Living Dangerously by Doing Public Philosophy
By: Shane J. Ralston
Tags: Racism, Free Speech, Bullying, Sexism, Philosophy

Living Dangerously by Doing Public Philosophy

Michel Foucault, the French intellectual, who — following in the footsteps of countryman Jean-Paul Sartre — is often characterized as the quintessential public philosopher.

Once upon a time on Twitter, I asked Nigel Warburton, Philosophy Bites podcaster in the UK, how he defines ‘public philosophy’ and I received no response, at least not from his account. However, soon after, a tweet appeared from a different handle (what I suspect was a sock-puppet account): “It is doing philosophy in public.”

I immediately thought, what a banal description of such an interesting activity. I too wouldn’t be proud to offer that answer. Let’s call “It is doing philosophy in public” the ‘sock-puppet’ definition of public philosophy.

What is Public Philosophy?

The interrogative “what is public philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question. Formulating an adequate response is challenging, whether the respondent is a philosopher, journalist, participant in a professional meeting or an institutional leader.

An answer is perhaps best arrived at by doing public philosophy — that is, by actually injecting philosophical ideas into public discourse and seeing where this takes you. Author an editorial for a local newspaper. Give a talk to members of a community organization. Serve on a citizen committee or in public office. Contribute regularly to a blog about public issues.

Probably the most non-controversial definition of ‘public philosophy’ I’ve found in years of searching is Jack Russell Weinstein’s in his essay “What Does Public Philosophy Do? (Hint: It Does not Make Better Citizens)”:

“In contrast to philosophy simpliciter, public philosophy denotes the act of professional philosophers engaging with non-professionals, in a non-academic setting, with the specific goals of exploring issues philosophically. In other words, public philosophy involves getting people to think about the assumptions that govern the things they do, the controversies they are immersed in, and the experiences of their day-to-day lives by looking at those aspects that are either invisible to them or taken for granted. Public philosophy and philosophy as it is usually understood are not too far apart, although their audiences differ radically. What public philosophy need not be, however, is professionalized and refined.”

Weinstein claims that “[p]ublic philosophy and philosophy as it is usually understood are not too far apart,” except that “their audiences differ radically.”

However, Weinstein’s definition strikes me as only a slightly elaborated version the sock-puppet definition, from “It is doing philosophy in public” to “It is doing philosophy for a general audience of non-philosophers.” (Another version I’ve heard “It is doing philosophy in a public-facing manner.”)

What I’m Up To

In this article I want to accomplish more than simply arrive at a definition of public philosophy. Instead, I wish to draw a ground-map of the terrain we tread as public philosophers and locate the metaphorical landmines — not in order to help others avoid them (some are simply unavoidable), but so that we can all acknowledge the risks in advance of undertaking the enterprise.

In other words, the point is to speak to some of the dangers of doing public philosophy and explain why attempts to eliminate those dangers or make public philosophy a safe and sanitized space, while well-intentioned, threaten to undermine the enterprise of public philosophy itself. I’m guessing that I’ll make some enemies in the process, but here it goes.

Romanticizing Public Philosophy

There is no shortage of scholars and journalists who have sought to romanticize the role of the public intellectual or public philosopher. I am guilty of it myself. I argued in at least two pieces (here and here) that more intellectuals should become what the American philosopher John Dewey called “liaison officers,” fulfilling dual roles as, one, interdisciplinary scholars (i.e. bridging between specialized discourses in distinct academic disciplines) and, two, public philosophers (i.e. translating academic ideas into the language of public or everyday discourse).

In this second capacity (public philosopher), the intellectual engages with the public in order to collaboratively identify, clarify and address public problems. She also seeks to educate and inform the public about issues that might appear inscrutable to all but the very few, the experts and policymakers. In this way, the public philosopher prevents the policy environment from becoming, as Walter Lippmann described in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” so that citizens’ opinions grow vulnerable to manipulation by elites — in a process famously called the “manufacture of consent.” This is a wonderfully idealized picture of public philosophy, though it borders on the naïve.

