As an American citizen, I am a free man! Nobody gets to tell me what I can or can’t do! I can make up my own mind and do as I please! Because, Freedom! Therefore, I should be free to harass or assault whoever I please for whatever reason I fancy without facing any consequences or criticism.
The absurdity of this argument is clear. In the Critical Thinking biz, we’d call this a reductio ad adsurdum, an argument that signals its own flaws through reaching a preposterous conclusion. This instance doesn’t proceed from false premises so much as from a faulty understanding of freedom.
And yet seemingly smart people like Elon Musk endorse exactly this line of argument when it comes to free speech. Never mind that many of the people who endorse this simple-minded free speech absolutism are blatantly hypocritical in their application of it. That inconsistency is a feature not a bug. As we are invited to get our knickers in a knot over censoring talk of DEI or climate change, we are distracted from the sloppy analysis of free speech the absolutist pays lip service to. The general effect is stupefying, which is a key part of how authoritarianism works. Keep people sufficiently confused and they will go along with just about anything.
So, let’s focus, people, focus! Let’s focus on just what freedom of speech might reasonably mean. This is not a question of defining words. Words are notoriously ambiguous, and we can often define them to suit our purposes. The issue here is one of conceptual analysis. We have some grasp on concepts of freedom, such as free speech. But that grasp is tenuous, which is to say that our understanding of freedom is unclear and requires some inquiry if we are to wield such concepts in an intelligent and ethical fashion. We can begin to clarify our conceptual understanding through thought experiments where we test proposed analyses and then weed out the bad analyses when they lead to absurd results.
Thought of in simple and absolute terms, freedom to do this or that tends to be self-defeating. I am free to move my body according to my will, yes, but most of us are much less free to move our bodies around if some of us are moving our bodies like Jake Paul in the octagon. Or to take another example, many people are enchanted with the idea of a free market, though any absolutely free market will soon collapse under the weight of fraud, extortion, insider dealing and such.
Markets need rules and regulations in order to function. And the salutary effect of these rules and regulations can only be realized with the cooperation of good faith participants, meaning businesspeople that adhere to high standards of honesty and integrity. Similarly, laws against assault and battery help to enhance our freedom to move our bodies about the surface of the planet. The effectiveness of these laws also depends on upholding social norms of basic decency and consideration towards others. When edgelords go around testing the boundaries of these liberties, they corrode liberty for the rest of us by undermining the basic norms we all depend on.
Similar reasoning applies in the case of free speech. We do lots of different things with words through speech. Sometimes we express our considered opinions, and this has great value for facilitating understanding and reaching reasonable compromises and accommodations. But we can also use words to demean, confuse, or assault others (yes, threatening speech meets the legal criteria for assault). These uses of words do not enhance liberty. To the contrary these forms of speech poison discourse and thereby undermine liberty.
John Stewart Mill provides a classic statement of the sort of liberty limiting principle that serves to enhance liberty overall in Chpt. 3 of On Liberty when he says, “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Of course, the analysis of liberty is hardly completed by incorporating this liberty limiting principle since we need to look into just what constitutes a nuisance. Mill is firm in denying that offensiveness limits liberty. The problem here is subjectivity. Some are offended by things others find benign. But then the problem here is with mere offensiveness. Sometimes people are offended by speech because it is genuinely harmful; for instance, if it belongs to a well-established tradition of rhetoric aimed at marginalization, as in the case of racist or sexist language. So, banning things like hate speech actually enhances freedom of speech overall.
Many people are struck by a sense of paradox at the idea that rules, regulations and norms might enhance rather than restrict liberty. Hopefully we’ve dispelled some of that here. A little conceptual analysis, testing our ways of understanding liberty through simple hypothetical cases, goes a long way towards a better understanding of freedom and the crucial role of rules and norms in sustaining and enhancing liberty.
I’ve been philosophically opposed to retribution for a good while, largely as a result of thinking about free will. I’ve come to see the urge for retribution as thinly veiled vengefulness. And I like to think of urge for revenge as a kind of after the fact fight or flight response. To quote the immigrant Russian Armenian tile-setter who helped me remodel my bathroom many years ago “When the fight is over, you stop swinging your arms.” I’ll explain the free will line shortly, but first a less involved line of argument.
The Socratic line
Thanks to Agnes Callard’s wonderful new book, Open Socrates, I’ve recently taken to the Socratic argument against vengeance and retribution. While the free will line of argument is metaphysical, the Socratic line is epistemic. Socrates thinks that retribution presumes a degree of ethical knowledge that people generally lack. Socrates is well known for the idea that “to know the good is to do the good.” On this view, bad action is always grounded in ignorance. This view is frequently dismissed with apparent cases of people doing bad when they know better. Callard explains these cases in terms of wavering conviction. So, when I eat that extra slice of pizza and earn myself a night of heartburn, this is because I temporarily judged the slice of pizza to be the better good. My unstable judgment is itself an indicator of ignorance. In this instance I haven’t fully come around to well-established knowledge about what is best for me. First, under the influence of appetites, I think I know the extra slice is best, then I later come to a contrary conviction.
To varying degrees, most of us shuttle back and forth between conflicting convictions and embrace varying levels of self-deception to paper over our inconsistencies. So, in the heat of indignation over some injustice I’ve suffered, I may abandon charitable understanding of others in favor of settling a score. Charitable understanding and score settling don’t really go together, but it is easy to temporarily forget this under the influence of what Callard calls our internal “savage commands.” The root of evil, on this view, is abandoning the inquisitive Socratic stance in favor of arrogantly and ignorantly taking ourselves to know more than we do about what is best.
None of this is to say we should give up on pursuing justice. Rather, intellectual humility counsels that we should pursue justice first through inquisitively trying to understand people (including ourselves), and then persuading (or being persuaded, which is often the kicker).
The Free Will line
A very common but poorly justified conviction has it that we are in control of our actions and that this is what it means to have free will. This view of free will that takes us to be in control in the sense that we could have willed for or against an action regardless of causal influences is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (no connection to libertarianism as a political philosophy). The justification for retributive punishment has always been predicated on the libertarian conception of free will. It is hard to see people deserve blame (or praise) for the things that they do if they don’t have the sort of control libertarian free will supposes.
