Opposing Orthodoxy about Heterodoxy
“Whenever I see people engaged in philosophical debate or argument, I want to see people trying to win. I like my philosophy adversarial, aggressive, combative, and even hostile. I think there are some good reasons for this approach… but I also think it’s more fun that way. And I’m not the only one. Friedrich Nietzsche once said one of the reasons Socrates was so popular among the high-born youth of Athens was that he introduced them to a new kind of competitive wrestling.”
[Gary Simmons, “Boom”]
Why not? For one thing, he doesn’t like “loyalty oaths”:
Heterodox Academy (hereinafter, HxA) is an academic advocacy group devoted to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education… If you aspire to team up with notable heroes of the campus free speech movement and declare that you too are HxA, you must go online, click a box, and thereby affirm the following statement. “I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement”. In other words, you need to take a loyalty oath.
But he also thinks this particular loyalty oath has a problem:
The problem is that “constructive disagreement”, as HxA understands and advocates for it, is inconsistent with open inquiry and undermines viewpoint diversity. That makes the HxA loyalty oath logically self-contradictory and the act of requiring people to take it self-defeating.
What does HxA mean by “constructive disagreement”? Veber shares the following, from the organization’s website:
The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic, and natural worlds. Try to imagine ways of integrating strong parts of an interlocutor’s positions into one’s own. Don’t just criticize, consider viable positive alternatives. Try to work out new possibilities, or practical steps that could be taken to address the problems under consideration. The corollary to this guidance is to avoid sarcasm, contempt, hostility, and snark. Generally target ideas rather than people. Do not attribute negative motives to people you disagree with as an attempt at dismissing or discrediting their views. Avoid hyperbole when describing perceived problems or (especially) one’s adversaries—for instance, do not analogize people to Stalin, Hitler/the Nazis, Mao, the antagonists of 1984, etc.
As noted above, Veber likes seeing philosophers who are out to win. But he also objects to the prohibitions on tone and to that “etc.” at the end, indicating “an open ended, and therefore infinite, and therefore infinitely abusable list of prohibited words and phrases.”
He objects to HxA Community Moderation Policy, which states, in part, that “Ad hominem attacks and threats will not be tolerated.” About this, Veber writes: “Ad hominem arguments are fallacious only when they are failures of relevance. And sometimes they’re not. [And] since relevance is highly contextual and itself subject to disagreement, sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a given ad hominem is fallacious.”
Veber opposes HxA’s injunction to “always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, ‘steel-man’ opponents rather than ‘straw-manning’ them)”:
I reject this also. If you disagree with me, I’d prefer you engage with what I actually said. To straw-man me is to distort what I said to make it easier to refute. But you can also distort by steel-manning. To say you should always steel-man me is to say everything I say should be filtered through your own opinion of what I should have said. But what I think and what you think I should think may be two very different things—especially if we are in a fundamental disagreement over some important matter. In a case like that, to steel-man is to paternalistically change the subject. And maybe you’re the one who’s out to lunch. So why not just listen to what I said and go after that? If I think I’m being mischaracterized, I can say so. If you think there’s a better view in the neighborhood of mine, you can tell me that and I can take it or leave it. And if you prefer to just criticize, I say go for it.
You can read Veber’s whole article here.
Discussion welcome. The comments policy, which is not a loyalty oath, is here.
(via Hollis Robbins)
Related: “The Purpose of a University / Negativity about Philosophers” and “The Problems with Philosophers: A Reply to Weinberg“
I think that the desire to “win” is the single biggest impediment there is to serious philosophical engagement. People fighting to win often do come up with good ideas, but it’s hard enough to hunt down the truth without being distracted by the goal of “winning” an argument. In fact, “winning” in philosophy should be when you give up one of your beliefs for a better one.
As you note, fighting to win is a font of good ideas. Fighting to win probably doesn’t help you or your opponent get to the truth, but it may well promote truth-finding for onlookers.
That’s how I read William James, Thomas Kuhn, and Philip Kitcher – things that make the participant more dug in can sometimes help promote the diversity of views available to third-parties, as well as the depth of evidence for and against these views. Eliminating these problems for the participants has the side effect of eliminating these benefits for third-parties.
But there is an important question of how widespread that “sometimes” is, and how much these situations also promote methods that tend to mislead third-parties, in addition to giving them a wider viewpoint diversity to encounter.
That’s a surprising reading of Kuhn in particular – we should discuss sometime!
Definitely!
Winning vs getting at the truth is a false dichotomy. But I appreciate your effort to try and defeat my position. As we say here in NC, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop fighting.
I’m really perplexed by the level of hostility and vitriol here. If you don’t agree with HxA’s core views, don’t join it! It’s not as if joining it brings you any particular career goods or is required for anything else.
I could set up the “Oxford is better than Cambridge” society, open it to all academics, and require them to tick a box saying “Oxford is better than Cambridge” as part of joining. Whether that would be a worthwhile thing to do depends on whether the definitional belief of the society is correct* and whether it’s actually worth organizing and campaigning on it** but at any rate there’s nothing coercive about it and calling it a ‘loyalty oath’ is strange.
*obviously yes.
**probably not.
Whoa, take it easy Wallace. Commands and exclamation points? Why do you have to be so aggressive? Very distracting to all us noble truth-seekers here on the Daily Nous comment thread. But it’s more like if the Oxford Is Superior Society makes members swear to that and to the claim that everybody’s equal. You say well don’t join then. I didn’t. So I guess you mean don’t criticize them either? I did, not because I’m after “career goods” but because inquiry is an interesting philosophical topic–another defect in your analogy.
I don’t know you, but I’d advise logging off and touching grass for bit. This is not a good look.
Come on, it was a joke. (I enjoyed, it, even if I still don’t agree with the underlying point)
Apologies — my joke/sarcasm detector must not be very reliable online.
