Last week (as noted the other day) Weinberg wrote another ponderously long response to this. I skimmed a bit of it, but I find him tedious and uninteresting, so I didn't read it with any care. Philosopher John Schwenkler (Florida State) posted some criticisms on Facebook and also in the comments at the "safe space" blog. But someone on the FB post summed things up perfectly:
the DN post is a great example of philosophers thinking the great intellectual challenge of our times is developing a sort of theory of the modern corporate human resources department while mimicking the style of an elementary-school classroom.
Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) tried to post a comment at the "safe space" blog noting Weinberg's typical passive-aggressive and fraudulent jab at me; predictably it wasn't approved, and Prof. Brennan kindly gave me permission to post it here; it begins with a quote from Weinberg:
"...'a well-known philosophy-blogger's obsession with belittling graduate students who use Twitter to discuss trans issues...'"
Come on, Justin.
This is a good example of how sometimes using more generic and abstract descriptions can obscure the issue to the point of seeming to change the moral valence of the situation. Suppose you, Justin, say, "Hey, Jason Brennan, I hope you die and rot in hell for eternity." Then I respond, "Whoa, dude, you shouldn't say things like that to me." You respond, "Oh, so you're saying I'm not allowed to have opinions? You're saying there's no right to free speech? You think you have the right to police what I say?" In this case, you'd be making an obvious error. No one is saying you have no right to express opinions; they are saying this specific action is wrong. (Similarly, if I say you shouldn't hit people, I'm not thereby saying you have no rights over your own body.) In this case, abstraction cuts out the issue.
In the same vein, describing Leiter's behavior as "belittling grad students...for discuss[ing] trans issues" is abstracting to the point of being misleading. Brian isn't going around belittling any grad student he finds discussing trans issues on Twitter. Rather, he was critical of a specific grad student who called another philosopher a "vile fucking human" because she...wait for it...has principled and reasonable--though perhaps mistaken--philosophical objections to a particular view of the metaphysics of gender, a view grounded in hundreds of years of feminist thought arguing that to be woman is not about mere belief that one is a woman and is not simply a matter of performing and conforming to certain stereotypes of femininity. Brian wasn't complaining about the grad student in question "discuss[ing] trans issues"; he was complaining about the graduate student unloading unjustifiable verbal abuse onto another person who didn't deserve it.
I've commented primarily on just three graduate students (out of the thousands on twitter) over the last year One was the appalling Keyvan Shafiei, as Professor Brennan notes. Another was Nathan Oseroff, who libeled Kathleen Stock (and abused his role at the APA blog etc.), and eventually apologized. (It was clearly libel under English law, and English law was correct!) A third was Christa Peterson, who has been sneering, mocking, and insulting Stock, Leslie Green, me, Holly Lawford-Smith, and many others in hundreds of tweets (maybe by now more than a thousand?) for over a year, obsessively and relentlessly. Here's a typical abusive outburst, which an alert reader sent me recently, in which Ms. Peterson enacts "solidarity" with the juvenile jackass from last month:
(One might have thought after her contribution to the 3AM fiasco, she would be laying low, but apparently bad habits are hard to break.)
The idea that adults in their 20s get a free pass for their public abuse of others is not an idea I accept, and no adult should accept it. Twitter is, after all, public.
Is Weinberg a liar or just pandering? I'm not sure.
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