Job offer negotiations and relationships with our future colleagues.

Posted on March 19, 2014March 19, 2014 by admin

Many pixels have already been devoted to discussing the case of W, the philosophy job candidate who says her job offer was rescinded after she inquired with the department making the offer about what adjustments in start-date, salary, new teaching preps per year, pre-tenure sabbatical, and maternity leave might be possible. Rather than indicating which requests were just not possible, the department’s response to the inquiry withdrew the offer of employment entirely with the justification that the items about which W asked indicated “an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered.”

In case you’ve been glued to your grading instead of the internet, The Philosophy Smoker has a nice round-up of the commentary. It’s worth noting too that some have expressed doubts that this try to negotiate/lose the offer scenario could really have happened as described. Whether it did or not, I think this is a good opportunity to examine the relationship at the center of negotiations between a hiring department and a job candidate — namely, the relationship between future colleagues.

When an academic department is conducting a job search, it is trying to hire someone to address the department’s needs. These needs may include teaching particular courses, developing new curriculum, advising students, spreading out committee work, contributing to a department culture that supports good pedagogy, productive research, and so forth. The specific needs of a department and the specific culture its members create are very much connected to facts on the ground — whether it is part of a college or university that is teaching-focused or research-focused, how willing the administration is to release funds to the department, how many students the department serves, how many faculty members there are to take on the shared work.

Search committees looking for a good “fit” between job candidates and the faculty position they are trying to fill seek not only candidates who can address the department’s needs but also candidates who show some grasp of those needs, some awareness of (or at least interest in) the facts on the ground that constrain how those needs can be met. If the department’s primary need is for a new faculty member to teach a significant part of the curriculum and the candidate asks to be excused from all pre-tenure teaching duties, that would probably indicate that the candidate didn’t grok the department’s needs and might not be able to contribute enthusiastically to meeting them.

However, a new faculty hire is not like a wireless learning-delivery device. A new faculty hire is a human who, in the course of helping to achieve the shared goals of the department, can be legitimately expected to pursue goals of her own.

Some of these individual goals ought to be goals shared by the department hiring the job candidate, chief among them creating conditions in which the new hire can contribute to meeting the department’s needs in a sustainable way over the long term. One of the big advantages here for the department is that creating such conditions can help obviate the need for another faculty search, a time- and labor-intensive process in the best of circumstances.

When you’ve gone through the trouble of a search, you don’t want to hire a candidate who’ll end up leaving in a few years for a job somewhere else that she perceives as a better fit for her needs. Neither do you want to hire someone who you’ll have to replace in six or seven years because she cannot do what she needs to do to get tenured.

Ideally, you want a job candidate who has been reflective about what she may need to be able to do a good job meeting the department’s needs and meeting her own needs — including being able to establish her case for retention, tenure, and promotion.

A job candidate who hash’t given this thought may put herself in situations where she cannot do an adequate job meeting the department’s needs — or where she can meet those needs, but only by courting burnout or ignoring other tasks she needs to do to get tenured.

This is a place where the case of W suggests to me a candidate who demonstrated thoughtfulness about how to support a department’s teaching mission in a sustainable way. In a small department, faculty members each need to do significant teaching to cover the curriculum. But preparing a course that works well with the actual population of students to be taught benefits tremendously from feedback from those actual students and modification in response to that feedback. W inquired whether it was possible to cap her new course preps at three per year for the first three years. Preparing three new courses per year requires substantial labor in itself. Road-testing them to make sure they meet the students’ needs as well in practice as in imagination is the kind of thing that ensures the prepared courses really are serving the needs of the department offering them. As well, limiting new preps while the new hire is getting immersed in the culture of the department is a reasonable way not to spread her too thin.

It may be that facts on the ground mean that the new hire will need to have more new course preps than this or else the department’s needs will not be met. But for a candidate to recognize the labor involved in doing the job right should be an advantage, not a disadvantage, in meeting those needs.

