A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas
and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics”
Guest post
by
Alison Reiheld*
On November 12, a slew of articles hit the internet announcing the formation of Journal of Controversial Ideas, a future journal that will be dedicated to, well, publishing cross-disciplinary controversial ideas and specifically ideas too controversial to be published elsewhere or which, if published elsewhere, would subject the author to threats. That authors might be threatened because of the content of their articles led the editors of the prospective journal (including Peter Singer) to explicitly decide in advance to allow pseudonymous publication.
While philosophers who pay attention to the blogosphere and social media have good reason to worry about the viciousness enabled by anonymity and a total lack of accountability (see Twitter, the metablog, the metametablogs, etc.), anonymity can also protect serious and careful valuable contributions to the profession, as with the “What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?” blog and countless other instances. Perhaps the editors, if acting in good faith, hope that peer review and editorial oversight will provide accountability and ensure that the abuses of pseudonymity are curtailed while the benefits of it are in full effect.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett warned of a coming backlash to the journal itself and not just to the kind of content that it wishes to print (“Cue the Outcry”). Why might there be such a backlash? And would it be justified? The tone of “Cue the Outcry” implies that it would not. Whether it would, depends on the new JCI’s editorial procedures, which ideas they find “controversial” enough to merit publication in their journal, whether these ideas include both conservative and liberal ideas, and a whole host of other factors.
My concerns about the journal stem from the kinds of work that authors elsewhere have painted as persecuted. As soon as I heard of the announcement of the journal, I thought in particular of the work of philosopher Jonathan Anomaly, who often says that it is unjust for his talks to be protested, that he receives hate mail in response to his publications, and that the American Academy is badly broken because of the way people respond to his work and the work of others who advance controversial ideas.
I want to propose in this post that some claims are indeed deeply problematic by their nature; thus, it is right and proper to subject them to greater scrutiny than other claims and perhaps to hold them to a higher standard. This discrepancy would make it appear that the former claims are being unjustly discriminated against, when in fact this is not the case. One such claim is that colonialism was morally good and is justified, a claim made in an article published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. Another claim is that we ought to have formal eugenics programs. This latter assertion is one of several interlocking claims advanced by Anomaly.
ZOOMING IN ON A CONTROVERSIAL IDEA
...our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are not a distraction from our serious thinking but a necessary part of it. And—what is perhaps more surprising—many of the visions that now dominate our controversies are ones which look as if they were based on science, but are really fed by fantasy… many of the favourite fairy-tales of our age—the myths that actually shape our thoughts and actions—are ones which owe their force to having appeared in scientific dress. —Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, xii-xiii
In 2018, Monash Bioethics Review published an article by Anomaly called “Defending Eugenics: From Cryptic Choice to Conscious Selection.” The article is part of a thematically unified research program that Anomaly has developed over the years in which he treats procreation/reproduction as a public good, considering group traits and individual traits as relevant to who should have children. This research program includes, but is not limited to, his 2017 article “Race Research and the Ethics of Belief” in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and his 2014 “Public Goods and Procreation,” also in Monash Bioethics Review. Related articles include Anomaly’s 2018 “Public Goods and Education” forthcoming in a Rowman & Littlefield anthology on Philosophy and Public Policy. Anomaly develops an interlocking set of claims across this research program which, I believe, I have roughly described as he himself would say is correct. The following are my summaries of the claims made in each of these four articles:
CLAIM (1) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND EDUCATION”: While education is a public good, social intervention in public education and intellectual development is often pernicious and government involvement in social factors affecting intelligence is thus often ill-advised, even in the form of public funding for education, vouchers, and especially stipulation of what should be learned.