YouTube video of the “Skeptics’ Panel” in which Weber presents his paper’s arguments at an HxA conference. Alice Dreger’s response begins around 33 minutes and Q&A features some piquant back and forth between them.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to call out how laughable HxA’s required statement of faith is. I mean that old bit from the “Life of Brian” where everyone says “I’m an individual” and “I’m unique” in unison and then hiss down the guy who disagrees encapsulates the absurdity of it doesn’t it? But let’s assume that the folks in the HxA are acting in good faith and this isn’t just the academic version of Bari Weiss’s grift (I’m not sure I really believe that but let’s do some steelmanning). The problem here is that, despite its popularity, what they recommend is a really dumb way of thinking about what inquiry looks like. Unlike Veber I don’t think a brutal emphasis on winning is the best way to find the truth. Some people do deserve a charitable reading, but the problem is that not everyone does. In fact, some people don’t deserve engagement at all. I’m sure some people will pretend to disagree with me, but you don’t not really. Does anyone in philosophy read say Thomas Carlyle or Robert Filmer anymore? Would anyone in their right mind want their students to waste time with those guys? Trying to steelman Filmer or Carlyle would be an even more egregious waste of time. To go with other fields would anyone want future biologists reading, much less steelmanning, Lysenko? Now of course that’s not to say that we should just ignore anyone who disagrees with us. As someone on the left I’ve learned quite a lot from wrestling with Nozick. Honestly much more than I have from Rawls or any of the more orthodox Rawlsians. But figuring who deserves engagement much less charity is a hard thing. And this holds for people who are trying to present what they see as the truth to you! Just ignoring them is an even better way to deal with out and out conmen. I mean does Jonathan Haidt think he not only has to listen to the car salesman’s spiel but plug in the weak points in his arguments? Does the same go for every “Nigerian prince” who emails him? All of which is to say that I’m going to continue to ignore so far as I can folks like Curtis Yarvin, that Stone Age Weirdo guy, and Cofnas. Whether they more like Carlyle or car salesmen engaging with them at all is in the best case a waste of my limited time on this Earth.
I haven’t read Carlyle, Lysenko, or Yarvin myself, and I don’t expect that there’s any value to reading them charitably. But if someone *does* find something of value in there, I’m open to their argument – and I expect that they’ll have to engage in a lot of steelmanning to find the bits of value and not get distracted by the sociocultural environments each of these people put their views out in the context of, and the tons of bad ideas they caked their putative good idea in as a result.
There are lots of people that are probably worth ignoring. But when not ignoring them, you’ll probably get the best value by engaging with their steel version, rather than what they actually wrote.
I don’t know that what we’re saying is really in contradiction. But I also don’t want to paper over what I suspect is a real disagreement between us. For one thing, I’ve seen deliberately and consciously uncharitable readings that I thought were actually quite good ways of engaging a philosopher. See for example Lucy Allais’s “Kant’s Racism.” I also have general worries about the principle of charity. I think there’s a real danger of sock puppetry when we try too hard to be charitable. Ryle’s silly attempt to read Plato as an ordinary language philosopher might be the best example of this I know of. I think Eric Schwitzgebel has had some interesting things to say about this danger with domesticating readings of Zhuangzi if memory serves in this vein.
But more to the point here I think there are a lot of contemporary figures that unlike say Plato or Kant don’t merit any engagement for their work on intellectual merits but are unavoidable due to political influence. I feel one could learn a lot more about these folks from one withering Isaac Chotiner interview than pages and pages and hours of the song and dance HxA wants. I mean Chotiner isn’t unfair or polemical to these guys but he certainly isn’t “steelmanning” them either.
‘I think there’s a real danger of sock puppetry when we try too hard to be charitable’
Some related notions I find to be problematic- ‘benefit of the doubt’ and ‘the presumption of good faith’.
If we dispense with the academic predisposition with whitewash the reprehensible by employing abstraction and various forms of professional deference, we can readily see that the rallying cry of the proponents of ‘heterodoxy’- which amounts to specious complaints of ‘Help, help, I’m being repressed! by those who wish to camouflage bigotry and unearned privilege- is only a form of special pleading to be taken seriously in the same university settings that have allowed diverse demographics to identify and oppose the bigotry and unearned privilege the proponents of ‘heterodoxy’ are seeking to re-establish and secure (in academia and the wider society).
That is, the proponents of ‘heterodoxy’, as the term commonly applied in academic philosophy (and political science), are acting in bad faith, and we need to cease extending them the benefit of the doubt.
One reason why treating people with more grace than you seem disposed to is prudent is that the same people might return the favor. On the other hand, if you start behaving like a hooligan, you erode the norms that support intelligible discussion, and incite a vicious cycle of hooliganism. Maybe you don’t want to have those discussions, but many people do. You don’t have to give people the benefit of the doubt but if you don’t you shouldn’t expect it from others.
Is the assumption here that they haven’t been given the benefit of the doubt to start with? Because I think that might be a fair criticism, if in fact they haven’t been given it to start with. However, it becomes unfair if it is insisted that “the benefit of the doubt” ought to apply as a permanent state—that, having already given them the benefit of the doubt, and having learned more than enough about their views to come to conclusions contrary to the assumptions made as a result of giving them the benefit of the doubt, we must continue giving them the benefit of the doubt, in perpetuity. I don’t see why it would be prudent or rational to ignore the evidence ongoingly given to us by an interlocutor in the course of discussing things with them—evidence that may well prompt a reappraisal of the initial assumptions we made by giving them the benefit of the doubt. The level of grace we give should be responsive to the realities before us. And while you might be right to say that we should start with a generous level of grace, giving people plenty of leeway and a great deal of the benefit of the doubt, it seems irrational to me to hold that that same level of grace must apply uniformly, even where new evidence indicates it may not be prudentially warranted.
I agree that one’s reasons to give people the benefit of the doubt can diminish. Ian has offered no evidence that they should, or that the presumption is defeated. He seemed to be saying we shouldn’t make such *presumptions*. That’s what I dispute.
‘I think there’s a real danger of sock puppetry when we try too hard to be charitable’
I don’t think you need to worry.
“Does anyone in philosophy read say Thomas Carlyle or Robert Filmer anymore?”
I haven’t read more than slight excerpts from Carlyle, though if I were a Mill scholar I might. I did read most of Filmer’s published work a little while back, because I’m interested in the history of political thought, and obviously an important bit of that, even if only as a target. I can say that lots of it is really boring, involves arguments that no serious philosopher would take at all seriously, and isn’t at all plausible, but I do think that, 1) reading it helped me understand what is going on in Locke (and, to a degree, Hobbes) better than I did before, and 2) plausibly helps me understand people who think a “patriarchal” leader is desirable a bit more. Given that there are a disturbingly larger number of such people today, and given that most of them don’t really make arguments, that can be useful.