The dance between search committees and candidates is complicated and emotionally fraught, each side trying to evaluate “fit” on the basis of necessarily incomplete information since many questions are only answered when the new hire actually succeeds or doesn’t in meeting the particular needs in the particular circumstances. In the absence of a perfectly accurate view of the future, evaluating how well a candidate fills particular curricular needs, understands and can support the mission of the department, and will be able to pursue their individual goals (with respect to pedagogy, scholarship, professional development, work-life balance) in this environment requires honest communication on both sides.

Candidates should be honest about their long-range aspirations and should not pretend to be a good fit for a position if they are not. Search committees should be expansive in their recognition of the plurality of individual goals that probably fit with the department’s needs. Both sides should understand that job candidates are frequently in a moment where they are legitimately poised between — and open to — different professional environments and trajectories, different people they could become within their professions.

It’s suboptimal for a department when a candidate pretends to be a good fit and accepts a job merely to stave off unemployment until her dream job somewhere else comes along. By the same token, it’s suboptimal for a candidate when a department cares only for its own needs rather than taking the candidate’s individual needs into account.

A job candidate is not a mere means to fulfill your department’s ends. Buyer’s market or not, a job candidate should not be treated as a supplicant deserving of punishment for asking questions in good faith. A job candidate is your potential colleague. A job candidate to whom an offer of employment has been extended should be treated as your future colleague.

Punishing your future colleague for asking what kind of support is available for her professional endeavors (including her professional endeavors that directly address needs your department hopes to meet by hiring her) suggests there is something badly wrong with your understanding of your relationship with that future colleague. It suggests that you are OK with using her, and it probably doesn’t bode well for your relationship with any new colleagues you manage to hire.

Whatever the facts on the ground may be, exploiting members of your professional community as mere means rather than recognizing them as legitimate ends in themselves is bad behavior — the kind of behavior job candidates should not expect from hiring departments. If that’s the relationship you expect to enact with your new faculty hire, you should at least have the decency to spell this out when you make an offer so job candidates will have no illusions about what it is you’re offering.

(Crossposted at Academe Blog)

Analyzing to avoid.

Posted on February 1, 2014February 1, 2014 by admin

From the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women report on CU-Boulder philosophy department, this paragraph on page 7 really jumped out at me:

The Department uses pseudo-philosophical analyses to avoid directly addressing the situation. Their faculty discussions revolve around the letter rather than the spirit of proposed regulations and standards. They spend too much time articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior instead of instilling higher expectations for professional behavior. They spend significant time time debating footnotes and “what if” scenarios instead of discussing what they want their department to look and feel like. In other words, they spend time figuring out how to get around regulations rather than focusing on how to make the department supportive of women and family-friendly.

(Bold emphasis in original.)

What the report is pointing to here is the chronic rules-lawyering, the looking for an exception to defeat any attempts at formulating useful descriptions, the valorization of the critical project to the exclusion of even a glance towards the positive project — in short, the kind of stuff that makes people hate being around a certain kind of philosopher (or “skeptic,” or debate team champion).

The complicated hypotheticals and counterfactuals and Devil’s advocacy get in the way of acknowledging actual things happening to actual people and working out something like a strategy (even if it’s an imperfect one) to change things so people don’t have to experience that sort of bad thing so much going forward.

Also, maybe not coincidentally, such pseudo-philosophical analyses keep the people engaging in them in their comfort zone (framing arguments, looking for counterexamples) rather than making them do the uncomfortable work of changing how they treat each other.

We can do better than that.

Good strategies and bad strategies for furthering your cause.

Posted on December 26, 2013December 26, 2013 by admin

Let’s say you’re a non-profit organization “dedicated to building a global community who will speak up for the ocean.”

Maybe part of your strategy to make this happen is to aggregate relevant news about the ocean environment and the impacts of human activity upon it on your website.

A quick and dirty way to do this might be to scrape content from other websites.