CLAIM (2) FROM “RACE RESEARCH AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF”: We rightly worry that any legitimation of claims that certain racial groups are better or worse at certain tasks due to physiology will lead to bias and oppression that can cause harm. But the harm principle is a bad reason not to believe something to be true if there is evidence that it is, and it is an especially bad reason to refrain from looking for any such evidence. “[I]f we allow ourselves to believe a proposition that is contrary to the available evidence, we may end up acting in ways that harm other people as well as ourselves” (Anomaly 2018, 293). Racial groups are genetically real, not just socially constructed, and research into race and shared racial traits should not be inhibited. What’s more, doing such research could help to explain racial prejudice. For instance, Anomaly argues that Ashkenazi Jews simply are, based on scientific evidence, smart and have heritably high IQ scores. Perhaps, Anomaly proposes, the best explanation for how Jewish folks became targeted for their success is that such success is indeed biologically group-based. Acknowledging racial differences as biological and real and heritable, rather than socially constructed, could serve to undermine racial bias, as well as lead to benefits in the treatment of health conditions that occur in some groups more than in others.
CLAIM (3) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND PROCREATION”: Economists are wrong when they view children as private goods that parents create for fun, companionship, help in old age, etc. Rather, children are public goods because “they can have far-reaching effects on the genetic composition, cultural trajectory, and general welfare of future people.” (172) Because the benefits of public goods are consumed in common and widely dispersed, and procreation and parenthood are public goods, we are justified in influencing reproductive behavior. While there should be a presumption in favor of procreative liberty, “nearly all of us would prefer—to the extent that it is possible—to create a world in which future people flourish. This will apparently involve preserving (or increasing) the prevalence of traits that can be thought of as public goods.” (179) We should at least use social norms to nudge people to make eugenic reproductive choices. The state could even provide free or reduced cost fetal or parental genetic screening and, with caution, even some restrictive interventions into reproductive choice such as parental licensing and, in some cases, temporary sterilization for the very unfit—”especially if their pathological behavior has a strong genetic component” (184)—which can be reversed in case of a mistaken judgment of lack of fitness. We would be “preventing probabilistic rather than actual harms.” (ibid.) Social efforts to influence reproduction should extend from genetically bad traits, to poor parenting by extremely irresponsible people, to people who might turn out to be poor parents (thus the word probabilistic). We also ought to think of future people as doing probabilistic harm, of “risks that prospective children post to other people.” (ibid.) Anomaly says that this is fairly extreme and that these options should be preserved, but that we should be wary of using coercive state intervention to achieve collective goals. Thus, the “most promising and least intrusive way of preserving the genetic basis of valuable traits may be genetic counseling and—once our understanding of genetics improves—subsidies for those who wish to use embryo selection or, under certain conditions, genetic engineering to enhance their children.” (185) This kind of “voluntary” eugenics should be supported.
CLAIM 4) FROM “DEFENDING EUGENICS…”: Anomaly begins his article by explicitly stating that he wishes to “reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin,” and that his defense of eugenics will not commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion nor to genetic determinism. He argues, furthermore, that “virtually every trait that influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life—including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control—has a substantial genetic component.” Reacting to the history of Nazis and the Holocaust, and American eugenics, by rejecting the genetic basis of race and other groupings of traits is, he notes, an “understandable over-reaction” to the cruel and racist policies of early and mid-twentieth century eugenicists. One of the problems facing societies is that people who have higher IQs, more education, and higher income have fewer children later in life, especially in developed countries with social supports and opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women. (The trend of successful career women having pets instead of children or adopting children is bad for the gene pool in the long run, and a form of pathological altruism, one example that Anomaly gives of “dysgenic trends in developed countries.”) Anomaly proceeds to defend a series of “plausible” moral principles laid out in the famous case of Buck v. Bell, including preventing the harm that future children of certain people might do to others and society. If we are cautious of state authority and more concerned with individual liberty, we can use these principles as the basis of a “liberal eugenics.” He defends access to contraception (on the grounds that it allows women to choose more carefully who fathers their children), access to genetic education, and genetic counseling through public financing of independent providers in a competitive market, access to genetic engineering as enhancements come on board, and a system of incentives and penalties including parental licensing. He also defends parental licensing on the grounds that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence and empathy have significant genetic components and so unrestricted reproduction entails many “parents who are unwilling or unable to take care of their children” and who “[pass] along an undesirable genetic endowment.” A fair parental licensing scheme would involve criteria that “are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.” If informal sanctions work, they are preferable to coercive laws, but they often fail to work well. While public policies cannot create a genetic utopia, changing reproductive norms can go some way towards making us better at choosing whether to have children and which kinds of children to have. After Anomaly advances this long argument in which he advocates numerous policies and endorses specific views about which traits are desirable, he closes with the following claim: “I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered. Sometimes the best policy is not to have one."
