Neven Sesardic wrote in this 2016 book:
^ Many contemporary philosophers have disgraced themselves by defending totalitarian political systems and advocating political ideas they should have easily recognized as distasteful and inhumane. To give just three well – known examples, Jean – Paul Sartre championed Stalinism and later Maoism, Martin Heidegger actively supported and celebrated Nazism, and Michel Foucault publicly expressed enthusiasm for Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic revolution.
* This is what Einstein had to say in 1929, on the fifth anniversary of Lenin’s death: “In Lenin I admire a man who has thrown all his energy into making social justice real, at the sacrifice of his own person. I do not consider his method practicable. But one thing is sure: Men like him are the guardians and reformers of the conscience of mankind” (quoted in Grundmann 2005, 253).
Notice the only thing Einstein says about the Leninist method is that he does not consider it “practicable.” The German word Einstein used is zweckmässig, literally “conducive to the goal.” So his only criticism of Lenin’s method is that it would not achieve its goal. There was no condemnation or moral disapprobation of the method itself, nor even any hint that it was widely criticized as highly unethical. (If one knows that a politician killed thousands of innocent people in order to achieve his goal, usually one would not object merely that the politician’s method was “impractical” or “not conducive to his goal.”)
Indeed, why did Einstein praise Lenin so profusely as a “guardian and reformer of the conscience of mankind” despite evidence, easily accessible at the time, that massive atrocities had been perpetrated under his leadership during the first years of the Soviet Union?* To the dismay of many of his friends, [Kurt] Gödel traveled from the safety of Princeton to post – Anschluss Austria in 1939 with the aim of convincing the Nazi authorities there to renew his university lectureship. He must have been aware that the condition for taking up the lectureship was signing an oath of loyalty and obedience to Adolf Hitler.
* Einstein and Gödel became friends at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and they had similar opinions about the postwar political situation. When it came to their critical attitudes toward the United States, their views were “nearly indistinguishable”.
* The American Philosophical Association (APA) has three divisions (Eastern, Central and Pacific) and more than 11,000 members, including many non – Americans. It is probably the most important philosophical organization in the world. It also has a long and rich history of being drawn into leftist political activism.
* In December 1971, Hilary Putnam proposed that the APA “condemn as unscientific and dangerous the views of [Harvard psychologist Richard] Herrnstein, [Nobel laureate physicist William] Shockley, and [University of California, Berkeley, educational psychologist Arthur] Jensen concerning the genetic basis of differences in mean intelligence between blacks and whites.” 2 The proposal also condemned the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Educational Review , and the New York Times Magazine on the strange ground that they “irresponsibly supported” these “unfounded conclusions” merely by publishing articles in which these claims were defended. Despite complaints that the views in question should not be condemned without sufficient evidence and that the condemnation actually opposed the exercise of free speech and free research, the motion carried and was put to mail ballot. It was voted down, but a similar motion was proposed again the following year. Although it was suggested that it made no sense to push the same motion that had been defeated the previous year, without any events’ occurring in the meantime that would likely change the result, the motion carried and was again put to mail ballot (with an unknown result).
* There are many other examples, besides the APA, of important philosophical institutions undertaking political actions that are not only unreasonable but also occasionally harmful to the profession. A good recent illustration is the jumpy reaction of the editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) to a reported gender disparity in philosophy and their hasty and ill – considered attempt to correct it.
To see how the mere numerical fact of gender disparity — unaccompanied by any understanding of its origins or awareness of potential consequences of meddling with the existing situation — can move prominent philosophers to rush to a conclusion and galvanize them into urgent action, consider the following sequence of events. On June 19, 2013, the sociologist Kieran Healy publishes data on his blog showing that of all recent citations in four prestigious philosophy journals, female authors get only 3.6 percent of the total. Although Healy warns that “this is exploratory work” and that there are unanswered “questions about the underlying causes of any patterns that show up in the data” as well as “various comparisons that sound straightforward . . . but are actually quite complicated to answer properly, or imply a lot more data collection and analysis than I can do here,” when Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman, the editors of the SEP, learn about Healy’s data they decide the issue needs immediate attention. On July 12 (just three weeks after Healy’s posting), they send an email with the subject “SEP request concerning citations” to all SEP authors, subject editors, and referees, which includes a link to Healy’s text, informing the SEP collaborators that the editors take the issue of undercitation of women philosophers seriously. Although they don’t explain why the issue is so pressing or what their objective is (besides pushing some numbers up), they announce that they want to “encourage our authors, subject editors, and referees to help ensure that SEP entries do not overlook the work of women or indeed of members of underrepresented groups more generally.” Furthermore, the collaborators are also urged to write to the editor “any time [they] notice a source missing from an SEP entry (whether or not it is [their] own entry).”