However, the people who generated that content might object to their copyright being violated by your quick technological solution.

Given that the people writing the stories that describe the ocean environment and the impacts of human activity upon it (whether in words or in pictures) might already be sympathetic to your organizational goals, a better strategy might be to respect their copyright (and, more broadly, their intellectual and creative labor). Instead of scraping their content, and burying attribution to the actual authors or artists at the very end of the post, it might be better to quote a paragraph, link prominently to the source, seek explicit permission for use, and cultivate a network of relationships with scientists and blog readers.

It takes relatively little to get the people blogging about science (and the audiences reading them) on your side. However, being too lazy or careless to respect their work is likely to communicate that you’re running one of those non-profits that plays fast and loose with important things when it suits you. Maybe those important things are proper attribution, maybe those important things are sound scientific research. If you’re cutting one kind of corner, what are the odds that you’re willing to cut another kind?

Don’t do that. In a crowded field of nonprofits, this kind of careless behavior will make you stand out in the wrong way.

An open letter to men scared that women will call out their behavior publicly.

Posted on November 19, 2013November 19, 2013 by admin

Hey guys,

It’s come to my attention that some of you are feeling kind of uncomfortable at the possibility that women in your life — in your community, in your trusted circle of friends — might call you out in the event that you engage in behavior that hurts them or someone they care about. Some of you have been telling me that you’re especially worried that you’ll be called out in front of other people, labeled persuasively as a bad guy, and that this will destroy your good name, your career prospects, your happiness.

I don’t doubt that you are anxious here. So, I have a few questions about how you’d like us to proceed.

First, can you provide assurances that, when women bring criticisms of your behavior to you privately, you will take those critiques seriously and change your behavior accordingly?

If so — and if you make this commitment public, so the women in your world know about it — you should be fine! You’ll address the harm you are doing right away, and everyone will move on.

In the (I’m sure rare or non-existent) event that you don’t respond to privately raised critique of your harmful behavior in a way that addresses the harm, can you provide assurances that you will respond promptly and constructively to a gently worded public critique?

If so, you should be fine! You’ll address the harm you are doing promptly, and everyone will move on.

In the (purely hypothetical) event that you don’t respond to a gently worded public critique of your harmful behavior in a way that addresses the harm, how many free passes on your harmful behavior do you believe you are entitled to?

Give us the number — is it two? five? ten? — so we know the point at which you recognize that you deserve a critique that is not private and not gently worded.

Yes, having your behavior criticized makes you feel defensive. We know this. As fellow human beings, we have those feelings, too.

But if you are defaulting to the position that it’s never OK for the women in your life to tell you when your behavior is harming them, never OK for them to expect you to address those harms, you know what? The women in your life will be defending themselves against you.

They will not trust you. They will not see your good-guy status shining through your actual behavior. When you proclaim yourself an ally, your best-case reaction will be eye-rolls.

It does not feel good to be told your behavior is hurting others. But it does not feel good for others to be hurt by your behavior.

Prioritizing your own hurt feelings over growth is a sure way never to be trusted as an ally by anyone paying attention.

And we are paying attention. For our own well being, we have to.

Sincerely,

Dr. Free-Ride

_____

On the Fixed State Ally Model vs. Process Model Ally Work

On allies.

On the labor involved in being part of a community.

This is not a post I want to write.

Posted on October 15, 2013October 15, 2013 by admin

I think sexual harassment is bad. I think other kinds of harassment, especially those that work by way of power imbalances, are bad. That’s a position I stand by, and I hope I still would even if I had not been sexually harassed myself, and even if I didn’t count among my friends an alarming number of people who had been sexually harassed.

We’ll never know about the truth of that counterfactual claim, though, given that I have been sexually harassed (in more than one professional field), and that the number of people I know who have themselves been sexually harassed seems only to increase.

