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‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
Do you think it's possible to make the gender-critical/anti-trans philosophical arguments without being annoying and mean / having your book banned?
Byrne's book, as far as I can tell, was quite reasonable, kind, and philosophical.
Like, is it really worse than being a negative utilitarian or eliminative materialist?
Well, I suppose it depends on whether you're talking virtue ethics/deontology or consequentialism.
Because yeah, a lot of things that are 'the same' under virtue ethics or deontology, are extremely different under consequentialism.
Once speakers at national conventions are talking about 'eliminating' groups of people to wide applause, it does raise the stakes on discussing the ideas their rhetoric is drawing from.
Definitely that's not really fair to the people who care about those ideas as ideas rather than policy goals, and who don't support the policies or more extreme rhetoric of those speakers. As someone who is interested in some leftist ideas, trust me, that's a hurt I'm intimately familiar with.
If Byrne had said 'when push comes to shove, philosophy professors are largely utilitarians who are reluctant to promote ideas that they think will lead to real people being actively harmed', I'd have a lot more sympathy for his point and find it a lot more interesting to discuss. He didn't say that though, he said they were cowards who were afraid of being ostracized.
When you ask blanket questions like this, the only correct answer is 'of course it's possible, anything is possible.'
Is it likely?... well, let me say that I think there's quite a lot of adverse selection at play in the current political environment, with regards to what type of gender-critical writing aimed at mass popular audiences is likely to get picked up by publishers and catch enough attention for people to hear about it.
Basically, this topic has been mind-killed in the popular imagination by dint of becoming a political football, and it's no easier to have a civil and well-measured discussion about it in popular media outlets than it is to have one about gun control or Trump or critical race theory or etc. One side is not interested in reading anything that's at all critical of modern gender movements, the other side is not interested in hearing any criticism of them which is polite or well-intentioned.
We're talking about a popular media book for general audiences that a publisher picked up and got somewhat wide attention. No, I think it's very very unlikely that any piece of gender-critical writing could reach that position in the current political climate without being annoying and mean.
I have admittedly not read any excerpts from the book itself, but the linked article from Byrne should presumably be representative, and is quite feeble IMO. Starting with the standard 'The dictionary defines gender as' spiel and the long-since hacky 'identifying as an attack helicopter' bit (in this case a princess), going straight into equivocating between the words gender and sex with no acknowledgement as if the proposed difference between those two terms weren't the entire crux of the article, slipping in standard right-wing blood libel rhetoric about desistance and mutilating infants through the back door of 'not infrequently (estimates vary)' and 'let us imagine', etc.
It is certainly true that Byrne takes on the affect of a polite, kind, and reasonable philosopher who is 'just asking questions'. In the same way that Ben Shapiro takes on the affect of being a smart, rational, fact-driven intellectual, despite actually being a kind of dumb affect-driven political hack. What Byrne is actually talking about (at least in the linked article) is mostly the same semantic games and innuendo that other conservative talking heads have been pedaling for a decade at this point, said with a lot more words and the aesthetic layout of a logical proof, but not that much more substance. And as his actions have shown, he's more than happy to jump on the conservative 'I've-been-cancelled the-left-is-intolerant' fame-and-fortune tour that is a clear and persistent political cudgel of the right.
So, yeah. If you're used to reading anti-trans stuff from politically-motivated right-wing talking heads, Byrne is certainly one of the most polite and thoughtful and restrained of those available.
Is he an important and meaningful philosopher with anything academically rigorous or interesting to say? Do his ideas demand serious response on their own merits, outside of their political import? I certainly haven't seen anything yet that would indicate as much.
The implication was that under virtue ethics or deontology, negative utilitarianism or brute materialism imply that immediately ending the lives of several billion people is either neutral or good. While Alex is, at worst, playing a bunch of word games that add up to "does trans really make sense? hmmmm.".
This is just "Hitler Exists, so you can't discuss HBD". HBD remains true.
Except Walsh isn't really Hitler, and at any rate suppressing Byrne's ideas are, like, a comically inefficient method of actually preventing some sort of anti-trans political action. Walsh is still out there! Seriously, how does suppressing the book actually prevent anti-trans political action at all? Maybe suppressing Matt Walsh or @libsoftiktok would do that, but there's essentially zero consequentialist case for putting any effort into suppressing Byrne. Surely the streisand effect, that none of us would've heard of him if it weren't for this incident, entirely zeroes out whatever microscopic benefit it has.
