Are moral philosophers any more moral when it comes to sexual predation? Maybe not, but at least their colleagues are sometimes willing to publicly shame them. Two hundred philosophers have publicly called out esteemed moral and political philosopher Thomas Pogge for “a long-term pattern of discriminatory conduct, including unwanted sexual advances, quid pro quo offers of letters of recommendation and other perks, employment retaliation in response to charges of sexual misconduct, and sexual assault.” (They include his department’s chair and all its tenured professors.)
Prof Pogge says he donates “as much as $40,000 a year to charities in the developing world” and “underwrote the purchase of 13 carabaos—a type of water buffalo—to help the Iraya Mangyan people, on the Philippine island of Mindoro, become self-sufficient.” Pogge has made celebrated contributions not only to the study of global justice and poverty, but to action programs to address the problems.
Three other philosophers were recently forced to resign over sexual harassment and assault claims, including “star philosopher” Colin McGinn, author of Moral Literacy: or, How to Do the Right Thing.
Why question their sincerity? They’re not politicians. Maybe this isn’t simply hypocrisy; there is cognitive dissonance here that defies understanding. What are these thinkers thinking? (Someone should write a book about it, but I’m afraid it would be hard to get beyond lies and shallow excuses. When you interview murdering dictators, at least they admit what they’ve done, even with pride.)
But what is it about philosophy? Also gone are a prominent Northwestern University professor, and one at University of Colorado (where the university forced out one other Philosophy Department professor, is trying to fire another, and banished another for two months). We all knew that some fields were hostile to women; now add philosophy to engineering, gaming and IT. (Just Google: “Philosophy climate hostile to women.”) Turns out that there is a greater gender disparity in philosophy faculty than in the physical sciences and roughly only a quarter of philosophy faculty are women, and measures of their recognition show even greater gender disparities.
Are philosophy departments worse than others? I don’t know, but the mastery of language and argument prized in the field is dangerously empowering; and where there is power. … And yet our philosophical tradition from its beginnings in Greece had high moral claims (well, women excluded there too). My interest in these stories was that these two “star” philosophers, Pogge and McGinn, both worked as moral philosophers and yet were MEW, Moral Except with Women.
Let the campus movements against sex crimes and the resulting Title IX investigations teach us the proper disrespect for authority — in this case, to the authorities who are themselves the repositories of authority. Universities have long been like the Church, sanctified spaces providing asylum for sexual predators. The Church would move its child rapists to some other parish; although this is a convenience unavailable to universities, they have found it easy to induce the victims to leave. The campus movement against sexual abuse and the resulting Title IX investigations are overturning attitudes, behaviors, and structures; and people can change their culture even when they can’t change their government.
But it is so interesting, so odd and so very sad that so many people continue to talk so fine and act so bad.
[Personal note: I studied in two philosophy departments; in neither were there any women on the faculty. Very long ago, but structures outlast graduations.]
[Check out the in-depth reporting on Pogge and the Yale Philosophy scandal in Buzzfeed by Katie J. M. Baker, who also presented the statement the Stanford victim read to Stanford rapist Brock Turner.]
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Some insights for student journalists: a template of three components for major stories (story, data, commentary) instead of “a long text that moves over two pages”; a look at their font choices; different thinking about a newspaper’s “destination page” (pp 2-3) (and maybe F Newsmagazine should rethink its contents page); and what they talk about in the morning meeting with which the editors begin the day.