I’m not the only naïve one, though. Others, such as the renowned Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, also excessively romanticize public philosophy. In the preface to his 2005 book Public Philosophy, Sandel identifies two “senses” of public philosophy: one, to “find in the political and legal controversies of our day an occasion for philosophy,” and, two, “an attempt to do philosophy in public — to bring moral and political philosophy to bear on contemporary public discourse” (p. 5).

Throughout the collection of essays, he plies his trade, analyzing a cross-section of controversial public issues, from assisted suicide to stem cell research to affirmative action to environmental pollution. Sandel is renowned for filling classes at Harvard University with hundreds of students for his first year course titled Justice and engaging them at a level you normally see only in significantly smaller graduate seminars.

But the true test of Sandel’s public philosophy is whether he can engage citizens outside the university, inspiring average people who care about these issues but lack the time, attention or aptitude to read his books or attend his lectures to take action. Perhaps the first obstacle a public philosopher must overcome is the anti-intellectualism that is unfortunately rife in American society and its politically polarized culture.

Professional Philosophy Associations are Also Guilty

Organizations such as the Public Philosophy Network and the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Public Philosophy (APA-CPP) are equally guilty. They too have also unnecessarily romanticized public philosophy. (Full disclosure: I served on the APA-CPP from 2012 to 2015).

In 2010, the APA-CPP organized a special meeting on the opportunities and challenges of practicing public philosophy, including how to teach it, evaluate it and emphasize its value across the university and within the wider community. Two participants, Sharon Meagher and Ellen Feder, created a report titled “Practicing Public Philosophy” in which they offered a record of the event and its findings:

“A consensus quickly emerged that we [participants in the 2010 American Philosophical Association meeting to discuss the value of practicing public philosophy] should not aim to define the term [‘public philosophy’] in ways that provided some sort of litmus test on whether someone was engaged in public philosophy or some project could claim the label. Rather, we worked to think about how philosophical engagement with various publics has been — and can be — valuable.”

The final report by the meeting’s organizers reveals some of the initial misgivings philosophers feel about accepting such a non-traditional form of philosophical activity. Will public philosophy be required of all philosophy faculty members? Will doing public philosophy eclipse standard practices of scholarship and service? How do tenure committees evaluate public philosophy?

Most of the report is laudatory, praising the activity and its value within and beyond the philosophical community. Its authors congratulate public philosophy and public philosophers for justifying the value of philosophy and the liberal arts generally, both inside and outside of the university, as well as enabling critical reflection and informed activism. The authors write:

“Philosophical practice is a public good and should therefore be practiced in and with various publics. It has the explicit aim of benefiting public life and should be liberatory. Public Philosophy should assist and empower those who are most vulnerable and suffer injustice, particularly through a critical analysis of power structures.”

While the report confers some much-needed legitimacy to public philosophy, the problem is that the idealized vision it offers belies some of the dangers inherent in the enterprise. Insofar as it is a fictitious rendering, the effort to state public philosophy’s value in such fanciful terms— much like the efforts to create safe spaces for its practice — are misconceived.

If I were an early career philosopher reading this report, I might be tempted to engage in this romantic form of philosophical practice without a full appreciation of how perilous it can be, without knowing where the metaphorical landmines are buried. That would be dangerous.

Doing Public Philosophy in Pennsylvania

In February 2016, I was approached by a former student who told me that he knew several cadets at the Pennsylvania State Police Academy in Hershey who were caught cheating. At the time, I was working as a professor at Penn State University Hazleton in Northeastern PA.

Despite the news reports, my former student claimed that these cadets were not so-called ‘bad apples.’ The cheating was systemic, longstanding and approved by the academy’s administration, he insisted. It would be more apt to say that apples (students) were not bad; instead, the barrel (organization) was bad.

It would be more apt to say that the apples were stored in bad barrels — in this case, a police academy rife with corruption. The status quo was maintained by administrators, faculty and political backers who knew full well that many incoming cadets were so academically unprepared that they had to cheat in order to matriculate. I interviewed several of the dismissed cadets and swore to them that I would not disclose their identities and that I would exercise discretion in choosing who I shared their stories with. Those cadets who told the truth to authorities, particularly that cheating was tolerated and even encouraged at the academy, were summarily dismissed, while those who lied graduated and became troopers.