There are at least five problems here. First, Zalta and Nodelman seem to assume, without providing any evidence, that the “undercitation” of women is at least partly the result of philosophers’ bias, i.e., their tendency to “overlook” women’s publications more often than men’s. Second, the way the editors try to address the problem of the low citation of women looks very much like an attempt to cure a disease without knowing its cause. Third, their action will have a perverse effect as well. Namely, de facto pushing (or nudging) so many scholars to cite more female philosophers (and to report on those who fall behind in this task) may distort genuine citation patterns in the discipline and undermine the integrity of a bibliometric analysis of philosophical publications. Fourth, there might be another perverse effect: If the SEP initiative to boost the citation of women’s publications becomes more widely adopted in philosophy, then philosophers who do not believe that the “undercitation” is due to sexist bias might react to the new situation by correcting for what they perceive as the citation inflation for one group. As a consequence, they might start to take the number of citations of a woman’s work as being, on average, a less reliable sign of scholarly quality than the number of citations of a man’s work. And fifth, it should be expected that other demographic groups would soon follow suit and demand that their “unfairly” low citation rate be similarly jacked up.
Given the SEP’s importance to the discipline — in many ways it serves as a standard – bearer for philosophy as a research field — it is odd how unconcerned the editors were about making such crude and blatantly political considerations a part of their official editorial policy. Even odder is that of hundreds (thousands?) of philosophers who have been acquainted with the new citation guidelines for more than two years, no one has decided to start a public discussion about that issue.* According to a 2013 – 2014 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the ratio of university professors who described themselves as politically “far left” vs. those on the “far right” was between 30 to 1 and 50 to 1 (Eagan et al. 2014, 112). The ratio for philosophers, however, must be considerably higher than that figure, which is the average across all academic disciplines.
I think these facts must be a large part of the explanation for why so many leading analytic philosophers were Stalinists or Soviet sympathizers, whereas there is no single instance of anyone of a similar stature having publicly supported the supposed right – wing equivalent — a fascist leader, say, or even much less odious right – wing politicians such as, for example, Pinochet.
A nice illustration of the effect of ideological majority pressure in philosophy is the case of Robert Nozick. He admitted that at one point he went along with the incorrect representation of his views just because he expected it would make his colleagues view him more favorably:
“[I]t was so nice for people to be slapping me on the back and telling me that they had faith in me and they believed in me. Because they hadn’t been saying that for years. And they started welcoming me back into the fold. And you know, God help me, but I just liked to not be vilified for a change. I liked to not be a pariah in my own department. And so I went along with it. I could have done the snarky thing and said, No, your approval of me is based on a misunderstanding. I could have said that, but I just didn’t. I was tired and I just let it go (reported in Schmidtz 2012).”
It should be pointed out that at the time (the end of the eighties), Nozick was a tenured full professor at Harvard widely admired for his intellectual brilliance. If despite his very high standing in the profession he still felt “like a pariah in his own department,” it is not hard to guess how much worse the position must be for those younger, less accomplished, and much more vulnerable scholars who share his political views. They would be much more motivated to let their opinions be misrepresented in the left – wing direction, not to mention that many of them might under pressure genuinely migrate away from beliefs that could sound outrageous to most of their colleagues. This is one of the mechanisms via which the high left – wing ratio might reinforce itself and increase further.* The idea that a black – white difference in average intelligence might play some explanatory role cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, the authoritative report “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” issued by the American Psychological Association states that “the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites” (Neisser et al. 1996, 93)…
A good illustration is the case of the philosopher Michael Levin, who in 1990 published a short letter in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (62 – 63) in which he suggested this explanation for the low proportion of blacks in philosophy. In the next issue the editor of the bulletin reported that Levin’s letter “has provoked the largest and most impassioned outpouring of letters I have yet received.” The members of Levin’s philosophy department at City College of New York published a letter distancing themselves from his views. Eighteen reactions were published, all of them negative, with some authors expressing strong disagreement and others condemning the APA for publishing Levin’s letter and calling it “racist propaganda.” Needless to say, Levin was not invited to respond to this barrage of attacks, although this is a customary courtesy extended to authors who generate a controversy.
A similar case (in which a prominent philosopher makes a late appearance) involves Frank Ellis, a former lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, who publicly expressed agreement with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s claims, made in their controversy – generating book The Bell Curve (1994), about the black – white difference in intelligence and its social effects. In response, the student union urged the administration to fire Ellis. The vice – chancellor of the university suspended him from his duties pending the outcome of a disciplinary process.* well – known philosopher Richard Rorty said in an interview for the Believer in 2003: “I think all that September 11 changed was to give the fascists a chance. The Republicans saw that if they could keep us in a state of perpetual war from now on . . . they could keep electing Republicans more or less forever.”
* David Albert’s account of his 1992 conversation with Sidney Morgenbesser, an iconic figure in analytic philosophy and one of the sharpest minds in that whole tradition: 3
“I remember Sidney and I sitting together in my office in 1992, on the morning after Clinton was elected. Neither of us had any illusions about Clinton, but both of us were caught up just then in the immense relief of Bush’s having lost. We were laughing and happy, and all of a sudden Sidney starts to kvetch. He said, “I can’t tell you what it’s been like for me, I can’t tell you how I have suffered, these past 12 years under Reagan and Bush.” And then he started to cry. At that, the floor just sort of came out from under me. I didn’t quite know what I was in the presence of, and I didn’t quite know what to do (Albert 2005).”