I take your point and yes I was exaggerating. Without the hyperbole my point is that picking whom to engage with is as important is as important as any sort of set of rules about how to engage. I take it you’d fault someone who picked Filmer over Locke and Hobbes or Carlyle over Mill. And this bit about selecting good interlocutors is true even outside history. It’s possible some rando on Reddit might make brilliant argument about a hot topic in M and E but nonetheless it’d be malpractice to recommend that graduate students spend a bunch of time on Reddit just in case. No instead any competent advisor would give them a list of influential articles to start with and then go from there. Developing this judgement about what’s worth engaging with is honestly one of the big things we all develop in grad school. It’s just wild to see HxA and so many others ignoring that for some cartoon picture that doesn’t at all fit academic inquiry.
What is your basis for this allegation against HxA?
(I hope it’s not just the fact that you disagree with them.)
Well they claim they’re all for free speech. But what they’ve managed to achieve is to grease the skids for bad operators like Rufo who want to completely destroy any sort of free speech in academia. So are they just so completely inept they’ve accomplished the exact opposite of what they really do want to accomplish? Or are they grifters who are so bad at defending academic freedom and speech because that’s not really what they care about? The principle of charity is such a hard thing to apply sometimes!
(Tongue out of cheek I grant that some are sincere folks paying HxA dues and signing the loyalty oath. But the level of out and out distortion and even flat dishonesty in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book makes “It’s a grift” a pretty hard conclusion for me to avoid in that case.)
I mean, under that standard, don’t you end up defaulting to vast segments of higher education being grifters? After all, the most common way higher education figures in politics is as a bad example (look what these professors/students are doing on your dime!) or, I guess, as citations for things people already believe?
To take a non higher ed example, I really doubt when the National Museum of African American History and Culture displayed it’s ‘whiteness chart’ (African American Museum in DC Removes, Apologizes for Including “Whiteness” Chart on Its Website) that their goal was to grease the skids for increasing racial tensions and provide the canonical example that elite spaces are racist against white people (and racist generally). Maybe the answer really is just everyone is super inept/dumb/grifters. Or maybe the answer is that you can’t actually predict the consequences of your actions and so judging solely on them is…deeply silly.
From what I see here, Veber has roughly the attitude and emotional maturity of an edgy YouTube atheist. Perhaps if he’s unsatisfied with the standards of decorum imposed by Academia, he’d be happier working that circuit.
Every time I cross paths with him he seems extremely well-received. He is more collegial than the typical philosopher.
Ditto. I’ve only met him this past year, and he seems a very decent guy
Oh yeah? Well I heard he’s arrogant, condescending, naïve, and makes us all look real bad. https://dailynous.com/2022/03/04/the-purpose-university-negativity-philosophers/
Does sarcasm still have a place in our literal age?
Framing it as a bold rejection of membership is certainly a choice, but Veber has a point that the HxA crowd has a certain dogmatic moralism about them.
Regarding the legitimate topics for debate and the legitimate conduct therein, everybody draws some line somewhere. The HxA is essentially a free association of people who agree on where the line is. But then it is not an association of people advocating for universal viewpoint diversity. They reject out of hand some viewpoints on where the line is (such as Veber’s), and they do not welcome debate by someone who acts from a line drawn farther out.
Veber does well to point out the arbitrariness of this. If the pursuit of truth is the goal, why prohibit analogies to historical figures? Sometimes, these analogies are appropriate. The prohibition is motivated by something else than truth.
But he himself does not fare any better. He permits ad hominems only when they are relevant, but of course there could be disagreement on what is relevant. I wonder whether he’d entertain debate on where to draw the line with someone who draws it yet further out. Supposedly, calling Veber every name in the book would be a legitimate move in these debates.
Anyway, all this just seems to be a reductio of the whole “viewpoint diversity” thing. It is a view nobody actually holds. Everybody draws a line.
Heterodox Academy doesn’t forbid the expression of opinions like Veber’s.
It doesn’t forbid their expression when done according to their norms of civility. But I also did not claim otherwise.
I claimed that it rejects these opinions out of hand, which it does. It also forbids debating Veber’s opinion according to Veber’s norms (i.e. where name-calling is allowed).
For what it’s worth, I don’t think these are necessarily bad normative stances to have. Veber is only right that they reveal the whole “viewpoint diversity” thing to be a sham.
I think that having a diversity of viewpoints is sufficient for viewpoint diversity. Nobody needs to accept your viewpoint, nor do they need to let you act in the way your viewpoint says would be best.
Ok, so this is viewpoint diversity:
“You can have whatever opinion about ad hominems, but you cannot use them in debate.”
But this is compelled speech:
“You can have wahtever opinion about pronouns, but you have to use people’s preferred ones in debate.”
I still don’t see the consistent position.
FWIW I think both are good debate norms. Not using someone’s preferred pronouns in conversation or debate with them is just rudeness, not any kind of substantive statement. (At least in everyday or academic contexts; I’d feel differently about how a rape victim is allowed to refer to their alleged attacker in court, for instance.)
Maybe this is why you are not a member of the HxA either. Hey, a publication opportunity in Theory and Society.
*Does* HxA oppose using people’s preferred pronouns? I did a search of their site and couldn’t find anything, but I might have missed something.
I think they oppose *mandating* using preferred pronouns, and oppose *prohibiting* using dispreferred pronouns.
I could believe it. Do you have a link?
Twitter search is failing me. But a HxA chapter is hosting a debate between a trans person and a … prominent critic this week. I’m sure the issue will come up.
The sense in which the oath conflicts with viewpoint diversity is explained in the article.
Disagreements over relevance are acknowledged and addressed in the article.
There’d be a very funny response I could make to this, but I think Justin’s policy won’t let me.
“I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
“Regarding the legitimate topics for debate and the legitimate conduct therein, everybody draws some line somewhere. The HxA is essentially a free association of people who agree on where the line is. But then it is not an association of people advocating for universal viewpoint diversity. They reject out of hand some viewpoints on where the line is (such as Veber’s), and they do not welcome debate by someone who acts from a line drawn farther out.”
