8 ms·

Philosophers should not be sanctioned for their positions on sex and gender

35 points by hirundo 7y ago

bairrd 7y ago
What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news, especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract from the broader issues at hand.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  Philosophy is absolutely a form of hacking. It's about pulling apart concepts and the unreal while building and applying systems.
pmarreck 7y ago
I came late to realize the existence of this problem, and discovered it when someone on Twitter blocked me simply for asking about Jordan Peterson. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I fail to see how sanctioning/blocking/banning/censuring/deplatforming is compatible with open honest debate (these are all basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum fallacy, "punishment-as-argument"), in any event, and since I strongly believe in the latter, I fall on the "strong free speech" side. (My Twitter account has all of 9 blocked accounts, and those are mostly things like low-signal-to-noise-ratio businesses with lots of promoted tweets) There are people who believe that ideas exist that are both bad and that cannot be defeated rationally, but I think they are wrong. Take racism, for example (I've argued against racists): They will come at you with supporting (correlational) data, so you come at them with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence and then you ask them whether they're shorter than average and still want to act on these correlations they put so much stock in, because in that case they need to now act against their own interests (favor preferential hiring of tall people, etc.), and you just wait and let that sink in because most of them will go quiet. ;)
- ashton314 7y ago
  Amen: the best way to defeat any bad argument is to subject it to public, open, and fair scrutiny. If anything is true, it will stand. If it is false, there is no greater boon to an intellectual community than having publicly dissected and exposed for what it is.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    There really is a difference between being able to logically refute an idea and for that refutation to hold any sway; if anything, there's a lot of evidence against what you're saying. Consider the widespread climate change skepticism movements, flat earth movements, anti-vaccination movements, the rise of far-right and neo-Nazism, and recent political happenings (e.g. the Brexit campaign tactic claiming that money given to the EU would be able to fund the health service in the UK). Can their arguments be countered and argued against? Of course, most people would say so. But does that mean that they'll be defeated in the court of public opinion? Consider that society does not function as and is not based upon systems of rational deliberation. The intellectuals may not be convinced by bad ideas and arguments, but the public is, and the importance of the public here is shown in the fact that all the movements I've named also take advantage of rhetoric, not merely logical argumentation. So the real question is: if open and fair scrutiny is a way to defeat a bad argument, what's the way to defeat the rhetoric used to prop up that bad argument? It's clear that one can have rhetoric with a bad argument too, isn't it?
    - pmarreck 7y ago
      > Consider that society does not function as and is not based upon systems of rational deliberation The court system? The medical industry? Science? Technology? The financial system? > if open and fair scrutiny is a way to defeat a bad argument, what's the way to defeat the rhetoric used to prop up that bad argument? Well, that's a good question. Charisma and persuasiveness can be used by both good and not-so-good (if well-intending) actors. I think intellectuals might spot and discount the appeals to emotion, but non-intellectuals and those of weak critical thinking skill would not, and the latter do make up the majority of the population. The thing is, public sentiment eventually does seem to drift closer to the truths the rationalists determined already; see for example marijuana acceptance, gayness acceptance, and (hopefully, maybe) human-caused climate change. Is it because of a slowly-encroaching realization that the rationalists were right? Or is it all down to the lucky benevolence of the "persuaders"? And if most people aren't swayed by logical reasoning, then how does ANY progress actually get made (where "progress" is measured as "closer to rational truths and goods"), except as an accidental beneficence of Those Who Persuade Us?
