But for my work, it is poison.”
Elizabeth Barnes is professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Health Problems: Philosophical Puzzles about the Nature of Health (2023) and The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (2016), among other works, which you can learn about at her website and at PhilPapers.
In the following guest post, she shares her personal reflections about disagreement, focusing on what she has learned from her interactions with someone with whom she has disagreed quite strongly over the years on a matter of great importance to her.
This is the sixth entry in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (It will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)
[Susan Kaprov, “Self-Portrait” (detail)]
The Personal Value of Conversations Across Serious Disagreement
by Elizabeth Barnes
A little while ago, I was a guest on an episode of Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari Radek’s lovely podcast, Lives Well Lived. Because I write on philosophy of disability, and because Peter Singer has views about disability that are—to put it mildly—controversial, people are often surprised to learn that he and I are on good terms, and that I have tremendous respect for him. That respect persists across significant disagreement—we talk about some of those disagreements in the episode, as well as lots of points of mutual agreement, and places where we’ve both changed our minds, partly through conversation with each other. In the wake of the podcast episode, Justin asked if I might be interested in writing a guest post reflecting on conversations like these, and on the value of having open conversations about controversial issues and difficult topics. So for whatever it’s worth, this is that post.
More often than not, when we talk about open disagreement and free exchange of ideas, we tend to focus on their broader social value. We say things like: promoting open disagreement is crucial to protecting free speech; promoting open disagreement is the only way to prevent harmful silos and echo chambers; promoting open disagreement is vital to democracy; etc. And I don’t dispute that there are many such values.
But I think an under-discussed aspect of striving to have conversations across serious disagreement is the personal value they can bring. For entirely self-interested and self-regarding reasons, I think these kinds of conversations are good for me. I think they make me a better philosopher and a better thinker.
So I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on that personal value. In doing this, I realize that my reasons are, well, personal—this is an exercise in personal reflection rather than argument, and some of what I say here may be entirely dependent on the uniqueness of this particular context and this particular situation, not to mention my own psychology. (Justin is on vacation, sort of, and I am using his blog as my over-sharing diary, you’re welcome.) But I thought it might be worth unpacking why, thinking only of myself and for completely selfish reasons, I’m really glad to have engaged in ongoing discussion with someone whose philosophical perspective is very different from my own, and some of whose views I find offensive. What I’m saying here is descriptive and not prescriptive, and your mileage may vary substantially, depending on the context and the person you’re talking to. But I’m putting it out there in case it’s of interest.
1. Opponents of a view never give me the best or most charitable version of it
I disagree—sometimes profoundly—with some things that Peter says about disability. But because I want to understand how people think about disability, I want to understand why he says these things. And in news that should be surprising to no one—but has surprised me way more than I’d like to admit—I’ve gotten a much better sense of this from talking to him than from talking to his opponents.
His opponents, simply in virtue of being his opponents, will inevitably present his view in a slightly strawman-ish or unfavorable light. Try as we might to uphold the principle of charity, it’s just very hard to make the most compelling case for something we think is false. And I think that’s especially true for things we think are both false and high-stakes.
When I mostly talk with people who share my outlook, it’s probably far easier for me than it should be to lapse into a caricature version of the views of someone like Singer. The line between making good objections and trying to dunk on someone you disagree with is, at least for me, way blurrier and easier for me to ignore than I’d like. And I think this matters even more when it’s a topic that’s of significant moral importance to me, because quite frankly it makes me a worse philosopher. And the last thing I want is to do sloppier philosophy on the topics I care about the most.
It was easier for me than it should’ve been to miss that Peter is a very systematic thinker—to understand his views on disability, you have to fully understand how he reasons across a wide range of issues, and his critics are simply unlikely to explain that. I don’t agree with his position on infanticide any more than I did when I first encountered it. But I do feel like I can understand it much better than I used to. And trying to understand an argument is step 1 in the process of making a good case for why that argument ultimately doesn’t work.
2. People who agree with me are never going to push me the way I need to be pushed
Related to the above, I’ve always tried to think that the single most valuable gift that someone can give me, qua philosopher, is a really great objection. If I’m doing philosophy well, I need to care more about what’s true than about being right. And this is stupidly hard, because the longer I play with an idea the more attached to it I become, and dammit I want to be right. But if I’m messing up, I (should) really want to know. And for that, I need the best objections.
But the truth is that people who are in broad philosophical agreement with me—while they can and do provide robust criticism—are just less likely to hit me with the toughest and hardest objections. That’s not from any lack of rigor on their part, it’s just that people who are broadly sympathetic to what I’m saying are less likely to be sympathetic to opposing viewpoints, and so less likely to defend them.
A much harder thing to talk about is a tendency, at least in some areas, to conflate conclusions we politically endorse with conclusions for which we have given good arguments. Sometimes I think—okay, I know—that people are reluctant to voice objections to things I’ve said, not because I’ve given a convincing argument, but because I’m a person with a disability making claims about disability, and it just feels uncomfortable to voice hard objections, especially in a public setting.
I get this. I’ve felt the same way in similar contexts. But for my work, it is poison. Without the compliment of forceful objections, I can’t make my work better.
Peter is an interlocutor who has given me a tremendous gift: he will always say what he thinks. No pandering, no soft-balling, just a good old-fashioned objection. I need this more than I’d realized.
3. Bogeymen only exist in my imagination
Just as it’s been far too easy for me to lapse into caricature of the views of people I profoundly disagree with, I also think it’s very easy to lapse into caricature when thinking about those people themselves. In some disability-centric circles, the name ‘Peter Singer’ is spoken in hushed tones. The way he’s talked about, you’d think he was something closer to a villain in a children’s fairytale than a mild-mannered academic.
The first time I met Peter, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was upset and nervous. This was Peter Singer. But I quickly figured out that the Peter Singer I was so nervous to meet isn’t real. I had built up an image of him in my imagination, and that image was genuinely unsettling. The real Peter Singer, though, is nothing like that image—he’s someone who’s always interested in hearing opposing points of view, who wins a million dollars only to immediately give it away, and had a truly amazing mustache in the 1980s.
The more I’ve read of his work and the more I’ve spoken with him, the more I’ve come to realize that Peter and I agree on much more than we disagree about, even if we arrive at our points of agreement in very different ways. We agree about animal welfare and ethical vegetarianism. We agree about the vital moral importance of health inequalities—especially global health inequalities. We agree about expanding access to assisted dying. (I very much encourage people to read Peter and Kasia’s recent NY Times op ed and then listen to their interview with Daniel Kahneman.)
It’s not that I no longer think some of Singer’s views are harmful—I think they are. And it’s not that I think that vulnerable people who are especially targeted by those harms aren’t justified in being angered by his views—I think they are fully justified in that anger. But it was an easy slide, at least for me, from a justified appraisal of the harms to a hyperbolic caricature. And that bogeyman, because it really only existed in my mind, only served to hurt me.
4. People are surprising and I can be a real jerk
Okay this bit is the most navel-gazing, but bear with me. At the end of the podcast, we talk a little about my experience of being diagnosed (in my 30s) with young-onset Parkinson’s. Something we don’t talk about is that I kept that diagnosis to myself for a while, just to try to get my head around it and get to a place where I felt comfortable talking about it. During the period that I was still keeping it mostly to myself—where I had only told very close friends and family—I happened to be corresponding with Peter about something random. And for reasons I can’t fully explain, I mentioned the diagnosis in passing. I mentioned it because, I think, I felt completely comfortable doing so. I knew that he would react exactly the way he did react—no pity, no condescension, just simple and direct compassion.
I don’t know what it says, exactly, that someone with whom I have such substantial disagreements could also be someone who I can feel completely at ease with on an issue so relevant to our points of disagreement. But I feel like it says something, and I’m glad to have experienced it.
It’s very easy for me to confuse the truth of the propositions a person assents to with the content of that person’s character. It’s very easy for me to assume that if I disagree with someone on an issue that is extremely morally important to me, I’m thereby a better person than they are. It’s very easy for me to be kind of a judgy asshole. I suspect I am not alone in this, among philosophers. I have been truly humbled by many of the ways in which someone I disagree with so starkly can continually fail to be a cartoon villain. I’m really grateful to have been humbled in that way—it’s been one of the most philosophically enriching experiences of my life.
Knowing how to “treat an objection as a gift” is a great philosophical virtue, and one of the main things I hope to teach to students. It can be difficult enough to maintain in purely theoretical questions, but to see Elizabeth Barnes insist on this curiousity-driven attitude in the philosophy of disability is truly impressive.
I love this post and I hope that more of us can adopt this open-mindedness. It’s also obvious that the “cartoon villain” impression is much more easily adopted and spread online. We would all do well to heed these words.
However, a question: correct me if I’m wrong, but Singer’s controversial views are almost entirely about severely disabled infants. These are infants with no prospect of a life worth living, no chance of consciousness, relationships, or happiness. This means that no interlocutor of Singer’s will ever be able to find themselves personally targeted by those views. That is, there is no person who will ever hear and understand him as saying: “Your life wasn’t worth living”. If they hear and understand him, then their life was, ex hypothesi, worth living.
Whereas, with many other heated debates over controversial topics, people are considering whether to have a friendly chat with someone else who literally targets them, their rights, their dignity, etc. Sometimes they manage this: the case of Matthew Stevenson shows. But it’s clear there’s a disanalogy here, yes?
Hi Nick,
Great question. I think it’s right that this is probably closer to his present view, which he’s moderated over time (though I’m not sure to what extent). But the original case as he presents it in Practical Ethics uses an infant with hemophilia as the example – and the argument is based on the idea that an infant with a condition like this, that causes pain and medical complications, would have substantially worse life prospects. Hemophilia is a lot closer to the kind of conditions that a lot of disabled adults live with than the kinds of extreme birth defects that prevent conscious awareness and have profoundly limited life expectancy. So he’s at least defended a much stronger view – that would be more directly relevant to people who might be talking with him – in print in a well-known book, although I’m not sure to what extent he’d endorse anything like that stronger view now.
In addition to the point Elizabeth has made about Singer’s earlier views, there are some other things to keep in mind about how Singer’s views might be relevant to someone potentially having a conversation with him. One of the ones I find most compelling is that judgments about whether a life is worth living are not always made very well, especially when it comes to what lives with certain disabilities are worth living. Endorsing a principle like “we should kill anyone without a life worth living” might often entail killing those with lives that would be worth living, because the judgments about whether a life is worth living. So one might oppose the principle not because one thinks in fact that lives not worth living ought to continue, but because one thinks there isn’t a good way to implement the principle.
Thank you for this wonderful contribution, Elizabeth.
Thank you for this wonderful post. I greatly admire both Peter’s and your work, so it gives me warm fuzzies to know you and he are on such good terms — the reasons you offer are persuasive too, but I won’t pass on a feel-good philosophical relationship.
This is speculative, but I wonder to what extent your continued respectful, if difficult, conversations with Peter may have led him to moderate some of his views. It seems plausible, at least to me, that this kind of engagement is more likely to lead to productive thinking on both sides than the typical strawmanning we observe.
Terrific essay that describes and also exemplifies some of our field’s great virtues.
Great post, thank you!
This is my favorite Daily Nous article in ages (not because others are lacking, but because I just quite enjoy this one)!
Thank you for this. It was a nice tool to aid in procrastinating my actual work.
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Robert Jones, Jr.
“I have been truly humbled by many of the ways in which someone I disagree with so starkly can continually fail to be a cartoon villain.”
Elizabeth Barnes
One could reply with something about the banality of evil here. But I don’t want people to get the impression that I am saying that about Singer and start a whole thing where people chime in to attack or defend him—such a comment is not about him. I’m just kind of surprised by how some philosophers can themselves be so shallow in their understanding of the world. Yes, people you disagree with or people who hold views that are maybe bigoted, can (and often do) “fail to be a cartoon villain.” Why would this be surprising to anyone here? Not every person who harbours hateful views will be vulgar; many will be unfailingly polite, insistent on civility, and demanding of respectability—more than capable of performing all the requisite academic rituals to climb professional ladders. Not some moustache-twirling cartoon villain with a secret lair in the basement of the department and a penchant for profanity, but an otherwise boring snob with a book deal. By the sounds of it, many are expecting the former, and utterly miss the latter.
What do you think is so shallow about my (or Barnes’s?!) understanding of the world?
Did you read the comment you are replying to? I explained what I saw as shallow.
I did. And I can’t see how you can infer anything meaningful about a person’s understanding of the world
from those snippets. Since you were replying *to me*, I wondered if you were implying that my (or Barnes’s) understanding of the world was shallow. Since I don’t think you know much about my understanding of the world, and Barnes’s strikes me as anything but shallow, I was curious how you came to that assessment? Not all evil is embodied by cartoon villains, sure. Anyone doubts it?
My comment sought not to personalise it to any individual philosopher, as I wanted to make a general comment on the idea conveyed by the quote, expressing that it should not be regarded as profound as some seem to regard it. I replied to you because your comment included the quote.
The reference to shallowness in one’s understanding of the world also isn’t meant to be taken as a criticism of one’s understanding of the world in general, but in the discursive circumstances that are the subject of the comment. I thought that was clear from the text that follows that sentence.
It would seem strange to read it as though I am saying that philosophers—especially ones who might agree with the idea conveyed in the quote—necessarily also have a shallow understanding of metaphysics, of epistemology, and of every other subject that they might have expertise in or some level of knowledge on. In that sense, you would be right; I can’t infer any shallowness in those respects solely from the quote. But I am not making such an inference anyway.
I see, that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
I’m not really surprised that there are bigoted people who are polite and generally respectful as I grew up encountering homophobes who were friendly and nice.
I am surprised that some people are surprised. I do wonder why though. Maybe they had the privilege of growing up in progressive circles most of their lives and rarely encountered the grey area people where someone is polite but bigoted.
I suppose such surprise comes at different times in people’s lives. I grew up less privileged and surrounded by bigoted conservatives so from an early age I had to witness such complexities early on so I’m not surprised as an adult.
I just finished watching the Handmaid’s Tale and I’m fascinated by Lawrence: he’s respectful, helpful, polite, rational, atheistic, but was the architect of Gilead. In fact, all of the villains on that show were once very normal, respectable, polite, and sane adults before America became Gilead. I think that show and book tried to tell us that bigotry (and evil) is banal.
I haven’t watched the Handmaid’s Tale, so I cannot speak to the last comment (I have read the book though).
But this does point to an aspect of bad-faith discussion that resonates with me, phenomenologically at least. I don’t see this aspect pointed out in the rest of the comments here.
It is an underlying self-invested attempt, perhaps unconscious but I wouldn’t say unintentional, of preserving one’s self-imagine as a moral person. Most of the frustrating resistance and self-defensiveness, including all the rhetorical moves pointed out elsewhere, that I’ve encountered in discussions come at a point where the only other conclusion is that one is morally complicit or morally compromised in some way. This is, admittedly, and to say the least, a very uncomfortable place to be. But I fail to see how lack of comfort is (morally) exculpatory. To paraphrase, ‘if you can’t handle where the argument takes you, then you should probably stay away from it’.
Perhaps if we were all prepared to accept as a possible outcome of a discussion that we are morally compromised, there would be much more good-faith discussion.
Lawrence decided to become a suicide bomber to kill the other architects of Gilead.
Yes, it was a good display of irony. A mixture of (divine?) justice and redemption. I wonder how many viewers are willing to forgive him or not. Is he forgivable?
Such cases of disloyalty are very rare in the real world and I’m glad the show didn’t exaggerate the regretful and righteous villain(s) trope and just made him the only one willing to do it. I enjoyed the later seasons more than the earlier ones. They toned down the melodrama and the pacing got better.
A timely post, given some of the recent comment threads on Daily Nous…
We must return to glazing prominent figures and we must do so promptly. After all, what purpose could a philosophy blog have if not such glazing, accompanied by constant, droning intellectual virtue signalling.
I find this unhelpful, for two reasons.
First, nearly everyone agrees with “you should have good faith debates with good faith debaters”. The contention surrounding “conversations across serious disagreement” isn’t about good faith debaters. It is about bad faith debaters.
Are you still getting the best version of an opposing view if your opponent argues in bad faith? Are you still getting the objections you need if your opponent argues in bad faith? I suppose you aren’t.
But then: should you debate them at all?
We don’t need to know more about the value of good faith debate. We need a serious conversation about how to handle the bad faith debaters in our midsts.
Maybe Barnes’s only point is an individualized one: that (despite allegations to the contrary), Singer is a good faith debater. If so, fine, I’m ready to believe that. But:
Second, “cartoon villain” is a strawman. Evil, in the real world, is banal. “I get along with him, so he’s not a bad person” is a fallacy.
Being a sharp thinker, personable colleague, or pleasant conversationalist doesn’t mean that one is a good person. Pleasant people have committed or supported all sorts of atrocities. (I have no opinion on Singer specifically, I mean these remarks in a general way.)
We judge people’s characters by their actions. Supposedly, their actions have something to do with their beliefs. Maybe they won’t act on these beliefs towards _me_ but perhaps only because they consider me as part of their in-group or as “one of the good ones”. Someone’s kindness towards _me_ is a relatively poor indication of their character if they otherwise are unkind (or advocate for unkindness) towards other people.
So maybe the real conclusion here is that someone’s moral character doesn’t matter for whether they are a valuable debater. It can be good to spar with bad people.
But we still need everyone to argue in good faith. THAT is what is at issue here, and Barnes (alongside the DN commentariat, as usual) seems to miss that point entirely.
I think your points are well worth considering.
To borrow your construction, though, I’d say that nearly everyone agrees with “you should not try to have good faith debates with bad faith debaters.” What matters are the criteria for being a bad-faith debater and how one can tell when a debater is meeting those criteria.
I, for one, have a low confidence in my ability to recognize bad-faith arguers. I fear I have trouble distinguishing them from, say,
There have even been times when I’ve been able, with some charity, to reconstruct the reasoning of an interlocutor whom I later suspected of arguing in bad faith.
All of which makes me want to know: What clues are there that an arguer is arguing in bad faith? What do you think the concept of a bad-faith arguer comes to?
Though I ask these questions in response to your comment, I’m directing them not only to you but also to that dreaded monolith, the DN Commentariat.
I’d also like to hear from others. I think it’s an important matter.
Roughly, I’d define bad faith debating as exhibiting contempt for, either or both, (a) your opponent in their capacity as a truth-seeker or (b) truth-seeking itself. I think we have some decent-ish heuristics for this.
Uttering bald-faced lies; shifting goalposts; “just asking questions” (with no regard for the merit of these questions for truth-seeking); motte-and-bailey tactics; whataboutism; construing criticism as an attack on their right to debate; conspiracy-theory epistemology (“evidence against my view is actually evidence for my view”). Just off the top off my head.
Our profession used to have a healthy immune reaction that excluded people who engage in such things from debate. But some of them have bullied their way back. In fairness, perhaps some of these immune reactions were also themselves pathological.
Either way, I don’t see how repeating the mantra “it’s good to hear opposing viewpoints” is at all helpful to resolve this.
Thanks for replying. I can see now that you’re working with a more expansive definition than I. Intuitively, the definition you provide seems reasonable, but I’m still thinking about it.
(One thing I’m going back-and-forth about is whether exhibiting bad faith in arguing is a necessary part of bad-faith arguing. And the reason I’m going back-and-forth about this is that I wonder whether building its manifestness into the definition assumes, for example, that the bad faith of an arguer is just there for anyone to see, if only one were paying attention. Or maybe you meant that its manifestness was sufficient, which sounds right to me. As I said — still thinking.)
Even accepting your definition, though, many of your heuristics, including ones you outline in responses to others below, seem not to distinguish bad-faith arguer (and thus no arguer at all, really) from bad arguer. (The latter of which might not be worth engaging either! But for different reasons.)
I understand that heuristics are imperfect almost by definition and aren’t meant to be guarantees of what they’re heuristics for. And it’s unreasonable to expect you to enumerate a bunch of rules for what is surely a highly context-sensitive phenomenon. And I agree that there are surely cases in which it’s obvious that, say, an interlocutor is spouting bald-faced lies without a care in the world.
So my provisional reply to you is this. Yes, bad-faith arguers aren’t worth engaging. But I believe we should be a little more skeptical of our own abilities to discern motives, feelings, intentions, and the like — except, perhaps, in face-to-face encounters. Maybe we should follow whatever eponymous law it is that counsels: don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to laziness, misunderstanding, or mistakenness.
A great couple of posts. For the reasons you give, I think it’s right to be suspect of our ability to detect bad faith in mostly-anonymous strangers, since its very difficult to read their real intentions.
Something I think makes matters worse is that bad faith in an interlocutor is typically the simplest available explanation for forceful, confusing, heated or interminable disagreement. That makes it far too easy to resort to that explanation, to the point where bad faith is close to the default assumption on social media (that’s my impression, at least).
By the way, I think that one reason to continue to engage even with bad faith debaters may be that many people arguing in bad faith don’t even realize that they’re doing it. For example, if I ask a question with no interest in the answer, with the intention of embarrassing my opponent, it may take an unusual amount of self-awareness to realize that this is my reason for doing this. If someone calls me out, I may fall back on observing how my contribution could technically be an honest question, without examining my own motives. I expect this is especially common amongst philosophers, since we typically take ourselves to be good faith debaters and even base some of our self-esteem on this belief, giving us motivation to avoid recognizing bad faith on our own part.
On the plus side, if someone doesn’t realize they’re arguing in bad faith, continuing to engage with them in good faith sometimes causes them to recognize and abandon their bad intentions, or more likely just forget about them, because they were never part of any deliberate plan. I do sometimes see this happen here on this site, where philosophers who start off with what is probably a bad faith contribution get drawn into a good faith discussion, since the bad faith wasn’t intentional and their trained good debating habits kick in after a while.
Thanks for the friendly addendum. I hadn’t thought of reasons why arguing with a bad-faith arguer would still be okay. You make a good point.
I can only nod in agreement with this:
I too would assume (defeasibly of course) that virtual exchange, as opposed to face-to-face exchange, makes this a much easier assumption.
And, based on my experience, I also think (but ditto) that if the stakes were actually high, the frequency of assumptions of bad faith would plummet. (And bad-faith actors would also quit their shenanigans.)
I’m okay with being cautious, hesitant, charitable in all this. But the problem with _never_ assuming malice is that you become an easy mark.
So there are important questions here that no witticism can resolve: at what point do we start attributing malice? And once we do, what do we do about it?
If we don’t have answers to these questions, we’ll just keep falling for the same con over and over again.
I don’t understand the concern here. Argument and discussion are public activities. Having malice is not a cheat code that lets you win arguments against opponents too pure to respond in kind. Making illegitimate argumentative moves is a visible thing that an audience – at least a philosophy-trained audience – is perfectly capable of assessing.
If you’re having a one-on-one conversation and you don’t think your interlocutor is worth talking to (for which malice is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition, but a good heuristic), just stop.
If you’re having a conversation in front of third parties, you can just continue patiently engaging, pointing out illegitimate moves by your interlocutor as and when it’s necessary but avoiding any response in kind, and trust that those third parties will draw appropriate conclusions.
(One of the useful features of the DN ‘likes’ function is that it lets you distinguish between these cases.)
> Making illegitimate argumentative moves is a visible thing that an audience – at least a philosophy-trained audience – is perfectly capable of assessing.
I guess that’s why you don’t understand my concern. I don’t agree with that, not even a little bit.
> If you’re having a conversation in front of third parties, you can just continue patiently engaging,
That sounds like “easy mark” talk to me.
If you do that, you will soon find yourself led down a garden-path of half-truths, misleading sources, bad statistics, etc. that might lead a careless observer (or a professional contrarian) to the impression that there is “something to” the bad faith position. If you point out that this is what going on, you’ll be accused of bias, of threatening your interlocutor’s academic freedom.
I don’t think you can easily deny that this is happening, or be assured that audiences won’t fall for it. This is happening everywhere all the time.
People use misleading sources and bad statistics all the time, and very often through sincere error. (“Here is one methodologically flawed study that supports my claim” is a move you see by actors all across the spectrum on a given issue, usually I think through scientific or statistical naïveté rather than malice). I don’t see a lot of value in psychoanalyzing why someone is doing this rather than just pointing it out.
Sorry, it seems I was unclear.
I don’t mean the occasional use of something misleading or bad. We all fall into that sometimes.
I mean the pursuit of a rhetorical (rather than logical) _strategy_ that could (for example) take the shape of: use bad statistics; when challenged, incessantly ask for sources; apply overboarding pedantry to these sources; when challenged, call foul.
It’s not a cheat code that just anyone can take. One has to be good at it.
“Bad faith debating” seems to name such rhetorical strategies. If you prefer a less psychologistic name for it, that’d be fine with me too.
That is helpful. I agree that this is happens, and I agree that it can be a useful thing to identify, not least because it depends on public data. (I don’t mind whether we call it ‘bad faith’, though it seems too narrow to capture all of what people have meant by that term: a question in isolation can’t be bad faith in your sense, for instance.)
But suppose I’m told: person X argues in bad faith. What am I supposed to do in response? If I trust the judgement of the person who tells me it, I might just believe them. But often that’s not the case – especially in online discussions where people are anonymous. (Of course I’m not going to believe someone is a bad faith reasoner just because you tell me: I have absolutely no idea who you are.) In that situation, the claim needs to be evidenced. And very often I find either that it is not evidenced or that I don’t find that the proffered evidence supports the conclusion.
Ultimately I don’t see any alternative to the object-level task of engaging with the argument (even if the engagement is to point out methodologically unacceptable moves.)
> What am I supposed to do in response?
That’s the question indeed.
If you do nothing or disengage, the cost is letting something stand uncorrected (that perhaps really ought to be corrected).
If you argue back in good faith, you might contribute to the false apperance that the questions posed in bad faith (or the fallacious arguments put forward in its favor) have merit.
If you point out the bad faith / the “unacceptable moves”, your interlocutor might cry foul: that you can’t handle disagreement, that you are unable to refute these arguments on their merits, that you are abridging their academic freedom.
The latter, we agree, seems to be the best option.
But what I’m trying to tell you is that it being the best option crucially depends on the audience being able to (mostly) see through the “crying foul” move.
You are optimistic about it. I am not. I see a lot of space for philosophers to be better at the “seeing through” part.
We’re at cross purposes. I wasn’t asking what I should do if I suspect bad faith, but how I should react when I’m told that someone else is in bad faith. And my experience is that accusations of bad faith are common but good evidence for those accusations is rare.
I see. In this case, perhaps the upshot of this discussion is that when person A claims that they are unjustly excluded from some debate, and person B claims that this is because A argues in bad faith… perhaps the best move is to go see for yourself what A is up to. Or ask B what they mean. Or whatever else is required to determine whether A’s exclusion was _unjust_.