What shall we make of these claims? At first glance, it might seem that claim (1) is entirely distinct from claims (2), (3), and (4). After all, taken together, the latter set of claims clearly pertains to genetic traits of groups, judging groups’ merits based on their genetics, and intervening in reproductive choice based on genetic merits. Let us take some basic background from disability studies.
A core concept in disability studies is that we can conceive of disability in several ways. We can conceive disability as a biomedical problem, which is resolved by biomedical therapies that either restore function to species normal function or provide cure. Transplants, functionally comparable prosthetics, and medications that affect neurological function fall under this kind of framework. Alternatively, we can conceive of disability as socially constructed, addressing it with adjustments to social structures and our built environment. Providing ramps and elevators in buildings, as well as, or instead of, stairs, making sure microphones are used at conferences, making large-font handouts available at conferences, and so on, are structural and contextual adjustments that fall under this latter kind of framework. Call this the “social model of disability.”
On the social model of disability, a person with the neurological capacities that we might call dyslexia is not at all disabled in a low-or-no-literacy society. But in a society that is highly dependent on complex text for education and for the best jobs, dyslexia can be quite disabling. These models—the biomedical model of disability and the view of disability as a social construct—are by no means the only ways in which to conceptualize disability (hybrid models and other, entirely different, models exist); nevertheless, they are core conceptions of disability and recognizable to many people once they are explained. For folks wanting to know more, Elizabeth Barnes provides a brief overview of these views, their pitfalls, and some other candidate models in Chapter 1 of her 2016 book, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability.
Let’s extend the social model of disability to education and consider Anomaly’s claim (1). Would Anomaly allow for government-mandated educational accommodations for disabled people? It seems that Anomaly would allow schools and universities to make these adjustments, but that he might not allow government to mandate that schools and universities are obligated to make them. When we combine (1) with (2), (3), and (4), we get a curious result. Insofar as measures of intelligence could be affected by non-biological factors like governmental directives, Anomaly is, in his own words, “skeptical” of such interventions, though he acknowledges that an educated, intelligent populace is a public good. And yet, Anomaly wishes to acknowledge that some racial groups are just smarter than others and that, given their capabilities, some groups of people are just more beneficial to society than others.
The implication of these claims, taken together, seems to be that social accommodations to improve functional outcomes of intelligence are worthy of skepticism, but biological explanations of differences in intelligence between people are to be taken seriously and accepted with relatively little skepticism. The result is a recommendation for paying greater attention to the ostensible genetic bases of the capabilities of individual organisms than to the capabilities all organisms could develop with universal social supports. Although Anomaly acknowledges in “Public Goods and Procreation” that “the science of genetics is still in its infancy,” he seems curiously certain that he can use it to determine how to promote eugenics rather than use it to promote the maximal development and support of the remarkable range of human capabilities. In other words, I think it fair to say that Anomaly wholly embraces a biomedical model of ability/disability, rather than a social model, with predictable consequences for his willingness to target genetics and reproduction in order to produce a society with a greater balance of capabilities.
The power of claims (2)-(4) comes in part from what Mary Midgley described as “having appeared in scientific dress,” as well as what Midgley referred to as “the lure of Reduction—the pleasure of claiming that things are much simpler than they seem” (2011, xiii). Midgley points out that part of the inheritance of the Enlightenment is that we see it as scientific when we talk “as if people were literally and actually machines.” (ibid., 27) We think of this sort of claim as a scientific claim and not as the metaphor that it actually is. In short, Anomaly’s claims rely on genetic determinants of intelligence, empathy, and more, despite decades of actual science that shows how few human conditions with a genetic component are in fact determined by that genetic component.