The libertarian conception of free will has been a bone of philosophical contention since Descartes, who unsuccessfully argued in favor of libertarian free will by cleaving us in two, a fully determined material body and an undetermined spiritual mind (thus, Cartesian dualism). Descartes was grappling with the emerging mechanistic understanding of the world, one that continues to dominate our thinking. The successes of science, even 400 years ago, were suggesting that all physical events are the result of prior causes. This is the metaphysical view known as causal determinism. Since our bodily movements are physical events, the worry is that these too are ultimately causally determined beyond our control, since the causal chains of determining factors for the things we do extends back prior to our own deliberation and willing.
Newton’s physics was causally deterministic. Of course, Newton has been superseded by quantum physics which is indeterministic. Some have latched onto this as opening space for libertarian free will. However, quantum indeterminacies don’t put us in the driver’s seat, in firm control of our actions through libertarian free will. They merely render us governed mainly by causal factors along with some the random influence of quantum indeterminacies. Quantum indeterminacies just introduce undetermined elements to the causal matrix of the world. And the causal matrix remains barren ground for the sort of control we like to think free will can afford.
Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky has recently popularized the scientific case against libertarian free will in his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Philosophers around the world have been shaking their heads in dismay over this newfound “discovery” by philosophically untrained scientists. Sapolsky has nicely documented the contemporary scientific case for rejecting libertarian free will. The philosophical conversation, however, moved beyond this as far back as Hume, who outlined a different way to understand free will, one that is compatible with causal determinism. The reigning view among philosophers today is “compatibilism,” the view that we do have free will, but it’s probably not what you think it is. And properly understood, free will is compatible with causal determinism.
Compatibilism in the philosophy of free will is a very active area of research today. I won’t canvas the varying approaches and views in any detail here. But we can get a general idea of what many compatibilist approaches to free will aim to do by thinking about bicycle drive trains. My bike’s drive train is a fully causally determined system. The wheels of my bike are determined to turn or not based on my peddling or braking. Still, the wheels will turn freely, or not, depending on how the drive train is functioning. If the gears, bearings and chain are clean, well lubricated and free of corrosion, the mechanism will function freely, and the bike will roll smoothly. If the crank or wheel bearings are corroded, or if the chain is grimy or rusted, the bike’s drive train will not turn freely, and it will be a bear to ride. Most compatibilist conceptions of free will operate with this this notion of “free” as something like freely functioning. Compatibilist philosophers of free will then aim to explain just what it means for our minds to function freely in formulating our wills.
The notion of freedom at work here is not at odds with causation. But it is also not exactly a causal notion. The notion of freely functioning is not itself a causal factor. Rather it is a concept concerned with what it is for a causal process to function well in achieving certain ends. That is, free will belongs to the realm of normative, teleological concepts. Normative concepts are not concerned with how things are, for instance how they are caused. They are concerned with evaluative standards of how things should be. Moral concepts like right or wrong are normative. So are epistemic notions of rational belief and knowledge. Normativity can’t be analyzed in descriptive terms like causal explanations. The normative is teleological, or ends oriented. Teleological explanation doesn’t look back to prior causes, but forwards to ends and goals. Your reasons for acting are about the ends you aim to achieve. A broad range of concepts dealt with in philosophy are normative or teleological.
A short list of indispensable teleological concepts includes belief, desire, action (as opposed to mere behavior), reasons (for acting or for believing), rationality (again concerning action or belief), moral categories of right and wrong, all other sorts of goodness and badness, beauty, love, personhood, agency and meaning. Over the past century and a half or so, many philosophers have attempted to either reject these and other teleological concepts or reduce them to the causal. The attempt to reduce everything to what can be explained scientifically in causal terms is to try to get along without all of these; love meaning, morality, beauty, and even rationality.
It is only over the past few decades that philosophers have broadly begun to appreciate the untenably high cost of abandoning the teleological and the normative. Of course, there are plenty of notable philosophers who never fell for the 20th century scientistic fashion of relegating philosophy to the janitorial task of cleaning up the language of science. The Oxford philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foote, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch come to mind as early holdouts (See Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). But a broad revitalization of serious philosophical inquiry into the teleological and normative has unfolded just over the course of my own lifetime. Ethics and metaphysics are serious business again, and philosophers are far better at illuminating the teleological and the normative now than in earlier centuries, perhaps going all the way back to ancient Greece. I’d even go so far as to say that we are catching up with Aristotle, who recognized teleological explanation as its own thing distinct from causal explanation.
We have multiple ways of understanding the world and ourselves. Causal explanation is one, and progress on this front has been wildly successful over the past few centuries. It has been so successful that many intelligent people have been led to believe that the world as revealed by science is all there is to discover. But really? And as soon as we ask that question, we are back in the philosophical realm of metaphysics.
In spite of its recent dominance, the scientific/causal paradigm is just one of the indispensable frameworks we have for making sense of our world and ourselves. The teleological is another and it needs to be engaged on its own terms. Compatibilist free will belongs in the teleological realm. Our attempts to ignore the teleological and normative haven’t made these realms of understanding any less crucial and relevant to leading becoming human lives. Rejection of the teleological and normative has led some into nihilism and despair and others into relativism and narcissism, though I suspect these to be just different ways of falling into the same philosophical and spiritual holes. Alternatively, perhaps, love and beauty are as real as truth after all.
At least as far back as Descartes, we have made the mistake of intermingling the causal and teleological paradigms in the notion of Libertarian free will. But the causal and the teleological paradigms are incommensurable. The rationale for retributive punishment is based on the untenable attempt to straddle the teleological and causal. In this confused attempt to merge the causal and the teleological paradigms, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we can do good by doing bad. In retribution we “hold each other accountable” as if we were god-like unmoved movers, originating causes of things that we will. And we relish this grandiose sense of power, at least when are not being judged for our shortcomings. But then things can get pretty ugly when we would-be gods sit in judgement of each other. We can quickly lose sight of the preciousness of the fragile light of consciousness we all bear through the flux of forces beyond our control.