I know what it is like not to be able to share details of my own experience for fear of the professional repercussions it could have for me. When the person who harasses you has enough power that he could literally destroy any chance of a career for you in your chosen field — when it’s clear that your professional community values that person a lot and that it hasn’t even gotten a chance to know you, let alone to value you — choosing to go public looks an awful lot like choosing to burn your own career.

So mostly, you don’t.

Maybe, eventually, once you find people within the community you feel like you can trust, people who’ve given indications that they value you, you share some of the details. Probably you wait for some sort of sign that these are people who, at least in principle, agree that harassment is bad. And probably, as you’re naming your experience, you avoid naming the perpetrator, just in case there’s a longstanding professional relationship that you didn’t know about.

Because even people who are against harassment in principle can be damned loyal to their friends.

But often by the time you’re ready to share some details with someone, you’ve so internalized the apologia that comes out when people do tell that you aren’t even sure if you can call what happened to you “harassment”. You wonder if, objectively, what happened to you can really be as big a deal as it feels like it is to you — if the fact that it feels like a big deal to you, one that you can’t just shake off, means that something is wrong with you.

Some days, when you start to notice how much harassment there is, how many of your peers (and mentors) have been harassed, and how little that seems to faze your community, you maybe even start to wonder if harassment is just the price of admission to the community, if shaking it off is the kind of skill people in the community need to cultivate to survive.

The landscape we bump up against every day discourages us from making a fuss.

It encourages us to use the most equivocal language available to describe our experience, if we talk about it at all.

It reminds us that we’re weak if we can’t shake it off, that we will be blamed for not finding some way to prevent what happened to us even though someone else did it to us.

It underlines that push come to shove, people are going to side with someone with more social capital, even if that person did something that the people siding with him are against in theory — and that people are going to trust their own gut feeling that the person who harmed you is a good guy over the most careful and accurate recitation of the facts, even over what they see with their own eyes.

Not speaking up is the most rational move in most circumstances. Jennifer L. Berdahl, a Professor of Organizational Behavior, notes that

It’s individually adaptive to go along with or try and act like members of the majority group when one is outnumbered. There are even rewards for criticizing others for not doing the same. But this individually adaptive behavior perpetuates the status quo.

So, if people aren’t brave enough, or fed up enough, or whatever, to risk the individual harm that comes with speaking up, we are likely to be stuck with how things are right now. And some days, how things are right now is indescribably shitty.

The proximate cause for my writing this post is that writer and playwright Monica Byrne described her own experience of being harassed and named an influential member of the online science community, Bora Zivkovic, as her harasser. In a statement on his personal blog, Bora confirms the facts of Ms. Byrne’s account, describes the measures put in place at Scientific American to address the professional harms to Ms. Byrne, and offers an apology.

I have known Bora for years. I have respected his professional judgment. I have deep affection for him and for his wife. I count him as a friend. He has never harassed me.

But that doesn’t mean that I am going to offer apologia for his bad behavior. It doesn’t mean I’m going to preemptively disbelieve Ms. Byrne’s account, not just of what happened but also of how it affected her.

People make mistakes, even people who are our friends. People who do great things for a community can also do great harm to individual members of that community — and, by extension, to the very webs of trust within that community that they worked hard to build.

I’m not going to stop being Bora’s friend, but I’m not going to try to minimize or excuse his behavior, either.

I’m going to keep caring for him, but part of that will involve me continuing to hold him to a high standard — because I know he can be that good, and I’m prepared to do what I can to help him do that.

I’m not going to cut Bora off as irredeemable, but I’m not going to center his redemption over mitigating the harms caused by his bad behavior. I’m not going to prioritize telling the world about his redemption, since I understand redemption as a quiet, personal, daily effort to live the standard one endorses.

I’m not going to argue that anyone else should forgive Bora or trust Bora. That’s a personal matter, and I’m not equipped to make that call for anyone else but myself.