I don’t think that’s quite right (though I agree it’s subtle). If I advocate for viewpoint diversity and civil debate, that commits me to believing that some people with different views (against viewpoint diversity, for uncivil debate) are incorrect; but I don’t thereby contradict myself. I’d only contradict myself if I refused to civilly debate people who support uncivil debate, or if I used somebody’s criticisms of viewpoint diversity as a reason not to hire them. (But I wouldn’t contradict myself if I refused to debate someone because they said that they would debate uncivilly, or if I refused to hire someone who refused to agree to follow the institution’s viewpoint-diversity policy.)
(Similarly, I support a fairly unfettered right of academic freedom. So I support the academic-freedom rights of faculty to argue against academic freedom, but I don’t think they have a right to violate the academic freedom rights of others.)
You are right that there is no contradiction if one thinks that Veber is incorrect about what is required to reach truth.
The contradiction arises if Veber is correct on the point that sometimes unflattering comparisons with historical figures are important viewpoints for the purpose of reaching truth. To wit, if one agrees with Veber but still advocates for viewpoint diversity and a civility norm that rules out such comparisons, then one contradicts oneself.
I think Veber’s point is hard to avoid for the HxA because it is essentially analogous to some core HxA precepts. It is important to tell a truth, even if it is uncomfortable or offensive, goes the precept. There is no reason to exclude from this precept, say, verisimilar analogizing to historical horrors.
There’s a contradiction if *HxA thinks* that Veber is correct, which I take it they don’t. (I think your ‘to wit’ point is in agreement with this.)
If they’re just wrong about what is required to reach truth, then it’s a fairly graceful failure of their framework, and one compatible with them changing their minds inasmuch as they are committed to being willing to have a civil debate as to whether debates should be civil, and to being persuadable that analogizing to historical horrors is bad provided that persuasion doesn’t involve HxA themselves being analogized to historical horrors. That looks a fairly low bar to clear (not that Veber clears it in his article).
Not quite — there is a contradiction if HxA *has endorsed principles* that entail that Veber is correct, regardless of whether they recognize that entailment (i.e. of whether they “think” Veber is correct).
This is getting into “let’s figure out deductive closure in the DN comments section” territory, but I think the qualification has to be made.
I think a good case can be made that they have endorsed such principles. That was the point of the third paragraph of my immediately preceding response.
This is probably just a matter of philosophical style (and at this point I’m pursuing the discussion because I think the style point is interesting in its own right rather than because I think it really matters for the OP).
Most (non-formalized) philosophical arguments involve a host of tacit premises, that are a mixture of normative, empirical and analytic (and where, at the risk of channelling Quine, the actually classification is blurry). In criticizing people’s views, you rarely get to an outright contradiction, but only to a conflict with tacit premises that can be denied… which can then lead to its own conflicts… and so on. I’d rather preserve ‘contradiction’ for cases where someone’s explicit premises really are deductively inconsistent (or perhaps: deductively inconsistent given really uncontroversial background premises).
What caught my attention here is that there really is risk of an outright contradiction in discussions of viewpoint diversity, academic freedom, etc – the sort that would arise if I said “academic freedom is good, and academics who disagree should be fired”. I had that more restrictive sense of contradiction in mind, and I don’t think HxA fall foul of it. But as I say, it might just be a style issue.
Perhaps as a mere matter of style, I see this a bit differently. (I also find this interesting and I agree that none of this matters to Veber, ultimately.)
A typical philosophical argument goes “Ps are Qs; x is a P; so x is a Q”. Often both major and minor premiss are made explicit. a typical challenge to such an argument is that “you deny that y is Q, but y is also a P”.
Insofar as “Ps are Qs” and “y is not a Q” were explicitly endorsed, and “y is a P” is not up for doubt, this is an outright contradiction. This matches your preferred sense of contradiction as well.
But of course the rebuttal of the challenge will not concede the contradiction. It will go by saying “ah yes, there was a tacit premise that I forgot to spell out; thank you for your help”. And the tacit premise is something like “except when the Ps are also Rs”. Here’s then the matter of style: I tend to see the statement of these additions not as eliciting something tacit that was hidden in the argument, but as a new thing created to restore consistency from inconsistency. I have reasons for this but they are paper-length.
In the concrete case at hand, I think we have an outright contradiction. HxA more or less explicitly says that everything that is conducive to finding the truth (Ps) ought to be allowed (Qs) (regardless of it being offensive). Veber points out that a bunch of things that the HxA prohibits (not Q) are conducive to finding truth (P).
I *think*, and I’m not fully confident of this, that the problem of that approach is that there’s lots of ambiguity about the meaning of terms in informal (even philosophical) argument, and part of what dialectic does is disambiguate and force people to be more specific about what they mean, in ways that your ‘tacit premise’ approach doesn’t always capture.
Consider:
HxA: everything that is conducive to truth ought to be allowed.
Critic: How about torturing someone to learn their credit card pin number?
HxA: obviously we don’t mean ‘conducive to learning the truth value of any arbitrary proposition’, we mean ‘learning the substantive truths that academia seeks’.
More interestingly:
HxA: everything that is conducive to truth ought to be allowed.
Critic: Surely there are some situations where incivility in debate is more truth-conducive than civility?
HxA: It might be on a specific instance, but the norm of civility is more truth-conducive than its absence, so preserving that norm is better (because more truth-conducive) in the long run, even if on a particular occasion it would be more truth-conducive to break it. And we’re concerned with what builds a truth-conducive academy, not just what’s truth-conducive in a single exchange.
Of course, that response allows a different critic to say (much as the more thoughtful critics of academic-freedom absolutism on DN threads say) that truth-conduciveness is *also* better served in the long run by excluding certain toxic view that pollute the epistemic landscape, and that if your mind is too open, your brain will fall out. I’m not actually disagreeing that there is a tension in HxA’s position! I’m just not convinced contradiction is the right way to analyze the dialectic.
Sorry if I was unclear, but I explicitly rejected the “tacit premise” account in favor of the “restore consistency from inconsistency” account.
Your first example strikes me as exemplifying the “tacit premise” account. The response to the objection seems to say that there was something in the argument all along that merely needed to be pointed out to resolve the objection.
Your “more interesting” reconstruction seems like an example of the “restore consistency” account. The response (“it might be on a specific instance…”) strikes me as a revisionary move that replaces an inconsistent premise with something else.