This would, at any rate, a lot more helpful than more general pleas for “debate across disagreement”.
How does it do that?
It’s a (partial, imperfect) heuristic as to whether any significant number of people are reading a conversation beyond the participants.
I tend to assume that they are, this blog being public and all. So it seems at best a corroboration of an otherwise reasonable assumption to hold—that some number of people have or will read the comments, and that some portion of them will engage minimally beyond that by hitting the thumbs up, and others will engage further still by commenting themselves.
Engagement with long threads and sub-threads is pretty time-dependent; you can see readership dropping off quite quickly after a few days.
A vitally important question indeed. I am going to do my broken-record thing, though, and point out that this question has a radically different character once it’s about online and tech-mediated discussion. We have eminently sensible human instincts which direct us to discount people when they are malicious/BSing/etc. But those instincts developed in cultural and evolutionary contexts that were mostly face-to-face and involved repeated interactions. It is hard to overstate how much important behavioural evidence we lose when we go online.
Our 21st century anxiety about the bad faith of our interlocutors is surely a product of this shift, and I don’t think there is a way out. So long as our “discussions” (if we can even call them that) take place on here, the true motives of our interlocutors will be nearly impossible to divine. And that means that comparatively few accusations of bad faith (or good faith) will be clearly justified. Yet, the accusation is, paradoxically, more popular than ever.
I think it often happens that two people begin a conversation in good faith and charitable curiosity about one another’s views, and end up perceiving many of these markers of bad faith in each other’s arguments, simply because they care a lot about the subject and both of them get emotionally activated.
A.S. – I’m struggling with this very issue right now. I have a not-that-close-friend, but a friend, nonetheless, who I know well enough to be fairly confident is probably not a ‘bad faith’ arguer and bears me no ill will, but falls into one of your other categories.
But it’s not always clear to me whether the lack of bad faith is sufficient to continue the debate. I want to be charitable, but at times I wonder whether the evidence (lack of understanding, not caring about certain things, different ordering of values, etc.) points to an underlying bad faith that they may not even be aware of?
And, whenever I attempt to even suggest such a thing — “Have you considered your biases?” “Why aren’t you willing to consider other evidence?” “I think you’re being unfair here.” — they become defensive and accuse me of being the one who is biased, etc.
This tempts me to think that perhaps they are exhibiting bad faith — they would seem to, on Q.P.’s account — but they are either oblivious to that, or (and here is where I get paranoid!) they actually *are* arguing in bad faith but they want to continue to appear as though they are my friend, even though when push comes to shove, they really don’t care about me.
But, then, that seems to be uncharitable on my part, so I try to continue the conversation, even as others say to me, “Why do you bother discussing with them? They’re biased/ignorant/etc.” It’s frustrating, to say the least. But I think it points to just how complex the idea of bad faith can be.
Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment…
Whooh. Yeah, difficult situation. This stuff IS so complex and subtle!
You might think deeper-than-average familiarity would be a hospitable environment for arguing-toward-the-truth with someone. But, it seems intimacy can also lead interlocutors to think they have the other “figured out,” so anything the interlocutors say to one another is seen under the aspect of something like Oh of course you’d say that or I know what you really mean by that.
A little off-topic: I wonder if the way one’s linguistic moves come wrapped in one’s personality makes a bigger difference to receptiveness than we philosophers would like to think. Maybe some personalities, or aspects of them, just create a friction that doesn’t let ideas pass by as smoothly as they would with other personalities. (I don’t know how to talk about these things except in metaphor.)
Just thinking out loud. Thanks for your contribution.
I wonder how useful the ‘bad faith’ construction is here (and elsewhere). At the risk of being behaviorist, it’s very hard to know what’s in someone’s heart, but it is much easier to ask: is this conversation still productive? And a conversation might be productive because:
– you think you might change the person’s view
– you’re learning something from it yourself and might change your own view
– the process of discussing things plausibly is improving your and/or your interlocutor’s understanding even if basic views don’t change
– it’s fun
– it’s not fun but it’s a necessary part of a relationship you want to preserve
– you’re interested in persuading or communicating with a third-party audience. (More relevant for blogs or seminar settings than personal friendships)
There are probably other reasons. But if a conversation is not productive there’s no shame in politely stepping away from it, and you can do that whether or not it’s in “bad faith”. I certainly have friends (in and out of philosophy) with whom I choose not to discuss certain topics (in and out of philosophy) because I’ve learned that we’ve reached the end of a useful interchange, but in very few cases have I thought they were arguing in bad faith.
This seems absolutely right, David; and yet, there’s that part of me that thinks, ‘But I should be able to have productive conversations with a friend!’ I know that’s not always reasonable… it just feels like an epistemic or moral failing somehow.
Strong agree
“Are you still getting the objections you need if your opponent argues in bad faith? I suppose you aren’t.”
Why suppose that? I think a lot of the objections I “need” are simply the ones that suggest I’m wrong. I could get such objections from a saint or an asshole. The latter is less pleasant, but that’s a different issue. I can’t count the number of times I’ve (sometimes very grudgingly) concluded: “that guy was a real jerk… but he was right, and I’d better address his complaint.” I thank philosophy for making it easier for me to do that.
Yes, good objections can come from bad people, and being an ahole is not the same as being in bad faith. I said that already in my initial post. (Like you, I imagine, I had to admit to myself that countless ahole reviewers actually made my paper better.)
But someone who argues in bad faith will not give you good objections, but will misrepresent and strawman your position, try to defeat you rhetorically rather than logically, try to discredit your view in outside venues, etc.
Oh, I see that now at the end of your comment—my bad. I guess I still don’t really see why someone who argues in bad faith will not give you good objections. To borrow your example, it seems like many reviewers with good objections weren’t arguing in good faith.
Maybe you and I just mean different things by “bad faith.” I think of it as a feature of motivations, which can often come apart from outcomes. For instance, someone who is just trying to “win” a debate is arguing in bad faith, but they could still make some good points. Sometimes it’s even easier to find objections with that attitude.
The common meaning of bad faith is dishonest participation in some normative practice.
Reviewers can be mean, contrarian, or even hostile to a view, but they can still honestly engage with an argument.
Bad faith, by contrast, would be dishonesty in the engagement. Say, willfully misrepresenting the argument, or blowing up a minor pedantry into a devastating failure. (Contempt towards shared truth-seeking, as I put it above.) None of this is helpful.
I agree that an objection produced in bad faith will not _necessarily_ (merely in virtue of the bad faith of the one who produced it) be useless. A bad faith debater is a lot like a Frankfurtian bullcrapper. A bullcrapper might accidentally utter a truth. A bad faith debater might accidentally make a good argument. The question is whether these accidents make the engagement worth it. I’d think not. We’re better off having strong norms against bullcrap and against bad faith.
If you think that an objection produced in bad faith will not necessarily be useless, then we have no real disagreement. Thanks for clarifying. (For what it’s worth, I agree that we shouldn’t engage bullshitters/bad faith debaters!)
Notwithstanding that this is a personal reflection on someone’s personal experiences with a philosopher whom they disagree with, I think the profession in general would benefit from internalising the opposite: That commentators who are pleasant, polite, or saint-like (in your analogy) can nevertheless harbour some deeply disturbing or objectionable views that many, within and outside the profession, may be warranted in responding negatively to. In some areas, the tendency to tone-police those who respond as such doesn’t evince an attitude of “this person isn’t responding in the right tone, but their complaint has merit,” so much as it shows the knee-jerk reaction of “this person isn’t using the right tone, so I’m going to assume their complaint lacks merit and the person with the polite, saint-like tone has something worthwhile to say.”
That makes sense, I think both norms (“don’t ignore objections from assholes” and “don’t assume polite people have good views”) are reasonable. I guess a lot of it comes down to detail–what makes a view disturbing, how much of a jerk someone can be before you ignore them, etc. etc.
As far as I can tell, I haven’t come across any *bad-faith* debate or debaters on Daily Nous. Any examples? Or examples from the allegations you mentioned that Singer is a bad-faith debater.
I hope “bad faith” doesn’t just mean someone who continues to disagree with you. If it doesn’t, an example of someone whose conclusions you agree with who is a bad-faith debater would especially help.
I don’t think Justin will let me explicitly name the people I’d like to name.
Anyway, I don’t think it is particularly *good* faith how multiple people in response to me express sincere confusion about the very common, everyday notion of bad faith.
What is it to argue in “bad faith” here? To argue for a position you don’t believe in?
I think that question is itself in bad faith.
Why would this question be in bad faith? Weren’t there important clarifications about the notion in other sub-threads? I myself feel like I have a decent grasp on what it is to argue in bad faith, but it is common enough for me to realize that I actually don’t have a good grasp on concepts that I initially thought I had a good grasp on. In any case, I’ve appreciated most of what you (Queer Philosopher) have said here so I hope you don’t take this comment to be in bad faith.
No worries. I don’t think that the suggestion that I would mean “positions [I] don’t believe in” was an honest engagement with what I said. It is a somewhat worn-out strawman that someone who thinks that some debates are not worth having is just unable to handle disagreement.
Given my position as I stated it, I see no point in attempting a joint truth-seeking effort on the notion of “bad faith” from this starting point.
I registered this reading too, but there’s another reading that is much more benign if the antecedent of ‘you’ is the bad faith arguer – does x argue in bad faith if x argues for a position x doesn’t agree with? I’d think the answer to that is generally not.
That just demonstrates how easy is it to mistake someone’s question as being in bad faith. If you think you can reliably do so, I believe you are very mistaken.
I don’t think you’ve proven otherwise though. So, at most, it may well be in bad faith. It may not be.
This has now become absurd.
To recap: Hey Nonny Mouse made a one-sentence comment, at the time their only comment on this thread. They were accused of bad faith, in hindsight it appears because their comment was ambiguous and one disambiguation would fairly obviously be a jibe. (I didn’t even notice the derogatory disambiguation FWIW: I read it as the suggestion that to reason in bad faith would be to defend a view the reasoner doesn’t believe.) Hey Nonny Mouse then says that they were not in bad faith; your response to them is that they haven’t proven that they were not and they might well be. But what would possibly constitute that proof? Sworn testimony? Contemporaneous notes? Affidavits from character witnesses?
I can’t think of a better demonstration of how useless this talk of ‘bad faith’ can be. (Which is not to say that it is always useless: I can potentially see the value of the more nuanced construction Queer Philosopher discusses upthread.)
> I can’t think of a better demonstration of how useless this talk of ‘bad faith’ can be. (Which is not to say that it is always useless: I can potentially see the value of the more nuanced construction Queer Philosopher discusses upthread.)
I think quite the opposite, to be honest.
What I have been advocating in response to your queries, is that when someone excludes someone else from the set of reasonable interlocutors (in this case, me excluding HNM), the best course of action is to evaluate whether the reasons for the exclusion are good (JDRox and Rav to me).
In this case they were apparently not good. That’s my bad and I apologize. But this whole conversation was a whole lot of more healthy than if, say, someone had levelled some overblown complaint about HNM’s free speech at me.
How can we possibly have conversations with strangers on the internet if the default presumption is that they may well be asking questions in bad faith? Should we presume the same of your own contributions here? We don’t know who you are, what your motives are, what your genuine beliefs are. Sartre, quoted below, theorized about bad faith. Presumably, that’s because it’s not self-evident what bad faith consists in. Indeed, his account is quite idiosyncratic and by no means an uncontested elucidation of the concept. Someone candidly—we should assume, if we want to have conversations at all—asks what ‘bad faith’ means in the context at hand. Someone dismisses their question suggesting 1. we should all know what they mean (I don’t); 2. the question is in bad faith. And now you’re telling us there’s nothing they can say that would disprove their bad faith. Someone is not coming across arguing in especially good faith here and it’s not who you think.
In fairness, I think Queer Philosophers original response to Hey Nonny Mouse is based on a sincere misreading of an unintentionally ambiguous post.
Agreed. I did not assume Queer Philosopher’s dismissal was *insincere*, though it was unfairly quick and harsh.
Where have I said that that “there’s nothing they can say that would disprove their bad faith”? Of course there are things they could say that would disprove it, such as by engaging in the discussion further—providing contributions that can allow for an appraisal one way or the other. At present, that’s lacking, so there’s little to base an appraisal on either way.
The burden shouldn’t be on them to demonstrate their good faith when they’ve been denied any presumption of it out of hand. But fair enough, you didn’t say there was nothing they could say to demonstrate it. I hope you realize that’s an awfully inefficient way of exchanging information.
The point is simply that they can demonstrate it. If someone suspects bad faith (as QP did), it is possible to demonstrate otherwise, and that demonstration comes from continued participation, which provides the basis for revising the initial appraisal.
I’m not sure what you can saying is inefficient here? That process of appraisal? It seems to me that’s something we’re all doing ongoingly anyway, and how we’re able to determine whether we want to continue in a particular discussion, what sort of tone we adopt in it, etc. This also allows for us to change course when we realise, through what comes up in the discussion, that maybe our interlocutor wasn’t actually engaging in bad faith, for example.
If I asked a question honestly and I met this kind of response I might as well decide it’s not worth the engagement. Indeed, QP still hasn’t answered the question. I agree with you that one could demonstrate one’s good faith. But one can be forgiven for not wanting to, given that the burden shouldn’t be on them.
Re inefficiency: look how many degrees removed we are from the question. QP could have offered a brief account of bad faith when prompted to but refused, choosing instead to impugn the asker’s motives. Not a very efficient way to move the conversation forward.
I did offer a brief account in response to AS and to Meme.
I was curt with the two people (On the Market Too, Nonny Mouse) who I interpreted as not honestly engaging with what I said.
Point taken. It’s hard to follow all the subthreads.
Honest mistakes happen.
If I misunderstood your meaning, I sincerely apologize.
Thank you. I appreciate and respect that. 🙂
“So I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on that personal value. In doing this, I realize that my reasons are, well, personal—this is an exercise in personal reflection rather than argument, and some of what I say here may be entirely dependent on the uniqueness of this particular context and this particular situation, not to mention my own psychology.”
By focusing on whether one should debate and on the vaguely defined notion of bad faith, I worry that *you* may have missed the point of her post, which is emphatically about *personal value.* Or am *I* missing the point of your comment? After all, I belong like you to the DN commentariat; we all have points to miss.
As said, I found this personal reflection “unhelpful” (in the context of ongoing discussion on this blog and in the profession). Two reasons, given above.
Unhelpful relative to what end?
Are you planning on similarly badgering those above who claim that this is “timely” or a “wonderful contribution”?
I’m not sure ‘badgering’ is apt, but given that I said, in good faith, that I found the post wonderful, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? When people tell me why they find personal value in something, I don’t tend to gaslight them about it.
Clearly this attempt to illuminate what you were expecting from the post is hitting diminishing returns, so we’ll leave it at that. I’m sorry you found Barnes’s personal reflection frustrating; I liked it a lot. As I like to say, in good faith, let a thousand flowers bloom!
If you understand for which context/matter it can be said to be “timely” or a “contribution”, then you also understand that this is the context/matter for which it can be said to be “unhelpful”. Is what I’m saying.
I didn’t comment on the ‘timely contribution’. I won’t badger someone for a one-line compliment, no, but maybe you should.
Why would he badger someone about a claim he agrees with? *That* would be arguing in bad faith!
To clear up who may or may not have missed any points, it sounds like what you’re saying is that we need a member of the DN commentariat to intuit the boundary between personal and professional value found in Plato’s Heaven, using thousands of words across dozens of posts. Anyone know a guy?
Hi Eugene,
Yes, that’s exactly what I wrote. Thanks for your continued support.
Best,
Nicolas
——
PS: if you are, as I am starting to suspect (but maybe I’m paranoid), the same Eugene/Eugine who has already made bizarrely personal and sarcastic comments about me on this blog, I am inviting you to email me so you can help me understand what your gripe is. Otherwise, I will simply kindly ask you to stop. I’m not that interesting!
‘We don’t need to know more about the value of good faith debate. We need a serious conversation about how to handle the bad faith debaters in our midst’.
Bingo.
Sartre had something to say about bad faith interlocutors in ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ (the subtitle is ‘An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate’), written in 1948, when memories of murderous bigotry in its ultimate form of expression were somewhat more fresh. We might apply his account of the interlocutory tactics of anti-Semites to any situation where prejudice against a disfavored group is smuggled into ‘civil’, intellectualized discourse. The most abhorrent speech and conduct can be morally laundered. There is no attitude or act, utterly indefensible on its face, that can’t be defended in abstract, sanitized propositions, while extolling the virtues of heterodox notions:
“The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devalue words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does give himself. He simply tries to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse… Never believe the anti-Semites are complete unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Anyone who cannot recognize in this account in the current political environment, or the accompanying assault on academic freedom (that is duly reported here on Daily Nous on an almost daily basis) is either not paying attention, or unwilling to acknowledge inconvenient details of reality.
> The most abhorrent speech and conduct can be morally laundered. There is no attitude or act, utterly indefensible on its face, that can’t be defended in abstract, sanitized propositions, while extolling the virtues of heterodox notions
Ironically, Sartre himself defended the indefensible many times in abstract, sanitized propositions.
I think this is a mistake. No one needs to debate anyone they don’t trust or respect. But to define a class of ideas or interlocutors as in principle off-limits for debate is counterproductive and a slippery slope. Refusing to engage with expressions of hatred sounds like a good idea, but in practice it forecloses a much larger space than intended.
In early modern Europe, many intellectuals called for free and open debate on religious topics, but they typically set certain conditions on How their adversaries should frame their arguments, given the high stakes involved and the apparent bad faith they perceived. In practice, this foreclosed any real debate most of the time.
Thanks so much, Elizabeth, for this terrific piece!
Having a conversation with Peter Singer is one thing, with the tristate Singer Bros another.
I agree. And honest and able criticism from a radically opposing view is a very rare gift. I’m a Marxist, and the critic I miss most is my late friend N. Scott Arnold, a libertarianish philosopher from University of Alabama Birmingham, taken from us much too soon. He wrote deeply critical, but very fair minded the studies of Marx and of market socialism, and many papers.
He and I did a dog and pony show with David Schweickart (a market socialist) on the philosophy talk circuit, and in his works and in his discussions he always put our views in the best possible light, reasoning, accurately, that his case for his own anti-socialist views would be strongest if he refuted the strongest versions of socialist views rather than straw men. He would write comments on my drafts that were sometimes longer than the drafts themselves. Everyone should be blessed with such a critic. May his memory be a blessing.
Thank you for this post and for your work, Elizabeth. It reminds me that there’s a double bind for doing philosophy on issues that personally affect us. Interlocutors may not criticize due to facts about us — or, individuals may not believe or take our lived experience as a fact (incredibly invalidating and painful). It’s definitely a risk to do philosophy that is personal; but it is necessary to expand perspectives in philosophy (instead of philosophizing from the armchair).
If you (in the general sense of ‘you’, not you in particular) are so personally invested in something that you can’t stand to hear out the opposing side in full, then that’s something you can’t discuss philosophically, and the right thing to do is to sit that discussion out.
If you not only want to avoid hearing the other side but also want to prevent anyone else from hearing or expressing the other side even in your absence, then the best you could do is try to make the case that nobody should be permitted to discuss those matters philosophically.
But if you feel that you have some special status that gives you the authority to declare to others what is right and wrong, true or false in some domain, while nobody else even has the status to dispute your claims, then the result cannot be philosophical inquiry even if you really had infallible access to indibitable knowledge (which would be quite remarkable in itself).
> if you feel that you have some special status that gives you the authority to declare to others what is right and wrong, true or false in some domain, while nobody else even has the status to dispute your claims, then the result cannot be philosophical inquiry
It is important to recognize here that this cuts both ways.
If someone thinks that their personal involvement gives them such authority, they cannot participate in inquiry. But if someone thinks that their LACK of personal involvement gives them such authority (e.g. because this lack endows them with a “superior neutrality”), then they can likewise not participate in inquiry.
So I would add to your principle (“if you are so personally invested in something that you can’t stand to hear out the opposing side in full” then you should “sit that discussion out”) that if you cannot muster the respectfulness to include the subjects of your inquiry in your inquiry, you should equally sit it out.
Hi, Queer Philosopher.
This doesn’t seem correct at all.
For instance: suppose that Smith has had a spiritual epiphany at her church, and now wants to tell the rest of us exactly what sort of lives we should be leading. She takes for granted that her epiphany and long-standing involvement with her religion, and with God (she believes) through her religion, gives her the truth on all sorts of matters. She doesn’t take seriously the possibility that anyone who objects to what she is saying could be right. To her, the world is divided into two classes: those who get it, and those who don’t. And anyone who gets it will agree with her, and those who don’t get it ought to listen and learn.
Jones, by contrast, is not a religious mystic. She doesn’t belong to Smith’s church or any other church. she simply wants to consider the best arguments for and against the various positions Smith keeps declaring to be true. He tries to be objective about these things, though of course that should not be confused with never coming to any decision about the matter. He simply wants to believe what is best supported by the best arguments, if anything is.
Whatever Smith is doing, she is very clearly not doing philosophy. She is dogmatizing. Even if, by sheer luck, Smith happens to be correct in all her conclusions, and even if God personally ensured that she would get nothing wrong, she has failed to engage in the practices that make philosophy philosophy. She has failed to present reasons for her views, she has failed to consider opposing arguments, she has failed to consider the weaknesses others can find in her views, etc.
This consideration does not “cut both ways” and rule out Jones from doing philosophy.
Jones is committed to considering the matter fairly, and she understands the simple principle that any legitimate form of intellectual inquiry must be neutral: that is, it cannot stack the deck in favor of one first-order doctrine. (Very obviously, that does not entail that he is barred from coming to some conclusion on the matter as a result of inquiring fairly into the matter).
Why would you think otherwise?
P.S. Thank you for your comment on the other thread: it seems I missed my chance to respond by being good and getting my work done for a week, since commenting there now appear to be switched off. I’m not convinced at all, and was going to explain why, but I appreciate your providing your reasons, which were interesting to consider.
The assumption here is that philosophy is a purely a priori discipline, right? Someone who saw the blue ball bouncing on Tuesday and who advanced a philosophical thesis depending in part on the blue ball having bounced on Tuesday, and who doesn’t take seriously theses that are incompatible with the blue ball having bounced on Tuesday, and who can’t convince someone who neither saw the ball nor will take it on testimony that the ball bounced, wouldn’t be doing philosophy by your lights, right? And “the blue ball bounced on Tuesday and I saw it, so therefore X” would not be a reason for a philosophical view? Etc.?
No, I’m not at all assuming that philosophy must be purely a priori. In fact, what I’m saying applies equally well to any area of genuine empirical science.
To take your example: if someone claims that blue balls never bounce, then we could legitimately disprove that claim by bouncing a blue ball. This could be done in public as a demonstration, or readers of an article could be invited to replicate the experiment for themselves by getting a bouncing blue ball from such-and-such a place and throwing it against a non-carpeted floor, etc. Science always progresses in that way, and some of that science could inform good philosophy.
But suppose I just make the claim that I saw a brontosaurus walking down a deserted street, and on that basis seek to establish the general claim that dinosaurs still exist. Nobody else was with me, the finding was not replicated by anyone else — people just have my assertion to go by. I just insist that I had that experience, and that nobody who wasn’t there has any experiential basis for doubting my words. Well, it’s *possible* that there really was a brontosaurus; but even if there was, this is not how philosophy or science works. There are rules to these things, and one of the rules is that you can’t just make unsupported assertions.
That doesn’t entail that those assertions are false: they might be true. But the process of coming up with them, articulating them, and trying to get people to believe them is not philosophy if all you’ve got in support is your own say-so.
The same thing goes for communities of people with conclusions they are committed to. If a bunch of Loch Ness Monster seekers claim to have been together when they saw it, that by itself does not establish its existence.
Another form of bogus science or philosophy involves taking a replicable or publicly observable event and then attributing some unseen cause to it merely on the grounds that one was there and experienced it directly.
For instance, if I bounce a blue ball on the sidewalk in front of people, it would not be properly scientific or philosophical of me to assert that it bounced the way it did because of a sort of ‘bouncy energy’ that had descended on the general environment, and then say that I know this to be true because of the way the ball felt when I bounced it, which none of the observers had a chance to do when the ‘bouncy energy’ was around.
But surely you have to admit there are some things only some people are privy to, right? And the rest of us will have to take those on their say-so? Only people who can see know what it’s like to see. All the blind people have to take it on testimony that there’s something that it’s like to see, and so on, even though they’ll never experience it themselves. The rest of it’s just haggling over what is and isn’t in this category of “stuff some people have to take on trust,” right?
Just narrowly on this interesting example, without prejudice to the larger discussion:
I don’t think blind people need to trust that sighted people have a certain sensory *capacity*: rather, there’s just vast amounts of evidence, available to them, that sighted people have that capacity. (And note that we are all in this position compared to people who claim, say, that they have telepathy or extrasensory perception: we don’t take the capacity on trust, we look for evidence).
Granted that the capacity exists, we can then ask about the what-is-it-like-to-see aspect. But that’s going to come down to familiar philosophy of mind issues. We’re basically asking whether blind people should trust that sighted people have visual qualia, and that’s going to depend on what we think about the general issue of qualia: skeptics like Wittgenstein or Dennett (except blind) are not going to take sighted people’s word here, because they generally reject that way of approaching conscious experience. (The method of heterophenomenology that Dennett outlines in Consciousness Explained is pretty much tailor-made for this situation.)
And in support of those skeptics, if a sighted person describes their visual experience to a blind person, they will probably make large mistakes: most people will sincerely but *wrongly* claim that they have no blind spot, that they have color vision to the edge of their visual field, etc.
“Only people who can see know what it’s like to see. All the blind people have to take it on testimony that there’s something that it’s like to see, and so on, even though they’ll never experience it themselves.”
If 99% of the people in the world were completely blind, and the sighted people just made declarations to the blind like “The chair at the front of the room is blue, which I know you’ll never experience for yourselves but you’d better believe it,” then that would not count as doing philosophy or science. Even if we grant that the sighted people can see the chair and agree that it’s blue, that’s not philosophy. There are no arguments: the blind people are just asked to accept on faith that the sighted people’s assertions are accurate. The sighted people have knowledge, but they did not arrive at that knowledge through philosophy, and their presentation of that knowledge is not philosophy.
Fortunately, in real life, blind people are not in the position of having to accept on faith that there are colors. They can take a bunch of objects that, as far as they can tell without being able to see, are identical to sensory examination, and ask the sighted people what color each one is. Then, they can mix them up and see whether other sighted people categorize them the same way, etc.
So even to the blind, colors are not in principle untestable.