In particular, Anomaly’s claim that autistic persons, sociopaths, and psychopaths are similarly genetically devoid of empathy (“Defending Eugenics”) is very poor science and does not cohere with current understandings of autism and its relation to empathy. Nor does Anomaly account for what neurodiverse people refer to as upsides or benefits of their conditions. Rather, Anomaly’s conceptions of capabilities and genetics, especially with respect to his discussion of autism, are based on popular/folk psychological conceptions of neurodiversity that bear only a glancing relation to reality. Scientific dress, indeed.
What’s more, people are enormously complex: some people who are very intelligent nonetheless have what Anomaly would consider defects of the body or the mind. For decades, persons with disabilities have been urging the world at large to see their many abilities and not just the traits that are perceived as disabilities. This kind of reductive flattening of a person into what nondisabled people take to be the person’s flaws is an enormous problem, especially when taken as the basis on which to “preserve” or “increase” certain desirable traits, while eliminating and decreasing other, allegedly undesirable traits. Since traits are mixed within people, and any one of us exhibits both desirable and undesirable traits (hold that thought about how we know what is un/desirable), what Anomaly proposes is of course about the elimination of people who have a given un/desirable trait. He would not go so far as to suggest murder and in fact flatly condemns it. But he is certainly willing to countenance coercive contraception in at least some cases in order to prevent people with certain traits from coming into existence. This, too, is a kind of elimination, albeit one that many people find less heinous or even acceptable. It’s the eliminative urge that ought to be questioned, however, and which is based in a biomedical model rather than a social one. Flattening reductionism of the kind that we see in Anomaly’s eugenics makes it seem as if we can talk about eliminating traits without talking about eliminating people. The lure of reductionism makes such talk appealing and even makes it seem reasonable. That is a flattening reductionism that creates a false picture, revealing that this reasonableness is a mere seeming.
Eli Clare pushes back on this reductionist tendency in his use of the term body-minds “in order to recognize both the inextricable relationships between our bodies and our minds and the ways in which the ideology of cure acts as though the two are distinct.” (2017, xvi) Writes Clare:
Eugenicists one and all—they considered some body-minds good, using as their criteria… ablebodiedness and ablemindedness. Other body-minds they deemed bad—marked by defectiveness, degeneracy, deficiency, perversion, feeblemindedness, poverty, criminality, and weakness. They worked to reproduce the ‘good’ and discard the ‘bad.’ History is a torrent shaped around them (Clare 2017, 105).
By referring to people who are targeted for reproduction or removal on the basis of a select few traits with this holistic term rather than by referring to their traits, alone, we can usefully force the larger picture and avoid the flattening reduction of persons to their traits.
The combination of the use of metaphor in scientific dress and the lure of Reduction makes Anomaly’s claims seem quite plausible, even palatable, if one does not stop to consider their implications for very real body-minds who are very real persons, complete with a range of traits and ways of producing good for society. Indeed, in order to be convinced that Anomaly’s arguments are any good, one must ignore the large body of literature in disability studies, philosophy of disability, and philosophy of science that has reflected explicitly on eugenics and reductionism. Beyond this form of the flattening reduction of persons—that is, of body-minds—into just a collection of traits, Anomaly has reductively deployed metrics for desirable and undesirable traits that are themselves suspect.
Given Anomaly’s own express commitments about the ethics of belief, one would think that he would hesitate to use metrics such as IQ to discuss who is desirable and who is not. However, his claims about IQ in both his article on race science and his article on eugenics don’t acknowledge that IQ itself is a concept that classically wears the mere dress of science and is a simplistic, reductive measure of intelligence. To proceed as he has—and for reviewers and editors to allow his arguments to proceed as they have—necessitated that Anomaly ignore the decades of literature that have levied powerful criticisms at the early “scientific eugenicists”—including Galton and other advocates of IQ—whose work Anomaly cites in foundational premises of his arguments. The very concept of IQ misses vast terrains of thought and intellectual capability, as Clare has pointed out in Brilliant Imperfections. Indeed, Clare, who received a diagnosis of “mentally retarded” in 1966 and would once have been a candidate for involuntary sterilization, was at one time a candidate for institutionalization on the basis of “low IQ.” As some readers and listeners of this blog know, Clare’s writing on distinctions between “cure” and health or wellness with respect to disability and chronic conditions is profoundly influential, and deservedly so. His body-mind is indisputably productive and contributive.