I think the tension in the HxA’s position is that it is simultaneously an organization that agitates against line-drawing and an organization that draws a lot of lines. The interesting question, I guess, is whether it draws any line in an outright contradictory manner.
The case that interests me particularly is the one I also put to Delon below. The HxA very forcefully advocates for the permissibility of discussing “offensive” positions, on the grounds that they might be true, and if they are false, then this will be revealed in debate. It equally forcefully advocates against the permissiblity of discussing whether some of the discussants of the “offensive” positions are bigots. But that strikes me as more than a mere tension.
I’m less opposed that you might guess to having difficult debates that do not pull punches. But then nobody should have to pull punches.
Yes, I think I slightly misread you; sorry, writing in haste.
I am not a professional philosopher (although much of my discretionary time is spent reading philosophy from philosophical traditions around the world), thus, perhaps not surprisingly, both sides of this debate rub me the wrong way, if only because I find academic philosophers often engaged in agonistic arguments that are directly or implicitly dismissive of what we might call the “art of conversation,” which can only be aspirational in the present political and cultural climate, at least in the U.S. There are historical exemplars of this aspirational art, and the “art of conversation” can be broadly (and perchance too loosely) defined and pursued as “an ideal vehicle for debate, dialogue and occasional deliberation conducted within the normative orbit of reason or reasonableness, equality or democratic sociability, and a communal or ethical sense and sensibility; all the while serving the ends of moral psychological autonomy.” But one virtue of this mode of philosophical discussion is that it has a chance of appealing to non-professional philosophers, in other words, it has qualities we might associate with what has been called (sometimes confusingly), “public philosophy.”
Here we might consider the skeletal structure of William Godwin’s (1756 –1836) utopian and “anarchist” ideal of a natural society, one which is fundamentally “discursive” or, better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society wherein advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and “argument” ensconced in conversations, with their implicit normative constraint and more explicit rules were the lifeblood of a radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability:
“The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a democratically participatory and deliberative discourse; furthermore, it artfully combines a sense of community or fraternity with individual moral and political autonomy: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.”
Another example of the aspirational practice of the “art of conversation” took place during the European Enlightenment largely in the French salons of the 17th and 18th centuries governed through the benevolent yet firm guidance of salonnières who enforced the norms of polite conversation:
“With the Enlightenment, the very way conversation was thought about changed; it no longer dealt only with the aesthetic preoccupations of a privileged elite but now addressed the basic problems of the new culture. The spoken word had to serve truth rather than merely provide entertainment. In eighteenth-century debate, writes Jean-Paul Sermain, ‘conversation was conceived as a group activity to further the advance of reason by offering an open and attentive method of inquiry into the best subjects and as solid reassurance of social cohesion, so as to strengthen concern for the public good.’ The great intellectual salons of the era—from the Marquise de Lambert’s to Mme Necker’s, by way of those of Mme de Tencin, Helvétius, the Baron d’Holbach, and Julie de Lespinasse—can be seen as so many possible variations of this unique, ambitious project.
The new responsibilities invested in conversation went hand in hand with the evolution of the idea of politesse, which alone made it possible for the esprit de société to be fully realized. Whether it was false or sincere, generous or egotistical, politesse had, at least in principle, introduced into a society founded on ‘rank’ a criterion of distinction and an assessment of merit that were independent of the established hierarchy. People could thus take part in worldly exchange on an equal footing, and as long as the discourse was regulated and solidarity was guaranteed, no other authority was required. When at the dawn of the eighteenth century politesse became the hallmark of the nation and was no longer the distinguishing mark of a gentleman, its pedagogic and moral aims became an integral part of civilization and progress.
As the touchstone of seventeenth-century politesse, conversation had adopted its rules in order to guarantee harmony and the free exchange of ideas. Having started life as an idealistic challenge, conversation had gradually developed a system of communication that, by entrusting itself exclusively to the respect for manners, made it possible for society to provide itself with its own forum, what David Gordon calls a ‘free audience “behind closed doors,”’ where it could express its own opinions. So private conversation made up for the lack of representative conversation, opening itself out to egalitarian dialogue and the confrontation of ideas. [….] For the philosophes who assimilated its code of behavior and subscribed to it fully, the art of conversation aimed not merely at promoting the Enlightenment and its popularity, but constituted the very dynamics of intellectual thought.” — Benedetta Craveri (Teresa Waugh, trans.) The Age of Conversation (The New York Review of Books, 2005): 357-358
There is a bit more here, which includes a list of suggested reading in both the letter and spirit of the art of conversation.
i suspect that despite being about as far apart as possible ideologically roughly the same number of commenters will have read godwin as have read carlyle, i.e. basically none.
‘HxA is self-contradictory’ is 100% correct and 100% missing the point, and I always roll my eyes at philosophers who feel compelled to smugly point out HxA’s failure to achieve the Platonic form of consistency. HxA is explicit there’s a problem that that is worth trying to fix or at least mitigate, namely, that academic inquiry and research have been compromised via insufficiently open inquiry, groupthink, and too much intolerance of disagreement. If you don’t think there is a problem to be solved, then fine, but ‘This group is only worth joining if they can come up with a philosophically unassaiable treatise on how the group and universities should work, and a solution that overcomes all arguments generated in response to Popper’s paradox of tolerance’ is simply not a reasonable standard to apply. Any shortcomings of things HxA have proposed, or which its members have said, also ought to be judged against other proposals to solve said problems, which, it should be kept mind, largely haven’t been working during the period that HxA has been around. If you want to point out argumentative flaws, congrats you’ve won 10000 philosophy points, but these unfortunately cannot be cashed in to fix the rightward populsit backlash that resulted (partly) from liberal institutional hegemony and intolerance, so maybe reconsider how much you value enforcing demands for philosophical rigor vs. not chopping down people who are attempting to improve things.
The trouble with contradictions is that they can’t be true. And HxA says truth’s the whole point. So, …
Yes, exactly. HxA isn’t a metaphysical system; it’s an attempt to change professional culture. The goal isn’t to produce a contradiction-free account of inquiry but to push back against the social and professional incentives that make disagreement costly in academia. Any attempt to formalize norms for open debate will look self-tensioned on paper, because “openness” and “constructiveness” are values that check each other in practice. That’s not hypocrisy; it’s what governing pluralism looks like. It’s not a logical problem; it’s a political one about managing pluralism inside a shared workspace. Pointing out “you’re not perfect” from the sidelines is a good example of why philosophy so often ends up talking past the problems of today’s society, and, honestly, why fewer and fewer people outside the field care what it has to say.