I am going to argue that, within our communities, we should look very hard at the power gradients that enable bad behavior that doesn’t seem like bad behavior to the people committing it. We should interrogate the factors that make it dangerous for targets of bad behavior to speak up. We should recognize our tendency to focus on intent and ignore actual effects. We should notice when we get sucked into the familiar narrative of apologia and cut that out.

We should hold each other to high standards and then get serious about helping each other reach those standards. We should keep tinkering with our culture to making being better to each other (and to ourselves) easier, not harder.

Being good can be hard, which is one of the reasons we need friends.

I stand with others who have been harassed. And I hope, as a loving and honest friend with high expectations, I can help bring about a world with fewer harassers in it.

Questions for the scientists in the audience.

Posted on September 5, 2013September 5, 2013 by admin

Today in my “Ethics in Science” class, we took up a question that reliably gets my students (a mix of science majors and non-science major) going: Do scientists have special obligations to society that non-scientists don’t have?

Naturally, there are some follow-up questions if you lean towards an affirmative answer to that first question. For example:

What specifically are those special obligations?
Why do scientists have these particular obligations when non-scientists in their society don’t?
How strong are those obligations? (In other words, under what conditions would it be ethically permissible for scientists to fall short of doing what the obligations say they should do?)

I think these are important — and complex — questions, some of which go to the heart of what’s involved in scientists and non-scientists successfully sharing a world. But, it always helps me to hear the voices (and intuitions) of some of the folks besides me who are involved in this sharing-a-world project.

So, for the scientists in the audience, I have some questions I hope you will answer in the comments on this post.*

1. As a scientist, do you have any special duties or obligations to the non-scientists with whom you’re sharing a world? If yes, what are they?

2. If you have special duties or obligations, as a scientist, to the rest of society, why do you have them? Where did they come from? (If you don’t have special duties or obligations as a scientist, why not?

3. As a scientist, what special duties or obligations (if any) do the non-scientists with whom you’re sharing a world have to you?

Who counts as a scientist here? I’m including anyone who has been trained (past the B.A. or B.S. level) in a science, including people who may be currently involved in that training and anyone working in a scientific field (even in the absences of schooling past the B.A. or B.S. level).

That means I count as a scientist here (even though I’m not currently employed as a scientist or otherwise involved in scientific knowledge-building).

If you want to say something about these questions but you’re a non-scientist according to this definition, never fear! You are cordially invited to answer a corresponding set of questions, posed to the non-scientists with whom scientists are sharing a world, on my other blog.
_____
* If you prefer to answer the questions on your own blog, or in some other online space, please drop a link in the comments here, or point me to it via Twitter (@docfreeride) or email (dr.freeride@gmail.com).

Why reporting abusive tweets to the twit’s mother might not work.

Posted on July 29, 2013July 29, 2013 by admin

Folks have been tweeting about a particular exchange on Twitter in which:

One person tweeted something abusive at another Twitter user
A third Twitter user offered to provide the target of the abuse with the mailing address of the first person’s mother, the better to print out and mail her the abusive tweet her darling son had sent
The first person tweeted what he said was a sincere apology for the abuse in his earlier tweet

The conclusion some have drawn from this one exchange is that Twitter needs a “report this tweet to the tweeter’s mom” button, which will seriously cut down on Twitter abuse.

Now, I chuckled at the abusive twit’s speedy about-face, but it only takes a few moments’ reflection to recognize that this strategy for reducing online abuse has problems. Here are just a few from the very top of my head:

It’s not a sure thing that Mom will have any problem with the offspring flinging abuse at others. (Maybe Mom flings online abuse herself! Maybe that’s where Mom’s offspring learned how to fling abuse!)
It’s not a sure thing that the offspring flinging abuse actually cares whether Mom knows about it. There seem to be significant stretches of the lifespan during which Mom’s approval isn’t a goal worth putting any kind of effort toward.
Even if the offspring flinging abuse does care if Mom knows about it and disapproves, tasking Mom with communicating her approval — especially to offspring no longer living under Mom’s roof — is just giving her more work. When will Mom’s thankless work be over?
For some Twitter users one might try to shame, there’s a decent chance of misidentifying the corresponding Mom. Now you’re giving that misidentified Mom thankless work generated by some other Mom’s offspring, which is not cool at all.
Maybe Mom has shuffled off this mortal coil. How are you going to shame her surviving offspring into behaving online now?
Maybe the offspring flinging abuse is not using a real name online.
Maybe the mother of the offspring flinging abuse is not using a real name online. Are you going to compromise her anonymity (for which she may have very good reasons), including providing her actual mailing address to a stranger, simply to deal with her offspring’s online behavior? That’s not cool.
Where the hell is Dad is all of this? Why is Mom presumed to be the only parent capable of exerting a civilizing force on offspring?

So, nice try, but we’re going to have to think harder about how to share online spaces and how best to prevail on people not to be abusive jerks to each other. This is just a subset of the project of being a grown-up who is also a decent human being, and Mom would really like you to figure out how to do this without her constant intervention.

(Plus, would it kill you to sit up straighter while you’re online?)

Musing about boycotts (or, the challenges of effectively living your values without being overwhelmed).

Posted on July 18, 2013July 18, 2013 by admin

This summer it seems like boycotts are on a lot of people’s minds.

In the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, Stevie Wonder announced that he won’t perform in Florida until its Stand Your Ground laws are repealed.

Author John Scalzi announced that he will no longer be a participant, panelist, or guest of honor at any convention without a harassment policy. But he also announced that he’s disinclined to join in a boycott of the Ender’s Game movie, despite the fact that he thinks the views of Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card (who is also a producer of the movie) on same-sex marriage and on LGBT folks more generally are “completely, totally and egregiously wrong.”

There is, in the field of philosophy, an ongoing Gendered Conference Campaign asking people to decline to participate in conferences all of whose announced speakers are male.

Individual academics have also engaged in boycotts of specific journals and publishers on account of their objections to their editorial practices or to the other kinds of business in which they engage. University libraries have also announced plans to boycott publishers whose institutional licensing agreements they felt approached extortion.

There’s a lot of back and forth in almost all these instances (and in the many others not mentioned here) about whether boycotts are an effective way to communicate your objection to the target of the boycott, whether they hurt others who really aren’t responsible for the thing you object to, even whether organizing or engaging in a boycott is a display of intolerance.

It’s a complicated tangle of things to worry about, at least if you’re a person who wants to live something approaching an ethically consistent life.

If you value X, you don’t want to give material support to a person or organization actively working against X. If you view Y as a great harm, you don’t want to have your consumer choices reinforce a system that perpetrates or enables Y. But chains of cause and effect can be complicated, and sometimes what people or organizations are working for or against can be obscure.

Sometimes boycotts have been effective, either leading organizations to change their practices of their own volition or bringing political pressure upon them to do so. In other cases, boycotts seem to have little effect beyond giving their participants something about which to feel themselves superior.

My own personal consumer choices are pretty motley.

There are pizza franchises that will never get my business (even if they were, some day, to make a palatable product) on account of the political donations of their founder. There are big-box stores whose threshold I will not cross (and have not since … the 1980s, I think?) owing to their abusive labor practices. In my immediate neighborhood, there are two gas stations I feel passable comfortable using; the others are off the table owing to the corporate owners’ involvement with environmental disasters, human rights violations, and lobbying against reasonable clean air standards in my state.

But I still use computer hardware from a company that I feel has a pretty lousy concept of corporate social responsibility, one that has gone to great lengths to avoid paying its fair share of taxes in states like California. I still buy chocolate, despite the environmental harms and labor atrocities involved in its production. (The fact that I don’t buy Hershey’s chocolate probably does’t get me off the hook.) And there are plenty of goods I buy from any number of corporations where I have no clear idea what the production of those goods entailed, nor what sorts of actions those corporations are engaged in or are supporting with the proceeds of their business. I’m making choices in a condition of radically incomplete information, and even what I do know indicates that some of my choices are quite a bit less than optimal.