I have critically examined whether Anomaly’s claims are actually based in science or whether they are based in metaphors about genetics and its influence that are “dressed in science,” metaphors that ought to be interrogated rather than taken for granted as science. I have also critiqued his ignorance of or failure to engage with the disability literature and the vast body of arguments that should have made his eugenic claims seem suspect and thus, per his own ethics of belief, not worthy of assertion. The qualification that Anomaly makes in the final sentence of “Defending Eugenics”—namely, ”I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered”—does not nullify the fact that he has recommended these policies. Even if it did, it would pertain only to the policies that he recommends. It is no escape clause for the principles that he defends: that some lives are worth more than others, that some lives are a threat to society, that genetics is the basis for this distinction, and that some people who are a threat to society should not come into existence. These critiques, I have levied.
“...who is worthy of protection?” —Eli Clare
And yet, as I have written this piece, I have subtly reproduced (hah!) some of Anomaly’s foundational commitments, if only implicitly. I have not contested Anomaly’s notion that there simply are certain traits that are more desirable than others. When I said above that Clare’s body-mind, despite his testably low IQ in his youth, “is indisputably productive and contributive”, I subtly reinforced the notion that value to society is in fact the measure that we should use to judge who is worthy of protection, and that intelligence—whatever the metric we actually settle on—is a valuable trait. Clare notes with great pathos that when he establishes his right to exist and be respected based on his intelligence, he implicitly devalues those with cognitive disabilities in ways that prevent them from demonstrating value in this established way. It is so tempting to do so precisely because of what Anomaly assumes and what Clare, in one context, describes and critiques:
...in today’s world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood… the pairing of personhood with intelligence needs to change. Yet when faced with allegations or assumptions of stupidity or diminished mental capacity, many of us respond by asserting out intelligence and distancing ourselves from intellectual disability… I’ve repeatedly used intelligence as the marker of my worth and personhood (Claire 2017, 157)
Entrenching the idea that people who “are intelligent” have value whereas people who “are not intelligent” do not have value feeds into eugenic reasoning.
Much as one commentator on Anomaly’s work, Matthew Sears, points out that his problem with eugenicists of the past seems to have been only that they both went to extremes and were wrong about whether Jews were “dysgenic,” Clare points out that insisting that intelligence is more than IQ or more than genetics still preserves intelligence as a criterion for determining which lives have value and which do not, for who is worthy of protection and who is not. We need to be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking that as long as we get our science right on who has which traits, it is fine to reduce their worth to those traits. The greater problem with Anomaly’s work is not that he dresses metaphor in scientific dress, but that the metaphors themselves select some lives as not worth living, as not worth existing, as not worth being allowed to come into existence, as… well… as public bads instead of public goods. This is fundamentally what eugenics does. It is indeed the entire point of eugenics. And this is a value judgment that, by being reductively flattened and presented in scientific dress, is not seen as such. No defense of science, no ethics of belief about evidence, will suffice where the basis of claims is not in fact scientific evidence at all, but highly contestable moral claims.
ZOOMING BACK OUT TO JOURNAL OF CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS
Anomaly’s work, which he has long claimed is under unjust attack, is precisely the sort of work that we could expect to appear in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. But it misrepresents itself and is a deeply flawed argument—set of arguments—for a kind of claim that cannot be idly considered as no different from any other. Make no mistake, any defense of eugenics is a defense of the claim that some kinds of people should not exist and should not procreate, while others deserve to do both. And as such, a defense of eugenics must be treated with the greatest caution and held to rigorous standards of argumentation and engagement with relevant literature.