jbob2000 7y ago
Philosophers search for truth and objectivity. A person’s identity (according to today’s school of thought) is not objective, it’s completely subject to their needs. And since you, the academic, don’t fully know their needs, you cannot understand their identity, and thus you cannot come to some objective truth about it. I think this is why philosophers are being called x-phobic; they’re using their power as academics to enforce some kind of truth.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism, etc. These are all well within the ability of science in all it's forms (biology, history, psychology, sociology) to explain. Their needs are well-quantified and analyzed in any number of papers that have been published. There's nothing new there, except the internet reinforcing existing behaviors in a novel way that wasn't possible before. But the underlying pathologies? They've always been there.
  - zbyte64 7y ago
    Weren't philosophers a decade a go lamenting of how reductionist science has become? Like I remember going to college and the professors held a forum where they insisted that science isn't the end-all be-all for human existence. Weird how I disagreed with their analogies but I find myself agreeing with their point that human experience is not meant to be reduced to what is already known.
    - jplayer01 7y ago
      And they (as much as one can generalize across an entire discipline) still do (rightfully so) lament about science and how it pretends to be the answer to everything. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to throw out everything we do know about humans through science, such as how they establish their beliefs or how they manage to persist or how these beliefs get tied up in identity, and what we continuously find out by applying scientific methods (such as how presenting facts can lead to reinforcing contradictory pre-existing beliefs).
zbyte64 7y ago
Sure, but when you start arguing that "pronouns" are defined by genetics when we had pronouns before the discovery of genetics, I think you should be respected about as much as Deepak Chopra.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  We had pronouns that matched[1] with expressed genetics, which everyone could see. Why would it matter that people did not know what the underlying mechanism was for what they were observing? Even if they had known, they wouldn't have used a DNA test as the basis for choosing their pronoun. [1] With the exception of hermaphrodites and such.
  - zbyte64 7y ago
    [2] With the exception of languages that have more then two expressed genders
- tzs 7y ago
  We had eye color before the discovery of genetics, too, so do you think, therefore, that eye color is not defined by genetics?
  - zbyte64 7y ago
    Maybe we should keep comparisons to language constructs?
drak0n1c 7y ago
Peter Singer was one of the signers of this letter, a name people outside of philosophy may recognize.
helen___keller 7y ago
Unlike many HN commenters, I generally fall in favor of the current trend in social media censorship and stratification. I don't think there's a problem with individuals choosing to engulf themselves in a "bubble" of reinforcing opinions. I certainly see no reason why any individual should be forced into internet debates about their opinions if they are not personally a fan of internet debates. That said, academic institutions are not Facebook or Twitter, and academics rightfully should hold the power to ask questions and make statements that make others feel uncomfortable. There is no doubt that there should be room at universities for people who want to muse on the nature of gender, even in a way that may challenge others' strongly held beliefs. However, it is immediate and utmost importance to recognize that questions of gender identity are not just abstract questions. There are members of universities and of society at large struggling to gain acceptance as queer and transsexual, and whether or not academics want to deliberate on what it even means to be of a gender, universities and the people involved with universities seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of protecting the current progressive status quo of gender identity. I think there needs to be an important distinction made. Academic inquiry into the nature of gender is fine. But oppressing those already struggling to gain acceptance in society is not okay. To that end, I'm not sure I understand the bullets listed at the bottom of the post: >We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy. >We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights. Is this not a contradiction? If we are looking to protect philosophers' "social and political advocacy for sex-based rights", it seems implied that this includes advocacy in opposition to the previously stated "right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse". Even within academic discourse, there is an Overton window. The window may be wider for academics but it still exists. I don't know who gets to decide the Overton window for academics, but there are topics which are certainly out. We can all agree that sympathizing with genocide or advocating racism, things of that nature, are outside the Overton window for academics. If a philosopher muses "maybe killing all Jews is okay", he or she would be removed from the institution, and rightfully so. The question here is where the Overton window's edge lies in the realm of gender identity. My opinion is that the window ends where people's rights begin. If you want to ask "does gender even exist? Is gender identity a meaningful form of expression?", fine. If you want to say "gender doesn't exist, so don't protect transgender folk from discrimination in legislation", you have gone too far. Who defines the Overton window in reality? There is no "Board of Acceptable Philosophy". The process we have now of internet rage mobs and "deplatforming" is arguably the most democratic way society has ever had of enforcing an Overton window, but that's not a good thing in the context of academia, which should rightfully be separate from society at large. I think in the old days, the outdated ideas would simply die off with the thinkers who hold them, reflecting the changes in the world in slow motion.
royaltheartist 7y ago
By the amount of attention this issue gets, one might actually think it were a real problem and not something that a specific segment of the population really wants to focus on. Even the open letter itself only mentions "conversations" and "proposals." No professor at a major university seems to have actually be sanctioned or punished for what they say on this issue, despite all the conversation around it. We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone. And that's just the ones Wiki editors decided merited inclusion. There are probably more, some unknown, and countless other trans individuals who face violence and harassment on a near daily basis. Meanwhile, the hollowness of these arguments and the crocodile tears of the people who focus on them is laid bare when considers the amount of anti-BDS legislation that have been passed, with many universities requiring speakers to sign statements saying they will not and have never engaged in BDS. These people, these "philosophers", simply want to be allowed to be transphobic in public without consequences. But that's the real heart of freedom and free speech. You can say what you what, it's true, but you're not free from people talking back or deciding they don't want to hear from you.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  >We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone. 70x more people will be crushed by soda machines this year.
  - royaltheartist 7y ago
    If only there were a difference between murders and freak accidents.
    - brighter2morrow 7y ago
      I think we should put things in perspective before going into a moral panic
- ErikCorry 7y ago
  You are saying that philosophers should not be so concerned about philosophy because there are bigger problems in society. But they are philosophers. Of course they are concerned about philosophy. Beetle scientists are concerned with beetle academia. Why the scare quotes around "philosophers"? They are university academics in the field of philosophy. The question of "what is a woman" seems to be obviously the sort of question that a philosopher should be engaging with. If you don't want to hear their thoughts on that don't read their journals, but to declare the question out of bounds seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophy is. Other statements that are obviously philosophical include: "Sex and gender are two different things" "Gender is a spectrum" "Sex is a spectrum" "A person can change their sex" And I am not persuaded by the argument that people's free speech is not violated if their career is merely ruined, but they are not put in prison. You can be sure that the blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick sent a clear message to every black NFL player that they were not free to share their support for BLM. :-(