Last week we examined some problems with anti-realist views of morality: nihilism, the view that there are no moral truths and a range of views that take moral truths to be a matter of say so (whether God’s, the say so of cultures, or the say so of individuals). In spite of the philosophical problems we ran into, the idea that morality is a matter of say so or authority remains broadly popular. Part of the problem is surely that rather few people ever study ethics and think about the problems that views like DCT (Divine Command Theory) or CMR (Cultural Moral Relativism) raise. But there are other factors. We learn basic moral guidelines as a matter of authority. We are told to be honest and kind by our parents, teachers, churches, etc. When you learn something on the basis of someone’s say so it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume that say so is what makes it so. Until you consider the philosophical consequences anyway.
But the idea that morality is a matter of say so has straightforward logical consequences that are pretty unpalatable. Perhaps the central problem is that say so is arbitrary. Anything could be commanded by God or society. Indeed, many clearly morally awful things have been commanded under the authority of religious doctrine or social convention. So, the time has come or us to consider the alternative: that morality might be a ‘figure it out’ sort of thing rather than a ‘somebody gets to decide’ sort of thing.
If we are fully prepared to treat morality as something we can inquire into, then we need to remind ourselves of some key points about how inquiry works. As always in inquiry we start from a position of basic human fallibility. We each have our own limited grasp on the world, and our own individual experience doesn’t provide us with the full picture. This calls for humility, along with respect and tolerance for our fellow fallible inquirers. Hopefully, with this reminder, we can see that the view that there are moral truths does not fit well with dogmatic attitudes. People who think there are objective moral truths, and that they know what these are, may feel entitled to impose them on the rest of us. But the disrespect implicit in the imposing is a pretty good indicator that they are mistaken in thinking they know what the moral truths are.
Still, we require some starting point for inquiry. If there are moral truths and we can inquire into them, then we will require some starting point for inquiry, something like evidence. Lots of people find ‘say so’ views of morality appealing because they think we lack evidence in this realm. Perhaps we don’t have empirical evidence of quite the sort used in science. But then we all know how awful it feels to find that we might have done a bad thing. Perhaps this is a sort of evidence. Most of us are horrified at the idea of cruelty. This is a part of our experience, as much as observing an image under a microscope. Of course, this evidence is fallible (as are microscope observations). We might find some other explanation for our moral sense of approval for some things and disapproval for others. But we have a starting point for inquiry into morality in our moral intuitions and the scientist looking through a microscope can ask no more of what she observes empirically.
Lots of you will be worried about differences in people’s moral judgements. First, this presents no more difficulty for inquiry into morality than it does for inquiry into astronomy, say, or biology. The history of science is filled with differing interpretations of the evidence.
Beyond this, we should note that our moral intuitions and judgements more often agree than disagree, in spite of a handful of well-worn moral controversies. We all pretty much agree that lying, assault, rape, murder, etc. are wrong. We all pretty much agree that helping people in need is a good thing. Of course, the sociopaths among us may not agree, but that’s exactly why we take these unfortunates to suffer a pathology. We have little reason to doubt that some things are blue because some people are color-blind. The sociopath is in position similar to the color-blind person. This person is just morally blind. More generally, universal agreement is not required for inquiry into morality to proceed any more than it is required for inquiry into astronomy to proceed. Some of our initial perceptions will miss the mark.
Perhaps then, we are ready to dive in. We’ll be examining Utilitarianism and Respect for Person’s as theories of morally right action. We’ll want to consider how well they account for our moral intuitions and judgements, at least where these are widely shared. At the same time, the explanatory power of these theories may lead us to reevaluate other moral judgements and intuitions, widely shared or not. We’ll only get to scratch the surface of this very active branch of philosophical inquiry this week. But hopefully this introduction will give you some sense for how inquiry into morality proceeds.
People generally have reasons for believing the things they believe. Sometimes those are good reasons and sometimes not. When we believe something, we typically take our reasons to be good ones. It would be hard to sustain belief for reasons we know to be bad. Perhaps people sometimes do this, but the problems with this sort of willful thinking are apparent and won’t get much comment here. The more common problem occurs when people mistake bad reasons for good reasons yet remain reluctant to testing those reasons. This is a failure of intellectual courage.
Intellectual courage consists in being willing to examine the quality of our evidence and arguments. Intellectual courage is typically exercised in a social context. It involves submitting our views and reasoning to the scrutiny of others, embracing peer review in spite of the possibility of humbling results. Left to our own devices, we aren’t so likely to spot and correct the mistakes in our thinking. We wouldn’t think the way we do to begin with if we thought it was flawed. And confirmation bias is liable to highlight evidence and reasoning that confirms our prior ways of thinking. So, without peer review from others, we are likely to become entrenched in our opinions and the reasons that support these, whether or not these reasons are well founded.
But subjecting our opinions to peer review from people who see things differently can be a frightening proposition. We risk a good deal when we do so. Not only do we risk finding that we might be wrong about something, we also risk public discovery of this embarrassing state of affairs.
Courage generally is a willingness to take risks when the potential benefits warrant doing so. Acting courageously does not mean acting without fear. It means acting in full awareness of what is at stake, including the possibility of failure. Perhaps a person who is has developed courage through a long-standing practice of reasonable risk taking won’t be phased by fear. But people will generally have to face down lots of fear in getting to that point.
People who are very concerned about what others think may inflate the risk of others discovering they are wrong. Sometimes people have powerful reasons to be concerned about what others think. We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Conservative former congressman Adam Kinzinger describes this as the current situation for republican politicians when he remarked on a recent Atlantic podcast (Autocracy in America) that “many people would rather die than not belong.” And so, we have the spectacle of republican politicians who can’t admit that the last presidential election was fair, even when they know better. Intellectual courage appears to be off the table for people who care more about belonging than truth and find themselves in social situations where holding the right opinion is required for belonging. Intellectual courage can remain a big ask when holding the wrong opinion merely lowers your status slightly in the eyes of some others. This, I’d submit, is the basic dynamic of groupthink. When the group in question insists on orthodoxy, this dynamic will be intellectually oppressive. The rare person who insists on thinking independently and speaking her mind in spite of intellectually oppressive group dynamics does so at a very high price, as Adam Kinzinger might attest.