Obviously Morgenbesser must have sincerely felt these powerful emotions that brought him to tears. But it is equally obvious that Albert, his close friend and apparently a fellow liberal, could not make any sense of this reaction. And the reason he could not is simply that in objective terms the reaction made no sense at all. For what on earth could Morgenbesser have imagined himself to have suffered so much under those two Republican presidents?* Derek Parfit, one of the most influential living philosophers. It would be very hard to find an analytic thinker today who is held in higher regard.
In June 2015, Parfit gave a talk at the invitation of the Oxford organization Giving What We Can, which tries to promote “the most cost – effective poverty relief, in particular in the developing world.” As has already been richly documented in these pages, it is exactly such occasions of political activism that tend to bring out the worst in philosophers, leading them to make extravagant feel – good statements and also to throw logic to the wind.
At the beginning of his talk Parfit says that according to William Godwin, if you walk past a beggar and you don’t give him your coins, you’re stealing; the money doesn’t belong to you, because the beggar needs it more than you, so you’re stealing (“Derek Parfit — Full Address,” YouTube, 8:15 – 8:39). Immediately after citing Godwin’s eccentric opinion that not giving to a beggar equals stealing from him, Parfit surprisingly goes on to agree with it enthusiastically: “Well, that is actually what I feel we rich people . . . in the world today are doing. We’re not entitled to our vast wealth.” And a minute later he adds: “If people from sub – Saharan Africa came and started removing my property, I wouldn’t feel that I had a right to stop them.”
So Parfit is arguing, first, that rich people are not entitled to their wealth (even if it is the result of their hard work), and second, he is making a much stronger claim: that rich people are actually stealing from poor people. The charge of stealing appears to be based only on Godwin’s rather flimsy reasoning (which Parfit seems to endorse) that if X needs “your” money more than you do, this by itself establishes that you are stealing it from X…
If Parfit genuinely believed that he had stolen his house, car, money, etc., from others, isn’t it clear that he wouldn’t continue to hold on to all those things? He is obviously not the kind of person who would keep something he himself regarded literally as stolen. Hence the very fact that he has been unable to renounce his possessions indicates that in his heart of hearts he does not truly believe that he stole them.
If Parfit did believe this, though, it would have been extremely easy for him to restore justice in his own case. For after having publicly announced that he wouldn’t stop the poor if they came to his place to remove his property, the only thing that remained for him to do in order to facilitate a quick and rightful restitution was to disclose to the world the address of his Oxford residence. Which he has not done.
Notice, however, that Parfit is not talking only about Parfit. He is talking about all well – to – do people in the West. Consequently the import of his statement is far – reaching. His view implies that if millions of sub – Saharan Africans came to the United States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Germany, and Italy, not only would they have a moral right to remove property from rich and well – off households in those countries, the local people would have a moral duty to invite these newcomers into their homes and ask them to take away all the stuff that the current “owners” had stolen from the needy.
Such a radical approach to economic redistribution is almost unheard of. In terms of ordinary political taxonomy, it is best classified as belonging to the extreme fringe of the extreme left.
To conclude, here is a concise evaluation of Parfit’s view: very high on compassion for the downtrodden, very low on logic.* …philosopher Jeremy Waldron, professor at the New York University School of Law and until recently Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Waldron participated in the debate “Is Torture Ever Permissible?” at Columbia University on April 21, 2005. (In the meantime the video of the debate disappeared from the Internet, but I saved the file on my hard disk.)
Since Waldron is well known for his absolute condemnation of torture under any circumstances, he was inevitably asked about the notorious “ticking bomb scenario”: What would Waldron’s advice be if a nuclear device were planted in New York City and if the only way to save millions of innocent people from a certain and horrible death were to torture an arrested terrorist who knew the location of the bomb?
He replied that the answer is clear: Since morality tells us there are certain things that must not be done under any conditions — and torture is one of those things — then it follows that in that kind of situation we should “take the hit” and let all these millions of people die.* One of the leading logical positivists spends more than two years doing propaganda for Stalin while millions die in the government – caused famine. Reactions? None. One of the most highly esteemed philosophers joins a militant Maoist party and is very active in it for four years, during the horror of the Cultural Revolution. Any interest among his colleagues in knowing more about the episode or understanding how this was possible? Nonexistent. A hugely influential thinker describes in his autobiography and several interviews how he suspended his opposition to Hitler after the Nazi – Stalin Pact and then reversed himself miraculously on the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Reaction? Yawn. A person who is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century did basically the same thing. Ever discussed? Not really. A preeminent philosopher is knighted for service to philosophy and racial justice despite giving a platform at All Souls College, Oxford, to a notorious and vicious racist. Comments? None. (Apparently this is regarded as not worth even mentioning or it did not register at all.) A scholar in one of the top philosophy departments in the UK defends for years the brutal Soviet oppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a completely justified response to a “fascist rebellion.” Response? A total lack of interest, followed by his being elected to the prestigious Chichele chair of political theory at Oxford. A renowned philosopher of science was in his youth an ultra – Stalinist as well as a police informer and also gratuitously forced a young woman to commit suicide. Response? An attempt to distort some of these facts and present them in a positive light, plus naming a university building and the highest award in the field after him.