I quickly realized that this was an ethical problem that had to be exposed. I also discovered that a local community college’s municipal police academy had a similar cheating incident occur only two years previous to the state police academy scandal. It was no coincidence that at both the state police academy and community college municipal police academy cheat sheets were passed from one student cohort to the next.

But the similarities did not stop there. Both scandals were subsequently covered up after the administration blamed the cheating on a few wayward students. In both cases, no instructors or administrators were disciplined or terminated. Promises were then made that exams would be changed more frequently to prevent similar patterns of cheating. Finally, I unearthed another trail leading to my then-current employer, Penn State University, an internationally recognized state research university.

My employer had started a project to help the state police academy recover from the bad press and improve recruitment numbers in the wake of the cheating scandal. The online education purveyor at the university I worked for, the only growing division, had experienced problems with student cheating too and were able to revise academic integrity policies and change testing procedures (by, for instance, not requiring in-person proctors). If more students cheat, then more stay in the programs and eventually graduate. Sometimes institutional sharing of best practices can be unethical, especially when it involves telling other educational institutions how to tolerate and encourage student cheating in order to artificially inflate retention and graduation rates.

Between February 2016 and August 2016, I conducted research on this phenomenon of institutionally-approved cheating at these three entities, as well as the sharing of best practices between them, and eventually wrote an article about it for the on-line publication Truthout. I’d like to say that what came next was unexpected, but that would be a lie.

As a result of doing public philosophy, I suffered retaliation from my employer, was harassed by the local police and bullied by the state police. In the course of six months, my website and blog were shut down by my employer, a state police trooper threatened me over the phone while I was transferring custody of my children to their mother and I was accosted and harassed by six members of the the local police department when trying to visit my children at their daycare.

I found out that the former police chief of the local police department had taught for the community college municipal police academy. For shutting down my website and blog, a student of mine filed a complaint with my employer through their ethics and compliance reporting system. I filed formal complaints against the state and local police. Nothing came of these complaints. The retaliators, bullies and harassers won.

But as I said, I expected that this would be the outcome. I was aware of the risks before I started the project and eventually accepted the retaliation, harassment and bullying as natural consequences of doing public philosophy. As I teach my ethics students, the Iron Rule of Whistleblowing is that when you expose the truth, those who feel threatened will retaliate. It is proof that they know what they are doing is wrong and that you are right. (Another account of this episode can be found here.)

The Perils of Practicing Public Philosophy

Romanticizing the role of the public philosopher can lead one to overlook the very real dangers of the enterprise. If you publicly criticize your university employer, you could become a target of retaliation. If you write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper exposing the corrupt practices of the police chief, you could be harassed by the police. If you draw attention to an issue that a college alumni network or a large professional association would rather you not talk about, you could find yourself (as well as your family) the target of a coordinated campaign of cyber bullying on multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). The dangers of doing public philosophy are manifold.

Push-back against public philosophers has become especially virulent in the blogosphere. Harassing messages and thinly-veiled threats are termed trolling. The people who make them are trolls. Public philosophers working in the blogosphere will inevitably face off with trolls and have to endure their trolling behavior.

For instance, in his 2015 New York Times essay “Dear White America,” philosophy professor George Yancy writes a letter to his readers, asking them to acknowledge their sexist and racist biases, as well as confess the privileges they derive in virtue of being male or white. The letter was based upon nineteen interviews he conducted with a diverse group of intellectuals discussing the topics of sexism and racism.

While some of the responses to his essay were positive, the overwhelming majority of commenters reacted in a negative and even aggressive manner, sending him hate mail, leaving harassing messages at his home and even threatening him with physical violence. Yancy’s essay was an exercise in public philosophy and it brought out the trolls.

In the blogosphere, public philosophers are fair game for trolls. It is a minefield that awaits anyone who dares to play the gadfly or speak truth to power. Doing public philosophy in this medium involves some unique risks and consequences too. Audience members can respond anonymously or under a pseudonym, so there is little accountability for the messages they post.

The question is whether someone who wishes to inject philosophical ideas into the public discourse is willing to accept the risk of being trolled and the consequent damage that trolling behavior could have for their reputation, mental health and physical integrity. If they are unwilling to accept the risks and consequences, then there are always alternatives: presenting those ideas at an academic conference with like-minded scholars or at a friendly departmental colloquium or in a supportive online discussion forum.