A healthier environment for exercising intellectual courage would be one where people can respect each other across differences of opinion. This isn’t quite what happens when people “agree to disagree” or when they dissolve disagreement by taking people to “have their own truth.” Demanding that others agree without is obviously disrespectful. But fencing off that part of another that doesn’t agree with you isn’t so much better. It’s a defensive maneuver which involves declining to understand the other. Respecting others does involve being open to reasonable disagreement. But disagreement is only reasonable when it is the result of reasoning together. Discovering disagreement should be a starting point for critical thinking aimed at greater understanding, not the occasion for a kind of truce or avoidance.
When I meet a philosopher I disagree with, I’m eager to understand why. This is how inquiry and research proceeds in philosophy. In trying to understand a view that differs from my current opinion I stand to learn about some new evidence or argument. The payoff for exercising intellectual courage is deepening my understanding of others and learning new things, sometimes learning from my own prior mistakes. Of course, philosophy is a pretty safe space for this kind of risk taking. Out in the real world we often encounter people who aren’t interested in understanding or being reasonable. So, it is up to us to cultivate community among critical thinkers.
We are fallible beings, and nobody likes to find they are in error. So, we will always have need of intellectual courage. But we can significantly lower the stakes and make it easier for people to exercise intellectual courage by seeking to understand differing points of view and making a shared project of reasonably evaluating our respective evidence and arguments. This is one of the key goals in teaching critical thinking.
I am constantly trying to get my students to slow their thinking down and give some thoughtful attention to how conclusions are reached, not just how they feel about the conclusions. Open-mindedness, as I understand it, is not being open to accepting or tolerating all manner of diverse ideas. There are some ideas we should not be open to because we already have compelling arguments against them. Instead, we should understand open mindedness as being open to fairly evaluating new arguments and evidence for ideas. So, let’s do that.
We’ve had some vigorous discussion on email in response to Dr. May’s recent message explaining “why the college’s leadership team and I have decided to exercise considerable restraint in making college wide public statements about external events that do not directly impact our educational mission.”
Dr May details the reasons for adopting this stance. These are worth paying attention to regardless of our feelings about the conclusions. But first, I think we’ve seen considerable distortion of the position adopted. Dr. May is not announcing a policy of institutional neutrality. He’s announcing one of “considerable restraint.” Were Bellevue to experience an event like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville a few years ago, it would be no violation of the stated policy to issue a statement denouncing this bigotry and the adverse impact of such an event on our diverse student body. Personally, I would expect the college to take a stand, and nothing Dr. May expressed the other day would be an obstacle to this. Reaction to Dr. May’s statement hasn’t favored clarity about the position he was announcing.
Reasons were offered in support of this policy. Whatever our feeling about the policy, these deserve to be evaluated on their own merits. Otherwise, we are reacting to something we don’t fully understand. We are not in a position to fairly evaluate an idea or an argument without doing our level best to understand the position first. This is the backbone of critical thinking. The whole point of open-mindedness, thoroughness and intellectual courage is to base our evaluation of ideas and arguments on sound understanding rather than emotion, favored ideology, or personal bias. This is not easy. People of all kinds and persuasions are prone to rush to judgement. But then we wind up with discord instead of discourse. We can do better. So, what are the reasons?
First Dr. May takes a central part of the mission of the college to be to foster and sustain an environment where everyone can “think critically, share ideas, and develop their own perspectives.” Putting the institution’s weight behind specific views is liable to stifle this. Even when the call is easy and righteous, say publicly condemning kitten torture, the weight of an institutional position communicates to students and other members of our community that some things are a matter of authority and power, not inquiry.
This rationale does not imply that the institution will now condone, say, expressions of white supremacy as we saw in Charlottesville. These expressions can by highly disruptive to the mission expressed above. People do not feel safe thinking critically and sharing their own ideas when these are likely to get shouted down by bigots. Perhaps this is why this rationale does not support “official neutrality,” but rather counsels “considerable restraint.”
Next, it is our responsibility “to teach students how to think about complex issues” that affect us all in different ways. This is certainly in the vein of the first reason, though with a more specific acknowledgement that we experience things in different and personal ways. This means it’s going to be hard for the college’s official statements to speak to people in univocal ways. The official line won’t be heard in the same way by all of us, and there is no anticipating just when or where the official line will land sideways (as it appears to have just the other day).
The institution is not a person. There is no room for dialogue with an institution. People who don’t take the official line in the spirit intended will have little opportunity to seek clarification or dialogue. So, here is one personal example that might clarify this aspect of the issue. Suppose the college adopted the official position that all events are to be opened with a land acknowledgement. This might meet with wide approval. Personally, I would not favor this. I often find these statements mildly offensive and patronizing. It does depend on just what is said and how. And it’s not that I hear anything false or derogatory in land acknowledgments. It’s simply that an acknowledgement that we are occupying the land of Native Americans isn’t a rent check. Will I feel safe if I’m speaking against official college policy? Should I feel safe now, regardless? We shall see.
Finally, Dr. May acknowledges the weight of the responsibility of “speaking on behalf of such a large and diverse community.” He goes on to express his concern that “Institutional statements on some matters can unintentionally exclude or alienate some members of our community.”
Most of us are aware of the recent events that have led many institutions to exercise greater caution on taking positions as an institution. Many colleges and universities took official positions against the killing of George Floyd and in support of BLM. More recently, different constituencies have demanded institutional support for opposing sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. On the one hand we have the long and ongoing history of antisemitism to contend with and on the other, the mass killing of civilians in Gaza by the State of Israel. What to do? I don’t think it is mere cowardice for the institution to decline to take a position in cases like this. Rather, declining to do so is a matter of supporting the role of this institution as an environment where diverse minded people can explore the complexities and think for themselves, hopefully trying to understand some diverse views along the way. The weight of the institution taking a side would tend to squash this. It is not for the institution to decide how we should view this conflict, it’s for us to figure out.
I encountered Dr. May in the free speech zone on campus this past spring as he watched a vigorous discussion between a few Christian supporters of Israel and a small group of students who were clearly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. The exchange was a bit heated, but peaceful enough for all parties to be heard. Were hearts and minds changed? Probably not. But people were demonstrating basic human respect in the context of deeply felt disagreement. Being able to do this at all, speak respectfully person to person with someone you might otherwise deem the enemy, affords us a path, perhaps narrow and slippery, to retaining our humanity and refraining from violence or disrespect. That in itself is a worthy outcome we should celebrate. It is something that can and should happen here.