And that's a big part of the whole criticism of 'the woke' - they seem to have incredibly distorted beliefs about how social cancellation and word-tabooing actually impact the world.
Also, what if there's actually something wrong with the pro-trans position, philisophically? For instance, what if trans identity has an idiosyncratic social or biochemical cause that could be fixed? I feel like the response to a government program to remove the Gay Chemical In The Water (imo much less likely than a social cause) would be very negative, but IMO it'd be justified. Or, what if trans women have - pre hormones - most of the innate psychological inclinations that men do? That's also, like, not something most progressives would be okay with saying. It is, as far as I can tell, true though. (And post-hormones it's still more of a mix).
As much so as 99% of existing philosophy professors.
-I take your point about the worse outcomes of embracing negative utilitarianism. My point was that utility calculations are how bad a consequence would be times how likely it is to happen. The odds that we elect a negative utilitarian and applaud as he launches the nukes are very close to the zero; the odds of politicians using rhetoric adjacent to Byrne's to justify bills that restrict the rights of trans people is 'its already happening.'
-I agree that surprising Byrne's book wouldn't help, but I don't even get the impression that's happening, just his publisher getting cold feet. I was focusing on his claim that academics refuse to take him seriously and engage with him in the public square; I do think that declining to publicly engage with people who want a platform for their ideas is meaningfully different from suppression, and can be one part of a balanced strategic response that is positive EV.
-Obviously the ideas do need to be discussed to see if we're missing anything important, and that does happen. That's different from public platforms for reheated memes. If any of the really important possibilities you raise were true, Byrne would not be the one to discover or discuss them, that's not his expertise or approach.
-99.999% of philosophy professors don't have a book or a wide public platform, and I don't think they're automatically obliged to one any more than Byrne is. My point remains that it's reasonable for people to platform and respond to you in proportion to how important and useful your arguments are, and Byrne joins millions of others in not reaching the very high bar needed to justify the type of attention and cooperation he is claiming to deserve.
Sure. It's still bad. I don't think they'd substantially engage with a counterfactual philosopher who makes good or provocative arguments. Which is the issue.
And a broader problem here is we're trying to keep potentially anti-trans philosophical ideas from spreading on the grounds that people will act in negative ways based on them. But, what if the current philosophical or scientific grounding for beliefs related to trans issues is somewhat incorrect? Then we're potentially both acting in harmful ways due to said misunderstandings, and preventing potential corrections to said misundrstandings from surfacing. Which is an issue.
Er, 'publishing a book' is an incredibly common thing for a philosophy professor to do. There are a ton of books, and academics don't have much else to do beyond write. Whether anyone other than you and your dozen friends who have their own books actually read it is a separate question.
After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.
That point being, almost everyone in the world, even most philosophy professors, never get a published book or a large public platform or widespread media attention with which to discuss and spread their ideas. Someone not getting that type of platform, even if they wish they had it and believe they deserve it, is absolutely the norm, the standard case, the null hypothesis. It takes a lot of something to overcome that barrier - merit, charisma, connections, etc. - and I don't see any of that from Byrne, such that we must imagine some conspiracy of silence and fear in order to explain why he's not more famous.
I think they would, although probably more in academic articles than in the public-facing media channels Byrne seems to want.
Again, regarding your point about the possibility that we're missing something important: I agree that this could happen, and it's important to have channels open to spot things like that.
I just maintain that Byrne is not putting forward anything, and does not really have the background or expertise, that could make him the one that would notice something like that. Nor is he pursuing it through the types of channels which someone with a genuinely new and important discovery would use, or where it would be possibly to explore such a finding with the necessary depth and scrutiny.
I do expect that the channels we'd need to discover something like that exist, and would be used if there were sufficiently strong evidence of something sufficiently important. I'm not saying there would be no pushback or inertia at all, unfortunately it's true that the political incentives around this issue make people skeptical of new findings that push one side's narratives, in the same way that people are skeptical of studies funded by corporations with a monetary interest in the result. But I do think if there were sufficient evidence, it would be picked up eventually.
I think it's way below 99%, too. As an exercise, I picked a random semi wellknown uni, picked a random phil professor off their list of professors (an asst. professor), and checked if they'd written a book - they had (The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality - Paperback).
I then picked a smaller local university, and checked a few of their professors. They, too, had each written a book.
Writing a book is, for a phil or humanities professor, a very common activity. Not a rarity at all.
Writing a book that gets a lot of attention, yes, that's a rarity.
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