Whether political or logical, it is fair to point out hypocrisy. Perhaps it is especially fair for a political project.
(Please, nobody say “what hypocrisy?”. It was granted that there is self-contradiction.)
Well, I’m sorry, but hypocrisy and self-contradiction are not quite the same thing. We could grant that, in the current state of affairs, HxA cannot help but logically contradict itself by precluding some methods of inquiry or discussion, but that would be hypocritical only if it contradicted what they aspired to or prescribed. But it doesn’t. It’s in the service of what they want to model—as others point out above, in service of a culture change, and so on. If I want my classroom to be a space for free and open discussion then I have to shut down the obnoxious student who talks over everybody else, makes fun of their others’ positions, or needlessly derails the conversation to score cheap points. The shutting down may be in contradiction with the Platonic ideal of free and open discussion but it’s not hypocritical. In practice, it’s a necessary part of getting there.
If you consider changing the culture as a sui generis good, this might be so. But I supppose you profess some broader ideals that underwrite your moral position. Say, the search of truth, viewpoint diversity, what have you.
Hyprocrisy is a the contradiction between one’s professed ideal and ones actions. This is also the contradiction that was granted.
This has gotten very abstract, so let me make it concrete again. If HxA deems it acceptable to have civil debate even if the content of the debate is offensive to someone, then they must (on pain of hypocrisy) permit civil debates whose contents are offensive to them.
Specifically, if we can have debate on offensive positions, then we must also have debate on whether these positions themselves are bigoted, idiotic, or rehearsals of past wrongs. These are candidates for truth. And if in the service of truth, no punches should be pulled, then no punshes should be pulled.
It’s not hypocritical if the expression of such views would undermine the pursuit of their ideals. Moreover, nowhere does HxA discourage the expression of views offensive to them. They just want their members to be committed to the same ideal. What I do find hypocritical is wanting to join an organization whose principles and value you disapprove of. I’m no fan of the pledge members have to take (and I’m not a member), but I wouldn’t join if I didn’t endorse the content of the pledge. I don’t think I should be compelled to take the pledge, but I think they see it as a fairly innocuous commitment. For instance, it has none of the material implications that real loyalty oaths have on employment, say.
I think we are going to bottom out at a conceptual analysis of “hypocritical” which would likely be pointless.
But I do think if your ideal would be undermined by expressions of the ideal, then you need to find another ideal. Among the scant formal means we have to refute moral positions, this is one of the better ones.
You’re twisting my words. I thought you were saying that it would be hypocritical to prevent the expression of views inimical to the ideal of free expression; but these views are not expressions of the ideal, they’re against it! I never implied that expressions of the ideal could undermine the ideal; I implied that letting members reject the core mission of the organization from the inside would undermine it. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just wanting things to work. I don’t love Robert’s rules of order but they fulfill an important coordinating function and faculty meetings are not the place to dispute them. HxA is happy to hear people criticize them. They just want their members to be focused on other things than telling them they should be doing things differently.
Now, I get that organizations can benefit from welcoming more internal dissent, and I hope HxA does to some extent. I’m not convinced the pledge means they don’t.
We might be talking past each other. I did not take a stance on an organizations internal conduct.
Let me try once more to make this concrete. If your ideal is (a) that everything that is conducive to truth should be permitted in debate, then you cannot accept that (b) something is conducive to truth and (c) not permitted. That’s logic. That is the granted contradiction.
The proper reaction is to modify or retract the ideal. But once the contradiction is made manifest, it is hypocritical to continue to profess (a) while still prohibiting the thing from (b) and (c).
(You can dispute this meaning of hypocrisy of course, but I’m not interested in a semantic debate. I think my use matches the common meaning.)
But presumably they don’t think that the censors’ expression of the view that censorship is good is conducive to truth, so there’s no contradiction. It’s also woefully unclear how they even remotely censor the censors. Is this still about the pledge?
It is about Veber’s claims that some conduct that is expressly prohibited by HxA is conducive to finding the truth.
But what’s being disputed by HxA is precisely that these are conducing to finding the truth. I would also dispute that HxA is, with this statement about constructive disagreement, *prohibiting* such views. The statement reads to me like guidance towards healthy discussion, not firm rules the violation of which would immediately lead to consequences other than a tsk tsk.
You’re missing two key points here, and I think Nicolas gestures toward both. The first is the pragmatic logic of internal limits, which applies in both law and institutional governance. The second is the difference between an ideal and a normative framework designed to sustain that ideal in practice. Without limits, ideals remain abstractions rather than guides for action. A commitment to open inquiry, for instance, requires norms that preserve the space for it, which means excluding conduct that shuts it down. Calling that hypocrisy mistakes the practice of an ideal for its betrayal.
You can see the same logic in constitutional law, at least in my jurisdiction. Freedom of expression is a self-limiting right. It doesn’t protect forms of speech that undermine the conditions for its own exercise. That’s not hypocrisy; it’s an internal limit that keeps the ideal from collapsing in practice. These boundaries aren’t bright lines, since whether something falls within or outside the scope of the ideal is a contextual assessment of the ideal itself.
The constraints that emerge when ideals are applied in practice aren’t necessarily instances of hypocrisy or self-contradiction. They’re what allow the ideal to function in real institutions and are intrinsic to how ideals operate in practice. Much of philosophy’s public irrelevance comes from missing this point, from valuing internal coherence over practical consequence. Taking the impurity of an ideal in practice as a decisive criticism rather than a necessary feature is part of the reason it keeps making itself irrelevant.
Said ten times better than I could. Thank you.
I’ll respond to this and not Delon, since he endorses it.
I agree wholeheartedly. Lines must be drawn. But it is hypocritical to moralize against line-drawing qua line-drawing when other people do it while drawing a lot of lines yourself.
Sure, the HxA has a moral position on where the lines are to be drawn, and it is internally organized to promote this position. But the way that it does that is by arguing against line-drawing itself.