The stated policy is not a permission slip for bigots to express bigotry around our campus. Bigotry will still face the criticism of many powerful voices on campus including faculty, staff and students. I do not think that we are so feeble as to require the bolstering of institutional authority in most cases. Dr. May has not closed the door to providing institutional support where the threat to our community is disruptive to its educational mission. But he is clearly prepared to weigh this against the potential for compromising our educational mission in support diverse voices being able to share our thoughts, think critically, and learn from each other, as opposed to merely yielding to the pronouncements of institutional authority.
My aim here is not to endorse May’s statement. I haven’t thought the matter through conclusively. But the conversation about Dr. May’s message so far has gone quite poorly. Participants have pretty much ignored the reasons offered in support of a policy of “considerable restraint.” Most have uncharitably in inaccurately interpreted this as a statement of “institutional neutrality.” And many have personalized this against Dr. May, while he is representing a collaborative effort with college leadership to support our educational mission. Perhaps we should take a breath.
Update (10/ 21/2024): Evaluation
A standard critical thinking model for dealing with arguments is the SEE model (State the argument, Explain the argument, Evaluate the argument). The post I sent out last week was mainly about stating and explaining the argument offered by administration for adopting a policy of “considerable restraint” in official communications. Perhaps my explanation of the argument sounded to some like an endorsement. Not so, as I indicated at the end.
We want to evaluate the best version of an argument. Otherwise, we are prone to commit the straw man fallacy, attacking a vulnerable weak statement of a position while ignoring its clearest, strongest expression. So, I aimed to illustrate the rationales for the considerable restraint policy with some cases where these rationales apply pretty well. Now, having exercised some charitable interpretation and, giving myself some time to sit with the argument and to contemplate some of the pushback, also with charity, I’m ready to engage in some admittedly fallible evaluation of the argument and policy.
The reasons for considerable restraint offered by Dr. May were given in terms of pretty abstract principles about the college’s educational mission. In these we see a vision of the college as fostering an environment where diverse voices can be heard, where critical thinking about issues is supported, and where students are at liberty to think for themselves and ultimately come to their own conclusions. These, roughly, are the premises that Dr. May and college leadership are arguing from.
In inquiry, evaluation of an argument is concerned with just two things: are its premises true and do they support the conclusion. But we should note at the outset that this is not inquiry. We are evaluating a bit of practical reasoning, reasoning about what to do (or, in this case, what policy to adopt). The goal here is not to establish something as true, but to provide reasons for acting in certain ways. So, our premises are not so much claims we can evaluate for truth as they are expressions of value. This doesn’t mean they are subjective. It simple means that in evaluating Dr. May’s argument we are going to be reflecting on what matters to BCs educational mission and how to support that. In evaluating a piece of practical reasoning, we still face two analogous steps, but these are about what’s important rather than what’s true. So here, we want to consider whether the values of free and open inquiry, Dr. May cited are the values that should guide our institutional policy. Perhaps there are others values that deserve similar priority. And then we want to consider whether the policy of considerable restraint best supports those values. So, we’ll take these steps in order.
Dr. May appealed to the traditional core values of a liberal arts education. That phrase has been understood in assorted ways at different times and places. I take a liberal arts education to be one aimed at liberating the mind. One that fosters the skills and inclinations to do the sort of thing I’m attempting to do here: weigh evidence and reasons slowly and carefully in ways that let us appreciate their merits, rather than simply reacting in ways that merely reflect and entrench our prior patterns of thought.
The fetters of the mind are more often internal than external. The mind is not as directly vulnerable to coercion and domination as the body is through physical force. This is not the deny the effects of propaganda and indoctrination. Nor the more typical skewing of thought as a result of social pressure or ego. Our thinking is subject to external pressures. But even these are soon internalized and become habits of thought we can’t easily correct without careful deliberate attention. Critical thinking is aimed at building skills and inclinations that can help to free us from the domination of our own mental habits of thought, whether our biases and mental foibles have roots in social factors or are a pretty much our own.
I won’t elaborate further, but I do see great educational values in the elements of a liberal arts education May grounded his argument in. It remains an open question whether, as an educational institution, there are further values we should uphold as on par with these core values of a liberal arts education, whether these might stand in conflict with the values May appealed to, or how they can be reconciled with the core values of a liberal arts education. I won’t try to adjudicate these issues here, but I’d love to see some thoughtful dialogue on these issues happen in our community.
Next step, do the core values of a liberal arts education, fully support the policy of considerable restraint. I’m beginning to have some doubts, thanks in good measure to some of the more thoughtful contributions to the conversation on the Diversity Caucus list. In my attempt to explain Dr. May’s argument, I did consider some concrete examples, but mainly to illuminate the abstract principles offered in support of considerable restraint, not so much to challenge them. Now, let’s consider whether we can accept Dr. May’s premises without accepting his conclusion. That is, can we endorse the core values of a liberal arts education he cites without endorsing the conclusion he draws, the policy of considerable restraint.
The principles offered might support restraint on taking sides on issues, particularly ones where some may disagree. Putting authority behind endorsement of what is true or false, good or bad, is what’s at issue here. That’s what risks quashing free and open inquiry. But what is at issue with something like recognizing Juneteenth isn’t the same. We have a holiday commemorating the freeing of slaves. The point of recognizing Juneteenth is not to take a stand on point of controversy. The facts are established. The point is to celebrate a good thing that really happened, the end of some people owning other people here in America. Celebrating that moment of justice isn’t going to undermine free an open inquiry on this campus. It is hard to see how the rationales offered for considerable restraint apply against a campus wide recognition of Juneteenth from the institutional level on down. If there is a conflict here, I’m not seeing it yet.
The source of much of the anger the administration has faced on this matter may be simply that the likely impact of the policy will be to voice less support for marginalized groups at the institutional level. Dr. May explicitly appealed to values of diversity and inclusion in the rationales for the considerable restraint policy. But I’m not yet seeing the conflict between these rationales and the equity piece, where we see leadership leading a deliberate effort to acknowledge and celebrate significant steps towards greater equality.
