This bizarre case of unprofessional behavior occurred while I was in Rome, and so I only just caught up on this nonsense in the last day.
On November 4, philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT) presented a paper at the PPE conference in New Orleans; here is the abstract:
Patriarchy and the Original Position
If politics is the art of the possible, political philosophy is the science of the possible. What kinds
of societies could there be, not just for Homo economicus, but for Homo sapiens, a recent product of
a long lineage of primate ancestors? One obvious—in political philosophy, often ignored—
feature of sapiens is sex. Unlike economicus, humans come in two distinct sexed forms, female and
male. And one striking apparently universal feature of past human societies (including at least
many contemporary societies), is patriarchy: the dominance of males in political and social
decision-making. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari says, it is plausible that some ‘universal
biological reason’ accounts for patriarchy. If that is right, then patriarchy may seem inevitable,
or at least hard to avoid. The first part of the paper outlines some evidence for Harari’s
‘universal biological reason’. The second part brings the first part to bear on Rawls’s use of the
original position, and the subsequent feminist adoption of it by Susan Okin. I will argue that
ignorance of one’s sex in the original position fails to deal with the problem of patriarchy, and
that the Rawlsian approach should be abandoned.
During Professor Byrne's talk, philosopher Carol Hay tweeted out the following:
Even if that were what Professor Byrne had argued--it was not, as Professor Hay has known for several days now without removing or qualifying her tweet--it is not appropriate to take to social media to humiliate a speaker behind his back during an academic conference. But this is made worse by the fact that Professor Hay completely misrepresented Byrne's argument, as several pointed out on Twitter and as I've now had confirmed by various attendees at the session who heard the entire paper. To do a Twitter "gotcha" at a conference is childish and stupid enough, but to do it and be wrong is beyond belief.
Professor Byrne, in fact, said nothing about "intelligence," and nor did any of the authors he discussed. He referred to arguments by anthropologists Barbara Smuts and Richard Wrangham suggesting that the universality of patriarchy could be attributed to "above-the-neck" biological factors; Wrangham, for example, claims that it has to do with the alleged "coalitional psychology" of males. That is what Byrne meant by a "cognitive" explanation for patriarchy; the slide in the photo was just a generic sex-difference picture he put up for a visual, Byrne didn't even discuss it. (And note that the female distribution was to the right, so it didn't even suggest that males were superior; indeed, the axes are not even labeled, so this wasn't even data!)
The content of the actual talk and its context was completely obliterated by Professor Hay's malicious and misleading tweet.
I don't know how many supposedly professional philosophers are so immature as to think it appropriate to tweet out "gotchas" during scholarly talks, but it would seem prudent going forward for conference organizers to make clear that "live-tweeting" of talks is verboten, lest the opportunity for scholarly exploration of a topic, and especially sensitive ones, be compromised by the fear of selective twitter defamation. Professor Byrne's reputation will be unaffected by this childish stunt (except among the devotees of twitter as the "Fox news of the wokerati.") But one can easily imagine how younger or less established scholars will fear presenting with people like Carol Hay in the audience. Hopefully conference organizers will think twice before inviting Professor Hay, given this episode.
ADDENDUM: A junior philosopher in attendance at the Byrne talk writes:
I was in the audience and everything you report is correct. I just want to add that Hay at one point turned to apparently record the entire audience. In addition to just being rather creepy, these kinds of acts have the potential to keep vulnerable members of the profession away from controversial talks (even if they disagree with the presenters), for fear of some kind of public shaming if their presence were noted online.
ONE MORE: A reader points out that a predictable source--Rebecca "Quill" Kukla (Georgetown)--has joined the Twitter denunciation of Professor Byrne, informing us that "Alex Byrne is really bad actually." Really! Actually! Quill "suck my giant queer cock" Kukla, by contrast, is a model of sober, professional judgment.
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