It might be objected that the blogosphere should be sanitized, cleaned up, made more safe, so that we can all do public philosophy without the associated risks and consequences. To some extent, that is what some members of the American Philosophical Association have decided to undertake by drafting and defending their official statement on bullying and harassment, to which we now turn.

The American Philosophical Association’s Statement on Bullying and Harassment

On February 12, 2016, the American Philosophical Association released its “Statement on Bullying and Harassment,” drafted by members of the Committee on Public Philosophy and the Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers. I would like to give a fairly literal account of the statement, quoting it wherever possible, and then offer my response.

The statement begins with a preamble affirming the value of public philosophy. The authors romanticize the public philosopher as someone who “bring[s] their philosophical expertise to the public by way of op-ed essays, public forums, teach-ins, and other venues.” The next paragraph relates George Yancy’s experience of being trolled after the publication of his New York Times essay:

“Recently several authors of high-profile public essays have been subjected to vilification, racist and/or sexist verbal abuse, and outright threats of bodily harm. In the past few weeks, Professor George Yancy, in response to his essay ‘Dear White America’ . . . has received harassing emails, phone calls, and letters containing racist slurs and threats of violence. This is one very egregious example of bullying and harassment that philosophers who speak out publicly endure, and there are many more, often taking racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or ableist forms.”

The following paragraph decries “bullying and harassment” based on sex, orientation, gender, race, ethnicity and disability. The authors acknowledge that philosophers are often “gadflies” who take all kinds of “intellectual, ethical and social risks in their work.”

Here philosophers are portrayed as provocateurs who, due to the nature of their work, can easily become victims of bullying and harassment. However, it is equally possible that they could become perpetrators. The final two paragraphs are worth quoting at length:

“Abusive speech directed at philosophers is not limited to responses by the public to published op-eds. A look at some of the anonymous philosophy blogs also reveals a host of examples of abusive speech by philosophers directed against other philosophers. Disagreement is fine and is not the issue. But bullying and ad hominem harassment of philosophers by other philosophers undermines civil disagreement and discourse and has no place in our community. Attacks that focus on a philosopher’s race, gender, or other status are unacceptable and in violation of the APA Statement on Nondiscrimination. We call upon any member who has engaged in such behaviors in the past to cease and desist. The APA condemns the activities of those who seek to silence philosophers through bullying, abusive speech, intimidation, or threats of violence. We also call upon our membership to speak out against such attacks, whether from within the academy or from the public sphere.”

The authors are concerned with policing speech, specifically “abusive speech,” “bullying,” “attacks on a philosopher’s race, gender or other status” and “ad hominem harassment.” For First Amendment scholars, this kind of blanket prohibition raises alarm bells, since hate speech is constitutionally protected in the U.S. (though not in Canada) unless it directly incites violence. Short of incitement, the troll can abuse, bully and insult someone based on any personal characteristic.

A common practice on Twitter involves insulting a person’s spouse or partner, even telling the target that others have slept with the person. Some respond to trolling with campaigns to censure or shame the trolls. No matter how wrong or unpalatable these messages strike us as, though, they nevertheless constitute constitutionally protected speech. When speech threatens violence or incites others to the same end, then it should be reported to law enforcement.

Still, the statement’s own threatening language of “cease and desist” is odd, seemingly borrowed from the cease and desist letters authored by attorneys. These letters usually accomplish little besides intimidating their recipients into silence with the threat of future legal action that often never materializes because there is no cause for action in the first place. Similarly, the APA statement’s ban on trolling is nothing more than a paper tiger, since the kind of speech it proscribes is constitutionally protected.

I publicly responded to the statement with an argument that abusive and uncivil speech should be met with more and better speech, not a ban on all unsavory forms of expression. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ marketplace of ideas metaphor, the better speech and arguments will inevitably prevail, so long as the market is left to its own devices: Uncivil, provocative and abusive expressions, while offensive to our ears, are nevertheless protected in the marketplace.

Threats or incitements to violence should never be tolerated. Verbal attacks or insults directed at someone because of their race, sex/gender, age or disability status should be met with better arguments, not group censure or public shaming. Let the marketplace of ideas do its work. Cease-and-desist language is for lawyers, not philosophers.