Update: 10/26
I sent a link to this post to Dr. May after the last update. He replied with some helpful comments and a few references which I’ll relate here. Some people have complained of a lack of transparency and communication with our current administration. I hope they will read this blog post (I’m trying to boost my hits and attract some sponsors. So, please Like and Subscribe).
Dr May says the policy he has adopted is “not a full retreat into the Kalven Report position.” The position of the Kalven Report is a classic statement of institutional neutrality on political and social issues and it has been the policy of The University of Chicago since the late ’60s. Dr May’s statement announces a policy of considerable restraint. So, for instance, May endorses my point above: “Were Bellevue to experience an event like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville a few years ago, it would be no violation of the stated policy to issue a statement denouncing this bigotry and the adverse impact of such an event on our diverse student body.”
Dr May aims to adopt a position closer to President Peñalver of Seattle University, in his statement on statements. President Peñalver summarizes his position in a recent issue of the Chronical of Higher Education which you will find quoted at the end of this post.
Peñalver’s contribution to the Chronicle describes a predicament faced by college presidents that Dr. May did not relate in his “considerable restraint” message. College presidents are frequently asked to make statements by various campus constituencies. The causes are generally worthy. But each request granted sets up an expectation that other worthy requests will also be granted. Refusal to grant some requests then leads petitioners to feel perhaps discriminated against, or perhaps that the college president just doesn’t care. The president that grants requests to make statements as a matter of routine risks turning their office into megaphone for campus groups with causes to advance. A college president may well feel personally inclined to support some or all of the causes that come to their door. But college president is a fiduciary role. The president’s role is to support the mission of the college. This calls for a measure of discretion that is often incompatible with a more activist role. In light of this fiduciary role, it could be an abuse of the power and authority of the president’s office to adopt positions on social or political matters.
There is power and authority in the voice of a college president. We should frankly acknowledge that parties who request statements from college presidents are seeking to harness that power and authority. Perhaps there are good reasons to do so in some cases. Many on this campus would argue that dismantling entrenched systemic injustices requires deploying countervailing power. I suspect that Dr May’s statement announcing a policy of considerable restraint in making public statements has led to some deeply felt disappointment that our college president might not feel that dismantling entrenched and systemic injustice is an appropriate use of his power and authority. I’m not sure this is the case. The policy of considerably restraint in making statements seems a rather thin data point for making that inference. Dr. May might feel that countervailing power is appropriate for dismantling systemic injustices, but that considerable restraint is called for in his role as college president reconciling the broader imperatives of justice with his role serving the educational mission of the college. This, I think, is what a closer reading of his statement of considerable restraint suggests. That statement is buried in our inboxes somewhere. Here it is again in full, followed by the previously mentioned quote from the Chronicle by the President of Seattle U:
Dear BC Community,
One of the beautiful parts of what makes Bellevue College the institution that it is are the people who study and work here. With about 100 languages spoken, multiple religions practiced, and countless cultures celebrated, our community is rich and vibrant. Open-access education brings people from all walks of life together under the shared purpose of learning. We are all here to teach and to learn together.
Because of this, we also recognize that Bellevue College is not a single voice. That is why the college’s leadership team and I have decided to exercise considerable restraint in making college-wide public statements about external events that do not directly impact our educational mission. This approach is based on several important considerations.
First, our mission is to foster an environment where every member of our community can think critically, share ideas, and develop their own perspectives. By refraining from taking a stance on national or world events, we allow space for the diverse voices of nearly 20,000 students, staff, and faculty to have their own views, unencumbered by a single, overarching institutional position.
Second, the events that shape our world – whether they be political, social, or environmental – are deeply personal, and they affect us all in different ways. As an academic institution, our responsibility is to teach students how to think about these complex issues. We are committed to providing learning opportunities for everyone to explore these issues and events, to share their perspectives, and come to their own conclusions.
Finally, speaking on behalf of such a large and diverse community is a great responsibility. While we may each feel great moral clarity about certain events, I believe that institutional statements on some matters can unintentionally exclude or alienate some members of our community. Instead, our focus will be on ensuring that Bellevue College remains a space where all voices can be heard, and where open dialogue and academic freedom are protected.
However, there will be times when I will speak on behalf of the college regarding issues that impact our educational mission or require us to reinforce our core values. As president, it is crucial for me to address these matters and reiterate our commitment to student success, equity, and fostering a safe, inclusive learning environment for all.
Bellevue College’s core values—student success, pluralism, collaboration, shared decision-making, creativity, and innovation—reflect our commitment to nurturing a diversity of thought. Pluralism embraces the idea that strength lies in our differences, including our cultural, religious, and intellectual perspectives. Making single statements on regional, national, or world events, political decisions, or news headlines in the name of such a diverse community could conflict with that value and stifle the free and critical exchange of ideas that is central to our educational mission.
While there are many challenges and much to celebrate in the times we live in, one thing is clear: Bellevue College’s mission is to be a student-centered, comprehensive and innovative college, committed to teaching excellence, that advances the life-long educational development of its students while strengthening the economic, social and cultural life of its diverse community. We do this best when we invite every voice to be a part of the conversation about important and challenging issues and provide the space for that to happen.
I thank you for being here and look forward to the academic year ahead and the conversations we will share.
David May, PhD
President Eduardo Peñalver of Seattle University
Over the past decade, presidents have faced increased demands to issue statements on topics of all kinds, many having little to do with the university itself: natural disasters, presidential-election outcomes, Supreme Court decisions, or — most recently — the conflict in Israel and Gaza. While it can be tempting to give people what they want, especially when the issue is not controversial (or at least, not controversial on your campus), every statement comes at a cost.
Statements center the president’s voice at the expense of others. Each one contributes to a self-reinforcing expectation that the university (and the president) should weigh in on issues large and small. This expectation is both inappropriate and impossible to satisfy, and the president’s inevitable silence on some issue or other is guaranteed to cause anger or hurt among those for whom that issue is particularly important. Issuing statements implicitly establishes a college orthodoxy, narrowing the range of permissible viewpoints and undermining the kind of robust debate we need to sustain our research and teaching missions. In that sense, some requests for statements are not that different from efforts to deplatform speakers or to punish students or faculty who give voice to controversial views. In the short term, statements enhance the power and visibility of the president, but at the cost of a more-inclusive campus conversation. It is both telling and troubling that, this past spring, one of the most ubiquitous demands of pro-Palestine activists on campus was for presidents to issue statements endorsing their perspective on the conflict.