Moreover, just imagine a situation in which a sighted person tells a blind person that a certain chair is blue. The blind person asks why that claim should be accepted. Then someone else says to the blind person, “You just invalidated the sighted person’s lived experience, and as a result he now finds philosophy unbearable and has left the conversation for good. If only you had kept your doubts to yourself, and accepted his reports about what he perceives, he would still be doing philosophy today.” Now the blind person is made to feel ashamed for having asked the question or raised any doubts. I would say that that’s a terrible environment for inquiry!
I don’t think people who have spiritual epiphanies typically say “I know you’ll never experience this for yourself but you’d better believe it anyways.” Indeed most of them seem to be giving advice about what they did to get the epiphany and what one can do to open oneself up to epiphanies and so on.
Maybe the idea is that the spiritual epiphany person is just an example and the real important case is transgender people. But I think transgender people are typically open to the possibility that scientists could invent an injection or a mind ray or whatever that could turn you trans, and in that event, you too could know what it’s like to be trans. I do agree with you that if someone is saying that what it’s like to be transgender is in principle impossible for you, Justin Kalef, to experience, then they’re being a little unreasonable, unless when they say this there’s the unspoken assumption that we’re holding fixed certain things about you. In that case I think it would be reasonable for them to say this.
As for whether epiphanies and being trans and so on are like the case with the chair where we can find other objects: I take it you think they aren’t? Maybe many (most?) epiphanies aren’t, but I don’t think I’ve seen many people claim that the experience of being transgender isn’t. Indeed there’s not just one “experience” of being transgender, but rather a whole host of things that transgender people report feeling, and you can compare all the different transgender and cisgender and agender people and all the things they say about gender and so forth, and arrive at various conclusions. So it doesn’t seem hard to do what you call philosophy about these sorts of things. I don’t see any transgender people getting upset at that process in the abstract. There are of course good and bad ways to go about it, including ways that are more or less invalidating of people’s experiences, but the basic idea is one I’ve never seen any pushback against, I think.
There’s a reason, though, that we’ve ended up in a situation where the gender-equivalent of the following thing happens:
The reason is that there is horrific discrimination against transgender people and that invalidation of their lives is part and parcel of this discrimination. So people are understandably touchy about this. Of course this is a terrible environment for inquiry, but we have the anti-trans people to blame for this, not the trans people. The trans people are just trying not to be assaulted, killed, deprived of their passports by their government, disrespected, misgendered, etc.
Of course everyone wants to live in a happy free world where inquiry on all topics proceeds unfettered. But until people stop being so horrible to transgender people and other sorts of people (agender people, gender nonconforming cisgender people, etc.) it’s going to be pretty hard for people to go around without their hackles up.
This is especially true if some of the people who start out doing the allegedly harmless mere intellectual inquiry about what gender is later move on to working directly for an anti-transgender government by helping to author a document that legitimates discrimination against transgender people. In circumstances like that, it’s going to be very hard to trust someone who says they just want to engage in abstract philosophical reasoning about whether (e.g.) you really exist as you take yourself to exist, or whether instead you’re deeply deluded and ought to be sent to the reeducation camps or whatever.
Hi, Daniel.
It would indeed be interesting if scientists could create a mind ray that would give all of us the experience of acute gender dysphoria, or of having a different sexual orientation, and so on. But I’m not sure what questions those things would resolve.
“What does it feel like to be X?” does not seem to be a philosophical question. We can philosophically consider questions like whether we humans can ever know what it’s like to be a bat, but if someone gave us that experience somehow, it’s not clear what philosophical questions would be resolved by having the experience that others could not resolve. Maybe there are some such philosophical questions, but it’s not immediately obvious to me what those are.
There are a number of interesting philosophical questions about transgender people. For instance, there are the questions Rebecca Tuvel famously discusses about trans-racial people: if one maintains that there are transgender people but not trans-racial people, what justifies that distinction? That would lead into some important and interesting metaphysical and epistemological discussions. Then, of course, there are the ethical questions about transgender people in sport or women’s prisons, the question of how we ought to deal with children who express a strong desire to bypass puberty by having so-called gender-affirming surgery, etc.
All of these are great philosophical questions, and discussing them would allow us to get clarity on the transgender phenomenon while at the same time helping to guide public policy.
But does being transgender, or being zapped with a transgender mind ray, really do much to answer them? I doubt it! I’ll tell you why.
Already, without being transgender, I am aware that trans people feel a great happiness in being allowed to be transgender, and some significant discomfort in having that impeded, as well as the gender dysphoria itself. I am also aware that transgender people are ill-treated and discriminated against in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We don’t need to be transgender to get that part.
But having a first-person transgender experience is also not sufficient for solving any of those questions. In fact, for many of those questions, knowing what it’s like to be transgender doesn’t seem to give one any clear advantage in coming up with the correct answer. Take the sports issue. We can all understand the dilemmas, and we know what stands in the balance on both sides. Most of us have never been a transgender person wishing to compete in sports, and most of us have never been a non-transgender girl or woman being asked to compete against a transgender athlete in contact sports. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t imagine things from the various perspectives, weigh up the good and bad aspects of either decision, and do our best to move toward a reasonable policy on the matter.
Nobody should be able to enter that dispute with a trump card. It would be wrong to give the (non-transgender) female athlete special consideration just because she’s had that experience, or has much to lose or gain by the decision. And the same goes on the other side.
“Of course everyone wants to live in a happy free world where inquiry on all topics proceeds unfettered. But until people stop being so horrible to transgender people and other sorts of people (agender people, gender nonconforming cisgender people, etc.) it’s going to be pretty hard for people to go around without their hackles up.”
Fair enough — but what follows about the philosophical inquiry? If we’re going to do it, we have to do it right: if it becomes deeply compromised because some people get to keep their thumbs on the scale, it’s not philosophy.
Compare, say, the victims of violent robberies. They are in that situation through no fault of their own. They should have our sympathy. It would be understandable if they found some discussions about the proper punishment for violent robberies to be callous and unbearable, especially when some people argue that the robbers should not be blamed or punished (which they should be permitted to argue for). That much is clear.
But what follows? Should the victims of violent robberies get to limit what others argue for on this topic? Should they get to shut down all discussion entirely, so that we’re all just left with our gut instincts or the policies we feel pressured into supporting? Or should they just stay out of the conversation if they find it upsetting to hear discussions of it? The latter seems the best course to me! But if we were ever to decide to let their discomfort with the discussion practically exclude the views they don’t like, the result would not be philosophy. It would be a charade that at best confers false legitimacy on conclusions and experts that are no such thing.
“This is especially true if some of the people who start out doing the allegedly harmless mere intellectual inquiry about what gender is later move on to working directly for an anti-transgender government by helping to author a document that legitimates discrimination against transgender people.”
This begs the question in an illustrative manner. The main question at hand in the document you are referring to is whether the children who seek this treatment as minors really can be judged to be transgender at this stage in their lives, such that we can be sufficiently certain that allowing the life-altering treatment would be a permissible violation of the general principle that minors not be permitted to make life-altering commitments where avoidable. Whether or not the policy is discrimination against transgender people depends on whether the minors in question really will grow up to be lifelong transgender people.
Would you say that the law that prohibits minors from getting married is a case of discrimination against married people?
The policy might be good or might be bad, but whether it is good or bad is a matter that we can only settle through arguing it out fairly. And yet, you’re saying that some people have an understandable dissatisfaction with arguing it out fairly because the people who would be apt to join the discussion have also done things like contribute to this document, which you say is clearly bigoted against transgender people, and yet we can’t fairly dispute that either, and round and round it goes. What keeps it going round and round is this idea that a certain class of people are authoritative enough to shut discussion down, and yet that we must treat the pre-philosophical judgments of those people as authoritative in advance of the investigation we now don’t get to have.
Regarding this:
And this:
In a certain sense, you’ve answered the questions you’ve posed. People already have their thumbs on the scale, in a sense. That is, there is already a set of “pre-philosophical judgments” that is treated as “authoritative in advance of the investigation.” That’s what cis-heteronormativity is.
It’s not merely a matter of queer people not being taken as authoritative on their own experiences, but not being taken as authoritative in general so far as any investigation of gender and sexuality is concerned. (That’s definitely true historically, and still true in many respects today, already arguably less so, as heteronormativity itself has become more visible in the investigation—arguably due, in no small part, to those you’d consider as implementing an “activist” methodology taking steps to make it visible.)
“People already have their thumbs on the scale, in a sense. That is, there is already a set of “pre-philosophical judgments” that is treated as “authoritative in advance of the investigation.” That’s what cis-heteronormativity is.”
Sorry, but I can’t accept that without evidence. I’m aware that activists have created the term ‘cis-heteronormativity’, and that they have claimed that it’s a powerful force in academia. But I haven’t seen good evidence that it is so. Granted, a few decades ago, it definitely was; but if anything, the academics I know tend to defer pretty seriously to the claims of transgender activists. Perhaps I’m mistaken about that, but it would take some compelling evidence to get me to accept that.
“It’s not merely a matter of queer people not being taken as authoritative on their own experiences, but not being taken as authoritative in general so far as any investigation of gender and sexuality is concerned.”
I’m not sure that I understand this complaint. Why should any demographic be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experiences, for instance about the implications and best explanations for their experiences? That is asking much too much, no matter which demographic group one has in mind.
Justin:
“but if anything, the academics I know tend to defer pretty seriously to the claims of transgender activists.”
Are the “academics” (versus “transgender activists”) you’re referring to here cis? And if yes, why are the former referred to as “academics” and the latter as “activists”?
“I’m not sure that I understand this complaint. Why should any demographic be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experiences, for instance about the implications and best explanations for their experiences? That is asking much too much, no matter which demographic group one has in mind.”
If this is a genuine question you are asking yourself, then you should also genuinely be asking yourself: Why should cis people be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experience, for instance trans issues?
(As well as: why should middle-class academics be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experience, for instance issues related to poverty? Why should white people be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experience, for instance issues related to racial oppression? You can also take intersections.)
/
To note: as for your distinction between “inquiry” and “activism”, as well as “academics”/”philosophers”/etc. versus “activists”, which you continue to use here without stating, we were having a discussion on this that ended with the following substantive comment, which I’m still waiting for you to address: https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476403.
Elsewhere, he takes it as a given, or goes by what he had “heard,” that anti-trans commentators are engaged in scholarly activity—the sort of inquiry that demands we take them seriously. Not only does he not label them activists, since that would entail having to dismiss them for not following the “proper” methodology that marks out “genuine philosophy” and “truth-seeking inquiry,” but he suggests we should not even call them anti-trans, preferring instead that they be characterised as critics of “trans orthodoxy.” He takes it as a given that there is such a thing to be critical of, but is deeply suspicious of there being something we might recognise as cis-heteronormativity—something that scholarly work might grapple with critically. No, *that* comes from *activists* he says. The stage could not be arranged more perfectly; methodology, hollowed out, becomes nothing but a prop.
“Are the “academics” (versus “transgender activists”) you’re referring to here cis? And if yes, why are the former referred to as “academics” and the latter as “activists”?”
I have no idea what gender category, if any, they see themselves as belonging to. All I’m saying is that in my experience at this point, most people in academia are quite deferential to the wishes of people who want to make the discipline more friendly to trans people, so on the face of it the notion that they are in fact hostile to trans issues seems implausible to me.
“If this is a genuine question you are asking yourself, then you should also genuinely be asking yourself: Why should cis people be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experience, for instance trans issues?”
Clearly, they should not be taken as authoritative on anything beyond their experience. The whole point I’m making here is that no people, merely by belonging to a demographic to do with race, sexual orientation, etc., should be taken as authoritative in their non-subjective claims about themselves (or in their claims about other groups) merely on the basis of their experience or alleged experience.
At no point have I suggested, or even come remotely close to suggesting, that those who are not transgender should be taken as authoritative on those who are. If you honestly think I meant something like that after all I’ve said, then you really haven’t been paying attention.
“…we were having a discussion on this that ended with the following substantive comment, which I’m still waiting for you to address.”
You wrote out a long, rambly thing that I got lost trying to follow. I asked you to please summarize your main case. You didn’t. I asked you to at least clarify your own view on the matter, so that I could address it. Instead of doing that, you referred me back to the long, rambly thing I don’t understand, which you have still refused to summarized. No matter how many times you refer me back to it without helping me understand the case you take yourself to be making, we will make no progress on that front.
The great majority of academics (and non-academics) I’ve met seem able to easily grasp the distinction between activism and objective inquiry, and to see that it’s blindingly obvious that academia should devote itself to the latter. Blindingly obvious. If you genuinely don’t see the difference after I’ve explained it to you many times and referred you to sources where you might take your understanding further, there’s really only so much you can expect me to keep trying to do. I have enough to do in my life without trying to teach the rudiments of academic inquiry to a single, anonymous, random person on the internet, over and over again.
If you don’t see the difference or the reason why activism can’t be a part of the methodology of fair inquiry without compromising it, after all that, then you’re free to leave this discussion, concluding whatever you wish about it. I feel that it’s long since run its course.
Lol. So much for the philosophocal discussion, eh, Justin?
Asserting you have explained X doesn’t make it true. For the n-th time, you have not addressed *a single* of the substantive issues, in the linked comment, over this very topic: *your* distinction between activism and philosophy. You just keep asserting stuff without a shred of an argument or reason.
I feel like you should have learned to read by now but okay, in a sentense: the conclusion of the argument in the comment that you keep ignoring was — your own conception of “proper philosophy” is “activist” by your own ligjts. For the full argument, actually read the comment.
(And no, “many say so” and “it’s obvious” are STILL terrible arguments.)
I’m happy to put this behind: provided you do not jump in pronouncing people unphilosophical or not “properly” philosophical without being willing to substantiate these claims. If you continue doing that, I shall continue requiring you to actually substantiate such claims.
Asked and answered.
Activists created the term? Not scholars? How convenient for you that you have already laid out the rationale for dismissing them then! This wouldn’t happen to be a cynical rhetorical invocation of methodology in the absence of an argument, would it? Because it sure seems like it.
My methodological reasons are clear: I do not feel compelled to accept the truth of theoretical entities generated by academic theorists, when those entities or the concepts underlying them have not been exposed to rigorous examination by critics as a part of those disciplines.
Similarly, when I consider whether certain claims about medicine are trustworthy, I do not accept any claims made by the company that produces or sells the medicine. I give those claims zero weight. I only take seriously what comes out of objective inquiry into those matters, in which critics of the safety and effectiveness of the medicine have also had their say, etc.
If you can demonstrate that the disciplines or subdisciplines that discuss the pervasiveness of cis-heteronormativity have subjected that claim to rigorous scrutiny by critics within those disciplines — critics who take seriously the job of subjecting these underlying theories to tough critical examination, and who are rewarded within those disciplines for doing so — then I’ll be inclined to give more weight to the claim that academia is pervasively cis-heteronormative.
I didn’t specify that I was talking about the pervasiveness of cis-heteronormativity in academia. I was talking about its pervasiveness generally as something that might be the subject of academic study. Which it is.
For reasons that aren’t clear though, you decided that it was activists who “created the term.” Even if that were true (and you’ve given us no reason to think that it is), you have already conceded that activism can be necessary in making visible the object of scholarly inquiry. Thus, even if the term originated in activism, that wouldn’t be a reason for you to dismiss it in the way that you have.
As I noted previously, from what I’ve seen, your invocation of methodology has little to do with serious methodological scruples—ones that, at any rate, you only allude to and which aren’t spelled out in detail (or, where they have been spelled out in some detail, you find that you have been misled, as was the case with regard to Zucker)—and more as a rhetorical prop on which you hang some other sort of scruples.
I should have added here that I also don’t believe you when you say that, given such evidence, then you would be “inclined to give more weight to the claim that academia is pervasively cis-heteronormative.” The reason I find this hard to believe is because your comments (here and elsewhere) lead me to think that you’d simply characterize it as academia being critical of “trans orthodoxy” or of “gay orthodoxy” or some other framing that strives to obscure the normative origins of (or background to) the anti-LGBT academics’ claims, pervasive or otherwise. This framing is necessary to establish a picture of the discourse in which cis-heteronormativity is invisible; where the only “orthodoxy” in view is any view that is positively valenced with respect to gay and trans people. It becomes then the only “orthodoxy” available to criticize. Sure, it’s bizarre to even call it an orthodoxy in the grand scheme of things, especially in the US, but presenting it as one is necessary to tee up the claim that these commentators aren’t really anti-LGBT; they’re just critical (in the scholarly, truth-seeking sense) of “trans orthodoxy,” or of the “gay agenda,” or some other boogeyman characterization that, surely we all agree, only activists could have come up with.
I don’t have much to add beyond Felix’s response. By way of filling it out, take for instance the idea that the minors in question should be assumed wrong by default. Stacking the deck against transgender people like this (and going even farther and assuming a lot of these people aren’t even trans) isn’t a neutral, disinterested way of approaching the topic. There are many thumbs on the scale against trans people already, but they have been there so long and they are so accepted that people don’t even take them to be thumbs.
Just to be clear, again: the alternative view to the radical gender-affirming approach is not the presumption that minors are wrong by default. It’s that we must consider the *possibility* that they are wrong.
Compare: a twelve-year-old asks for a large neck tattoo. The parents say that the child will be able to choose to get that tattoo later, but not yet. This might be a reasonable course of action even if the parents think that the child is 90% likely to persist in the desire through adulthood.
It’s surely stronger than having to “consider the *possibility* that they are wrong.” Nobody objects to that. We’re allowed to consider possibilities until the cows come home. What is being suggested in the report at issue (and by others) is that the balance of evidence suggests one conclusion in particular, a conclusion at odds with the one you call “the radical gender-affirming approach” (although I think maybe you don’t think it’s radical when applied to children who claim they are cisgender, so I am not sure this is a good name for it). I don’t think one could believe that conclusion unless one takes for granted a bunch of anti-trans thumbs on the scale.
By ‘radical’ here I mean an extreme view. One extreme view would be a refusal to accept that anyone ever suffers from gender dysphoria. An opposing extreme view would be that on every single issue that involves trans people, the correct answer is always the one that gives the greatest possible weight to the interests of actually or potentially trans people, and that anyone who disagrees with that extreme set of positions is thereby bigoted and ‘anti-trans’.
I’m going to try to wrap up my involvement in this discussion, but I will have a few things to say below to Queer Philosopher’s arguments about youth transitioning, if you’re interested.
Justin, as has been discussed previously, you don’t know what you are talking about. That’s not what an affirming approach is.
Well:
If the affirming approach merely says that we have to listen to certain people, then fine — I don’t see anyone here arguing that some people should never even be listened to.
If the affirming approach says that we should accept the views of certain people as authoritative, then I’m against it for all the reasons I keep mentioning.
If the affirming approach says that we should give more weight to the views of certain people just because they belong to a certain demographic, then again I’m against it for the reasons I keep pointing to.
If it means something else, then perhaps you’ll explain clearly what it means.
See ostrasyn’s previous comment.
I can’t tell what those comments imply in practice.
I just caught up with this thread.
> The sighted people have knowledge, but they did not arrive at that knowledge through philosophy, and their presentation of that knowledge is not philosophy.
Maybe they did not arrive at that knowledge through philosophy, but that they have that knowledge still matters FOR philosophy, no?
Suppose some blind philosopher would subject the idea of “color” to conceptual analysis and conclude that the notion is incoherent. Stranger still, if he concluded that the “sighted” surely are experiencing _something_ but they aren’t “seeing” “colors”.
You can see how this would happen: the blind philosopher would apply the conceptual vocabulary he possesses, and find it impossible to analyze “color” in these terms. Perhaps the best he can come up with is that “blue” is like a sad melody, but extended in space not in time. But melodies extended in space are conceptually incoherent. Maybe, he concludes, their other senses are just more sensitive in some not-yet-understood capacity that allows them to make the distinctions they call “color”.
The sighted would respond that this conceptual analysis is inadequate to what they experience. The philosopher would respond in turn that they are welcome to critique his analysis and postulate their own.
Given the difficulties of explaining color to a blind person, the sighted might not be able to do that.
They can only reject the philosopher’s analysis on the grounds that it does not match their experience. And whatever conceptual vocabulary they develop to analyze color would appear incoherent/incomprehensible to the philosopher.
Clearly something has gone wrong here.
What has gone wrong, I’d say, it is that the philosopher rejected the response “this does not describe my experience”.
(Wallace’s comments about qualia are herewith acknowledged; I’d be equally happy to constrain this scenario to one where it is *currently* not possible to explain color to a blind person, but in some future situation this will be conceptually or technologically possible. I make no presuppositions about the Knowledge Argument.)
If a blind person argued that there is no experience of seeing colors, then yes, people who can see colors would have some reason for thinking that the blind philosopher’s reasoning goes wrong somewhere.
Then again, there are (perfectly sighted) skeptics about the existence of colors — they acknowledge that there is something that we judge to be seeing colors, but that we are led astray by appearances.
If someone were to fail to understand this and barge into the discussion and say, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m seeing colors right now!”, I think most of us would recognize that that person failed to understand what is going on in the conversation. Neither side denies that at least some people feel that they are seeing colors, etc.
> Neither side denies that at least some people feel that they are seeing colors, etc.
Good. This is a fact that deserves explanation.
If you try to explain the feeling of seeing colors from first principles and without consulting people who feel colors, you’re likely not going to be giving the right explanation.
(Even heterophenomenologists would agree to this. They would just not say that it is the feeling that needs explanation, but the report of the feeling.)
Agreed 100% about heterophenomenology – but of course note that the range of possible explanations becomes larger from that perspective, and includes the possibility that the person who reports colors is making mistakes in their reports, being fooled by illusions, theorizing incorrectly, etc – as with the blind spot or (slightly more controversially) the general idea of a visual field.
I considered responding to you about heterophenomenology above, but wasn’t sure you were reading along here still.
The way I’d put it, is that the occurrences of the feelings / reports are indisputable and in need of explanation, but that there is vast space to dispute the _causes_ of these feelings / reports.
In such terms, the point of my first response to Justin in here is this: you can’t theorize properly about these causes if you don’t listen to the people having/reporting the feelings.
Hence, to pierce the thin veil we put over the issue in here, I find the demand “you have to actually talk to a trans person before you do this” entirely reasonable, not just on moral but also on methodological grounds.
What I find very charming about Dennett is that he also considers Chalmers’ beliefs worthy of explanation — and worthy of an explanation that Chalmers himself would agree is an explanation.
Dennett wouldn’t be happy with just concluding that Chalmers is delusional! But “delusion” is usually the explanation offered by the anti-trans philosophers for the feelings/reports of trans people. That’s a mistake, again both on moral and on methodological grounds.
So, perhaps, we have a residual disagreement on how broad the range of possible causes should be. I suppose I’d advocate for a somewhat narrower range than you. (I’m sure this is partially due to me disageeing with Dennett on the blind spot and related phenomena; we don’t need to get into it.)
“[T]he point of my first response to Justin in here is this: you can’t theorize properly about these causes if you don’t listen to the people having/reporting the feelings.”
My goodness — I certainly never said that we shouldn’t listen to the people having or reporting the feelings! I merely said that it would be wrong to treat those reports as the last word on the subject, and (in a case where there is a moral problem to be weighed) wrong to not consider the other side’s experiences, concerns, and arguments as well.
“Dennett wouldn’t be happy with just concluding that Chalmers is delusional! But “delusion” is usually the explanation offered by the anti-trans philosophers for the feelings/reports of trans people.”
If you’re using the term ‘anti-trans’ to refer to anyone who resists any component of transgender orthodoxy, to any degree, then that is not so.
For instance: many people who say that we should exercise caution before complying with the wishes of minors to medically transition, or who feel that self-identification as a woman should not be sufficient for admission to some women’s sports, women’s prisons, etc., also hold that there are many genuinely transgender people. They just hold that we have to balance competing desiderata carefully in matters of public policy, etc.
> If you’re using the term ‘anti-trans’ to refer to anyone who resists any component of transgender orthodoxy, to any degree, then that is not so.
I don’t think I have ever used the term like this. Last week we had an extended exchange on how I use the term: to denote anyone who claims that being trans is somehow lesser than being cis, that it is undesirable or a “bad outcome” to transition. For all I know, if there is any argument given for this “badness”, it comes down to something like “delusion”.
If you want to have a productive discussion here, you need to stop shadowboxing against this caricature you have of trans-inclusive thinking.
Speaking of (quoted you from above):
> Just to be clear, again: the alternative view to the radical gender-affirming approach is not the presumption that minors are wrong by default. It’s that we must consider the *possibility* that they are wrong.
Last week, I argued at length that if you take into account the *possibility* that they are wrong, then you also have to take into account the possibility that they are right. And then you cannot agree with the mainstream opponents to gender medicine.
I wasn’t able to respond to your last comment on that thread because comments were shut off, but I have quite a number of reasons for thinking that it does not at all follow from the fact that one takes a cautious approach to gender transitioning among minors that one thinks that being transgender is inferior, etc. With all due respect to you, I think that case is very weak and neglects all sorts of general principles of risk analysis and best practice in medical ethics that have been followed and articulated long before these youth gender medicine issues became a serious part of the medical ethics discussion.
I don’t think that your accusations of straw man are fair here. Yes, you said that being anti-trans, in your terminology, is a matter of thinking that being trans is ‘lesser’ than not being trans. But you have also, I feel, rather liberally attributed this to all sorts of people on what I take to be weak evidence. In effect, it seems, you feel justified applying it to anyone who resists any component of trans orthodoxy.
If you think that I’m wrong in making that inference, please tell me some component of trans orthodoxy that someone could reject, on your view, while still clearly not being ‘anti-trans’.
> With all due respect to you, I think that case is very weak and neglects all sorts of general principles of risk analysis and best practice in medical ethics that have been followed and articulated long before these youth gender medicine issues became a serious part of the medical ethics discussion.
With all due respect to you, last week you had to concede that one of the people who established the “principles” you refer to (Zucker) does hold anti-trans attitudes, and that one of the people you regard as trustworthy regarding gender medicine (Singal) might not be.
I’m trying to tell you, and I’m going to take one more run at it, that the “principles of risk analysis and medical ethics” you refer to contradict the typical opposition to youth gender medicine as long as you assume that some gender dysphoric youth indeed are best served by early transition.
Here’s a typical case for such risk analysis:
A patient presents with some potentially serious condition. There’s a medication A that in studies resolves the condition in 60% of cases, has significant and irreversible side-effects in 5% of cases, and does not do much at all in the remaining 35%. There’s another medication B that in studies resolves the condition in only 30% of cases, but has nearly no significant side effects.
What do you do? Maybe you’d like to be “safe”, so you start by administering B and observe. If it doesn’t work, administer A. But such “safety” might not be safe at all! Time is ticking. By the time you’ll know whether B worked, it might be too late to administer A. So sometimes it is right to administer A right away.
