This interesting post (using this case as its starting point) is worth reading, especially given its resonance with issues we've discussed in recent months. An excerpt:
I want to argue that this situation demonstrates an absolute fissure in contemporary progressive politics, that there is a direct and unambiguous conflict between our efforts to address mass incarceration and the insistence that people accused of crimes such as sexual assault should be presumed to be guilty and that those who are guilty are permanently and existentially unclean. I want to argue that there’s nothing particularly hidden about this conflict, that acknowledging it is as simple as noting the direct contradiction of two progressive attitudes: the belief that certain crimes, particularly sex crimes and domestic violence, should be treated not only with harsh criminal punishments but with permanent moral judgment for those guilty of them; and the idea that we need to dismantle our vast criminal justice industrial complex, to oppose the carceral state, and to replace them with a new system of restoration and forgiveness. I further want to argue that progressives are not doing any of the moral and legal reasoning necessary to resolve these tensions, and that if we don’t, eventually they’ll explode....
[I]f an acquittal is insufficient to prove Parker’s innocence, what would such proof look like? Is exoneration even possible? And what do we do with people who are accused of crimes like sexual assault and domestic violence when their cases never go to trial? The current progressive impulse seems to be to simply treat them as guilty regardless, and permanently. Yet this strikes me as unambiguously contrary to the spirit and philosophy that contribute to our drive for criminal justice reform. How can we make such reform possible if we condemn huge groups of people to the status of guilty despite never being found guilty of any crime? And if such crimes carry existential and disqualifying moral judgment for life even for those only accused, how can we bring those imprisoned and released back into normal adult life?
...
People swing wildly from talking about criminal justice reform to insisting that everyone accused of entire classes of crimes, let alone convicted, are necessarily condemned to a lifetime of guilt. These impulses are not compatible. I strongly believe that we can balance the need to give sexual assault victims far more support and understanding than we traditionally have, and to begin to fix our society’s ugly failure to protect women from sexual assault, while still fighting mass imprisonment and the carceral state. But it will take hard work to get there, and the issue does not seem to even been on the radar for most people.
Meanwhile, the default rhetorical style of today’s social liberalism makes it much harder to have a productive conversation about these topics, as the constant invocations of disbelief — I can’t believe you don’t already know that’s offensive! — and presumption that all moral questions are black and white corrupts our ability to think these issues through. This topics are not easy. They are not simple. What good people should believe and how they should act are not clear. The Manicheanism endemic to contemporary progressive life leaves us with no ability to sort real moral conundrums. We need to be ready to confront ethical dilemmas that don’t leave us in the position of screaming at people for being wrong. Yet conventional progressive practice is to treat those who merely question guilt in a particular case as themselves guilty of inadequate sensitivity to sexual assault victims. We can’t do the work of figuring out these tough moral questions if the process of talking through them leaves us vulnerable to accusations of insufficient opposition to such crimes.
Finally, I must note that the philosophy graduate student who sent this to me added: "If you choose to disseminate this piece more widely, please do not identify me as the person who sent it to you, for reasons I'm sure you can appreciate." This by-now familiar climate of fear in academic philosophy has been created, oddly, through social media by a handful of very vocal figures (many otherwise quite marginal to academic philosophy), whose mixture of foolishness, sanctimoniousness and/or vindictiveness we've commented on many times before--for example, here, here, here, here, here, here. "Pathologically self-righteous people" (to quote an earlier correspondent) can't be reasoned with, but perhaps they can be stopped. But this will require more courage and forthrightness from the majority in the profession, both faculty and students, who find this climate of fear, with its harm to honest intellectual discussion, unacceptable.
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