Two years ago, I sent a message to our community that I refer to as my “Statement on Statements.” I said that I would limit university statements to issues and events that have some direct bearing on Seattle University. The result would be a diminished voice for the president but greater space for others. Although this precommitment did not prevent activist demands for a statement this past spring, it did forestall the argument that — in declining to speak — I was doing so because of their specific viewpoint.
This is not to say that presidents should never weigh in. But we should do so judiciously, and only when there are clear institutional imperatives. Over time, the choices we make can help us to avoid creating expectations that no leader can possibly satisfy.
So, I’m starting to see some students use AI to write their assignments. Of course I’m not giving credit for this. So far, AI writing is surprisingly easy to catch. this is because there is such a thing as style. It is easy to get AI to write in a technically expert style, but this is not how my students write. This is not a diss. I don’t expect my students to write analytically flawless essays. They’d have little need for my class if they could. When I have my suspicions, they are easily confirmed by one or another of several decent AI detectors freely available on the web. So far, my suspicions have been pretty reliable.
My primary objection to using AI to do your work in college is that it defeats the point of you being here in the first place.
The day you can get AI to go to college for you is the day your potential employers can get AI to do the job you are able to do.
Personally, I have zero enthusiasm for being a cop. I teach to help people who want to learn and grow. So, in the hope of avoiding some enforcement drudgery, I’d like to ask you to think some about why you are in college to begin with. Of course, you probably want to get a decent paying job. I hope you also want to learn how to think more clearly and effectively. Indeed, I suspect the later will become more and more crucial to getting a decent paying job as AI advances. Still, for your own sake as a human being, a being with a mind, it is good to think well. This is simply a matter of health and vitality for beings like us. I can help with this, but only if you are willing to engage in the process of learning to think clearly and effectively. This is always a process of learning from one’s mistakes. To learn to think better, you will have to exercise the courage to make your own mistakes, recognize them through critical feedback and your own developing critical thinking, and adapt and grow accordingly. If you can manage to develop a life-long habit of doing this, you will become wise, even if you are not super-smart. If you don’t, even being super-smart won’t help you so much.
Reading and writing are crucial to learning to think clearly and effectively. It is worth meditating some on just what these activities amount to. Reading is thinking in tandem with someone else. If you are reading lots but mostly the rantings of fools, that’s the sort of thinking you will be practicing. Expect the writing of clear and effective thinkers to be challenging for a while. If you are like most people, you probably aren’t used to delving into evidence, ideas and arguments in depth. Reading the work effective critical thinkers will take some patience. For your mind, this may feel like the difference between a casual stroll and a session with a personal trainer. But you know which of these produces fitness results. If you go to the gym regularly, you’ll also know that you can acquire a taste for making the effort that makes a difference and produces growth.
Writing is organizing your own thinking on paper (or digitally). It is good to work with a trainer when you read, but the ultimate goal is to build your own ability to think well. Writing is where you practice this. In college, you have the opportunity to think for yourself as you write and get some coaching on your efforts from your professors. This is not the same as working with a personal trainer, who guides you every step of the way. You are thinking for yourself when you write, but then you can benefit further from reflecting on some critical feedback. I hardly get to help you correct every misstep in your thinking through writing, but I will offer a paragraph of so of commentary when I can find useful ways to do so on key issues.
Think of a writing assignment in my class as an invitation to a conversation. I’ll ask you to explain something, you’ll do your best to organize your thoughts, I’ll reply with some suggestions for clarification, then maybe you’ll come to office hours, and we’ll continue the conversation. Or perhaps we just do so through more writing. The invitation is open ended. I don’t expect your best effort to be perfect. It is always good to give it your best effort. I’ve trained with very fit minds, and I continue to do so. I share my own practice of thinking about ideas as clearly as I can through things I write for my students. And I’m always ready to help you up your game and become a more active interesting member of the community of critical thinkers. AI can’t yet do this for you.
We tend to be subjectivists about perfection. But that is hardly the obvious view. It would have struck Descartes and most people as obviously false up until pretty recently. We may have our different tastes and this may bias us so that we have different ideas of perfection. But that’s just variation in our perceptions and opinions. Perfection might be very real and objective in spite of our differing opinions of it.
It’s not hard to think of cases where some things are objectively closer to perfection than others. People might have a pointless debate over whether Taylor Swift is a better musician than Beyonce (as if either holds a candle to Joni Mitchell). But all these women are far closer to perfection as musicians than I am. I don’t think anyone doubts the objective truth of this comparison. If some things are objectively closer to perfection in some way, that would imply a standard of perfection that makes this so. None of us have a clear idea of just what that standard is, but that’s only because we are limited an imperfect. The idea that there is no perfection because we can’t quite imagine or define it is self-defeating since it presupposes that we have minds perfect enough to understand perfection.
Pamela Paul takes universities to task for failing to promote open ended inquiry and knowledge seeking in the editorial linked above. She blames misuses of academic freedom whereby academics short-cut inquiry on a rapid path to conviction, advocacy, and activism, generally of a left-wing sort. But Academic freedom isn’t quite what she thinks it is. Most of our professors are adjuncts, they are contractors hired to teach a course that won’t run without adequate enrollment. A professor who would prefer to eat and pay the rent can only teach what students are willing to sign up for. Open-ended inquiry requires patience, perseverance, and intellectual humility that is increasingly hard to find in our culture. Logic and critical thinking are hard. Too many people want the satisfaction of feeling they know what is right, and the quicker the better. Not so many people are interested in the hard work it takes to actually know what is right. So, the easy to comprehend melodrama of social justice sells with students. The patient hard work of learning how to reason well doesn’t.
Of course, we still advertise and give lip service to critical thinking. But then look at the class schedule at your local college and count the number of sections of courses in logic or critical thinking. Now compare that to the number of sections offered in sociology or cultural and ethnic studies. Social injustices are relatively easy to comprehend, and the naive inquirer has a much shorter path to the satisfaction of resolving doubts and justifying convictions.