How should a practitioner make such calls?
This is why medical organizations define protocols. Essentially, decision trees to determine which course of action to take for any given patient. But nothing at all can guarantee that a protocol leads to the best outcome for any one individual patient. This can only be known in hindsight. Say the protocol says to administer A right away. Maybe the patient develops severe side-conditions. Maybe B would have worked instead. But if the protocol is properly designed to maximize the chances of the best outcome, administering A was still the right choice (if there is a malpractice suit, the physician would only have to prove that they followed the accepted protocol). That’s how medicine works. It cannot work any other way.
So this whole idea that we need to be able, with approximate certainty, to separate the cis from the trans people before administering treatment is nonsense!
The proper protocol for youth gender medicine must maximize the chances of obtaining the best outcome for ALL patients that present with gender dysphoria. A protocol that gives the “trans” treatment only if the “cis” treatment has been ruled out to a near-certain degree does not do that (I ran you through the numbers last week).
I sense that you, like J Y below, will now again draw an analogy to youth marriage, tattoos, whatever. But this is a strawman. The case for youth tattoos, say, is an argument from autonomy. The case against youth tattoos is an argument from (well-meaning) paternalism.
But I am not making an argument from autonomy or try to refute an argument from paternalism. I am purely arguing from a medical ethics perspective.
The medical ethics perspective is this: there is a group of patients that we can identify (the gender dysphoric youth); we owe to these patients a treatment protocol that maximizes their chances for their best outcome; this ought to be done with no prejudice about whether being cis or trans is “better”.
“[L]ast week you had to concede that one of the people who established the “principles” you refer to (Zucker) does hold anti-trans attitudes, and that one of the people you regard as trustworthy regarding gender medicine (Singal) might not be.
Much clarification is needed here.
First, while you have clarified the way you are using the term ‘anti-trans’, I find it to be a rather deceptive and highly misleading use of the term.
In our environment, most people work very hard to not be seen as ‘anti’ any protected demographic, including trans people. Since the term ‘anti-trans’ suggests being opposed to trans people, as soon as you call something or someone ‘anti-trans’, most people in academia (and beyond) will feel a strong urge to distance themselves from that attitude or person.
But you are using the term to refer, as you say, to anyone who sees being trans as in any way lesser than not being trans.
That is very different indeed from being against trans people!
For example: rabbis often make a practice of trying their best to dissuade non-Jews from converting to Judaism. Would-be converts really has to fight hard to get a typical rabbi to go along with it. Only after the rabbi is satisfied that the would-be convert has thought carefully about it for a long time, and fully considered all the bad things that might go with becoming Jewish, will the would-be convert be given the opportunity.
However, some of these same rabbis also hold that converts to Judaism are in an important sense even better than people who were born into Judaism, since they chose the religion for themselves.
Now, it would clearly be highly misleading to say that such rabbis are ‘anti-Jew’ or ‘anti-convert’, just because they first try to dissuade people from converting to Judaism. But that is how you’re using the term ‘anti-trans!’
Second: the ‘in some way less than’ bit gives you remarkable license in applying the much-feared ‘anti-trans’ term to people. Compare: Jack loves to travel the world, and enjoys spending time in many foreign countries. Among those he loves, the top three are Australia, France, and Jamaica. One day, someone asks him which country is his very favorite to visit. He replies that it’s a hard question to answer, since he adores all three of his top picks — but that, if he absolutely had to pick a single favorite, he would have to admit that Jamaica is slightly superior, in his books, to France and Australia.
Well, it follows from that that he thinks that France is, in some way, inferior to Jamaica. But would any reasonable person call Jack ‘anti-France’ because of this?? That would give the extremely misleading suggestion that he hates France, which is not at all true.
So I do not find this use of ‘anti-trans’ fair or legitimate, and I will not use it myself.
On Zucker and Singal:
The quote you or someone else provided from Zucker does, it’s true, strongly suggest that in the mid-’90s, as I recall, Zucker felt that he should try to help the children that came to his clinic feel more comfortable in their own bodies if he could, so that it would not be necessary for them to have to go through the ordeal of medical transitioning, and that he only went down the path of medical transitioning in cases where it seemed hopeless to expect that the children would ever be comfortable without transitioning. Others may choose to call that ‘anti-trans’ if they wish.
I don’t recall whether Jesse Singal ever said anything about Zucker, but I did say last week that, if Zucker had said something I hadn’t believed that he said, I would take seriously the possibility that the people I take to be more trustworthy, including Jesse Singal (whom I deem to be very fair and nuanced in general) might be incorrect on some of these matters about youth gender medicine. And I do take that possibility seriously. However, at present, I have vastly more evidence that, say, Jesse Singal is generally fair, reliable and unbiased than that his critics are. Time and again, when I have looked into the claims of his critics an dthen at what he originally wrote and his replies, I find that he comes off as far more honest, while his critics tend to engage in cheap shots and deceptive moves. Of course, I could be wrong about all this, and don’t take myself to be anything like an expert on these matters. But if there were some randomly-chosen dispute between Singal and one of his critics on these points, and I knew nothing beyond that fact and had to wager $100 on who was in the right, I’d definitely put my money on Singal.
> But you are using the term to refer, as you say, to anyone who sees being trans as in any way lesser than not being trans.
> That is very different indeed from being against trans people!
I don’t see how it is very different at all. Maybe you can explain.
The difference between “lesser” and “against” is the one made by racists who say things like “I have nothing against Black people, I just think schools should be segregated so they don’t slow down the White kids”.
There is all sorts of research on bigoted attitudes that characterizes them as a judgement that some demographic is “lesser”.
Perhaps it helps to clarify the relevant meaning of regarding someone as “lesser”. It is the attitude of regarding someone as less relevant in the moral calculus. Or, if you are a Kantian, it is regarding someone not as an end (or as less of an end).
You can easily see how all my arguments (centered on treating the needs of trans people as on a par with the needs of cis people) conform to this definition.
I think this clarification should sort out your rabbi/traveller examples. (I think, for the record, that you are wrong about the rationale for the rabbi’s practice, but that is by the by.)
On the remaining matter, I will just recap where we left it last week. Readers-along can judge for themselves. You said the following (https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/#comment-475923 ):
> if the objective evidence confirms what you say about Zucker, then I need to give far less credence to any of the critical sources I’ve looked at, and take seriously the possibility that the critics of youth gender medicine (including Jesse Singal, whom I find trustworthy) are engaged in a biased deception.
I then gave you such evidence, and you responded:
> I see that you are correct on this matter about Zucker. I concede that point.
“Perhaps it helps to clarify the relevant meaning of regarding someone as “lesser”. It is the attitude of regarding someone as less relevant in the moral calculus. Or, if you are a Kantian, it is regarding someone not as an end (or as less of an end).
“You can easily see how all my arguments (centered on treating the needs of trans people as on a par with the needs of cis people) conform to this definition.”
No, I don’t think it conforms to your definition at all.
I have given you all sorts of reasons why people might plausibly feel that ethics demands waiting until children reach the age of majority and make their own decision about transitioning, and not a single one of those reasons involves the view that trans people are less relevant in the moral calculus, or less of an end in Kant’s kingdom of ends.
Also, that question — the central question we are considering here — does not involve a trade-off between satisfying the wishes of trans people and satisfying the wishes of non-trans people. The whole question is whether the child is, in fact, trans at all, or whether the child simply appears at present to be trans: whether, in adulthood, the transitioning will be a choice that will align with the child’s present feelings.
Compare: suppose that a fifteen-year-old boy falls madly in love and wants to start having babies with his beloved right away. His parents and his school counselor both strongly object to this plan. Does it follow that they hold that fathers are morally inferior to non-fathers, and count as lesser beings?
Of course not. The reason they oppose the boy’s wish to become a father right now is not that they think that fathers deserve less moral consideration than non-fathers, or even that sixteen-year-old fathers deserve less moral consideration. It’s that he is not yet a father, and the whole question is whether he ought to do this now or, if he chooses, later.
Calling such people ‘anti-father’ would be highly misleading.
A more apt comparison would be someone who holds that a person seeking abortion should have to wait nine months before they’re allowed to make any decision. Or someone who holds that, if a minor is pregnant, they don’t get any input into the decision at all. In both cases, “present feelings” may change. With regard to abortion, we have empirical data indicating that most people don’t experience regret. But is the arguer really interested in how likely “present feelings” are to comport with future feelings or do they simply want to say that a person’s “present feelings” are wrong and that they should not act on them?
> I have given you all sorts of reasons why people might plausibly feel that ethics demands waiting until children reach the age of majority and make their own decision about transitioning, and not a single one of those reasons involves the view that trans people are less relevant in the moral calculus, or less of an end in Kant’s kingdom of ends.
And I have responded, at great length, that each and every of these reasons is either (a) grounded in anti-trans sentiment or (b) a falsehood promulgated by propagandists.
> Compare: suppose that a fifteen-year-old boy falls madly in love and wants to start having babies with his beloved right away. His parents and his school counselor both strongly object to this plan. Does it follow that they hold that fathers are morally inferior to non-fathers, and count as lesser beings?
You keep coming back to such examples, and I keep giving you the same response: not having a child is something easily reversible later in life; undergoing endogenous puberty is not. The cases are not analogous.
I like Felix’s response here. Your point is a bit like saying “I’m not anti-abortion, but the medical risks and irreversibility of the procedure must be carefully weighed over a 9 month waiting period”.
Again and again and again, you fail to factor in the significance of the fact that we are dealing with children here. Since you are now clearly talking about pre-pubescent children, we are talking about young children indeed.
There are plausible, long-standing principles in medical ethics that severely limit the acceptability of allowing minors — especially minors before the age at which they are apt to begin puberty to make life-altering decisions. And yet, for some reason, you seem unable to take seriously the possibility that there could be any basis for exercising caution here other than a hatred of trans people. I feel that I’ve presented all sorts of alternative reasons for coming to that decision, but you doggedly refuse to take them seriously, and continue to tar anyone who disagrees with you as ‘anti-trans’.
Very well: I’ve made my case, and you are free to maintain your position in spite of it, for whatever reason. I don’t see what else I can do here.
The point that endogenous puberty is itself an irreversible transition has been made already. I have addressed it elsewhere: the puberty blockers you recommend for prepubescent children come with their own health problems and risks, which in some cases can include permanent infertility, the permanent inability to have an orgasm, and a number of lifelong health problems. How great are these risks? How should they be weighed against the disutility of going through puberty and becoming more mature before deciding? Those are questions you are of course free to explore. But for the reasons I’ve been saying here, the accusation that anyone who chooses differently than you do must be a bigot with a hatred of trans people is just bullshit, as far as I can see.
We’re way past diminishing returns here, and I’ve got many other things I need to devote my time to. I’m afraid I can’t continue this any longer. Take care.
> There are plausible, long-standing principles in medical ethics that severely limit the acceptability of allowing minors — especially minors before the age at which they are apt to begin puberty to make life-altering decisions.
You keep returning to this idea that this is a matter of autonomy, of what decisions minors should or should not be allowed to make.
As I have made abundantly clear, the matter has nothing to do with that.
The medical ethics question concens solely how to obtain the best medical outcome for a group of patients (those who present with childhood gender dysphoria). Perhaps the best outcome is achieved by having all the decisions made by adults, I don’t know. In practice, all the decisions are made by adults.
My only contention is that this decision making process, whatever it is, needs to respects the needs and rights of trans people. The position you are taking does not respect these needs and rights.
That implies that caution isn’t being exercised already. Which is false. That’s the reason we’ve excluded that possibility; because if that were the full extent of these commentators’ “concerns,” it would be fairly easy to address them by pointing out that caution is being exercised.
Another reason to exclude that possibility is that, despite going on at length about “health problems and risks” and how “long-standing principles in medical ethics severely limit the acceptability of allowing minors” to have input in decisions about such treatments, such concerns do not extend to the usage of such treatments in cisgender populations. That is, treatment for precocious puberty is allowable, in their view, even though the person receiving such treatment is a minor and even though the treatment still carries risks, as all medical interventions do. Treatment for the discomfort a young man might feel due to enlarged breast tissue is allowed, even though it carries risks and even though patient satisfaction isn’t guaranteed to be 100%. (See my previous comment on this.)
Another reason to exclude the possibility is because we see how they treat evidence in this area of medicine differently to other areas of medicine. (ostrasyn hinted at an example of this back in Feb. when discussing how treatment evidence is appraised.)
In other words, we exclude the possibility because we can see that these commentators aren’t working from a consistent set of principles—whether they be methodological principles relating to what constitutes “genuine philosophy,” principles of medical/clinical ethics, or principles for appraising treatment evidence to inform policy—but from a view that being trans is undesirable and to be avoided.
Sorry to double-post, but after reading Felix’s response to you, I felt an important addition was in order.
> And yet, for some reason, you seem unable to take seriously the possibility that there could be any basis for exercising caution here other than a hatred of trans people.
I have never argued against exercising caution. I’m all for caution.
I am against the kind of caution that only takes the needs of cis people into account.
Caution also means cautioning against someone undergoing an unwanted puberty.
Hi again, Queer Philosopher.
This argument you advance here depends to a large degree on the numbers. Nothing at all was established in any of our discussions about what those numbers, probabilities, etc. are. I agree that, depending on those facts, all sorts of things might be reasonable. But there are many factors to consider here.
For the sake of illustration, I’ll grant you (though I’m not at all prepared to grant it in reality) that there is no difference between acts and omissions in medical ethics.
Even then, there are all sorts of reasons one might hold, that have nothing to do with being bigoted against trans people, for being reluctant to accept medical transitioning for minors.
1. Suppose that we begin very conservatively: we take a sample of a thousand thirteen-year-olds who express strong gender dysphoria and wish to have (say) radical mastectomies, complete castration, or other life-altering procedures. We subject them all to careful psychoanalysis, which, after three years, weeds out two thirds of the original pool, who come to feel that they don’t want the surgery after all. Then, we proceed with all those operations (the minors are all now sixteen years old). We check back a decade and then two decades later to see how our experiment worked out.
Let’s consider a scenario that would apparently be very strong for you. Let’s say that things go in the way you predict, and that 70% of them are glad that they had the surgery, while 20% say they regret it. For every one who regrets it, over three times as many are glad they did it.
Would this confirm that it was the right move overall?
No! We have to consider not only the numbers that ended up being happy or unhappy with the procedure, but also what they stood to lose if they simply waited another two years until they turned eighteen. We also have to consider how strongly the regretters regret the surgery. On a strictly act-utilitarian calculus, the added utility that we get by allowing someone to transition two years earlier is going to be very small compared with the lifelong regret and disutility that someone will incur by being allowed to make a decision that turns out to be the wrong one, especially if that involves the loss of the ability to have children, etc. It’s an empirical question, but I find it hard to imagine that the difference of those two extra years will add up to the same amount as a lifelong change.
2. Then there’s the fact that we’re talking here about a medical transition. You have made the point before that going through natural puberty is also a life-altering transition: point taken. But in the case of physically healthy children, going through puberty doesn’t bring with it anything like the risks of surgery (which is always risky), or the prospect of a lifelong dependence on further medical interventions, including drugs, and so on. The general principle that surgery, all other things being equal, should be avoided, needs to be factored in here.
3. Let’s say that you somehow get past all those problems, and that it turns out (very implausibly, I suspect) that the utility gained by allowing the minors to transition two years earlier is so much more significant than the disutility suffered by the people who regret the procedure that, even factoring in the risks and lifelong costs of surgery, it’s wins overall in the hedonic calculus. Let’s also keep imagining, to make the case very favorable for you, that the numbers are 70% who continue to feel twenty years later that it was the right decision, and only 20% who feel that it was the wrong decision.
Okay. Now, imagine that some people (as it seems you advocate) push for a removal of all the safeguards that were put in place to get this result. Remember that I said that two thirds of the original pool of thirteen-year-olds were weeded out, mostly because they changed their minds before turning sixteen. Well, someone like you might argue: why not remove that three-year waiting period? Let’s just give the surgery to the thirteen-year-olds. Aren’t we oblligated to do that, on your view, on the view that anything else would be anti-trans?
But then the percentage of people who come to regret the procedure would skyrocket: more or less all the people who would otherwise be filtered out would come to deeply regret the surgery. Let’s say that, somehow, 10% of those people don’t. We still have 90% who do. So now, instead of 20 out of 100 coming to feel that it was the wrong decision, we have 200 out of 300 — a significant majority.
4. You have said before that youth transitioning should be accepted on the grounds that, whether one has the surgery or goes through puberty naturally, one’s body will change in ways that are difficult or impossible to reverse. Again, I’ll grant you the falsity of any act/omission distinction here for the sake of argument and take this as given. So: one argument you could make here is this one about even natural puberty being an important transition.
However, in order for that to be effective here, you would have to advocate that the children go through their medical transitioning before they reach puberty: otherwise, the argument you’re making won’t work. But if the aim is to put children through the transitioning at that age, then we would need to do it before puberty has a chance of starting. Since girls typically begin puberty between the ages of 8 and 13 while boys typically begin puberty between 9 and 14, the only way we could reasonably ensure that they avoid it would be by performing these surgeries while the children’s ages are in the single digits. TAnd that would seem to make it far, far less certain that the children would be identifying an unchangeable and significant lifelong desire to transition. It also makes the argument for paternalism much, much stronger.
5. Then there’s the question of social influence. If a teenager living in most parts of the country in the 1970s or 1980s persistently claimed to want to medically transition in this way, it would be hard to see how this could be the result of being exposed to an idea that temporarily seemed compelling. That would give the teenager’s persistent feelings much greater weight. What child would voluntarily come up with a desire like this, despite all the social pressure not to, unless it were serious, heartfelt, and emotionally irresistible?
But nowadays, there are all sorts of ‘influencers’ on Instagram and TikTok who promote these ideas to young people, many of whom get into watching them obsessively. It seems more difficult now, especially with younger minors, to determine whether the desire is socially influenced or not. As that possibility becomes more salient, the wisdom of allowing the child to transition right then, rather than simply waiting a few more years, seems much less weighty.
These are all factors that, even in the absence of an acts/omissions distinction, weigh in the balance against having young people transition immediately rather than making them wait until they reach the age of majority. And none of them are based on the idea that it is better not to be trans. They simply attempt to help children make decisions that they are apt to be happy with later on.
Is it right or wrong to allow minors to transition? I don’t claim to know. But these are my reasons for thinking that it is unfair to call people bigoted merely because they think it best to wait.
> We have to consider not only the numbers that ended up being happy or unhappy with the procedure, but also what they stood to lose [etc.]
I agree that the overall calculus is not just about numbers. I only maintain that the overall calculus needs to balance the needs of trans people with the needs of cis people on equal footing.
I would be receptive to your argument about surgeries on these grounds. My argument works only for hormonal transition. Perhaps this clarification helps us overcome our impasse.
> It’s an empirical question, but I find it hard to imagine that the difference of those two extra years will add up to the same amount as a lifelong change.
As I have said multiple times, puberty is also a lifelong change! All of these are lifelong changes. “Lifelong change” is not something that carves a useful joint here.
> However, in order for that to be effective here, you would have to advocate that the children go through their medical transitioning before they reach puberty:
I believe that this is why the accepted (trans-inclusive) protocol includes puberty blockers and social transition as a diagnostic *before* any “lifelong changes” occur.
> But nowadays, there are all sorts of ‘influencers’ on Instagram and TikTok who promote these ideas to young people, many of whom get into watching them obsessively. It seems more difficult now, especially with younger minors, to determine whether the desire is socially influenced or not.
As far as I know, this supposed influence is largely a myth pushed by the anti-trans folks. Another empirical question, I suppose.
I know of content promoting the view that it is *okay* to be trans, if this is what you want. The opposition to this content strikes me as on a par with the similar and related opposition to “gay propaganda”.
“I agree that the overall calculus is not just about numbers. I only maintain that the overall calculus needs to balance the needs of trans people with the needs of cis people on equal footing.”
Again, this is a misleading way of discussing the issue of youth gender medicine. The whole question is whether we can be sure that the strong current urge to transition is just a temporary manifestation of a phenomenon that will revert to something else later on (my understanding, again, is that the feeling that one really ought to have been born in a body of the opposite sex is fairly common among adolescents on their way to realizing that they are gay or lesbian, and that in many cases those feelings of dysphoria resolve once they grow more comfortable with themselves as gay or lesbian).
As an empirical matter, as I understand it, strong childhood feelings of being gay or lesbian are very likely to indicate a lifelong sexual orientation, whereas strong childhood feelings of being transgender are much less reliable as signs of what the child will desire as an adult.
Since the whole reason for hesitation here depends on our being unable to determine whether the gender dysphoria will fully resolve later without transitioning, referring to the children as ‘trans people’ already begs the question. The hesitation does not come from thinking that trans people are less deserving of consideration. It comes from not knowing whether the children at hand are in fact trans people, in the way that we would know that more clearly when they are adults.
“I believe that this is why the accepted (trans-inclusive) protocol includes puberty blockers and social transition as a diagnostic *before* any “lifelong changes” occur.”
That’s an improvement, at least. But one of the big arguments on the other side is that puberty blockers are already a lifelong change, and already introduce a number of serious medical risks: they do not just ‘press pause’ for a few years.
“As far as I know, this supposed influence is largely a myth pushed by the anti-trans folks. Another empirical question, I suppose. I know of content promoting the view that it is *okay* to be trans, if this is what you want.”
Yes, an empirical question. We’re not talking here about content promoting the view that it is merely okay to be trans, but rather content that pushes that self-diagnosis (just as other ‘influencers’ push the self-diagnosis of Tourette’s, etc.) and, among young people who obsessively follow the influencers, create a sort of psychological contagion. I haven’t seen anything that would make me rule that out as a myth.
Note that supposed ‘gay propaganda’ does not seem to be a parallel here: we have good evidence that sexual orientation tends not to be socially conditioned, and tends to be difficult or impossible to alter (as far as I know).
> The whole question is whether we can be sure that the strong current urge to transition is just a temporary manifestation of a phenomenon that will revert to something else later on
> referring to the children as ‘trans people’ already begs the question.
Just to make sure: is your point here that it might be that _none_ of the children who present with dysphoria will want to transition in adult life?
Because that is empirically false.
Of course not! That in no way follows.
Good! But then I am confused about your response.
> referring to the children as ‘trans people’ already begs the question.
I am using ‘trans people’ to refer to those who will seek adult transition.
It does not really matter that I cannot, at this moment, determine the extension of ‘trans people’ among the (supposedly larger) group of people who present with childhood gender dysphoria.
This group, even if you cannot tell with certainty who belongs to it, has rights and needs.
Justin:
It does bring about risks, Justin, for transgender individuals. Queer Philosopher’s point is that you are taking the risks they face less seriously. I don’t think you can dispute this. It simply follows from your reasoning that the risks they experience are subordinated to the risks others might face from such care being generally available.
There is also the claim regarding surgery. I don’t think I can put it better than Rohan does here.
“Social contagion” arguments targeting LGBT people aren’t new. However, even on your own terms, this is a bit silly. There are plenty of people, now adults, who say things along the lines of “I have always felt this way, and I felt bad about it and kept it to myself, because I never saw anyone like me in the wider culture (or, if I did, it was only to see them denigrated) and I didn’t know that there were other people who felt the same. I didn’t know there were words for this.”
I presume you don’t want us to go back to a situation where the only way someone could receive care was by continually expressing the serious, heartfelt desire for it in the face of deeply entrenched, unrelentingly systems that subjected them to abuse for feeling that way? I presume, in other words, that you don’t think it is good to make them suffer to prove that they deserve it.
No. I’m not even taking a stand on whether gender transitioning for minors would be a good idea in this or that case. I’m just trying to make the point that some people are opposed to it for reasons that don’t involve bigotry or hatred.
If we had a crystal ball that could allow everyone to see the distant outcomes of our decisions and confirm whether the children in question would continue to have strong trans feelings into adulthood if left alone, and whether they would be glad forever after that they had made the transition, then the situation would be very different.
Why would we need a crystal ball? We have data. Presumably you don’t hold that we need to be absolutely certain before acting? Because that would be bizarre, and would cut equally against any decision, even those you’d advocate. After all, maybe you’d develop such strong feelings tomorrow too; we just don’t know. We don’t have a crystal ball.
“if you take into account the *possibility* that they are wrong, then you also have to take into account the possibility that they are right. And then you cannot agree with the mainstream opponents to gender medicine.”
This doesn’t follow at all. We don’t allow minors to marry, or get tattoos, or contract for 30-year mortgages even though we entertain the possibility that their childhood inclinations may prove accurate: as an adult they might marry their middle-school sweetheart and live happily ever-after, or spend a lifetime pining for the one who got away, or get the tattoo they wanted since they were 13 and love it, or spend the rest of their life lamenting they missed out on buying their dream home.
You could say these prohibitions cause some people to live less flourishing lives. But even if that’s the case, these prohibitions are justified given what we know about human development and the dynamic nature of adolescence. Hesitation about allowing endocrine or surgical interventions in minors to relieve psychological distress or to achieve embodiment goals is perfectly consistent with these other prohibitions on minors. No presupposition of animus required.
I laid out my argument in detail elsewhere, I’m not going to repeat it here: https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/#comment-475882
The same level of hesitation doesn’t seem to enter the picture when a young man seeks treatment for the discomfort he feels due to enlarged breast tissue. Or any other intervention or procedure that is conducted along strictly cis-heteronormative lines. I’m not convinced that these prohibitions follow from “what we know about human development,” so much as they reflect a view on how that development ought to go.
This is why you’ll find that prohibitions often extend well beyond medical interventions; that is, such commentators often argue that even things which might lead to such interventions being considered later on ought to be prohibited, suppressed, etc. Early signs of nonconformity become marked as pathological, even if they occur in contexts where no medical interventions are being discussed.
A young man seeking treatment for the discomfort he feels due to enlarged breast tissue is almost certain to feel the same way later in life. But, as I keep saying, it seems that feelings of gender dysphoria are fairly common (and temporary) among adolescents finding their way to accepting themselves as gay or lesbian. That seems to be a significant difference here.
Even so, if treating the enlarged breast tissue that is making the young man uncomfortable would cut off certain options in the young man’s future, or if there is a risk of side effects from the procedure, then the doctor has an obligation to weigh them carefully and discuss them with the young patient and, if he is a minor, with his parents.
Almost certain? In presumably cisgender groups, patient satisfaction following such procedures isn’t necessarily 100% (1,2). But even if it was, we could adopt the same argument that anti-trans (and, quite often, anti-abortion) commentators use, which is to say that, at some point in the future, they will surely realise the mistake they’ve made and come to feel intense guilt and regret over it. In short, we can dismiss actual levels of patient satisfaction and actual rates of regret to hold forth a position that, because it might (read should) result in guilt and regret, we ought to withhold providing these forms of care. That way, absent studies capable of capturing secret deathbed confessions (and possibly not even then), we can always “um” and “ah” about whether someone is likely “to feel the same way later in life.”