It’s not obvious to me that my individual consumer choices make a whit of difference to large multinational corporations. They probably are more hassle for me than for the businesses I’m patronizing (although honestly, in a world where there are fewer places I’m comfortable buying gas, my response is to drive less whenever possible — and that’s probably a good effect).

I don’t believe we’re going to save the world with our consumer choices. I’m not entirely comfortable equating money with speech.

Then again, until I’ve entered into an agreement to secure a good or service, I don’t believe anyone has a right to my money.* Thus, ethical issues seem like as good a reason as any to opt out of buying a particular product or patronizing a particular business.

If you’re going to tell me it’s wrong to opt out of buying tickets to see “Ender’s Game,” you’re going to need to give me a positive argument.

Beyond that, despite how thoroughly we are cast as creatures of consumption (usually by someone who wants to sell us something), I suspect that the real action in the marketplace of ideas takes place at some remove from the exchange of currency for goods and services. Some of it is happening where people are interacting and actually exchanging ideas and opinions.

And here, the choices get a lot trickier for me than they do when I’m deciding where to get my groceries or gas.

For example, there are people with whom I interact because our kids are involved in some of the same activities. I am aware that some of these people belong to organizations whose aims I think are not good — to organizations that see some people as less than fully human, and that put lots of money into political campaigns to restrict their rights.

If these people were businesses, I’d drive right by them. But they are parents of my kids’ peers — of their friends.

Usually we don’t talk directly at all about the political divides. It’s possible (although I haven’t taken steps to find out) that they are opposing some of these organizations from the inside; I’m related to some people who do that, and I think they’re fighting the good fight.

I’m not engaging in a fight. How I’m playing it right now is that I’m trying to be someone who interacts with these folks, someone who interacts with these kids, someone who they know to be caring, trying to be a help …

… so that by the time they connect the dots and notice that I fit in one of the groups targeted by their organization (or that people I care about with the same regard I show to them are so targeted by their organizations), they’re going to have to reevaluate whether they stand behind what their organizations are doing.

This all depends on the assumption that growing to care about actual people in their lives can make a difference to the organizations and activities they support. It turns on the assumption that getting to know the “other” makes it harder to treat the issues as abstractions. It recognizes that people are complicated — that almost all of us have contradictory views and commitments in our heads, and that most of us haven’t put lots of effort into noticing this or trying to sort out which views or commitments we really endorse.

And it is helped by the fact that, so far, these folks I know haven’t displayed values or views so repellent that I give up engagement with them as a lost cause. That could still happen. I’m hopeful that it won’t, but I’m watchful.

But honestly, the complications of personal entanglements in a marketplace of ideas make decisions about how ethically to spend one’s money look a lot more straightforward. That seems like a weird outcome.

______
*Except the state (at the relevant level), since I partake of the goods the state offers, and thus have an obligation to pay my share to support those goods.

Baffling things I have read in blog comments discussing Colin McGinn’s exit from University of Miami

Posted on June 9, 2013June 9, 2013 by admin

Storify by
Janet D. Stemwedel

Sun, Jun 09 2013 12:57:57

Baffling things I have read in blog comments discussing Colin McGinn’s exit from University of Miami

Sure, people are always warned not to read the comments. But in the philosophy blogosphere you might expect more thinking-through of positions, more recognition that what is metaphysically possible is not always plausible, and so forth. Plus empathy and stuff. And yet …

The baffling things presented here are mostly paraphrases (on account of Twitter’s 140-character limit). The commenters whose comments I’m paraphrasing would undoubtedly say I’m being uncharitable in my paraphrasing. I leave it to the reader to peruse the comments at NewAPPS, Crooker Timber, The Philosophy Smoker, and other fine blogs dealing with philosophy and/or academia that have commented on the McGinn resignation to see how many of these sentiments turn up.

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