None of this is to accuse my colleagues in the social sciences of left-wing political bias. The injustices addressed in class are typically grounded fact, and Pamela Paul does open-ended inquiry a disservice if she means to suggest that it needs to make room for contorted denial or rationalization of things like systemic racism. And that is pretty much what the countervailing political pressures are demanding. Ron Desantis isn’t demanding attentive fact-based open-minded inquiry on matters of race or LGBTQ issues. He is simply demanding that that academics not reach the conclusions such inquiry leads to. Either that or shut up.
Open-minded inquiry doesn’t place us under any obligation to entertain disingenuous both sides-ism. Open mindedness doesn’t require neutrality between competing views when some views are well supported by evidence and argument and others just aren’t. Open-mindedness requires that we be open to fairly evaluating the evidence and argument. When the evidence and argument clearly favor one among the competing views, we should have the degree of confidence warranted by the evidence and argument. This is often sufficient to settle the issue. When an issue is politicized in the broader culture and people on one end of the political spectrum don’t like the conclusions reached by a fair-minded evaluation of the evidence and argument, it’s not professors that are being politically biased. It’s the people that are having a hard time with the facts and the conclusions these support. We’ve seen this happen with climate change for decades. Now we see it happening with contemporary culture war issues like race and LGBTQ rights.
More perspectives on campus won’t fix this. At this point it would just ignite more conflict on campus. More focused and dedicated instruction in how to reach conclusions, how to analyze evidence, formulate and evaluate arguments, seriously entertain objections without begging the question, identify and filter out fallacies; all of this would help enormously. Now try to get your student to sign up for that class. Critical thinking is challenging. Your student might not get an A.
Higher education in the US is in a sorry state. We still do pretty good at STEM. Moneyed interests demand this, after all. But we are badly failing to prepare students for participation in a free and open society. Many competent professors are doing the best we can. But there is more to the problem. We are up against a culture of instant gratification where education is routinely approached with a consumer mindset, political polarization that undermines critical thinking about the most important issues we face, and debilitating anxiety among students who vaguely get that things are not well with the world. Who is to blame is not a pertinent question. There is plenty of that to go around.
This said, colleges and universities could do better. General education courses that focus deliberately on critical thinking skills, the skills required for patient, open-ended, open-minded inquiry, should not be in competition for enrollment with courses that offer satisfying conviction, even where this is warranted. Courses focuses on the methods of open-minded inquiry should be pre-requisites for the others. Courses like logic and critical thinking need to be supported by degree requirements. This is something colleges and universities could do. It would help enormously to restore the credibility of our institutions and it would better prepare our students for the sort of open-minded inquiry needed a free and open society.
Arguments are commonly regarded as tools of persuasion. Seen this way, arguments are sales pitches for believing something. In our consumer society, we are all skilled at negotiating the constant onslaught of sales pitches. Our default is the hard no. Any of us would soon be broke without rejecting the vast majority of sales pitches. And yet, we buy often enough. Whether we buy, consider, or reject a sales pitch, we make this determination in reference to ourselves, what we want, what matters to us. We are passive in our mode as consumers. We accept the sales pitch, or we don’t. Perhaps we step back and do some research when the stakes are high. Sellers would generally prefer that we not. And typically, there is no need to reach beyond ourselves, to actively engage the world beyond our needs and wants. We know how to operate as customers, it’s a comfortable space for us denizens of late-stage capitalism. It also misses the point of argumentation.
When we treat arguments as tools of persuasion, our default stance is to resist persuasion. Persuasion, after all, feels like an assertion of someone else’s will, which we will naturally want to resist unless it aligns with our own will. In such self-referential assent or dissent, our will is engaged in reactive mode. But reaction is not the same thing as exercising agency.
Our general reluctance to change our minds about things is known as epistemic conservativism. Perhaps without a healthy dose of epistemic conservativism, we’d be changing our mind all the time and wind up confused (or confusing). A degree of epistemic conservatism can be a healthy thing. But it is healthy only when we are reluctant to give up beliefs that are themselves rigorously examined and well supported by evidence and argument. Otherwise, epistemic conservatism leads straight to confirmation bias, the tendency to endorse or reject arguments on the basis of how we already feel about the conclusion.
How are things different for the critical thinker? A distinguishing mark of the skilled critical thinker is that she treats arguments as instruments of inquiry rather than instruments of persuasion. An argument is a set of premises offered as a reason for thinking some conclusion is true. We should find good arguments persuasive simply because it’s good to believe things that are true. What is operative for the critical thinker, though, is inquiry, the active search for truth and understanding. Not the passive consumer’s role of being persuaded, or “buying” the conclusion. The critical thinker may still want others to find her arguments persuasive, but only if they are good arguments. For the critical thinker, the desire to persuade is conditional on the quality of her reasoning being good, not on her own will.
Critical thinkers aren’t just concerned with determining whether the conclusion of an argument is true. Rather they are more broadly concerned with what can be learned from the argument. This starts with aiming to understand the viewpoint embodied in the argument. We aren’t in a good position to evaluate and argument without first clearly understanding what it says. Beyond this, learning from arguments often takes the form of learning from our mistakes. When the critical thinker finds a flaw in an argument, she will straight way consider whether this signals a compelling countervailing argument, or whether that flaw points the way to a better argument. Whether the conclusion of an argument is true or false is not the primary concern for the critical thinker. The primary concern is to see how the argument can help us get closer to understanding and truth, even if this only amounts to recognizing that some line of argument is a dead end.
Critical thinking is not really about figuring out what views to “buy” or “not buy.” It’s about building a robust understanding of the world and each other. It’s about getting clear on all sorts of issues, from those our well-being depends on to those that simply engage our wonder (though I’d argue that the latter is itself an aspect of well-being). The critical thinker is actively engaged in the project of building a mind that focuses and clarifies her understanding generally, including her understanding of herself, her interests, and values. The skilled critical thinker is not a consumer of arguments, ideas or beliefs. She is a gardener, cultivating her own mind, producing her own intellectual sustenance and delight, and nourishing her own community of fellow critical thinkers. Our ability to act in ways that realize our considered interests depends on engaging inquiry actively. In this regard, critical thinking replaces reactivity with agency.