You keep making this claim, yes, but I’m not sure what you expect others to do with it. For one, trans people are more likely to not identify as straight anyway. So, either way, they are likely going to be counted here. Second, I already linked to the comments ostrasyn made elsewhere, where they explained that this is why we need an affirming approach in the first place. Because such an approach is about sexuality and sexual orientation as well.
Which is already the case and which no one disputes as a matter of good practice. All interventions that carry risks require that the risks be discussed. As I said two weeks ago:
Felix, it’s a ridiculous straw man to present all the people who counsel a cautious approach as saying that “at some point in the future, [the children who transition] will surely realize the mistake they’ve made.”
The fact that you could think that that’s remotely like what cautious people would say, like so many of your other comments, shows me that you can’t be that interested in sorting through the complexities of the issue. The actual concern is — of course! — that there’s a chance that the children might regret it later on, and since they’re minors with not-fully-developed brains, it would be better to let them make the decision later on.
You leave no room for your interlocutors to say that. I know that it’s deeply morally satisfying to portray them all as hateful bigots who think that all transitioning is a mistake, and that the issues of youth gender medicine have nothing to do with the youth of the patients. But it’s bad philosophy.
If I’m wrong and you are genuinely interested in what we can and can’t be reasonably certain of in considering the desistence rate of minors who undergo gender-affirming surgery — despite the very one-sided picture you seem to have — here’s a good place to start.
Either way, I’ve got to move on to other things and will not be able to respond to further comments here. So long.
It makes no sense to say that I’m presenting a strawman of those who “counsel a cautious approach.” We already have a cautious approach! Nothing you have presented indicates that the approach taken is insufficiently cautious. That said, it’s extremely misleading to say that anti-trans commentators merely “counsel a cautious approach,” as if we don’t already know the details of what they counsel to be able to determine that “caution” isn’t what’s principally undergirding their project.
Before getting to the substance of the paper you linked to, it’s worth noting that the author lists their affiliation as SEGM—one of the “key organizations [involved] in spreading anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience, especially regarding transgender healthcare.” The organisation is deeply intertwined with other anti-trans orgs and lobby groups and has been designated as a hate group by the SPLC. That may or may not mean much to you, but it seems odd that, while in the beginning of your comment you accuse me of presenting a “ridiculous strawman,” and elsewhere reprimand me for suggesting that bigotry is a large part of what’s motivating certain commentators, by the end, you’re citing a source authored by someone working for (or with) a hate group?
Regarding the substance, some of the points made would be applicable to follow-up studies in many areas of medicine, so I’m not sure that those points necessarily say anything important about this particular area.
Some of it, then, contains good general advice. Some of it leaves certain questions open. For instance, what is “long enough”? Should we design studies with the hope of capturing secret deathbed confessions of regret? (I jokingly mentioned this before, but who knows, maybe that is what some commentators would consider necessary to meet the “wait long enough” condition. Of course, those who believe in an afterlife might think even this isn’t sufficient!)
I drew a parallel earlier to anti-abortion commentary, an element of which also focuses on regret. For instance, take this paper. Because actual frequencies of regret are low, and the authors (two of whom are affiliated with an anti-abortion lobby group) can’t just came out and say that those who obtain an abortion ought to regret it, it becomes necessary to cast doubt on whether we really even know what the actual rates of regret are. As they argue in the paper, maybe we haven’t waited long enough:
So there’s still a chance!
Others are right to call this out for what it is:
In the context of this discussion, it seems like anti-trans commentators focusing on regret are doing much the same. Because the data doesn’t comport with their view, and because they have to be coy and avoid saying that, if someone seeks out such care, they ought to regret it (if not today, then some time in the future), it becomes necessary to pick apart extant data and claim that we can’t rely on it.
In a certain respect, as I said above, they’re right; there are certain general things that all follow-up studies, in every area of medicine, should strive to do, and many studies will have fallen short of that, often for very practical, logistical reasons. (Reasons that aren’t helped by having science funding cut, especially for areas deemed “DEI” by this administration.) In another respect, I don’t think their position is being argued from a consistent set of principles, nor that their primary motivation is to improve empirical work, so much as it is to try every avenue they can to bring about a world where such care is either severely limited or outright banned.
I’ve got a bit of time to check in here and respond, so:
1. “It makes no sense to say that I’m presenting a strawman of those who “counsel a cautious approach.” We already have a cautious approach!”
Do you? Please explain what you mean. What cautionary steps do you (you personally, and the rest of those you include when you say ‘we’) insist on in the case of minor who wishes to undergo surgical procedures? Please be precise about just what you all agree that a child must not be permitted to do.
2. There is of course a great deal of material out there seeking to make the case that youth transgender medicine is urgently needed, the only humane response, reasonably risk-free, and so on. These arguments and reported facts are very widely disseminated, especially within academia. However, dissenting views, arguments, and research is much more difficult to find in these same circles, since those who advocate for any alternative to the orthodoxy face serious and often career-derailing punishment for it. In such an environment, it would of course be very foolish to treat the activist-controlled echo chamber in which the matter is discussed as authoritative. Even if the orthodoxies promoted therein were to turn out to be true, we cannot *know* that they’re true unless we check the claims and arguments against the harder-to-find alternative claims and arguments.
Are the critical arguments — so carefully (and blatantly) scrubbed from the discussions within academia — powerful enough to overcome the view that has been allowed to dominate? I don’t know. But I do know that any serious person who wants to get to the bottom of this will have to consider them. I recommended some that will count as a good place to start.
Instead, you dismiss those sources on the grounds that they have been condemned as hateful. But you have to know that any source that publishes critical material about youth gender medicine is thereby pilloried and condemned as hateful.
If only the public conversation would turn against those who have corrupted the discussions in academia and the media by blatantly bullying and attempting to destroy the careers (and often the lives) of anyone who disagrees with them, we could just turn to the discussions in the academic journals to guide us. But since this has not happened, the best we can do is consider all the facts and arguments on both sides, and try to sort it out ourselves.
Again: since the discussions more or less everywhere are highly partisan at this point, there doesn’t seem to be any forum of discussion one can count as authoritative. But that does not of course mean that we shouldn’t listen to the arguments from both sides: nobody who fails to consider both sides will be able to come to an epistemically responsible conclusion on the matter.
3. The abortion analogy you raise doesn’t do much to illuminate the case at hand. Of course, for any procedure, or for any major life decision, there will be some people who will regret having done it, some people who will regret not having done it, and some people who will be happy with their decisions. I see nothing wrong with trying to determine how many people will be happy a year afterward, ten years afterward, thirty years afterward, and so on, or with helping people know, when considering whether they should follow the same path, the odds that they will feel regret or satisfaction with the decision.
Needless to say, scholars should make sure that the research is conducted and reported accurately.
Given that the so-called scholarship on these matters is infused with advocacy within academia, it is not surprising that the evidence we keep hearing about supports the view that regrets are few, while those who find flaws in that research or research that points in the other direction have to publish their work elsewhere, if at all. Again, to get to the truth, it is necessary to try to weigh all this evidence. But one who only looks at this matter from one side can have no good grounds for belief.
However, nothing you have written here gives the impression that you are at all interested in seriously reading and considering alternative research and arguments, and there is nothing to stop you continuing to dismiss it all from within your echo chamber.
Since you are again out here labelling some as ‘activists’ (now ‘controlling’ whole ‘echo chambers’), Justin, I point you to my last post, which summarises for you in numbered form the argument you had so much trouble understanding: https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476666/.
Respond if you disagree with anything. If not, I take it you agree.
In which case, and assuming you care about consistency between beliefs and practice, you should stop engaging in the very practice you accuse others of engaging in and drop the ‘activist’ vs ‘proper inquirer’ label. Instead, you could follow the lead of your own beliefs (if not practice) and engage with the arguments people offer to you here.
I have responded to that post, which is shot through with fallacious moves.
That is to be determined in the other sub-thread.
Justin:
Regarding your second point, I suggest that you know this isn’t true. It’s false in at least two respects:
(1) Up until relatively recently, academic work on LGBT people was preoccupied with questions about what went wrong in a person’s development or socialization that resulted in them being LGBT, with follow-up questions centered largely on how to “manage” that outcome, if not prevent it. There isn’t some scarcity of literature that views LGBT people through that lens—contrary to what you claim, it’s not “harder-to-find;” you only have to look back a few decades to find the orthodoxy you’re desperate for. (For some reason, it doesn’t occur to you that maybe that orthodoxy was challenged for good reasons, and that’s why it’s “harder-to-find” credible sources endorsing it today. Another commenter suggested this to you previously, in the comments section of another post, but you never responded to their point.)
(2) I don’t think having one’s views aired in large press outlets and writing reports for federal government departments can reasonably be considered “career-derailing punishment.” The old orthodoxy reasserting itself in institutions is indeed a cause for concern, but the idea that holding to or seeking to reinstate that orthodoxy and its norms is “career-derailing” is absurd in the current environment. Institutions have long defended those who do it, and there’s no shortage of people easily impressed by the intellectual virtue signalling that so often accompanies it—going by your comments here, yourself included.
But I addressed some of the paper’s substantive claims? So clearly I haven’t dismissed it in toto. Acknowledging that certain organisations working in this space (e.g., SEGM) are anti-trans activist / lobby groups seems like it would be an important thing to do so that we understand what “critical” means in this context. Otherwise you’re just using “critical” as a weasel word to obscure what such organisations are and what changes they wish to effect. (Ironically, you have the opportunity to use the word “activist” to describe such groups, but you demur on that. One can only guess at why.)
Yes, you have to exercise judgment—I have been saying that from the beginning. As others have also pointed out to you, the “two sides” are not equivalent. Failing to recognize this is to exercise poor judgment.
Justin, with respect, most of your comment is absurd. The “alternative research and arguments” you are referencing constituted the dominant view with regard to LGBT people for decades. As another commenter said, “Your problem then isn’t that such views haven’t been considered, but that, having been considered, they’ve been rejected.” The old orthodoxy that you’re here defending (albeit without endorsing) is reasserting itself much in the same way that anti-vaccine ideology has asserted itself up to the present: Not by having good reasons, but by claiming it’s been unfairly maligned and suppressed even as it’s widely aired in the media and increasingly influential on policymakers. One would think that, being so concerned about “proper” methodology and the avoidance of anything resembling “activism,” this would bother you.
What a bizarre framing, Justin. We are merely doubters of cis-heteronormative orthodoxy—doubters of the doctrines of anti-trans commentators.
Sounds fine. I don’t think I’ve ever denied that, or its parallels.
Just checking, you then also agree with this:
> the demand “you have to actually talk to a trans person before you do this” [is] entirely reasonable, not just on moral but also on methodological grounds.
Of course! Talk about a straw man. Who ever said here that people should come up with conclusions about the nature and ethics of trans people without talking to trans people???
The question is merely whether the declarations of (a subset) of trans people should be taken as authoritative, or whether the declarations of people who have entered the arena as activists rather than as objective inquirers (usually on their own glad admission) should count as authoritative — whether their say-so should be permitted to settle the matter, or at least heavily influence the matter.
It seems, then, that we agree.
I hope, however, you realize that this exclusion of authority about the causes of one’s feelings again cuts both ways.
If
an assertion of “I feel this way because of my gender identity” licenses academic discussion of gender identity that may lead to the denial of this assertion.
then
an assertion of “I feel this way not because I am transphobic” equally licenses academic discussion of transphobia that may lead to the denial of this assertion.
At least one prominent philosopher affirms the premise but denies the consequent.
Moreover: If, in the latter case, “you have defined transphobia as so-and-so but this does not match my inner experience” is a valid rebuttal, then also in the first case “you have defined gender identity so-and-so but this does not match my inner experience” is a rebuttal as well.
I have a hard time understanding what ‘gender identity’ even means, so perhaps I’m not the best person to entertain that argument!
I don’t think one needs such understanding to apprehend the argument “if you are allowed to question my self-identification (as some gender), I am allowed to question your self-identification (as not bigoted)”.
Well this seems to strike to the core of it. If questioning the veracity of self-identification as a measure of identity amounted to being subject to charges of bigotry, then there’d be no dispute. The question is whether disagreeing over the right of trans self-identification to determine others’ thinking amounts to being rightly subject to charges of bigotry.
That’s a surprising thing to hear, honestly.
I thought the rules were that such things as social consequences, potential harms (including to one’s reputation), or offense caused have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of some inquiry.
I’m not making a first-order claim about whether some inquiry is legitimate. I’m pointing out what I take to be the dispute. You presented the following as an argument: “if you are allowed to question my self-identification (as some gender), I am allowed to question your self-identification (as not bigoted)”. It’s a conditional, but on the principle that object-language assertions in conditional form given expression to the goodness of inferences from antecedents to consequents, I get what you’re saying. And it nicely illustrates the issue: namely, whether disagreeing over the right of trans self-identification to determine others’ thinking warrants an inference to the conclusion that such people are bigots. So I’m sure Justin (and others) can appreciate that argument, in the sense that they understand this is an inference that you (and others) accept — but that’s not to say they agree that the inference is a good one! And whether it is, it seems to me, is precisely the issue.
I think you misunderstood the argument.
> whether disagreeing over the right of trans self-identification to determine others’ thinking warrants an inference to the conclusion that such people are bigots
I did not make a claim about this inference.
I’m saying this: if self-reports are not authoritative as-such, then this applies to all self-reports.
That includes self-reports like “I am not a bigot”.
It is then a legitimate inquiry whether some belief makes one a bigot, even if someone self-reports that they hold the belief and that they are not a bigot.
The legitimacy from the inquiry into bigotry derives from the same source that legitimizes the inquiry into trans-self identification.
Right, I get the general principle. If self-identification as something is never authoritative as such, and inquiry into whether someone really is as they self-identify is generally acceptable, then inquiry into whether one who self-identifies as a not being a bigot is generally acceptable. It’s the specific application that I take to be the issue, and about which there is disagreement. And that turns on whether both self-identifying as a woman or a man (or whatever) and self-identifying as not being a bigot are each meant to be authoritative as-such. And surely those who think the authoritativeness of self-identifying as not being a bigot is not meant to be of the sort sometimes claimed by those who self-identify as a woman or a man (or whatever) won’t see the general principle as having a valid application in cases where the fact that one has questioned whether trans self-identifications can be authoritative as such is thought to license suspicions of bigotry.
For what it’s worth, I took my initial point to be uncontentious, and certainly not a “gotcha” or anything. I was genuinely pleased to see the issue so starkly expressed. It was refreshing.
Sorry, I’m confused now.
> I get the general principle. … It’s the specific application that I take to be the issue
> those who think the authoritativeness of self-identifying as not being a bigot is not meant to be of the sort sometimes claimed by those who self-identify as a woman or a man (or whatever) won’t see the general principle as having a valid application in cases … [of] suspicions of bigotry.
I don’t understand how one can accept a general principle while rejecting a specific instance or application of it.
Rather, you seem to be saying that the principle is not general at all. There is a distinction among self-reports regarding their authoritativeness, and the principle only applies to one side of it.
If so, fair enough! But that would be trouble for Kalef, for it means that his argument is incomplete. He now needs to _additionally_ argue that trans self-identification falls on the non-authoritative side of the distinction.
Perhaps I can attempt another stark expression:
I agree, of course, that the salient first-order issue is whether it is bigoted to question trans self-identication. I think that it is legitimate to inquire into this issue. Some scholars, however, have denied this legitimacy.
I’d like people like Kalef, Wallace, and you to defend the legitimacy of this inquiry with equal fervor as you defend the legitimacy of any other inquiry.
Or, else, state general principles that legitimize one inquiry and delegitimize the other without applying the principles selectively.
Hi again, Queer Philosopher. I have a bit of time today to look this over and respond.
1. You seem to have latched onto an utterly bizarre principle — the principle that people’s claims or beliefs about themselves should be taken as authoritative, apparently — and to think that, since I reject that principle by taking seriously the possibility that pre-pubescent children might be mistaken about their long-term desires, etc., my rejection “cuts both ways” and undermines my own position by making it legitimate for people to deny my claim that am not bigoted.
First of all: what a ridiculous idea, to think that all claims or beliefs we have about ourselves are either dubious or trustworthy, as an undifferentiated whole! I mean, really!
People have all sorts of claims and beliefs about themselves. Those range from self-evidently true to self-evidently false, and also include incoherent beliefs.
I can tell you that I am under twenty feet tall, or that I exist,
I can tell you that I am over twenty feet tall, or that I do not exist.
I can tell you that I am Gaunilo’s famous objection to Anselm’s ontological argument, or that I am the square root of fourteen, or that I am a factory in New York City, or that I am the earthquake that rocked San Francisco in 1906.
You have no reason to accept any of those claims, merely because I make them.
The claims we make about ourselves are generally assessed as true, false, likely to be true, or whatever, on the basis of corroborating evidence, or (where that is not available) by considering whether, how, and to what extent the speaker has reliable access to that information, how likely it is that the speaker got it wrong, how likely it is that the speaker misremembered the information, and how likely it is that the speaker is motivated to distort the information willfully or by mistake.
We humans tend to be famously bad at assessing how good we are at doing things. It would have been silly of me to have tried to establish that I am not bigoted by just claiming that I am not bigoted, since a bigoted person could just as easily make, or believe, that claim. But I never said that you should accept that I am not bigoted because I said that I am not. In fact, I don’t think I ever said that I am not bigoted! So this whole idea that, if I refuse to accept a child’s view of his or her own long-term wishes as authoritative, then that cuts against the force of my own claim, is a straw man (not to mention how clearly bad the principle would be).
People should not be deemed to be guilty of vices, including bigotry, unless there is good overall evidence for that conclusion. But that has nothing to do with trusting people’s claims about their own beliefs.
You also say:
“You keep returning to this idea that this is a matter of autonomy, of what decisions minors should or should not be allowed to make.
As I have made abundantly clear, the matter has nothing to do with that. The medical ethics question concens solely how to obtain the best medical outcome for a group of patients (those who present with childhood gender dysphoria). Perhaps the best outcome is achieved by having all the decisions made by adults, I don’t know. In practice, all the decisions are made by adults.
My only contention is that this decision making process, whatever it is, needs to respects the needs and rights of trans people. The position you are taking does not respect these needs and rights.”
Three things about that (continuing the enumeration from above):
2. I have already explained, in detail, many different reasons why unbiased people might conclude — in the absence of caring about autonomy, and also in the absence of an acts/omissions distinction — that children might be significantly more likely to grow up to regret the decisions they once strongly desired. That was my point: that, since those things cannot be ruled out, you have no grounds for dismissing such people as bigots, as you have done.
3. Even though you have, indeed, declared a couple of times that the paternalism/autonomy question is not a factor here, there’s a big difference between declaring something and establishing it. You seem to think that you can, at will, choose to ignore the role of autonomy in medical ethics questions regarding children, and instead just make the determination of what’s good or bad for the child’s future with no regard to the child’s autonomy, at whatever state of development that autonomy lies.
But even if that weren’t a highly dubious move to make in medical ethics — and it is! — it wouldn’t solve the problem you’re facing.
After all, how are you to determine what would be best for the child? How do we know what the child will want, or benefit from, as an adult? In some cases, we can consider the role of things that would be undesirable for nearly everyone (like being imprisoned or socially ostracized) or desirable for nearly everyone (like becoming wealthy). But in this case, we have to consider whether the child, as an adult much later on, will want to have undergone the procedure he or she presently requests. And we have no way of knowing that without going by discussions with the child, and trying to figure out whether the child’s wishes will persist.
So, even if we go the path of just trying to create the best outcome for the child, there turns out to be no way around the problem of determining whether the child’s present wishes will persist throughout his or her adulthood. And that takes us right back to the problem you tried to sidestep by declaring, by fiat, that the child’s autonomy is not at issue.
4. Most important of all here: you keep begging the question by referring to the child as trans. But this use of the term cannot, if you are taking our responsibilities to the child seriously, just refer to the present desires of the child: it would, I hope you would agree, be grossly irresponsible to subject a child to a life-altering medical intervention that the child would see no use for, and that would not benefit the child in any way, a year or a month later, say. So by ‘trans’ here, you must (again, if you are being even minimally considerate of the child’s welfare) be referring to a lifelong or at least very long-term tendency.
But whether we can be sure that a pre-pubescent child’s present feelings about being trans are reliable is exactly the point in question! We can’t know that, and therefore we can’t, in any non-momentary sense, properly refer to the child as ‘trans’.
So the position of the advocates of caution is not, as you keep saying, one that puts the interests of non-trans people above the interests of trans people. It is, rather, a position that concerns a child who may be trans, and that needs to come up with a solution that has the least chance of dooming the pre-pubescent child — who may not be trans! — to a life-altering course of action he or she would regret for, let’s say, most of his or her life.
One other point:
5. You keep saying that you have adequately responded to my invocation of other cases — like getting married at a very young age, and starting a family — by saying that all those things are reversible decisions, while going through natural puberty is not a reversible decision.
But that is incorrect. If Mary wishes to get married at the age of thirteen to her current sweetheart, and to become pregnant right away with his baby, then our prohibiting her from doing that makes an irreversible change to her life. Her current sweetheart could well marry someone else while she waits for him, even though he might have stuck with her otherwise. She will never again be in a position to spend most of her teenage years as a mother. She will never be able to experience life as an empty-nester in her early 40s. And so on.
None of this irreversibility is normally taken to be sufficient to dismiss the responsibility we have to minors, whose ability to make important life decisions or even to foresee their own state of mind in adulthood is generally understood to be very limited.
Justin:
Thank you for engaging on the other sub-thread, I’ll respond with a more thought-out and, importantly, non-rhetorically-charged reply so that we can hopefully continue with a constructive discussion, which I take it both of us are committed to.
I’m sure Queer Philosopher will respond, but I did want to add here that I was surprised by your points 2ff, particularly, the comment that “there turns out to be no way around the problem of determining whether the child’s present wishes will persist throughout his or her adulthood” (and the rest of the points along these lines). This already assumes a default presumption about the persistence (or lack of it thereof) of a child’s wishes — the default prsumption is a cis normative one. Queer Philosopher already explained this quite well (at least according to me and, as much as I can tell, David Wallace) and, whether you disagree or not, your comment seems to completely ignore this explanation:
https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/#comment-475882
> 1. You seem to have latched onto an utterly bizarre principle — the principle that people’s claims or beliefs about themselves should be taken as authoritative, apparently — … I reject that principle
My only point was that your rejection of the principle was on such general grounds (about authoritativeness) that they entail not just the negative of the principle, but in fact its contrary.
I broadly agree to the contrary of the principle, see above on heterophenomenology.
> But I never said that you should accept that I am not bigoted because I said that I am not.
I never attributed this to you. I was obliquely referring to some British philosophers.
> you keep begging the question by referring to the child as trans
I have never talked about “the child”, that’s all you. I talk about the rights and needs of the group of trans children. You have already agreed that this group exists.
> You seem to think that you can, at will, choose to ignore the role of autonomy in medical ethics questions regarding children, and instead just make the determination of what’s good or bad for the child’s future with no regard to the child’s autonomy
Respectfully, this is ridiculous. You are the one who insists that paternalistic determinations about what is good or bad override arguments from autonomy (arguments that I never even made, mind you).
I’ll say my piece one more time for onlookers and then I’ll be done:
We do know with certainty whether any individual (“the child”) is cis or trans. We do know that some children present with gender dysphoria. We owe these children the best care. The best care is NOT found by ocusing solely on avoiding adverse outcomes for cis children.
That’s it. That’s the entire thing.
Of course I made an embarrassing typo.
The last bit should read:
We do NOT know with certainty whether any individual (“the child”) is cis or trans. We do know that some children present with gender dysphoria. We owe these children the best care. The best care is NOT found by ocusing solely on avoiding adverse outcomes for cis children.
Sorry for the delayed response, Queer Philosopher.
I find this last statement of yours — what you call ‘the entire thing’ — very helpful. I particularly find it helpful to distinguish, as you do here, between being trans and having gender dysphoria. Having gender dysphoria is a psychological state that may last for any length of time. The phrase ‘being trans’, at least as I am using the term, refers to a very long-standing, and presumably permanent, property.
So: following your useful distinction, there are several people, including some children, who have gender dysphoria at any given time. Some, but not all, of those people are trans.
I grant you, and I have granted since the start of this conversation, that irreversible medical transitioning could well be the best course of action for those who are genuinely trans. But for non-trans people who falsely believe due to deceptively temporary feelings of gender dysphoria, it would presumably turn out to be a bad course of action. So in determining whether it is the right course of action, if the subject is so young that others have to make the decision for now about the right course of action, it is highly relevant to determine whether the person’s gender dysphoria is temporary or whether it is a sign of being genuinely trans.
To be clear: what I am saying is that if someone *is* trans (again, meaning a more-or-less permanent disposition) and desires surgery, then surgically transitioning seems to be the best course of action, but that if someone is not trans but is merely experiencing temporary gender dysphoria, it is not clear to me why medically transitioning would be the right course of action for such a person.
And here’s the point: you’ve been saying here that any approach that errs on the side of not medically transitioning children in cases of doubt must be anti-trans, and also must give less weight to the badness of gender dysphoria. I think I can now show why this is not correct. And even though I don’t consider your rejection of the acts/omissions distinction to be compelling, I will not rely on that distinction here.
Imagine a doctor, D, who is deeply supportive of trans people in every way. If she becomes aware that someone is trans, she not only gives that person full consideration, but even special consideration. No reasonable person could fairly call her ‘anti-trans’. She is also highly sympathetic to the suffering of people undergoing gender dysphoria, and does her best to alleviate it. But she also understands, as you and I both do, that having gender dysphoria and being trans are two different things. Having gender dysphoria can be a sign of being trans, but it doesn’t follow from the fact that one has gender dysphoria that one is trans.
When any children come to her suffering from gender dysphoria, she is committed to recommending a course of action that brings the child effective relief. But she is also a utilitarian, and always considers the long-term interests of the child: she does not allow her compassion for the gender-dysphoric child before her to outweigh her compassion for the future time slices of the child. She seeks, in all cases, a course of action that will lead to the greatest long-term happiness for the child.
She gives full consideration to the fact you keep mentioning: the fact that going through puberty naturally is a sort of irreversible transformation that, in the case of a trans child, would itself carry the risk of permanent disutility. But she also knows that, for some children suffering from gender dysphoria, going through puberty will alleviate the dysphoric feelings and allow the child to feel more at home in his or her body.
What are the odds of these things happening to a child? I don’t know — they’re empirical questions — but Doctor D does her very best to find out about them, and to learn the telltale signs that might indicate whether the child is trans or merely experiencing temporary gender dysphoria.