The problem with this whole area of debate is that nobody believes in viewpoint diversity without any qualifications. We all draw lines. And we’d all be better off (and better positioned to find a suitable compromise) if we could recognize this and have a productive conversation about where to draw these lines. The HxA is actively in the way of this better outcome.
You’re still missing the point. The problem isn’t line-drawing, but how internal limits, the intrinsic logic of an ideal, relate to the normative framework that puts that ideal into practice.
No I think you are missing the point. You say that some ideals are self-limiting. Sure.
My point is that it is hypocritical to allow oneself to implement a self-limiting ideal and then critique others, who implement the same ideal with another self-limitation, for self-limiting.
I’m somewhat reminded of van Fraassen’s notion of a stance. At least on the construal that Pragmatist offers, HxA isn’t so much advancing a set of propositional claims about viewpoint diversity as advocating a generally pro-attitude to it.
(A fairly throwaway thought, maybe not correct.)
What Veber complains about (that which he refuses to sign) is surely a doctrine rather than a stance. Maybe the more broad “being for viewpoint diversity” is a stance. If so, my complaint is that it is hypocritical to apply one’s stance to everything except one’s own doctrine.
If I recall this right, this exact kind of hypocrisy is what van Fraassen faults the empiricist dogmatists for.
I think QP put it very clearly both here and here.
I’m not as familiar with HxA so I’ll avoid commenting on them as an organization specifically and instead look to another example of how “heterodoxy” has been invoked. Brett Weinstein, for instance, talks of what is required to maintain “responsible heterodoxy,” implying that heterodoxy is not merely a straightforward description of a view’s position in the wider landscape of views, but a view (or set of views) in and of itself. And seemingly not merely a view with respect to how discourse should proceed; he articulates “responsible heterodoxy” in defence of Jordan Peterson and against a piece published about Peterson’s views, ironically, by HxA.
Applying QP’s analysis here, it should be clear what’s gone wrong? Weinstein has drawn a line. Elsewhere, he says or implies that no punches should be pulled; here, he balks when no punches are pulled; when serious consideration is given to whether someone’s position (Peterson’s, in this case) is bigoted or in some way morally contemptible—when people seriously ask whether that is true.
The ideal is invoked to reinforce that Weinstein, Peterson, and others of like mind should be allowed to pull no punches in the pursuit of truth; and it is abandoned (or bizarrely, invoked still but in a contorted form as “responsible heterodoxy”) to say that others must pull their punches; that their moves cannot similarly be understood as the pursuit of truth; that their inquiry carries no such legitimacy.
QP’s point about line-drawing is that we’d be better off acknowledging that exercising judgment is not optional. We do it and we have to do it. I’m not sure whether it becomes hypocrisy or a contradiction or something else, but it seems to me like bad faith (perhaps even unintentional bad faith) to invoke “heterodoxy” in an attempt to evade this. As above, it turns “heterodoxy” into something that isn’t a description of where one’s views sit in the wider landscape, nor does it turn into an ideal; instead, it becomes more a rhetorical tool for narrativizing about how one’s own inquiries are Bold and Daring Ventures in Seeking Truth Even If It Offends, while at the same time holding that those who counter (on the substance resulting from that venture) aren’t permitted to use that tool—they’d be “irresponsible” for it.
You’re both still treating this as a moral or logical question about hypocrisy or sincerity. The point isn’t about individual motives but about structure, about how an ideal sustains coherence through its own internal limits and the normative frameworks that give those limits force in practice. Motives aren’t irrelevant, but they’re not the level of analysis that explains how ideals function or persist. Philosophical habits of thought tend to flatten sociological and institutional dynamics into moral or logical categories, as if ideals were propositions to defend rather than practices sustained through norms, negotiation, and constraint. That’s why tension within an ideal isn’t a flaw in reasoning, it’s what keeps the ideal functional in real institutions. Calling that hypocrisy, intentional or not, just confuses a structural feature for a moral or logical lapse.
There is a certain recurring fixation on the purity of intentions (“bad faith”, “hypocrisy”, “grift”) that I find both perplexing coming from people who otherwise advocate for systemic change and irritating because, as you note, it’s distracting from the important issues. I guess Nietzsche was right again; religious thinking will not die so easily and will crop up in surprising places.
Yes, I’m aware there’s a certain ad hominem element to my comment. But since we’re probing people’s hearts…
What has hypocrisy to do with intent? It is moralizing about norms to which one’s own conduct does not conform.
Without knowing anything about a person’s attitudes to both the norms they purport to uphold and their conduct it seems hasty to talk hypocrisy. I can see pragmatic contradiction, I can see weakness of will, I can see failing to live up to a demanding ideal, I can see plenty of things that do not look to me like hypocrisy, but it seems like semantics at this point. I’m glad to hear you’re not impugning intentions.
Ah, I think I see our problem now. It is not the holding of an ideal (as a cognitive act or state) while falling short of the ideal that I object to. It is the moralizing (as a speech act) about an ideal that one falls short of that I object to.
This’ll end up pure semantics if you disagree, but someone who falls short of a difficult ideal, or is akratic about it, or whatever is not necessarily being hypocritical. But if he moralizes about the ideal, harshly judging others who are similarly falling short — that’s hypocrisy.
That sounds right. I’m not convinced HxA is *moralizing* all that much instead of drawing lines that are necessary to uphold the ideal in practice (I’m with Pragmatist here), but we’ve ironed out a large part of our disagreement, that’s good! Thanks for engaging.
I don’t care about motives. I didn’t say anything about motives. I do care about hypocrisy (moralizing one thing and doing another — not about motive). I find the implication strange that I shouldn’t.
Let me try to put this in a pragmatist key. “Where do we draw the line?” is a practical question. There’s a few ways we might answer it (debate, implicit agreement, trying out different lines and see how they work, etc).
For this practical matter, “viewpoint diversity” just isn’t a useful category to appeal to. The contention is among a bunch of different people with different views on what is included among the legitimate viewpoints. They are all for diversity within this legitimacy.
Saying to any of them that merely in virtue of drawing a line at all they are violating the ideal is not helpful for answering the question. But that’s the HxA approach.
We are simply talking past each other, I think. I am not at all talking about the ideal in the abstract, so far as there even is one. I am talking about its invocation or usage in actual discourse as a means to an end other than realization of the purported ideal. I think that’s also what QP is talking about; hence the invocation of examples to that end.