35 points by hirundo 7y ago

What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news, especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract from the broader issues at hand.

vorpalhex 7y ago
Philosophy is absolutely a form of hacking. It's about pulling apart concepts and the unreal while building and applying systems.

pmarreck 7y ago

I came late to realize the existence of this problem, and discovered it when someone on Twitter blocked me simply for asking about Jordan Peterson. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I fail to see how sanctioning/blocking/banning/censuring/deplatforming is compatible with open honest debate (these are all basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum fallacy, "punishment-as-argument"), in any event, and since I strongly believe in the latter, I fall on the "strong free speech" side. (My Twitter account has all of 9 blocked accounts, and those are mostly things like low-signal-to-noise-ratio businesses with lots of promoted tweets) There are people who believe that ideas exist that are both bad and that cannot be defeated rationally, but I think they are wrong. Take racism, for example (I've argued against racists): They will come at you with supporting (correlational) data, so you come at them with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence and then you ask them whether they're shorter than average and still want to act on these correlations they put so much stock in, because in that case they need to now act against their own interests (favor preferential hiring of tall people, etc.), and you just wait and let that sink in because most of them will go quiet. ;)

ashton314 7y ago
Amen: the best way to defeat any bad argument is to subject it to public, open, and fair scrutiny. If anything is true, it will stand. If it is false, there is no greater boon to an intellectual community than having publicly dissected and exposed for what it is.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  There really is a difference between being able to logically refute an idea and for that refutation to hold any sway; if anything, there's a lot of evidence against what you're saying. Consider the widespread climate change skepticism movements, flat earth movements, anti-vaccination movements, the rise of far-right and neo-Nazism, and recent political happenings (e.g. the Brexit campaign tactic claiming that money given to the EU would be able to fund the health service in the UK). Can their arguments be countered and argued against? Of course, most people would say so. But does that mean that they'll be defeated in the court of public opinion? Consider that society does not function as and is not based upon systems of rational deliberation. The intellectuals may not be convinced by bad ideas and arguments, but the public is, and the importance of the public here is shown in the fact that all the movements I've named also take advantage of rhetoric, not merely logical argumentation. So the real question is: if open and fair scrutiny is a way to defeat a bad argument, what's the way to defeat the rhetoric used to prop up that bad argument? It's clear that one can have rhetoric with a bad argument too, isn't it?
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    > Consider that society does not function as and is not based upon systems of rational deliberation The court system? The medical industry? Science? Technology? The financial system? > if open and fair scrutiny is a way to defeat a bad argument, what's the way to defeat the rhetoric used to prop up that bad argument? Well, that's a good question. Charisma and persuasiveness can be used by both good and not-so-good (if well-intending) actors. I think intellectuals might spot and discount the appeals to emotion, but non-intellectuals and those of weak critical thinking skill would not, and the latter do make up the majority of the population. The thing is, public sentiment eventually does seem to drift closer to the truths the rationalists determined already; see for example marijuana acceptance, gayness acceptance, and (hopefully, maybe) human-caused climate change. Is it because of a slowly-encroaching realization that the rationalists were right? Or is it all down to the lucky benevolence of the "persuaders"? And if most people aren't swayed by logical reasoning, then how does ANY progress actually get made (where "progress" is measured as "closer to rational truths and goods"), except as an accidental beneficence of Those Who Persuade Us?

jbob2000 7y ago

Philosophers search for truth and objectivity. A person’s identity (according to today’s school of thought) is not objective, it’s completely subject to their needs. And since you, the academic, don’t fully know their needs, you cannot understand their identity, and thus you cannot come to some objective truth about it. I think this is why philosophers are being called x-phobic; they’re using their power as academics to enforce some kind of truth.

jplayer01 7y ago
I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism, etc. These are all well within the ability of science in all it's forms (biology, history, psychology, sociology) to explain. Their needs are well-quantified and analyzed in any number of papers that have been published. There's nothing new there, except the internet reinforcing existing behaviors in a novel way that wasn't possible before. But the underlying pathologies? They've always been there.
- zbyte64 7y ago
  Weren't philosophers a decade a go lamenting of how reductionist science has become? Like I remember going to college and the professors held a forum where they insisted that science isn't the end-all be-all for human existence. Weird how I disagreed with their analogies but I find myself agreeing with their point that human experience is not meant to be reduced to what is already known.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    And they (as much as one can generalize across an entire discipline) still do (rightfully so) lament about science and how it pretends to be the answer to everything. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to throw out everything we do know about humans through science, such as how they establish their beliefs or how they manage to persist or how these beliefs get tied up in identity, and what we continuously find out by applying scientific methods (such as how presenting facts can lead to reinforcing contradictory pre-existing beliefs).

zbyte64 7y ago

Sure, but when you start arguing that "pronouns" are defined by genetics when we had pronouns before the discovery of genetics, I think you should be respected about as much as Deepak Chopra.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
We had pronouns that matched[1] with expressed genetics, which everyone could see. Why would it matter that people did not know what the underlying mechanism was for what they were observing? Even if they had known, they wouldn't have used a DNA test as the basis for choosing their pronoun. [1] With the exception of hermaphrodites and such.
- zbyte64 7y ago
  [2] With the exception of languages that have more then two expressed genders
tzs 7y ago
We had eye color before the discovery of genetics, too, so do you think, therefore, that eye color is not defined by genetics?
- zbyte64 7y ago
  Maybe we should keep comparisons to language constructs?

drak0n1c 7y ago

Peter Singer was one of the signers of this letter, a name people outside of philosophy may recognize.