Maybe the medical research determines that there is some other factor, A, such that children with gender dysphoria and factor A at this early age are 99% likely to be trans, and to be glad forever after for having undergone the transitioning before puberty. And maybe there is some other factor, B, that is the opposite: children with gender dysphoria and factor B at this young age are 99% likely to outgrow the gender dysphoria naturally, and to deeply regret having medically transitioned in childhood. If this is all the information Doctor D. has, then she recommends all the children with factor A for transitioning, and none of the children with factor B.
Her decision to deny the surgical transitioning requests of the factor B children cannot fairly be described as insensitive to gender dysphoria: she is acutely aware of how bad the gender dysphoria is, but she is equally sensitive to the future states of those children. And it would be unfair to describe Doctor D. as ‘anti-trans’, since she promotes transitioning for every child who is likely to be trans, and cares immensely for trans people, especially her trans patients.
Now for a wrinkle: in fact, the doctor does not know of any Factor A or Factor B that can determine whether a pre-pubescent child presenting with gender dysphoria is likely to be trans. Maybe that information will become available later, but nobody knows it now. However, she is aware — let’s say for the sake of argument — that pre-pubescent children who present with gender dysphoria are fairly likely not to be trans, but that people who present with gender dysphoria at the age of 18 or 19 are considerably more likely than not to be trans.
What should she do? It’s an empirical matter, of course. So, let’s say she factors in everything: the disutility a genuinely trans person might experience from going through natural puberty, the medical risks, the long-term effects, everything. She adds it all up and determines that, to the very best of her calculations, a patient coming to her clinic with gender dysphoria at age 9 is 75% likely to be made worse off by transitioning (largely because many of them will turn out not to be trans — again, just for the sake of argument: I have no idea what the actual numbers are), while those aged 18 who come to her clinic with gender dysphoria are 80% likely to be made better off (largely because most of them will in fact be trans). Following her utilitarian approach — with no acts/omissions distinction — she should (in those circumstances) recommend the 18-year-olds for medical transitioning, but recommend against it in the case of the 9-year olds. At least, that is what Doctor D’s approach would recommend, and by assumption, Doctor D’s approach is neither anti-trans nor indifferent to the badness of gender dysphoria.
Even in that case, there may be some young gender dysphoric children with a certain extra factor whose appearance makes it much more certain that the children are in fact trans and that pre-pubescent medical transitioning would lead to greater overall odds of increasing the child’s utility. Children known to have such a factor might, under Doctor D’s approach, be fairly recommended for medical transitioning. But if it is not yet clear whether they have that factor, Doctor D’s utilitarian, pro-trans, gender-dysphoria-sympathetic approach entails that she should err on the side of not recommending the child until the factor can be confirmed, in the scenario I have described.
I think this makes it clear that, once one is careful about the difference between being trans and having gender dysphoria, it cannot follow from the fact that anyone with a presumption against transitioning for prepubescent minors is anti-trans or unmoved by the plight of people suffering from gender dysphoria.
“Inquiry” seems only loosely applicable to activities that include both social and political activism, and investigation into, say, sexual dimorphism in mammals (a biological category whose sexual dimorphism is evident in its name).
And I take the significance of “as-such” in “authoritative as-such” to show that the general principle does not have a specific application in this context. For a critical asymmetry in the specific case at issue is that no one maintains that the self-conception one has of not being a bigot is authoritative as-such in determining one’s identity. The worry now is that the “inquiry” gets off the ground (by establishing itself in research, education, civic life, the workforce, etc.) only if it’s an activist inquiry, in which case it seems to presuppose its conclusions concerning the very topic at issue: bigotry over trans issues.
At any rate, all that’s said without prejudice as to where different forms of what we call “inquiry” are or should be going. This is just by way of general reflection over the state of the field, and I don’t have a settled view beyond a few deep-seated convictions. Overall, I’m of the mind that the categorial divides between chemicals, organisms, and persons are deep and interesting, and that the boundary between organism and person is marked by our capacity to define ourselves in ways that (in general) swing free from our biological natures. There’s a region of logical, scientific, and cultural space here that we’re not investing much energy in studying, but which is full of intricate detail and interdisciplinary use. I’ve tried to get more people to pay attention to such a project in the metaphysics literature today, but they’re off hunting hyperintensions. \rant
I think you’ll find in me an ally for your project.
Anyway, the issue at hand can now be put quite concisely. If someone says “I am not a bigot, I just have concerns” or whatever, then their protestation “I am not a bigot” should have no bearing on any sort of psychological, sociological, or philosophical investigation into whether these concerns are, in fact, bigoted.
Eh, I bristle at the universality of the claim, and again about asymmetries in its application. There’s a lot of room between “my self-declarations are authoritative as-such” and “my self-declarations have no bearing on any sort of, etc.”, and so far as I can see it’s not the people accused of being bigots that are endorsing claims like the former.
You’re right that there is some air between the two. The self-declaration has bearing insofar as that self-declaration itself is a data point in need of explanation (see my response to Wallace on heterophenomenology).
I think I could give you numerous examples of people saying that it is illicit to accuse someone of bigotry when they have, according to themselves, “reasonable concerns”.
There’s quite a bit more room between the two extremes than that! In context, we have all sorts of methods for discriminating the kinds of thing, and to what degree, justifiably left to a person’s self-declaration for determining what we ourselves think and do. Whether you’re imagining a red patch in the upper left quadrant of your vision, whether you’re in pain, whether you forgive a friend for some slight — none of these things are infallibly determined by what a person sincerely avows, and they are more than just datapoints that need explanation. They’re part of our everyday way of getting along in the world, and with one another. And again, from what I’ve seen it’s not those denying they are bigots who maintain the denial as-such determines what is true, or what anyone else ought to believe or do.
“If someone says “I am not a bigot, I just have concerns” or whatever, then their protestation “I am not a bigot” should have no bearing on any sort of psychological, sociological, or philosophical investigation into whether these concerns are, in fact, bigoted.”
Whoever said otherwise? And which people ever tried to make the mere utterance “I am not a bigot” stand for evidence that they are not bigots?
The person who accuses someone of being motivated by bigotry bears the burden of showing that this is the only plausible explanation for the other person’s behavior. If the accuser is unable to demonstrate this after making such a charge, and especially if an at-least-equally-plausible alternative explanation can be furnished that the accuser ignored or overlooked, that should cost the accuser some credibility (otherwise, the cheap shot of making such accusations baselessly would become much more popular, since it is a move that careless, inattentive, and unprincipled people could make at any time to derail conversations and impugn others’ character).
But if there is good reason to think that someone is bigoted, then uttering the words, “I’m not bigoted” would not and should not help the accused person, and it is hard to imagine that anyone would not see this.
I’ve mostly dropped out of this thread as I think it hit diminishing returns a while ago (plus I’m traveling) but just briefly: I think it has to have *some* bearing, just on Bayesian grounds, since someone saying “I hate trans people and want them to suffer, and that’s why I have these concerns” would have strong bearing the other way! I agree it should have fairly negligible bearing.
This seems neither here nor there with regard to Queer Philosopher’s point, which was that lack of personal involvement does not necessarily imply a superior level of neutrality and that attempts to exclude the subjects of one’s inquiry from the inquiry likewise doesn’t necessarily confer neutrality to the inquiry (in many cases, arguably the exact opposite occurs).
I don’t think this example maps onto what I said. Here is what I said:
> if someone thinks that their LACK of personal involvement gives them such authority (e.g. because this lack endows them with a “superior neutrality”), then they can likewise not participate in inquiry.
In your example, we have a dogmatic theist and a well-reasoned skeptic. The epistemic position of the skeptic isn’t better because the skeptic lacks religious experience, it is better because the skeptic has better arguments (or, in this case, any arguments at all).
A more precise example would feature a theist and a skeptic who both have some amount of rational argument for their beliefs.
If the skeptic were to declare that the arguments of the theist can be discarded BECAUSE the theist had a religious experience that the skeptic did not, the skeptic would make a mistake.
“A more precise example would feature a theist and a skeptic who both have some amount of rational argument for their beliefs.
“If the skeptic were to declare that the arguments of the theist can be discarded BECAUSE the theist had a religious experience that the skeptic did not, the skeptic would make a mistake.”
I agree with this. But who is saying that people who have had certain experiences, and who present independently plausible arguments for their views, should have those independent arguments ignored (or should be excluded from the conversation) merely because they have had certain experiences? Never in my life have I heard anyone say anything like that, and I don’t understand why anyone would say it or think that anyone else is saying it.
If you like, I can dig you up some cases. It usually looks something like: some civil rights issue affects some minority, and some non-minority people claim that they are better suited to adjudicate the issue because they are not affected by it.
“Nothing about us without us” didn’t come about from nothing.
Maybe someone said something like that at some point, but I’m not saying it, and neither is anyone here, as far as I can tell.
“Nothing about us without us” sounds like a political slogan to rally people from a certain demographic to demand things. It doesn’t sound anything like a policy that would generate trustworthy scholarship.
In healthcare settings, elements of co-production / co-design are increasingly part of research methodologies, so evidently others disagree with you on the question of trustworthy scholarship. To go with a recent historical example though, I don’t think you’d say that scholarship on queer people was more trustworthy back when it systematically excluded and pathologized queer people, such as by having homosexuality classified as mental illness in the DSM. It’s perhaps no coincidence that when that classification was finally removed, defenders of the classification claimed that its removal amounted to the “politicization of science” and that it was due principally to “pressure from activists” rather than some deep scholarly rationale. Of course, it’s questionable whether there was ever a deep scholarly rationale for having it classified as such in the first place, but would we know to ask that sort of question if those you might call “activists” hadn’t made it visible?
Perhaps not. But even if not, there’s a difference between saying that activists can sometimes effectively urge scholars to consider things they hadn’t considered by bringing those things to public attention (which sounds fine to me), and saying that activism is a part of the methodology that scholars ought to use to discover the truth.
For the same reason, we make a distinction between an attorney and a judge or jury. The judge or jury might be led to consider useful things because of the attorney’s biased presentation, and that’s part of the system working well (because the other attorney also gets a say in a principled manner). But if the judge or jury were as partisan as the attorney, we’d have a serious perversion of justice.
I’m not sure that I buy that analogy. But I’d like to focus more on this:
I’m not sure how to neatly draw the line here. After all, if they hadn’t considered it, then wouldn’t that be a deficiency in the methodology, if you are defining methodology as something they “use to discover the truth”? But then, in pointing out that deficiency so that it may be addressed, wasn’t the “activism” necessary “to the discover the truth”?
We have to keep clear the difference between the context of discovery and the context of justification.
Suppose, for instance, that an unsavory hawker of educational technology offers you $10,000 to write positive reviews about my education software. When you decline the offer, he tells you that he’s going to spread nasty rumors about you unless you adopt that ed. tech. in your classes next semester. You adopt it, and amazingly, you find that it really is pretty great. You set up an experiment with other instructors, following fair protocols. Sure enough, it turns out that the students who use the ed. tech. learn much more and are much more engaged in the course.
The hawker’s highly unethical business practices are what led you to discover this effect for the first time. But they are no part of the methodology you followed in determining that the educational technology was in fact effective. We should not conclude from the story that we should invite unsavory hawkers to come and use threats and bribes to get people to do or believe things.
I think here it’s a simple matter of denying the analogy as applicable. Activists aren’t necessarily unsavoury hawkers, and scholars—even ones who perform the requisite academic rituals—aren’t necessarily ethical. See the earlier example I gave: who was being ethical in this situation, Justin? The scholars who maintained that homosexuality needed to remain classified as such in the DSM or the activists who pushed for its removal?
Again: my point was to clarify the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification.
And my point was that your distinction doesn’t seem to hold if you take methodology to be the process or processes “use[d] to discover the truth.” Unless you are claiming that discovery isn’t part of that process or that, having deficiencies (methodological or otherwise) brought to light (discovered?) is of no consequence to “discover[ing] the truth”?
In any case, I’m not sure that the term “activist” is doing much in these discussions except providing a self-serving justification for dismissing certain concerns as “activist” concerns and therefore outside the remit of “genuine philosophy,” even though it seems that genuine philosophy has often been attuned to—and even productive of—activism.
My point then is simply that the line is much blurrier than you appear to take it to be. And, as Bothered has argued, it appears that elements of your characterization of the two—”activism” and “proper” methodology—would render “proper” philosophy “activist” anyway.
You’re right… ‘fact’ was a poor word choice on my part. What I meant is that this dynamic does happen: people sometimes invalidate or dismiss lived experience, and that experience itself can affect how one is heard in philosophical contexts. I’m not claiming special authority or shutting down dialogue. I am just pointing out a pattern that deserves philosophical attention rather than being ignored or waved away as nonexistent. (While still taking opposing views very seriously).
I don’t know what it means to ‘invalidate’ lived experience, Grad Student, and I have never understood how ‘lived experience’ is meant to be different from experience (anyone who has had an experience has also lived through that experience, no?).
There must be some experiences I have had that you have not had. But the fact that I have had those experiences does not in any way guarantee that I have interpreted them correctly, or remember them correctly, or draw the right lessons from them, and so on.
It also might be that I think I have experienced things that I never experienced. For instance, perhaps I have formed an opinion that everyone hates the way I look, or my hometown, or my accent, or something, and become very self-conscious about it. Perhaps this makes me very sensitive to slights, and to fit them all into a big hypothesis that I feel is confirmed over and over again. But maybe the people I encounter are just generally grumpy, or maybe I’m just imagining that they are unhappy with me.
The point is this: many people could think that they are in a good position to know things on the basis of their ‘lived experience’, and maybe they are getting those things right, but they might also be getting them wrong. And that gives us a good reason to be very careful about letting people use claims of ‘lived experience’ to settle disputes or to make it more uncomfortable for people to raise alternative hypotheses.
For instance: I might tell a bunch of people that people from my hometown face terrible oppression. Someone expresses doubt, but I say, “Uh… really? You’re actually going to invalidate my lived experience here?” Now the doubter has to take a public stand in order to maintain the doubt, and that stand has to be against ‘validating’ my lived experience, which seems to be something people would be very reluctant to do.
This seems like a move that can derail all sorts of fair doubts and criticisms.
The same way claims to objectivity can be weaponised to derail all sorts of fair doubts and criticisms. Really nothing new there. It would be a matter of actually diving into the details.
“It would be a matter of actually diving into the details.”
Right. And we would have to do that fairly and objectively, by considering the best cases for and against the interpretation in question. The person making the claim from ‘lived experience’ doesn’t get a free ride, and doubters must be free to raise their doubts without being cast as morally defective, etc.
Justin:
Those who claim that *we* *have to* do something “fairly and objectively” (defined on their own terms—see prior discussion) don’t get a free ride either.
Especially when they simply ignore entire prior discussions and keep just outright asserting claims of “objectivity”, “neutrality”, and so on, completely dismissing “doubters” to their own position. Thus, also, refusing to engage in the consideration for “the best cases for and against” they advocate for in a way that doesn’t cast their “doubters” as “unphilosophical” or not “properly philosophical”.
Bothered, it won’t do just to play that tired old trick of saying, “Ah, but when you say that you oppose bias, you neglect that you yourself are biased, and when you say that certain things don’t measure up to the standards of philosophy, you yourself do not measure up to those standards.”
It may be satisfying to say such things, but you will have to go further and actually show that what I said has those problems by getting specific.
Also, the lazy formula of saying, “You are refusing to address your interlocutors’ argument” gets us nowhere unless you specify which argument it is that I didn’t address.
I hope we can at least agree that genuine philosophy and empty sophistry are different things.
As is the vapid intellectual virtue signalling that so often plagues these comments sections. One might reduce it to a lazy formula even.
Justin:
On this:
“Also, the lazy formula of saying, “You are refusing to address your interlocutors’ argument” gets us nowhere unless you specify which argument it is that I didn’t address.”
Here:
https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/#comment-475793
All right:
“I can make out four necessary conditions for this distinctive unique methodology in all of the above, one negative and three positive:
(i) it is not a form of “activism”, which you say is implied by the (logically) weaker requirement that
(ii) it do not assume its conclusions prior to inquiry,
(iii) all positions are open to inquiry.
(iv) “it is an attempt to seek the truth on philosophical questions”.”
Right. I take these things to be essential to philosophy, properly speaking (though naturally that does not effectively prevent pseudophilosophers from misusing the term ‘philosophy’ to refer to whatever they please: there is no stopping that.)
“On (i), you do not define “activism”.
Here’s the definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.”
“There is a sense in which you cannot have both (ii) and (iii) at the same time: for inquiry to get off the ground, you need starting positions.”
This is incorrect.
Take, for example, astronomy: the study of objects and matter outside the earth’s atmosphere. Certain things are (at least tentatively) presumed in astronomy, such as the existence of items outside of the earth’s atmosphere, the existence of space, etc. But that is not to presume the conclusions of any inquiry prior to inquiry.
Let’s say that one astronomer feels that there are over a hundred billion stars in the universe, and that another astronomer thinks that there are only about a million. They should engage in their inquiry without presuming that either side is correct. And astronomy per se does not assume that either side is correct.
On the other hand, if some other astronomer arrived on the scene and argued that there is in fact nothing outside of the earth’s atmosphere, it would be laughably stupid (and entirely unscientific) for the other astronomers to say, “What you’re saying is false, as we can demonstrate: we are doing astronomy here, and astronomy presupposes that there are objects outside of the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, astronomy proves that you are wrong. QED.”
Either that assumption would have to be suspended so that the inquiry could take place, or else it could be decided that the question lies outside of the bounds of astronomy and must be approached by some other branch of science. Either way, the domain in which one asks the question may not presume the answer to that question.
“Except (ii)–(iv) are methodological positions, positions that are heavily debated in the parts of philosophy you rule out as “not philosophy”. I fail to see how this amounts to anything but question begging.” (It’s also worth noting in passing that while you have staked out (ii)–(iv) as positions, you have again not provided arguments for them.”
By that standard, one could say that the taboo against testing scientific hypotheses through interpretive tea leaf reading is question-begging: after all, the interpretative tea-leaf readers will not find the rejection of their so-called ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ compelling. In fact, they can probably find all sorts of support for their methodology by interpreting some more tea leaves.
Rather than try to get down to first principles with someone who rejects the fundamental tenets of reasoning the rest of us take for granted, I’d be happy to resolve the issue some other way. Let’s separate out the methodologies and call them different things. Then, we can make separate pitches, asking for the public to take the results of our work seriously (and continue to fund them). You are welcome to use whichever methodology you like to pursue things, provided that those of us who stick to reasoned inquiry don’t need to operate under the same name as you. Astrologers, and many others have opened up schools along those lines. Whether they belong in a university is something you should be welcome to argue for.
“You may be ignorant of the parts of philosophy you don’t consider philosophy.”
Maybe. Or maybe I’m not.
Justin:
“Right. I take these things to be essential to philosophy, properly speaking (though naturally that does not effectively prevent pseudophilosophers from misusing the term ‘philosophy’ to refer to whatever they please: there is no stopping that.)”
Good, I take it then that this characterisation of your view was sufficiently faithful. (The part in brackets is what is at issue here, so you cannot just stipulate what is ‘pseudophilosophy’.)
“Here’s the definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.””
Fine. This was, as mentioned in the comment, not the main issue. (At this stage, at least; if or when we actually get into good reasons for and against the methodological positions in (i)–(iv), the definition will become relevant and I’m happy to let you revise it then, if you wish.)
“This is incorrect. [. . .] Either way, the domain in which one asks the question may not presume the answer to that question.”
What you say now elucidates the main contention, I believe. To take the core topic at issue here, “(proper) philosophical methodology”, what you say implies that
(a) the domain in which one asks the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’ may not presume the answer to that question.
At the same time,
(b) you define “philosophy, properly speaking” by (at least) the methodological positions as stated in (i)–(iv). Again, these are, as they stand now, merely presumed answers to the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’.
It follows that the domain in which one asks the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’ is not ‘philosophy’. Just as the domain in which one asks the question ‘does anything lie outside of the earth’s atmosphere?’ lies outside astronomy.
Two questions, the second of which is *more important*:
(1) What discipline then, if not philosophy, asks the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’?
For the second, *more important*, question, what your view, on the above reconstruction, implies is that we have “philosophy” (defined by the presumed positions (i)–(iv)) and then we have other disciplines, such as “critical theory”, “continental theory”, which are not “philosophy” because they take as starting positions different answers to the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’.
And then the unnamed third type of discipline is where the question is actually asked.
(2) What determines why “philosophy” should be defined by (i)–(iv) rather than the starting positions of “critical theory”? Put differently, what determines why “philosophy” is not defined by the starting positions of “critical theory”, so that what you call “proper philosophy” is called, say, “analytic theory” (a discipline outside “philosophy”)?
It is (good) answers to this second question that are lacking so far. And this would require engaging in a good faith discussion over the methodological positions in (i)–(iv).
The only two answers you’ve offered so far are both weak: the first is weak by your own prior admission.
The first answer appeals to “us”, “the rest of us”, and “those of us” who determine “the fundamental tenets of reasoning” and what “reasoned inquiry” consists in. (The whole paragraph starting with “Rather than try to get down to first principles” proposes a popularity contest.) I’m apparently excluded from this select group. Anyhow, we already discussed reasons that appeal to ‘popularity’ and you agreed that these are not good reasons (https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/#comment-475723).
The second answer I see seems to suggest that the only alternative to positions (i)–(iv) is the equivalent of “interpretive tea leaf reading”. This is a straw man. I, and others in the prior thread, have continually told you that there are good reasons against (i)–(iv) in critical and continental philosophy, to take the most glaring examples. Why you refuse to engage with those reasons but continue appealing to straw tea-leafers I cannot divine.
Hi again, Bothered.
There is something special about the broad discipline of philosophy such that it involves branches that ask background questions about other branches.
For instance, normative ethics is a branch of philosophy, and it inquires into questions of what makes things right or wrong. But there are also questions about the nature of morality, moral judgment, etc., and these are covered under metaethics, which is its own branch.
None of this violates the rudimentary picture I have been spelling out. Normative ethicists dispute, for instance, whether what makes an action right or wrong can be reduced to the actual or anticipated consequences of that action. True, that inquiry presumes that actions can be right or wrong, and that there are actions at all. But that does not require the tipping of the scale toward certain answers to the normative ethical question under discussion. Moreover, no respectable normative ethicist would expect people to accept the existence of moral rightness or wrongness just because the existence of such things is presumed by much normative ethical inquiry. Instead, those who doubt whether moral rightness and wrongness exist can be directed to discussions and arguments in metaethics, where such things are not presumed. And so on.
Also, as you say, there is a domain of philosophy in which proper philosophical methods for the entire discipline can be argued out. That domain is sometimes called metaphilosophy. Once again, like any other legitimate area of inquiry, it does not presume answers to the questions it is meant to address.
You ask: “For the second, *more important*, question, what your view, on the above reconstruction, implies is that we have “philosophy” (defined by the presumed positions (i)–(iv)) and then we have other disciplines, such as “critical theory”, “continental theory”, which are not “philosophy” because they take as starting positions different answers to the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’. ”
Well, I’m certainly no expert on critical theory or continental theory. I’ve heard many conflicting things about what exactly they involve.
But what I can say is that if they employ a methodology that presumes the truth of matters on which it also claims to engage in respectable truth-seeking research, or if it does not require its participants to engage thoughtfully and in a genuinely fallibilistic spirit with objections and opposing arguments, or if it makes room for the shaming of people who question central dogmas, or if the discipline as a whole adopts or presumes an activist, partisan orientation, then they clearly cannot be doing philosophy or science properly.
Some people assure me that critical theory and continental philosophy are not guilty of any such sins. If they are right, then nothing I say here stands against those approaches.
My comments about interpretive tea reading are meant to point out that it would be awfully silly to insist that any method of inquiring into things is as good as any other: the interpretive tea reading case is a reductio against that extreme position. Naturally, there can be a range of steps between interpretive tea reading and proper philosophy/science. But in order to eliminate even interpretive tea reading from serious considerations, we need to agree that there are reasonable standards for what constitutes a truth-seeking discipline, and that not everything people will come up with meets those standards.
But, you keep asking me: why should I think that activism, or social pressure, and so on are illegitimate components of a methodology of sound inquiry?
I do keep pointing out that the reasons should be clear to most philosophers, etc., and the reason is that I’m not relying here on being able to explain this to absolutely everyone: at a certain point, I need to get on with other things. But I can make a start.
Consider, first of all, any truth-seeking inquiry that will be undertaken by other people, but whose outcome matters to you. In particular, you have a strong desire that the inquiry will discover the truth of the matter.
For instance, you could imagine that you are considering taking some medicine that could relieve some pretty bad illness, but you want to know whether it is effective and also whether it is likely to kill you. You definitely want to be able to rely on the inquirers to get to the truth about that.
Or perhaps someone has caused you harm and is threatening to cause worse harm still, and has now accused you of being the perpetrator. The matter is now going to trial, and you hope that the jury will discover the truth.
You get to choose the methodology you’d like the medical researchers or judge, lawyers, and jury to follow. Which would you choose of the following?
(a) A system in which everyone tries to fairly consider the evidence from both sides, and patiently consider all the best objections and counter-arguments that others raise. Then, people check everything over through open, reasoned deliberation before reaching a verdict.
(b) A system in which certain people are permitted to provide their opinions on the matter with authority, and others are shamed if they raise doubts.
(c) A system in which it is already presumed from the outset that the drug is safe or that it is dangerous, or that you are guilty or that you are not guilty, and the main point is to create arguments that help persuade people of that predetermined verdict.
I think you might find it useful to consider your reasons for preferring the option you do.
This seems bizarre to me. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with it, but that it is evidently open to abuse, and you seem not to acknowledge this. What I mean is that the above (specifically the part italicised and in bold) is exactly what cranks and charlatans regularly claim when seeking to undermine the credibility of a discipline. EU cranks in physics, for example, have long argued that physicists have stopped “doing science properly.” Anti-vaccine cranks in medicine accuse “the medical establishment” of adopting some sort of partisan orientation to vaccines and of not properly testing and validating these medicines. Cranks in archeology say they’ve been subject to “shaming” for “question[ing] central dogmas,” and so on. All of the above would likely hold that the disciplines whose credibility they are seeking to undermine have some reached some “predetermined verdict” and formulated some “central dogma” and have thus ceased “doing science properly” and abandoned a genuinely truth-seeking enterprise.
But we don’t take these claims seriously. Or at least, most of us don’t. Presumably because we understand that there are very good reasons that vaccine scientists have the “orientation” that they do, and it’s not because they are averse to truth-seeking inquiry; rather, their “orientation” is a result of that inquiry. Nevertheless, the language that extolls the virtues of truth-seeking inquiry can be co-opted to argue against such inquiry; it is open to abuse.