I am not sure whether to call it hypocrisy, contradiction, or bad faith. Despite my efforts to defuse the negative connotations each carries (by noting that it can perhaps be unintentional and done without malice), maybe those connotations are inescapable, given that both you and Nicholas have picked up on them.
I believe it can be reframed in terms of, as you put it, “a structural feature” rather than “a moral or logical lapse.” That is, where such “bad faith” occurs, it represents a structural defect in discourse, arising from an unwillingness to embrace the need to, and even the fact of, exercising judgment. Such discourse becomes structurally defective in that it is very unlikely to realize the purported ideal invoked or the good to which that ideal aims (truth). Put otherwise, it departs from the bold truth-seeking it claims to aspire to. Whatever it is a structural feature of then, it is not a structural feature of the discourse envisioned by the ideal.
Maybe that doesn’t convincingly remove the personal element. After all, if it becomes little more than a rhetorical tool, as described above, it’s a tool wielded by an arguer who finds some use in it, even if that use is only its rhetorical effect and not its bringing about the ideal being invoked—for which it does the opposite, if the analysis above holds. It becomes difficult then to not say that it’s the individual arguer whose bad faith is at issue; that it is a lapse to which he should attend.
Maybe it’s “heterodox” to make such charges, but if the ideal is to pull no punches, then, as QP points out, it’d seem oddly like special pleading to say that an arguer’s lapse—especially one that has the effect of taking the discourse further away from what the ideal aims at—cannot bear examination, whether with a view to explicating its structural (de)ffect in the discourse or with a view to encouraging the arguer to acknowledge their own line-drawing so that we can at least get on to the substance of why the lines are drawn the way they are.
I think you’re both still describing the micro-pragmatics of discourse, as if the issue were how individuals deploy ideals rhetorically or negotiate them in conversation. The question I’m raising is institutional: how ideals like open inquiry reproduce themselves through the norms, rules, and governance that make them possible. Those frameworks already embody forms of line-drawing; that’s what gives the ideal coherence rather than violating it. Treating this as a matter of rhetorical usage, procedural choice, or individual performance collapses the sociological level of analysis into moral psychology. Some philosophers find it hard to see that level because philosophy’s default grammar is individualist, even when it borrows the language of structure, and I think that’s what’s happening here.
Of course the issue is how individuals deploy ideals rhetorically! The HxA is an advocacy organization. Deploying ideals rhetorically is what they do.
Most of this sub-thread are missing the point Ed Teach is making. FTR, I liked Veber’s paper and think it makes a great point. But I also think that it’s not a bad thing for HxA to recommend a different approach to dealing with colleagues than what has come to be normal in many departments, such as accusing one’s colleague of being a white supremacist because they think assignments should due dates, or because they’re a social psychologist who wants to explore public perception of BLM (real examples btw). Having a faculty culture where every philosophical or policy disagreement is cashed out in for-us-or-against-us terms is not one that is conducive to free enquiry and truth-seeking. HxA is trying to get people to think about faculty culture and recommending that we not default to “oh, you must be a nazi” whenever someone has an outlying view. But that doesn’t mean that some people aren’t nazis, and this is the value in Veber’s critique (which, recall, HxA gave him floor time to advance). I think it can be simultaneously true that HxA is responding to a real problem with good suggestions _and_ that Veber is right to point out the underlying tension in their stance. Thinking about that tension is a good thing, esp for our field.
I was invited to join the society for open-minded people, but I said if they were really open-minded, they would accept closed-minded people. But then my more enlightened friend said that if they were even more open-minded, they would accept non-people. But then my even more enlightened friend said that if they were even more enlightened, they wouldn’t “accept” people as an action; everyone would already be a member. Then my most enlightened friend said that the whole idea of “accepting” people is itself close-minded.
We all then agree that philosophy should get more public funding.
Seems to me the issue might be resolved by paying attention to what one might mean by “winning” an argument. As we typically teach in a first-year intro to philosophy class, or critical thinking, there is “winning an argument” in a matter of factual sense: your interlocutor has had enough, and doesn’t want to keep arguing. Or, as in winning a legal argument, the judge (say) rules in your favour. Insofar as the judge has ruled in your favour, you “won”. But suppose your argument was a bad argument, or the judge is corrupt–your “winning” is a fact, but it is not a victory for reason. On the other hand, a normative sense of “winning an argument” would be your interlocutors agreeing that your reasons carry the day; that you have won because you have convinced them that you have the better argument, the better reasons. Or, at the very least, that you have good reasons that they currently do not have an answer to, although they might reserve judgement on the overall issue. This would be the sense in which the judge rules in favour of a legal argument because they find the reasons the more compelling.
It is only in the normative sense of “winning an argument” that “winning” is of any worth. Otherwise it is just debate as sport–which might be fun (not to me), but is merely persuasion without regard to quality of reasons.
And, it should also be evident that the normative sense of winning an argument is compatible with having as one’s aim, in a philosophical argument, to both “win” in the sense of persuading your interlocutors that you have the better reasons AND to learn from your opponents position and not merely gainsay their points. (As Monty Python’s famous Argument Sketch notes, merely gainsaying the other’s point is not an argument.) Philosophical inquiry that takes the form of dialectical argument has its greatest strength in that it is the attempt of interlocutors to determine who has the better reasons, in a way in which all participants’ reasons have equal claim to the title of the better reason, but in which the participants attempt to find out just who, in fact, does.
So, it is entirely compatible with any sense worth having of aiming to “win” a philosophical argument, that one should also seek to fully understand others’ arguments, incorporate their good reasons into one’s own, etc. The beauty and brilliance of philosophical dialogue is this unique practice of cooperative contestation, and it is foolish to dismiss either half of that formulation.
“If you aspire to team up with notable heroes of the campus free speech movement and declare that you too are HxA, you must go online, click a box, and thereby affirm the following statement. “I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement”. In other words, you need to take a loyalty oath.”
This is certainly not a loyalty oath, least of all not in any problematic (logical, pragmatic, or otherwise) sense of “loyalty oath” if one insists on calling it one.
Imagine a student raises his hand in PHIL 101 and asks for an example of a loyalty oath. Would you really cite this one as a clear case? I wouldn’t and would be shocked (or at least dumbfounded) if my colleagues did. I’d wonder what the bases for using this example would be.