08 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Politics, Truth
Tags
academia, Charlie Kirk, democracy, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, pedagogy, Rebecca Tuvel, rights
Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill get this point clearly enough that they are worth quoting in full:
Continue reading25 Sunday Jan 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Economics, Flourishing, Humility, Politics, Truth
Tags
academia, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Barnes, expressive individualism, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, Noah Feldman, utilitarianism
Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.
On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!
Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.
Continue reading18 Sunday Jan 2026
Posted in Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation, Sex
Tags
academia, conservatism, gender, Martin Peterson, pedagogy, Plato, Republican Party, Roger Scruton, Saba Bazargan, Texas A&M University, Tommy Williams, United States, William F. Buckley
The Social Justice movement has been notorious for its intolerance to dissenting opinions, and has often reached high levels in university administrations. And of course such left-wing movements on race and gender have a long history of attacking “dead white males” – in contrast to those contemporary right-wingers who seek to “RETVRN” to a premodern West, stylizing it with a V to indicate their classical sympathies. So when a university orders a professor to remove Plato from his philosophy syllabus, surely that must be a woke thing. Right?
Nope!
Texas A&M University ordered the removal of Plato because he was too woke.
Continue reading30 Sunday Nov 2025
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Fear, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Politics
Tags
academia, Charles Mills, gender, identity, race, Rebecca Tuvel, Socrates
A couple years ago I wrote a post arguing that we should not be defined by biological categories. I stand by that post today. It focused on transgender (and did so before I came out as gender-fluid myself), but it also mentioned race: “I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are.”
Anyone who read that post could have come up with the reasonable question: well then, must you not also believe that we should allow transracialism alongside transgender? That people should be allowed to define their own race just as they define their own gender?
At the time I wrote the first post I would have refused to answer that question – for reasons that came down, in a word, to fear. I saw what happened to Rebecca Tuvel, who defended the idea of transracialism in a philosophy journal (Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy). After a smear campaign on Facebook and Twitter where Tuvel was accused of doing “violence”, more than 800 people signed an open letter demanding that the journal retract the article and publicly proclaim that publishing it was a “failure of judgement”. An associate editor immediately published an apology for publishing the article, followed by a spate of resignations that ultimately took the journal’s entire editorial staff.
Continue reading29 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Fear, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Politics
Tags
academia, Daily Nous, gender, identity, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Kathleen Stock, Willow Starr
Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently found myself embroiled in some of this controversy on Daily Nous, the main blog for philosophy as a profession.
I’ll start here by recapping the controversy to date, before turning to a response. There’s a new free zine out just launched, called Being Trans in Philosophy, which shares trans philosophers’ stories of their experiences. That’s not the controversial part: I think it’s great to give trans philosophers a dedicated space to tell their stories! I have no objection to the zine itself. What I objected to was this passage in the zine’s press release:
Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline.
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22 Sunday Jun 2025
When I described philosophy in my “Why Philosophy?” interview, I hadn’t intended my description to be controversial. Only when Céline Leboeuf gave the interview a title did I realize that it is.
Leboeuf entitled the interview “philosophy crosses boundaries”, which is a phrase that had just felt obvious to me when I wrote the interview answers. But when I saw that that was the title Leboeuf had picked, I suddenly realized that it isn’t. Many philosophers, I recalled, don’t think that way.
Continue reading11 Sunday May 2025
Tags
21st century, academia, Adam Rubenstein, Adolph Reed, Boston University, Democratic Socialists of America, gender, Google, Ibram X. Kendi, John Lansing, New York Times, NPR, race, technology, United States, Uri Berliner
A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.
There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing
declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
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27 Sunday Oct 2024
Posted in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"
Tags
academia, autobiography, Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Rawls, justice, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, trolley problem, utilitarianism
I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.
I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.
In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).
13 Sunday Oct 2024
The prominence of Ibram X. Kendi in American institutions takes a further harmful turn with his ignorance of, and indifference to, the complex lives of people who are neither black nor white. The most egregious example is this passage, asserted with his book’s characteristic absence of argument: “It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White.” (38)
I read those lines over multiple times and all I could think was:
What?
There’s no footnote, no further explanation. All Kendi gives you as reason to believe these statements is his say-so, as someone who is not “White”.
So, as someone who is also not “White” (by any standard actually in use), I am just as qualified as he is when I respond, from my own lived experience: these generalizations have no grounding in reality. They make no sense. They read like a fever dream.
Continue reading22 Sunday Sep 2024
Tags
academia, autobiography, Boston University, David Decosimo, Ibram X. Kendi, Northeastern University, pedagogy, race, United States
Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:
Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.
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