This is why Queer Philosopher’s (and others’) discussion of bad faith is crucial. Because, regardless of one’s adherence to the relevant methodological principles, bad faith actors can (and will) invoke the general language of those principles to insinuate or claim that the truth-seeking inquiry has not been followed “properly.” For if it had, it surely would have arrived at the truth of the Electric Universe, or of the dangers of vaccines, or of Atlantis and the Hollow Earth.
Claims that the medical establishment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, etc. have replaced science with political partisanship are advanced because, if those claims were right, then those bodies would not be properly scientific at all, and should lose all authority.
That’s one reason why those who are cranks try to make those accusations: if true, they would be serious enough to undermine the authority of the people they’re fighting against.
The most decisive way to respond to cranks who make these false accusations is to show that the scientific community/institution has done no such thing.
We’ve tried that, Justin. The “most decisive way” turns out to not be so decisive at all. Because cranks and charlatans are capable of amassing power regardless. We can’t afford to be naive of the political realities of the world we live in, and how the language of our disciplines can be co-opted, weaponised even, for ends that have little or nothing to do with the intellectual virtues being touted.
The point is a simple one: if people are expected to support or trust an institution (including the branches of academia) for being fair and truth-seeking, then it very obviously undermines that case for support or trust, and destroys the objectivity of the institution, if the institution is open to corruption through partisanship.
The fact that some people use dubious charges of corruption through partisanship to try to bring down legitimate institutions does nothing whatsoever to show that we expect all such institutions to be fair and objective in seeking the truth.
Nothing whatsoever.
I don’t think it has “nothing whatsoever” to do with it. I spelled out what I think it has to do with it:
That said, I think you have more-or-less just acknowledged this, albeit stopping short of suggesting how we should deal with the very real dangers this poses, which are very much live and unfolding before our eyes.
FWIW, at least in physics I don’t think the cranks are in bad faith in the way that term seems to be being used on this thread. The ones who write to me seem very sincerely committed to their views; insofar as they think physics is dogmatic or broken or whatever, it’s usually because they think that’s the only plausible reason their obviously correct views are being ignored.
There is, to be sure, something pathological about how physics cranks argue, and most physicists (and philosophers of physics) quickly learn how to spot the pathology and avoid wasting their time engaging with cranks. But I don’t think that pathology fits the “bad faith” framework. (I could try to offer a positive framework but it would be getting pretty far off topic so I’ll demur.)
I should add that we do need to keep open the serious possibility of a given subfield being politicized or otherwise disconnected from good epistemic practice – we can’t just avoid doing so because of fear of abuse. Soviet biology under Lysenko is a hopefully-uncontroversial example; the more doctrinaire bits of Chicago economics in the 1980s and 1990s comprise a more controversial one but with a different political valence from the ones that usually come up in these discussions; a number of philosophers of physics think string theory is an example, and while I strongly disagree with them, it isn’t an illegitimate view for them to take.
That’s an interesting point; with regard to physics, it seems to me that a few open discussions among physicists (and philosophers of physics) have been taken by cranks as an indication that they were right all along. That is to say, when some physicists have spoken of a crisis in this or that respect, cranks have seized upon that to say, “See! Vindication!” The open science community seems to be experiencing something similar, as cranks co-opt the language of open science to justify policy positions that are arguably not just inimical to the aims of open science but to science generally.
I’m not sure what we can do about it. Raising the general public’s awareness of how such abuses can arise might be a step in the right direction. But maybe that itself is useless without a deeper societal commitment to education, including philosophical and science education, that the current political environment is unlikely to allow. I’m a bit pessimistic about it; the convergence of hustle culture, grifting, crypto (and other) scams, influencer media, conspiracism, and scientific cranks, together with a collapse in trust in public institutions and and a disdain for the sort of sincerity needed to forge the political will to change things, creates conditions that will only make it harder to prioritise education as a public good as time goes on.
Justin:
“There is something special about the broad discipline of philosophy such that it involves branches that ask background questions about other branches.”
Given this special character of philosophy, the whole example of astronomy was moot. So you say that philosophy includes in its domain the “branch” metaphilosophy that asks and debates the question ‘what is “(proper) philosophical methodology”?’. It also includes the “branch” that starts from (i)–(iv), call it “philosophy (i)–(iv)”. I take it that you wouldn’t count philosophy (i)–(iv) as part of philosophy without there being good reasons for (i)–(iv). This is because, as you point out, “it would be awfully silly to insist that any method of inquiring into things is as good as any other”. And the only method of determining what a good method of inquiry is, per your own continually stated views, is to debate the arguments for and against these methodological positions.
Now, there are “branches” that, for good and long debated reasons, start from methodological positions that are different from (i)–(iv). (More on this below.) And, on your view now, they should be counted as falling in the domain of philosophy, just as philosophy (i)–(iv) does. The tea-leaf example was a straw man because it allowed you to ignore these reasons.
“Well, I’m certainly no expert on critical theory or continental theory. I’ve heard many conflicting things about what exactly they involve.”
To start with:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-phil-race/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disability-critical/
Coincidentally, I’ve just been reading this, which you might find particularly informative in the present context and full of many relevant references: https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article/99/1/1/8195949.
(As an aside: I used “critical theory” and “continental philosophy” because they, or “branches” of philosophy that stem from or draw from them, seem like obvious rivals to your view and they’ve been mentioned before. There is an interesting discussion to be had about the usefulness of such classifications. There is another interesting discussion to be had about why practitioners of some of these “branches” may identify or not as philosophers. But I don’t think we’ve reached a place where these discussions are possible.)
“But, you keep asking me: why should I think that activism, or social pressure, and so on are illegitimate components of a methodology of sound inquiry?
I do keep pointing out that the reasons should be clear to most philosophers, etc., and the reason is that I’m not relying here on being able to explain this to absolutely everyone: at a certain point, I need to get on with other things. But I can make a start.”
First, “this is obvious” is not a good argument.
Second, and this is why I said your definition of “activism” will become relevant, you seem to assume that the type of “inquiry” you favour does not involve “social pressure”. More on this below.
Third, and most importantly for now, since your dismissal of whole parts of philosophy (and their practitioners) rests on these until-now unstated reasons, you cannot in good philosophical faith leave them unstated. Otherwise, you are asserting the power to decide what is philosophical and what not by decree. Or, as you put it here, to provide your opinion “on the matter with authority”, shaming others as unphilosophical. Or, as you put it before (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476241), “to declare to others what is right and wrong, true or false in some domain, while nobody else even has the [philosophical] status to dispute your claims [since they’d better “sit the discussion out”], then the result cannot be philosophical inquiry even if you really had infallible access to indibitable knowledge (which would be quite remarkable in itself)”.
It is because of this assertion of power and authority that I have been pushing you to provide some justification for (i)–(iv). If there were no such blanket boundary-policing statements about who is a (“proper”) philosopher or what is (“proper”) philosophy, I imagine much of this cross-post exchange might not have occurred.
So I appreciate this current attempt to provide some justifications.
The sketch in favour of (i)–(iv) you provide now seems to rest on the following two methodological views, among others:
(a) Philosophy is like the (natural) sciences and so social facts are like natural facts, they are out there to be discovered by “inquiry”. Your continued use of analogies with the natural sciences and your description of how “truth” is discovered suggests this view.
(Let’s bracket the issue of whether this constitutes a plausible view of the natural sciences, or of natural facts, in the first place. Coincidentally, the ASSV article above should again be informative for you on this issue.)
(b) Importantly, “theoretical inquiry” is and can be separate from “practical action”. Your continued contrast between “activism” and “inquiry” suggests this view.
On what I take to be a charitable reading of what you say about “activism” vs “theoretical inquiry”, “activist inquiry” would be one that “presumes answers to the questions” addressed by that “inquiry”.
There is much to be said about this and a lot of it would depend on being more specific about (a) and (b). The only thing I’m trying to point out here is that the type of inquiry carried out by philosophy (i)–(iv), one committed to (a) and (b), very clearly presumes such answers (and so would violate your condition of “legitimate area of inquiry”).
It presumes answers because it excludes certain substantive types of answers.
For example, answers that deny the existence of any pre-theoretical “truth” about what constitutes categories such as class, gender, race, or ability; not to mention categories such as “proper inquirers” or “proper reasoners”. If such categories are constructed as part of “theoretical inquiry”, then also the social reality—call it “truth”—of who belongs to a certain class, for example, and who doesn’t, or who counts as a “proper inquirer” and who doesn’t, is not something that is discovered by “inquiry”; it is a product of it. This means that the practitioners of such “inquiry” are not innocent discoverers of “truth”—they participate in constructing it, together with the social reality in which people are positioned, often times coerced, to live in. The neat distinctin between “theoretical inquiry” and “action” collapses; and the question of who the practitioners of “inquiry” are, and what interests they might have, becomes important.
As I read these continued exchanges between you and me, and others here, much of the opposition comes from trying to make you see—*as legitimate*—answers that are sensitive to *who* the practitioners in an inquiry are. The above should clarify why, I believe, you continually have resisted to do so: your commitments in (a) and (b) rule out such answers and so presume, prior to “inquiry”, what type of answers can “legitimately” emerge from this “inquiry” or even be on the table.
Again, you are free to continue being committed to (a) and (b) and to continue believing you are engaging in a “legimate area of inquiry”. But you can’t do so while simultaneously holding that the latter doesn’t “presume answers” to the questions it poses.
/
“I think you might find it useful to consider your reasons for preferring the option you do.”
I don’t know which option you presume I prefer (or why you think I base my views on preferences).
But the construal of the three options is again a straw man. None of the “branches” of philosophy that have been at issue here deny option (a). But, of course, the devil is in the details: what constitutes “fairly” or “best objections”, who the “people” who do the “checking” are, and what constitutes “open, reasoned deliberation”.
These details are at issue here. A better set of options would disambiguate option (a) according to different conceptions of the terms above.
I appreciate the long response, Bothered, but I must admit that I’m getting lost in the forest of it all.
From what I gather, you’re trying to persuade me here that I ought to accept, as properly philosophical or scientific, areas of inquiry that put considerable weight on who the people are who make certain claims, arguments, or objections.
Could you please summarize (or produce for the first time) your reason for thinking this?
Justin:
Not quite what I wrote, see above.
Since you ignored pretty much all of what I wrote, you’ll have to help me help you.
Can you rephrase in your own words what *exactly* in the text above confuses you or you do not understand?
Then, I can begin to see how I can clarify it for you.
Bothered,
We really seem to be at a weird point now in which you’re wondering the equivalent of why I take it that food should be understood as something we eat, or why I take it that a statement is a sequence of words, or why I take it that animals are living things.
No doubt, people can use familiar terms in all sorts of ways. I’m sure that people call all sorts of things philosophy that are not philosophy.
I’m getting less and less out of these exchanges, I must admit. But if it’s important to you to try to make some case here for an alternative understanding of what philosophy is, it would be most helpful if you were to explain
Justin:
I’m certainly not here to make sure you get something out of anything.
I’m also certainly not here to defend a view of what “proper philosophy” is.
I’m here because *you* have been repeatedly, by decree, pronouncing what “proper philosophy” is. As well as *who* the “proper philosophers” are. (Amazingly, they include you, and exclude those you disagree with.)
I have been trying to get to some common ground by unrooting the assumptions about “science”, “truth”, “philosophy” that drive these views.
They’re stated here: https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476403.
I’m still waiting for you to actually address this post. You continue to ignore it.
I’ll wait till you’re ready and have had the time to digest it.
Again, I found it incoherent, I’m afraid.
And again no single reason why: what *precisely* is incoherent? Can you articulate in words a lack of consistency you seem to perceive?
No. I didn’t understand the point of the thing at all. It wasn’t coherent in certain points and incoherent at others. I’ve explained this. I’ve invited you to summarize your point. This is far too much to expect of another human being in this circumstance. Goodbye.
Hi Justin:
Ok, so, as I understand it, there is some lack of reading comprehension here. As I do with my students, let me break it down for you:
(1) You take philosophical inquiry to be aimed at discovering the truth.
(For example, “truth-seeking inquiry” is supposed to “discover the truth of the [respective] matter”: https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476379)
(2) When you say ‘discovering the truth’, that seems to imply that there is some truth that is out there *before* theoretical inquiry and that, importantly, theoretical inquiry aims to uncover but does not affect.
(3) The conception of ‘truth’ in (1) and (2) is just that: a conception (per Rawls). It is an understanding of ‘truth’, one among many, that presupposes the kind of answers that are acceptable as ‘truth-seeking’.
(4) Some ‘branches’, as you put it (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476379), of philosophy recognise a different conception of ‘truth’. Namely, that ‘truth’ is not prior to theoretical inquiry but a *product* of theoretical inquiry (see the references here: https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476379). For example, what ‘class’ means and *is* is not given by ‘nature’, prior to any theoretical inquiry, but a construction that is specific to a given historical and social milieu.
(To give one rough example: What is the ‘truth’ with respect to what ‘class’ is, and hence with respect to what kind of ‘class’ a specific individual falls into? David Ricardo, say, partitioned society into ‘landowners’ and ‘labourers’, while Marx partitioned society into ‘capitalists’ and ‘labourers’. None of these conceptions of ‘class’ is a ‘natural’ one (in the sense of ‘pre-theoretical’). They are specific to the historical and socio-economic conditions of the time.)
(5) Thus, you assume that ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ aims to discover some pre-theoretical truth (per (1)–(2)), which is not affected by inquiry.
(6) Your understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ (in (5)) thus presumes that ‘truth’ is not something that is a *product* of inquiry—any answers that starts from the assumption that ‘truth’ is, in fact, a *product* of inquiry will, according to you, count as ‘improper’.
(7) Point (6), in turn, implies that there are certain philosophical answers that *your* understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’—grounded in a specific conception of the ‘truth’ (spelled out in (2))—rules out. That is, your understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ assumes certain answers *prior to inquiry*.
(8) At the same time, you seem to define ‘activism’ as ‘inquiry’ that ‘assumes certain answers prior to inquiry’ (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476373).
(9) By (7) and (8), it follows that your own understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ is ‘activist’—by your own definition of ‘activism’, as given in (8).
Conclusion: You accuse others of ‘activism’—why? Because they assume (certain types of) answers prior to theoretical inquiry.
But: Per (9), this is precisely what you own understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ does—it assumes (certain types of) answers prior to theoretical inquiry.
(10) Hence, your own understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ is ‘activist’—per your own understanding as given in (8).
Which, in turn, means (if you are committed to any type of ‘consistency’ or ‘non-contradiction’) that you are accusing others of doing what you yourself are doing—namely, ‘activism’.
Is there anything you would like to revise with respect to your prior commitments above and/or do you want to disagree with anything of the above?
(Don’t forget to point out why.)
Thank you for this, Bothered. Now that you’ve set out your reasoning more clearly, I can see why I found it so confusing before: many of the steps (especially toward the end) are, alas, quite confused, and I think it was just too hard to piece together where everything was going wrong when I saw it all together.
I do have a bit of time now to respond.
(1) “You take philosophical inquiry to be aimed at discovering the truth.”
This one is correct. Good.
(2) “When you say ‘discovering the truth’, that seems to imply that there is some truth that is out there *before* theoretical inquiry and that, importantly, theoretical inquiry aims to uncover but does not affect.”
That one’s largely correct, but all I need to commit to here is that, whether or not theoretical inquiry somehow affects the truth it seeks in some or all cases, not all of the truth is affected by inquiry into it. (That’s a pretty mild thing for me to say, and it’s hard to imagine that any philosopher would deny it, since we all presumably learned in our first year of study of the problems we would otherwise be led into).
(3) “The conception of ‘truth’ in (1) and (2) is just that: a conception (per Rawls). It is an understanding of ‘truth’, one among many, that presupposes the kind of answers that are acceptable as ‘truth-seeking’.”
Well, you may of course say that this conception of truth is one among many, and it is no doubt the case that some people could use the term ‘truth’ to refer to a ham sandwich instead, or to all sorts of other things. We could also find people who use the word ‘science’ to refer to the process of saying whatever one’s wealthy backers pay us to say, and so on. But I’m not yet sure what alternative understanding of ‘truth’ you have in mind that doesn’t do clear violence to what we mean by it.
However, I doubt that this has much bearing on your main points, so maybe we should let this go.
(4) “Some ‘branches’, as you put it, of philosophy recognise a different conception of ‘truth’. Namely, that ‘truth’ is not prior to theoretical inquiry but a *product* of theoretical inquiry (see the references here). For example, what ‘class’ means and *is* is not given by ‘nature’, prior to any theoretical inquiry, but a construction that is specific to a given historical and social milieu.
(To give one rough example: What is the ‘truth’ with respect to what ‘class’ is, and hence with respect to what kind of ‘class’ a specific individual falls into? David Ricardo, say, partitioned society into ‘landowners’ and ‘labourers’, while Marx partitioned society into ‘capitalists’ and ‘labourers’. None of these conceptions of ‘class’ is a ‘natural’ one (in the sense of ‘pre-theoretical’). They are specific to the historical and socio-economic conditions of the time.)”
What you go on to use this for doesn’t seem to require it, so I don’t know how much I want to derail the conversation by focusing too much on it. But:
– There might be some conceptions of philosophy that see the truth as entirely something that we make up out of our minds, and that see the aim of philosophy as the creation of propaganda for some pre-determined purpose. But such things would not be branches of philosophy: they would be alternative models of philosophy (and, incidentally, models that I think are incorrect).
– Your examples don’t support what you are saying, though I’m not sure whether the whole thing matters. Yes, there are cases where we could use different terminologies to divide things up in different ways. But, to take your case of Ricardo and Marx, there are mind-independent facts that determine whether or not someone fits into a certain category, even if we are free to create the categories as we choose. Marx was more interested, as you say, in those who held capital than in those who held land, and the situation may have been different in Ricardo’s time than in Marx’s time. But once Marx sets out his definition of a capitalist, his designation of someone as a capitalist could be false, given his definition. The facts to which he applies his terms are not created by him. But again, I don’t know how profitable this side-path will be.
(5) “Thus, you assume that ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ aims to discover some pre-theoretical truth (per (1)–(2)), which is not affected by inquiry.“
Well, proper philosophical inquiry aims at discovering the truth about something, and the act of discovering the truth about something is not the same as creating that truth however you like. If that’s what you’re saying that I’m saying here, then that’s correct.
(6) “Your understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ (in (5)) thus presumes that ‘truth’ is not something that is a *product* of inquiry—any answers that starts from the assumption that ‘truth’ is, in fact, a *product* of inquiry will, according to you, count as ‘improper’.”
If you just mean what I said above, then yes.
(7) “Point (6), in turn, implies that there are certain philosophical answers that *your* understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’—grounded in a specific conception of the ‘truth’ (spelled out in (2))—rules out. That is, your understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ assumes certain answers *prior to inquiry*.”
At this point, you’re definitely going off the rails.
You say that there are certain philosophical answers that I am ruling out, prior to inquiry. That is false. I am, of course, ruling out certain things as proper philosophical methodology. But that is very different from ruling out an answer.
The question, “Which methodologies ought to be ruled out as inappropriate for philosophy?” is a meta-philosophical question that one can, and must, explore without presuming as a part of the very methodology of inquiry what the answer is. And indeed, I have never said or suggested that the methodology we must use for answering the question is what guarantees the answer I give.
(8) “At the same time, you seem to define ‘activism’ as ‘inquiry’ that ‘assumes certain answers prior to inquiry’.”
No: there are many manifestations of activism that involve no inquiry at all. For instance, disrupting traffic or screaming through a bullhorn can be used as activism, but they don’t inquire into anything.
(9) “By (7) and (8), it follows that your own understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ is ‘activist’—by your own definition of ‘activism’, as given in (8).”
False for several reasons, as I show above.
(10) “Hence, your own understanding of ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ is ‘activist’—per your own understanding as given in (8).”
Again: this does not follow, for the reasons I have already given.
This whole thing closely resembles a number of well-known pseudoscientists’ dodges: when called out for violating the principles of good science while passing off their work as scientific, the pseudoscientists try to make the accusation that all scientists are just as good or bad as any other, since all facts are constructed by researchers anyway, so it should be no big deal if some people engage in bad scientific practice: proper research practice is in the eye of the beholder, and so on.
These moves have appeal only to those with no serious interest in discovering the truth. But there are many such people, including all sorts of ideologues and snake oil salesmen, who never tire of trotting out these familiar moves.
Justin:
Thank you for engaging (somewhat) substantively, I shall ignore the rhetoric and focus on the argument.
Before addressing the substance of your response, I need to finally get a clear answer on this:
“(8) “At the same time, you seem to define ‘activism’ as ‘inquiry’ that ‘assumes certain answers prior to inquiry’.”
No: there are many manifestations of activism that involve no inquiry at all. For instance, disrupting traffic or screaming through a bullhorn can be used as activism, but they don’t inquire into anything.”
What is your understanding of ‘activism’ or, at the very least, of the *salient properties* that make some discourse X fall into the category ‘activism’ rather than the category ‘proper inquiry’?
I have been trying to obtain a concrete answer from you on this for some time. (I take it you have abandoned the MW dictionary definition.) I tried reconstructing such an understanding from what you write. You say now my reconstruction is mistaken. Please provide the correct understanding, so that I can respond to the rest constructively.
No, the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is just what I mean: “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action, especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.”
People engaged in an ostensible inquiry would be perverted into mere activism if, for instance, they were to decide in advance that the results of the ‘inquiry’ must support some cause they are committed to.
For instance: suppose that some people have decided that they want to eliminate traffic lights, for some reason. They are committed to that cause and would like to do whatever it takes to get rid of them. They realize that a major obstacle is the fact that they can’t just take the lights down: they have to convince the authorities to do that. So they resolve to put pressure on the authorities by producing convincing-sounding ‘studies’ that might persuade some of the authorities, and they also find ways to alter public opinion about traffic lights. One method is to write editorials that cite a bunch of phony studies. But where will these studies come from? They see that their best bet is to have them come out of universities, etc. So they raise money to get journals funded on ‘Traffic Light Studies’, and then use (manipulated) popular opinion to persuade university presidents to found units to ‘research’ different aspects of the traffic light question. Anyone who criticizes any of this, or who takes a pro-traffic-light view, is publicly reviled for doing so, and is certainly not welcome in Traffic Light Studies, which really operates as a sort of front for the traffic light movement. Everyone takes for granted that the name of the game in Traffic Light Studies is to produce pseudo-research that persuades people of the pre-established conclusion. The actual studies are data-mined in ways that create the impression that traffic lights are a great danger, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a psychopath, etc.
In this example, the people who have decided to abolish traffic lights are engaging in activism. They are following a doctrine that emphasizes the need to take vigorous action to further the goal of eliminating traffic lights. There is no sincere inquiry into the questions at hand: there is just the facade of inquiry.
True, those who do find evidence that really does support the view that traffic lights are dangerous can conduct their research with no interference. But nobody should trust that research, because even if its conclusions are true, we’re Gettierized: we would get the same sort of conclusion regardless of whether the research showed that or the opposite. The entire discipline I have described has been corrupted.
To bring it back to the context of some of the comments here, wouldn’t this mean inquiry that takes a position that, say, the subjects of the inquiry, have inherent dignity, is “activism”? Any field of study that deals with human subjects, and takes a position on how they ought to be treated throughout the inquiry, is “activism”?
I suppose you could argue it isn’t because your view pertains to the results. But in many fields the results are for the sake of the subjects? That is, the point of the inquiry is to produce results that benefit the subjects of it (e.g., improving their health and wellbeing).
More broadly, I’m not sure what it even means to say that an inquiry should be “neutral” on certain questions pertaining to the rights and dignity of the people whom the inquiry is about. I also can’t make sense of thinking that an inquiry should produce “results” but that we should take no view on how those results ought to be used to improve the lives of those that they are about. Or that we should be indifferent if someone decides to misuse the results to advocate for things that would harm the subjects of inquiry.
This sort of desperate “neutrality” strikes me as being, not only facile, but practically begging to be abused by those who do want to cause harm but need facial justification for why they’re doing what they’re doing.
I wonder if this reasoning could be applied to other eliminationist projects, ones targeting people? 🤔
Justin:
Thanks again for the substantive bits.
/
First, some important preliminaries.
Part of the reason why I thought you had abandoned the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition—above and beyond your own discussion of the issues—is because the definition is circular: it *defines* ‘activism’ through ‘action’ ( “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action, especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue”). So, in order to distinguish between ‘activist’ versus ‘(properly) philosophical discourse’ on the basis of this definition, one first needs to provide a distinction between ‘action’ and ‘discourse’. You have not provided such a distinction so far.
Another reason why I thought you had abandoned it is because your discussion so far has consistently provided an (implicit) definition that has the merit of not being circular. Your very second paragraph in the reply above (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476707) returns to this definition: those engaged in ‘activist discourse’ “decide in advance that the results of the ‘inquiry’ must support some cause they are committed to” (which, by the way, is basically the definition I reconstructed that you said was mistaken; I’m glad to see it wasn’t mistaken, after all, though it does need one addition—see below). This is similar to the second part of the Merriam-Webster definition (which, notice, is not the core of that definition but just a qualification: “especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue”).
To the extent that you have not provided an account of what distinguishes ‘action’ from ‘discourse’, I take it that the second part is the core of your understanding of ‘activism’.
So, going forward, I take it that you understand ‘activist discourse’ as follows:
ACTIVIST DISCOURSE: Discourse (i) whose practitioners have decided in advance which position(s) the result of the ‘discourse’ or ‘inquiry’ favours and (ii) this position(s) is something the practitioners are committed to.
So there are two parts to your understanding of ‘activist discourse’ (I’ll use ‘discourse’ and ‘inquiry’ interchangeably). The first part says that the positions of ‘activist discourse’ are decided in advance; the second part adds that these positions are not just any run-of-the-mill positions but ones that the ‘activists’ are committed to.
Let me know if you want to revise this definition. If you want to include ‘action’ in the definition, you need to say what distinguishes ‘action’ from ‘discourse’.
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With the above understanding of ‘activist discourse’ fixed, something that is at the core of our disagreement, I’ll address the substance of your reply above (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476698). I’ll again number the points for easier reference, including in case you do not understand or disagree with something—in such a case, please direct me to the point you do not understand or disagree with.
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For the sake of clarity, I’ll first respond to your points. Then, I’ll summarize the upshot for you.
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RESPONSES
(I) *This is the most important response.*
“(1) “You take philosophical inquiry to be aimed at discovering the truth.”
This one is correct. Good.