An objection to my view is that some speech is simply so objectionable that it must be banned altogether from public speech forums. It poisons discourse and harms vulnerable audience members. One of the most eloquent advocates for this position is Lynne Tirrell who, in her 2017 essay “Toxic Speech: Toward an Epidemiology of Discursive Harm,” compares speech that harms to toxic substances in the metaphor of ‘toxic speech’:

“Toxic speech, like any toxin, is a threat to the well-being and even the very lives of those against whom it is deployed. The level of threat can fluctuate, its power can be acute or chronic, the damage can be local or systemic, but toxicity damages all it touches. To many, this claim may seem hyperbolic, but even a sketch of the concept of toxic speech dispels the hyperbole.”

Indeed, Tirrell’s account is an exaggeration of the kind and degree of harm offensive speech predominantly inflicts on its listeners. Most abusive speech consists of slurs and epithets. The typical response is that the listener feels offended. Some interpret these expressions slightly differently, understanding them as defamatory to their character or harms to their reputation. But a minority of speech directed at audiences actually precipitates violence.

If the speech harms listeners’ mental health, they always have the option of exit. However, as the recent spat of incivility between gender-critical and transgender-supportive philosophers proves, the quest for sanitizing (or de-toxifying) public discourse, even within the philosophical community, is pointless. Philosophers will vigorously disagree and no official statement by an academic association (or one of its committees) will stop them from deploying uncivil or toxic speech.

To summarize my argument: If we decide that some kinds of speech are unacceptable and preemptively ban them from blog discussions and comment boards, we might inadvertently restrict the best ideas and arguments from being freely expressed in these forums. Likewise, when we stop public philosophers from framing their ideas and arguments in rude and discriminatory language, we also risk undermining the enterprise of public philosophy itself.

Making spaces to do public philosophy safe and sterile, free from personal attacks and uncivil language, inhibits free expression, and public philosophy depends on improvisation and the free exchange of ideas for its survival. My tactic of bracketing the insulting or abusive language is one way to proceed without establishing an outright ban on such language.

The Future of Public Philosophy

While I do not wish to sound alarmist, I believe that the APA’s “Statement on Bullying and Harassment” jeopardizes the future of public philosophy. The difficulty with regulating style of expression is that eventually it verges on regulating speech content.

Some free speech experts describe this as “censorship creep.” It is similar to making so-called ‘safe spaces’ in universities free from the expression of offensive ideas. Over time the discussion of all controversial topics disappears from these safe-speech zones. Whether regulating speaking style or banning toxic speech outright, the outcome is ultimately to chill free expression.

For public philosophers, a limit on involvement in all but the most highly regulated speech forums would spell an end to public philosophy, unless of course all public speech forums were made to resemble university faculty seminars. Since public speech forums are not safe spaces, a viable alternative is to warn early-career philosophers of the many risks of doing public philosophy and how push-back or retaliation could negatively affect their mental health, their personal safety (as well as their family’s) and their job security.

When the APA Committee on Public Philosophy began taking clear positions on political issues, I immediately saw the danger this posed to its mission of encouraging public philosophy at large. (Indeed, my tenure on the committee ended at about that time.) The committee’s impulse to sterilize public discourse, to make it safe for public philosophers to participate, poses a similar hazard. Saying what positions it is acceptable for public philosophers to take and how they should express themselves inhibits the free expression of ideas and eventually ends public philosophy as we know it.

A healthy future for public philosophy depends on philosophers defining and redefining what public philosophy is by doing public philosophy in public spaces before general audiences of non-philosophers. Just as street performers improvise, adding and subtracting elements to their performances, so public philosophers improvise, mixing philosophical concepts and strong rhetoric, adding and subtracting expressions, some abrasive and insulting, others rational and persuasive.

Prescribing either the content or style of discourse that counts as public philosophy is equivalent to what the participants in the 2010 APA meeting on practicing public philosophy explicitly denied they would do, namely, offering “some sort of litmus test on whether someone was engaged in public philosophy or some project could claim the label.” Surely a ban on abusive and offensive speech is such a litmus test and, ultimately, if it is heeded, will spell the end of public philosophy.