helen___keller 7y ago

Unlike many HN commenters, I generally fall in favor of the current trend in social media censorship and stratification. I don't think there's a problem with individuals choosing to engulf themselves in a "bubble" of reinforcing opinions. I certainly see no reason why any individual should be forced into internet debates about their opinions if they are not personally a fan of internet debates. That said, academic institutions are not Facebook or Twitter, and academics rightfully should hold the power to ask questions and make statements that make others feel uncomfortable. There is no doubt that there should be room at universities for people who want to muse on the nature of gender, even in a way that may challenge others' strongly held beliefs. However, it is immediate and utmost importance to recognize that questions of gender identity are not just abstract questions. There are members of universities and of society at large struggling to gain acceptance as queer and transsexual, and whether or not academics want to deliberate on what it even means to be of a gender, universities and the people involved with universities seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of protecting the current progressive status quo of gender identity. I think there needs to be an important distinction made. Academic inquiry into the nature of gender is fine. But oppressing those already struggling to gain acceptance in society is not okay. To that end, I'm not sure I understand the bullets listed at the bottom of the post: >We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy. >We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights. Is this not a contradiction? If we are looking to protect philosophers' "social and political advocacy for sex-based rights", it seems implied that this includes advocacy in opposition to the previously stated "right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse". Even within academic discourse, there is an Overton window. The window may be wider for academics but it still exists. I don't know who gets to decide the Overton window for academics, but there are topics which are certainly out. We can all agree that sympathizing with genocide or advocating racism, things of that nature, are outside the Overton window for academics. If a philosopher muses "maybe killing all Jews is okay", he or she would be removed from the institution, and rightfully so. The question here is where the Overton window's edge lies in the realm of gender identity. My opinion is that the window ends where people's rights begin. If you want to ask "does gender even exist? Is gender identity a meaningful form of expression?", fine. If you want to say "gender doesn't exist, so don't protect transgender folk from discrimination in legislation", you have gone too far. Who defines the Overton window in reality? There is no "Board of Acceptable Philosophy". The process we have now of internet rage mobs and "deplatforming" is arguably the most democratic way society has ever had of enforcing an Overton window, but that's not a good thing in the context of academia, which should rightfully be separate from society at large. I think in the old days, the outdated ideas would simply die off with the thinkers who hold them, reflecting the changes in the world in slow motion.

royaltheartist 7y ago

By the amount of attention this issue gets, one might actually think it were a real problem and not something that a specific segment of the population really wants to focus on. Even the open letter itself only mentions "conversations" and "proposals." No professor at a major university seems to have actually be sanctioned or punished for what they say on this issue, despite all the conversation around it. We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone. And that's just the ones Wiki editors decided merited inclusion. There are probably more, some unknown, and countless other trans individuals who face violence and harassment on a near daily basis. Meanwhile, the hollowness of these arguments and the crocodile tears of the people who focus on them is laid bare when considers the amount of anti-BDS legislation that have been passed, with many universities requiring speakers to sign statements saying they will not and have never engaged in BDS. These people, these "philosophers", simply want to be allowed to be transphobic in public without consequences. But that's the real heart of freedom and free speech. You can say what you what, it's true, but you're not free from people talking back or deciding they don't want to hear from you.

brighter2morrow 7y ago
>We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone. 70x more people will be crushed by soda machines this year.
- royaltheartist 7y ago
  If only there were a difference between murders and freak accidents.
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    I think we should put things in perspective before going into a moral panic
ErikCorry 7y ago
You are saying that philosophers should not be so concerned about philosophy because there are bigger problems in society. But they are philosophers. Of course they are concerned about philosophy. Beetle scientists are concerned with beetle academia. Why the scare quotes around "philosophers"? They are university academics in the field of philosophy. The question of "what is a woman" seems to be obviously the sort of question that a philosopher should be engaging with. If you don't want to hear their thoughts on that don't read their journals, but to declare the question out of bounds seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophy is. Other statements that are obviously philosophical include: "Sex and gender are two different things" "Gender is a spectrum" "Sex is a spectrum" "A person can change their sex" And I am not persuaded by the argument that people's free speech is not violated if their career is merely ruined, but they are not put in prison. You can be sure that the blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick sent a clear message to every black NFL player that they were not free to share their support for BLM. :-(