(2) “When you say ‘discovering the truth’, that seems to imply that there is some truth that is out there *before* theoretical inquiry and that, importantly, theoretical inquiry aims to uncover but does not affect.”
That one’s largely correct, but all I need to commit to here is that, whether or not theoretical inquiry somehow affects the truth it seeks in some or all cases, not all of the truth is affected by inquiry into it.”
This is a qualification that you haven’t offered so far and it is quite consequential. So what you concede now is:
(I.1) (Proper) philosophical inquiry aims at discovering the truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is, to take some specific examples).
(I.2) The truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is) consists of, at least, two parts: the part that might be affected by philosophical inquiry itself—call this the ‘inquiry-dependent part’—and the part that is not affected by philosophical inquiry—call this the ‘inquiry-independent part’.
You didn’t say which part is the relevant part in (I.1) but I take it that it is the inquiry-independent part—otherwise, the use of ‘discovering’ in (I.1), which you agreed to, would be misplaced. What you say here also supports this reading: “Well, proper philosophical inquiry aims at discovering the truth about something, and the act of discovering the truth about something is not the same as creating that truth however you like.” (The ‘however you like’ part is a straw man—see (III).)
So, (I.1) should be qualified to read:
(I.3) (Proper) philosophical inquiry aims at discovering the inquiry-independent part of the truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is).
This, in turn, implies:
(I.4) Inquiry that aims at, in some relevant respect, the inquiry-dependent part of the truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is) is not properly philosophical. It may be ‘activist’ if satisfies the two conditions in ACTIVIST DISCOURSE. Or it may not be ‘activist’ if it violates either, or both, of the conditions—but it would still not be ‘properly philosophical’.
Where our wires get crossed I think is with respect to an implicit assumption of (I.3). The implicit assumption seems to be that the *relevant* inquiry-independent part of the truth of some social category, such as ‘class’, is itself given pre-theoretically. This seems to be what you’re saying here:
“But, to take your case of Ricardo and Marx, there are mind-independent facts that determine whether or not someone fits into a certain category, even if we are free to create the categories as we choose.”
I don’t think we disagree significantly that, given a certain conception of X, there is something ‘out there’ that determines whether one fits the conception of X or not. (Happy to concede that there is something ‘out there’, I go about my daily business under this happy assumption.)
What we do disagree on, importantly, is that the above fails to acknowledge the following: *which* inquiry-independent (or ‘mind-independent’ if you wish) facts determine which category one fits into are themselves dependent on inquiry.
To see this, take ‘class’. If one were to partition classes on the basis of ownership over the means of production, then the relevant inquiry-independent/‘mind-independent’ facts that would determine class membership would be (lack of) ownership over the means of production. (Bracketing that ‘ownership’ itself is not pre-theoretically given.) If one were to partition classes on the basis of nobility, then the inquiry-independent facts would be (lack of) noble status. (Similar caveat.) The *relevant* inquiry-independent/‘mind-independent’ facts themselves *depend* on the inquiry-dependent part of the ‘truth’ about ‘class’ (how ‘class’ is conceptualized).
Or, take ‘biological sex’. If one were to define ‘biological sex’ on the basis of gametes, then the inquiry-independent facts that would determine sex membership would be gametes. If one were to define ‘biological sex’ on the basis of external organs, then the facts would be external organs. Either way, the *relevant* inquiry-independent facts that determine the ‘truth’ of one’s sex membership *depend* on the inquiry-dependent fact—how ‘sex’ is defined.
(This is just an example; clearly, both of these, as well as other, definitions of ‘sex’ are incomplete.)
A commitment to (I.3) has already taken the position that there exist some relevant inquiry-independent facts about, say, ‘class’. So, a commitment to (I.3) has already taken a position on what ‘proper’ or ‘legitimate’ philosophical answers to the question ‘what class one belongs to’ are: those answers that identify what kind of assets one owns or what kind of status one has, for example, depending on the conception.
Answers that do not identify such inquiry-independent facts would be deemed not properly philosophical, per (I.4). For example, answers that point out that there are, in fact, no ultimately inquiry-independent facts about ‘class’—for the reasons above—and so that the question ‘what class one belongs to’ can’t be answered without naturalizing this social category would be deemed not properly philosophical.
It is for this reason that your commitment to what ‘proper philosophical inquiry’ is, in (I.3), already assumes certain substantive answers to first-order questions as ‘proper’ answers and rules out as ‘improper’ other answers. Specifically, those committed to (I.3) have already decided in advance which positions inquiry favors—positions that identify some supposedly existing inquiry-independent facts. This means that those committed to (I.3) satisfy condition (i) of ACTIVIST DISCOURSE. I take it you are genuinely committed to (I.3)—the fervor with which you’ve tried to defend it testifies to that. Fine, but then, the discourse you’ve been engaged in satisfies condition (ii) of ACTIVIST DISCOURSE too.
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(II)
“Well, you may of course say that this conception of truth is one among many, and it is no doubt the case that some people could use the term ‘truth’ to refer to a ham sandwich instead, or to all sorts of other things. We could also find people who use the word ‘science’ to refer to the process of saying whatever one’s wealthy backers pay us to say, and so on. But I’m not yet sure what alternative understanding of ‘truth’ you have in mind that doesn’t do clear violence to what we mean by it.”
This is extremely uncharitable (I assume unintentionally so). Of course, the point is not about there being possibly infinitely many conceptions of truth, each created by merely uttering the words ‘truth is X [ham sandwich]’, ‘truth is Y [avocado sandwich]’, and so on. The point is about conceptions of truth that have been supported by reasons and motivated on the basis of these reasons (not to mention debated over lots of ink and bytes). These are not infinitely many and I already gave you one example in the very next paragraph you are responding to. More generally, the most debated ones, I guess, are summarized here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/. Your reply here amounts to misconstruing the claim ‘Your conception of truth is one among existing conceptions of truth that have been argued in the literature and motivated on the basis of reasons and arguments’ as ‘Any utterance of the form ‘truth is X’ counts as a conception of truth that—*absent* further reasons—should be taken just as seriously as any other conception that has been motivated with reasons and arguments’—this is uncharitable not only because of the misconstrual but also because this misconstrual leads you to engage with the straw-man ham-sandwich conception rather than with plausible existing conceptions. To engage with the latter, of course, you’d need to actually engage with the reasons supporting these conceptions and can’t reject them with a flippant ‘they’re ridiculous’.
(For what it’s worth, I agree that a gastronomical conception of truth is implausible—since we agree on this, I take it it’s not necessary to get into the reasons why this is so.)
(You also can’t just reject one of the SEP conceptions of truth, say, by pronouncing that it does ‘violence to what *we* mean by it’—I don’t know who ‘we’ is supposed to be here, we’ve already discussed, a number of times, the lack of merit of such appeals to some imagined ‘majority community’; an imagined community that, surprisingly, always seems to include you but exclude your opponents.)
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(III)
“– There might be some conceptions of philosophy that see the truth as entirely something that we make up out of our minds, and that see the aim of philosophy as the creation of propaganda for some pre-determined purpose. But such things would not be branches of philosophy: they would be alternative models of philosophy (and, incidentally, models that I think are incorrect).”
This is again extremely uncharitable (again, I assume unintentionally). Nowhere did I speak of ‘making up something out of our minds’. Instead, the paragraph you are responding to here speaks of the ‘truth’ of something (say, the ‘truth’ of what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is) being the product of theoretical inquiry, which is specific to a given historical and social milieu because inquiry itself unfolds in a historical and social milieu. The bit about ‘historical and social milieu’ is there for a reason.
Your use of the label ‘propaganda’ puts the cart before the horse because what merits this label is precisely what is at issue here. Using the label *prior* to having settled the issue is mere rhetoric.
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(IV)
“You say that there are certain philosophical answers that I am ruling out, prior to inquiry. That is false. I am, of course, ruling out certain things as proper philosophical methodology. But that is very different from ruling out an answer.”
See above, point (I). ‘Ruling out’ here, of course, refers to ‘ruling out as proper philosophical answers’ (the core of our, shall I say it, serious disagreement). Your claim here seems to rest on the following belief:
INDEPENDENCE: The (second-order) choice of what counts as ‘proper philosophical methodology’ does not rule out certain substantive answers to (first-order) questions as not ‘properly philosophical’.
In other words, what counts as a proper philosophical answer to a first-order question is independent of what counts as a proper answer to the second-order methodology question.
Point (I) above argues why this belief is mistaken.
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(V)
Your traffic lights example doesn’t match the definition of ‘activism’ you give just prior to it:
“People engaged in an ostensible inquiry would be perverted into mere activism if, for instance, they were to decide in advance that the results of the ‘inquiry’ must support some cause they are committed to.”
The traffic lights example slips in, so far as I can tell, an implicit condition for ‘activism’ that requires some sort of ‘collective action’. (Again, one point here is that you haven’t provided a distinction between ‘action’ and ‘discourse’; not to mention what would make an action ‘collective action’.)
If you want to claim that those engaged in ‘activist discourse’ are necessarily engaging in some ‘collective action’, then you need to say more.
And if you do want to claim this, then there is a lot of work you need to do to establish that those you’ve been arguing are engaging in ‘activist discourse’ are part of a ‘collective action’.
(Not to mention why then those who engage in anti-trans discourse are not also engaging in ‘activist discourse’.)
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UPSHOT
You’ve committed yourself to the following two claims.
(I.3) (Proper) philosophical inquiry aims at discovering the inquiry-independent part of the truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is).
(I.4) Inquiry that aims at, in some relevant respect, the inquiry-dependent part of the truth (of, say, what ‘class’ or ‘gender’ is) is not properly philosophical.
The commitment to (I.3) assumes in advance the position that ‘properly philosophical’ answers identify supposedly existing inquiry-independent facts. If this commitment is also held genuinely, then this type of discourse fits your definition of ‘activist discourse’.
Let me add one more point, which is important. Not only does the commitment to (I.3) assume in advance what answers—on questions of ‘class’, ‘gender’, etc.—are ‘properly philosophical’; it also assumes what *questions* are ‘properly philosophical’—only questions inquiring about these supposedly existing inquiry-independent facts. Questions aimed at the inquiry-dependent part of the ‘truth’ about such categories are, per (I.4), not ‘properly philosophical’.
Again, as I said before (https://dailynous.com/2025/07/08/the-personal-value-of-conversations-across-serious-disagreement-guest-post/#comment-476403), this should clarify your resistance to see as ‘legitimately philosophical’ the interventions by your interlocutors in this cross-post exchange. Your commitment to (I.3) has already assumed in advance that the type of answers *and* questions they provide on the topics discussed here are not ‘properly philosophical’.
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I add this final somewhat tangential note for your benefit, Justin, but also for that of anyone else reading this exchange.
The view in ACTIVIST DISCOURSE (particularly, condition (i)) is one that has been a subject of much debate in the literature. For those wishing to inquire further into the plausibility of the view, I provide the following references that I’m aware of (not working on this myself). Feel free to add to them if you know of further relevant pieces.
Whitcomb, Dennis. 2010. “Curiosity Was Framed”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81(3): 664–687.
Friedman, Jane. 2019. “Inquiry and Belief”. Nous 53(2): 296–315.
Archer, Avery. 2021. “The Aim of Inquiry”. Disputatio 13(61): 95–118.
Falbo, Arianna. 2024. “Inquiry for the Mistaken and Confused”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109(3): 962–985.
And for a survey:
Haziza, Eliran. 2023. “Norms of Inquiry”. Philosophy Compass 18(12): e12952.
Hi again, Bothered. I’ve got a few minutes now to respond to this.
I appreciate the engagement and the energy you’re putting into what you write here, but what I’m saying is really quite simple, and I can’t help but think that if you understood the simple sort of point I’m making, you’d have a hard time disagreeing with it. Many times now, you’ve written a long analysis that clearly aims to be a rigorous, airtight refutation of my position, but you are only edging by slow degrees each time toward what that position is. It seems to me that you already decided in advance that I must be wrong, for politicial reasons.
I think it will be much more efficient if you just consider things the other way around, with the political polarities reversed.
So: please imagine that exactly the opposite pressures have been brought to bear in the creation of an academic discipline or sub-discipline. Imagine, say, that universities create something called ‘Straight studies’, which is devoted to opposing tolerance for trans or non-heterosexual people. ‘Straight studies’ is created under pressure from anti-trans political activists, who gain political ascendancy. Far-left activists are driven out of the universities, but they are replaced by far-right activists. To keep their jobs, most professors and administrators stifle any concerns or doubts they have about Straight studies and the ideology behind it.
There are departments, conferences, and journals in ‘Straight studies’, but no room for dissenting voices. Anyone in ‘Straight studies’ who suggests that homosexual behavior is found in nature, or who argues for some limited tolerance for people who fail to conform to gender stereotypes, is publicly attacked and faces serious reputational harm within the profession, and often outside of the profession as well.
And so on.
Now, I would say that ‘Straight studies’, as I describe it, cannot possibly be an authoritative discipline. No doubt, the ‘Straight studies’ researchers would come up with some evidence and arguments that seems to support their views: it’s extremely easy to do that for any view, if your critics are either silenced or else silence themselves. But since what they produce does not emerge from a serious process of robust criticism of the sort that legitimizes an academic discipline, we should not give the general agreement of that discipline any weight at all. It would, by its partisan guiding principles, fail to be an academic discipline.
That’s not to say, of course, that we should dismiss the arguments of ‘Straight studies’ professors in that scenario: even if the discipline is compromised, the individual arguments that make up its discourse cannot be dismissed out of hand without committing an ad hominem fallacy. But it would not be proper for anyone to say (for example), “Are you not aware that homosexuality is unnatural? You’d really better do some reading in Straight studies and learn the facts.” ‘Straight studies’ should be taken as no more authoritative than Dianetics, young earth creationism, or any other pseudo-discipline that fails to follow the proper norms of inquiry.
So:
1. Do you agree with me that, if ‘Straight studies’ as I have described it came into being, the ‘findings’ of that purported discipline should be granted no epistemic authority?
2. If you do agree, then please explain, in your own words, why you would share my judgment on that matter.
I think the chances are quite good that, in answering these questions, you’ll start to articulate the general principles I’m relying on.
Justin:
Thanks for taking some time to read the response. I have to say it’s very difficult to keep assuming you’re engaging in good faith. Again, you didn’t address a single substantive point (so how am I to see that you “appreciate” the philosophical labour *others* put in for you?), waved to some imaginary political reasons, and introduced a completely new point.
The comment you responded to argued the following (in a lot of detail reconstructed from your writing): you go around accusing groups of people of not being proper philosophers on the basis of a criterion that makes you not a proper philosopher, by your own lights.
So far you haven’t argued against this so it’s hard not to continue believing you’re being contradictory, to say *the least*, when you go around labelling groups as not proper philosophers.
If there’re any “general principles” you’re willing to argue for that would disperse the contradiction, do spell them out explicitly.
I have (good, I believe) reasons for spending energy and intellectual labour on this, yes. If you were ineterested, you could just ask. Rather than make up some “political reasons”.
Feel free to offer substantive reasons if you disagree with the contradiction above. Absent that, I just take you not to be interested in doing proper philosophy, again, by your own lights: so, I mean, what are you doing then?
The amusing thing here is that what you describe as “straight studies” has been more-or-less the prevailing paradigm for thinking about sexual and gender diversity up until very recently. And anything seen to criticise or challenge it was often cast as an attack on “the proper norms of inquiry” itself, with the alleged attackers characterized primarily or even exclusively as “activists” whose “gay agenda” was “undermining science.” So it’s not so much a question of what we should do if what you call straight studies “came into being.” It already exists as a constellation of views, which amalgamate to a certain picture of sexual and gender diversity, one in which anything not straight was seen as lesser.
I agree with this broadly, Bothered. The only thing I’d add: That one says we should be careful, and fair, and objective does not mean that one is being any of those things. That one constantly extolls the virtues of “genuine philosophy” does not mean that one is doing genuine philosophy or, at any rate, doing it well. Appeals to intellectual virtues do not, in the end, amount to the demonstration or enactment of those virtues.
Such appeals can, however, bring about certain rhetorical effects. Entering a discussion to dispense advice on how its participants should be careful, and fair, and objective can (and is seemingly intended to) imply that they are not being careful, fair, or objective. Such advice may well be warranted, but only if it is shown to be, and it can only be shown to be by critical engagement on the substantive matters that the discussion is about, as well as an articulation of the standards by which participants’ contributions are being appraised.
Maybe somewhat tangential: On the methodological question, I mentioned elsewhere that I vaguely recall Gaita versus Singer talking about this in the abstract, but more focused on the question of what does the work in philosophy (specifically, in ethics) and what its methods actually are for or what they should be for—specifically, what role argument plays versus other factors that might lead to expansion of a person or persons moral imagination.
Felix:
Likewise agree with what you say here. As I mention above, it is these blanket statements of what is “proper”, “fair”, and, more to the point, what is “improper” and “unfair” that I find particularly problematic. You call what these statements imply with respect to one’s interlocutors rhetoric; I’d call it assertion of power; yours might be more charitable. Either way, it’s inconsistent with
“critical engagement on the substantive matters that the discussion is about, as well as an articulation of the standards by which participants’ contributions are being appraised”.
Thanks for the Gaita/Singer reference, I didn’t know about this exchange. I see they’ve held some live talks that don’t seem to be recorded, but there’s also some textual exchange, so I’ll look into that.
“Entering a discussion to dispense advice on how its participants should be careful, and fair, and objective can (and is seemingly intended to) imply that they are not being careful, fair, or objective.”
I think that the reasons for seeing philosophy and science this way are evident to most philosophers and scientists, on reflection. If they are not, there are many accessible books out there already that argue for it. I’m about to start writing one myself: three others are Hrishi Joshi’s _Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind_, Julia Galef’s _The Scout Mindset_, and Jonathan Rauch’s _The Constitution of Knowledge_ (which looks at the importance of nobody being able to have final authority in liberal science).
I don’t follow. I don’t see “philosophy and science this way” at all. In fact, it seems to me that most of those engaged in what I describe (in the text you quoted) aren’t actively working in philosophy or science or academia broadly. They’re more interested in doing podcasts than academic work. Because of “The DISC” or something.
You’re entitled to your opinion.
My worry is that after being dismissed, the individual would stop pursuing the project entirely or leave the field.
The individuals I’m thinking about would not say “Uh… really? You’re actually going to invalidate my lived experience here?” Instead; the conversation stops and the individual silences themselves or removes themselves entirely. This is my worry with personal experience – silencing.
And I’m talking about silencing doubts, which is at least as serious a problem if we’re trying to get at the truth in a fair manner — if we’re trying to do proper philosophy.
So, what solution do you propose to all this? You’re saying that some individuals want to advance a set of claims, and yet you’re saying that if any doubts are raised about the claimed experiences of those people, or about the causes of those experiences, the people advancing those claims will shut down and leave philosophy.
If some people tried this move on you, would you accept it? Take any view you find false, dubious or socially harmful. Imagine some people showing up and expressing that view, and saying in addition that it follows directly from their personal experience that the view is true. And then, whenever you raise any doubts about whether the thing allegedly experienced really happened just that way, or whether the view is really supported by the experience, these people just silently leave philosophy altogether after all their years of study(!), and then other people call you a jerk for having ‘invalidated’ their lived experience.
Would you buy that? Would you allow the view you take to be false, dubious, or socially harmful to get a free pass just because the proponents use these tactics, or because you sincerely believe that your doubt or disputation might be enough to make them leave philosophy?
If so, then you open the door to the entire discipline being overwhelmed by this tactic, which is far easier and more liberal than serious argumentation. All it takes to establish anything at all now is a sort of emotional blackmail: I tell you that the claim follows from my experience, and that my experience must be respected, and that if you don’t respect it, I’m leaving.
Your idea of “proper philosophy” seems to involve training people to be witless contrarians. You don’t need a philosophy degree for that.
Apparently, you aren’t satisfied that the hole you’ve dug yourself into is deep enough. Keep digging, then!
Speaking of!
Although I assume you didn’t get the philosophy degree for that.
I have a theory that philosophers are particularly susceptible to pathological contrarianism because they so familiar with positions coming in affirmation/denial pairs, that they think each position OUGHT to come in affirmation/denial pairs.
Here’s a real conversation:
-Here’s this thing that’s been missed in conversations in philosophy. (not appealing to personal experience in philosophizing – just a general comment).
-Advisor/Professional Philosopher/Grad Student/Etc. Response: “That’s not real” or “That’s not real philosophy” or “that’s not worth doing” or “Your project is meaningless”
Never once have I asserted that my own personal experience gives me a special privilege or that I must be respected. But, after hearing that my project is meaningless, I’m more likely (especially at the stage of grad school) leave the profession at large.
I’m not trying to undermine philosophy’s integrity. Nor give any instruction for the field. I’m just noting that there’s a double bind when doing personal philosophy.
It’s hard to know what to say about this, in the abstract. Some purported things are real, and some aren’t; not everything is real philosophy or worth doing; and some projects are meaningless. I can’t tell whether this is one of those cases.
I don’t yet see why this puts you in a double bind or even a single bind. It could be that someone is just doing you a favor by advising you to stop thinking that the project is worth pursuing. I can think of a couple times when I was a graduate student when someone did me that favor, and I’m grateful.
And now for something completely different: I have written a critical response to this “personal reflection” in a post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
You can find my BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post here: Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Barnes, Self-Importance, and Epistemic Oppression – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Hello Dr. Tremain,
I disagree with the reasoning you provide (in your linked response) to support your criticisms of Elizabeth Barnes’s post as “self-important” and “uninformed.”
1. You write:
“Why [is Barnes’s post] self-important? Because the very existence of the post is premised on the notion that Barnes is an authority with respect to disability and philosophical work on disability. Barnes evidently considers herself in this way, assuming that her alleged authoritative status with respect critical philosophical work on disability should render her professed respect for and friendship with Peter Singer highly controversial and should thus matter to the rest of us, should even trouble us to the point that we will seriously reconsider our own philosophical approaches and methods.”
In her post here, Barnes does not claim any authoritative stance on disability or philosophy of disability. She says that she “write[s] on philosophy of disability.” This is simply a descriptive (and indisputable) fact about one of the topics on which she writes. And, while she reflects on which sorts of conversation are better or worse for the quality of her philosophical work, I really don’t see her making (or saying anything that commits her to) any claims, anywhere in her post, about the absolute quality or authoritativeness of her work.
I also don’t see evidence in Barnes’s post that she assumes that her friendship with and respect for Peter Singer should be controversial or should matter to other philosophers. Rather, she writes: “people are often surprised to learn that [Singer] and I are on good terms, and that I have tremendous respect for him.” This is another purely descriptive claim: she’s reporting reactions that other people have, in fact, had, and have shared with her. So, clearly, Barnes’s respect for Singer is at least somewhat controversial, regardless of whether it should be.
Whether or not the controversy is justified, I think the fact that there is some controversy – even if just in the mild form of surprised reactions from people in Barnes’s life – is itself a reason for Barnes to write publicly about the thing she’s doing that’s controversial: namely, having respect for and maintaining a positive personal and intellectual relationship with Singer. The surprised reactions she’s received in the past give her some (of course defeasible) reason to believe that some readers of this post will not be antecedently inclined to see her positive relationship with Singer as a good thing. I don’t want to put words in Barnes’s mouth about the value/importance of her post. So I’m just speaking for myself when I say (unoriginally, sorry) that there’s a distinctive value in writing for an audience who (you have good reason to believe) will not agree with what you write. I’m also just speaking for myself when I say that Barnes’s reflection here on her experiences with Singer does matter to me. I think her post beautifully articulates the value of conversations across serious disagreement; it’s an important reminder to me to try to avoid intellectual complacency and the bad habit of caricaturing those I disagree with, which I also prey to; and as someone with a chronic and sometimes quite isolating disability, I was moved by Barnes’s story about her mentioning her diagnosis to Singer, and his response.
2. You write:
“[T]he uninformed nature of [Barnes’s] post is perhaps best crystallized in this remark:
The apparent humility of this (contestable) sentence is especially remarkable insofar as the claim effectively obscures and hence invalidates the work of many other disabled philosophers of disability who have variously and astutely documented the epistemic oppression, gaslighting, structural gaslighting, verbal assaults and slurs, condescension, testimonial injustice, and other forms of humiliation and degradation that disabled people in general and disabled philosophers in particular encounter when they position themselves as knowers in academic institutions, exchanges, and publications; doctors’ offices and other medical encounters; professional settings; business dealings; families; friendships; and other everyday social situations.”
The humiliation and degradation that disabled people encounter is real and significant and calls for major social and political remedy, and I’m very grateful to philosophers who shed light on it in their work. (Barnes is one of those philosophers, by the way. I don’t agree with everything she says in her work about disability and ableism, but I’ve learned a lot from it, and I believe it’s helped me think about those things more carefully, both as a philosopher and in my personal life.)
None of that is obscured or invalidated by Barnes’s observation that some people are reluctant to challenge what a disabled person says about disability. Indeed, assuming Barnes is right (as I think she is) about the personal and philosophical value of open disagreement, we might classify that reluctance as itself one way in which disabled people are sometimes treated unfairly in virtue of our being disabled. (I think this way of viewing it is compatible with respecting and sympathizing with the good intentions that might motivate the reluctance.) In any case, the well-meaning-reluctance-to-challenge that Barnes observes in some of her interlocutors is compatible with, and does not detract from the moral significance of, the egregious and multi-faceted ableism to which disabled people are subjected.
If you think I’ve misunderstood anything in Barnes’s post or in your response, I’d appreciate the opportunity to discuss it further.
I really enjoyed this, interesting piece I think…
Personally, Peter Singer is one of two contemporary or near contemporary philosophers I can think of who have produced a large, systematic and influential body of work which I admire, have enjoyed reading, and have learned from – while completely disagreeing with the basic premises of their positions and thus thinking they’re essentially wrong or not-even-wrong about almost everything.
(Other one – David Lewis)
Mea culpa!
Yesterday, in scrolling through the page, my mouse cursor flitted over a red icon, the little reporting flag. Because the icon was red, and not dormant gray, I (unreasonably?) suspected that I had accidentally reported the comment. And so I clicked to un-report the comment. But then the whole comment and a substantive responding comment disappeared!
Perhaps the timely disappearing was mere coincidence, or perhaps the comments disappeared just for me. But in case your contribution disappeared mysteriously, it might be my fault. I promise that it was an accident!
Also-the scroll over text for that icon is cut-off. It ends, “And please don”. What a cliffhanger! I suspect that the request was directed exactly at digital ne’er-do-wells like myself.
Terrific post. At a time of increasing divisions, polarization, and echo chambers, within our profession but also and especially within public opinion at large, one cannot emphasize enough how important it is to actually listen to our opponents and try to understand their reasons.