Relevant literature must include literature that deals with our ability to determine intelligence, empathy, health, etc. It must include literature that takes seriously issues of who should exist and not exist. It must include literature that takes seriously whether we can deal with risk and benefit to society through social supports. And it must include literature that questions the very basis of how we assign value to human beings.
In June of 2018, a loose-knit group of philosophers engaged in an informal debate on social media about whether work like Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” should ever be published. While scholars do not necessarily think that a journal’s publication of a claim means that the journal endorses that claim, we do tend to think that a journal’s publication of a claim means that the journal has vetted the quality of the argument supporting that claim and endorses the quality of that argument.
Some members of this loose-knit group of philosophers came down on the side of Publishing All The Things and subjecting them to evaluation in the public squares of our disciplines. There are no things that should not be said, argued these folks. Or at least, there is no reliable criterion for determining which those things are that won’t also prevent other things which should be said from reaching the light of day.
Other participants in this discussion came down on the side of gatekeeping what makes it into the public square, arguing that journal editors (and peer reviewers) have a duty to prevent low-quality arguments or egregious claims from receiving the stamp of approval that comes with publication. Jonathan Kaplan, who was not a peer reviewer but had written the editors of the Monash Bioethics Review regarding some of the flaws in Anomaly’s paper prior to publication, was a member of this group. Kaplan argued as follows (extended quote posted here with his explicit permission).
This isn’t a matter of publishing something unpopular, or edgy, or that many people happen to disagree with... This topic—defending eugenics—is one that, I would argue, any remotely reasonable person of good will would recognize as not merely ‘controversial’ but steeped in a particularly ugly racist history (and one that, historically, was associated with massive and gross harms). This suggests that any reasonable professional acting in good faith (and not just trying to maximize clicks/cites) would approach it with some caution.
It is not impossible for a paper titled ‘Defending Eugenics’ to be a responsible scholarly article, and one that a good journal would be justified in publishing. But minimal professional responsibility demands that a paper on such a topic be vetted with some particular care, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Not necessarily held to higher standards, but extra care taken to ensure that the usual standards are in fact maintained.
So yes, this is about this *particular* paper. But the fact that this *topic* is one that warrants serious care says something about the editors’ professional judgments and responsibility, given that they published a piece that is both of poor academic quality and steeped in racism and misogyny, and it was a topic that any remotely reasonable person of good will would recognize required additional scrutiny compared to e.g. typical meta-ethics papers.
Should a work that presents such ideas be published at all, anywhere? Perhaps. But if it is, it should be held to higher standards than it has been. Anomaly’s own work on the ethics of belief contains the seeds of arguments that would support publication if and only if claims which could do harm rise to the level of evidence. This same kind of criterion and the closer scrutiny that I, with Kaplan, believe can be required of claims that can do harm, would need to be applied at Journal of Controversial Ideas.
For make no mistake, the journal aims to publish high stakes, provocative ideas just like these. If it did not, they would not be controversial. All three of its editors—Singer, McMahan, and Minerva—-are philosophers who will preside over a journal that aims to produce controversial work from a variety of disciplines. Can they provide adequate oversight that controversial ideas will take into account the relevant bodies of work from disciplines as widely varied as hard sciences and theoretical humanities? Will they be able to see when a submission did not? Will they be able to choose reviewers who will do so, and take seriously the feedback of reviewers and anyone else who warns against the quality of a paper that will be, by virtue of having been submitted to this journal, high stakes and controversial? Arguably, Monash Bioethics Review did not. A Journal of Controversial Ideas surely must.
In that old figure of speech, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. There is reason to be skeptical of the very idea of a JCI, and to critique it on the front-end in order to ensure it establishes the standards which it must, but only the thing itself will show us what it is and can be. We shall see whether controversial ideas are indeed given adequate scrutiny. They certainly should be. Anything less would be to reveal that the point of Journal of Controversial Ideas is to simply be controversial. Let us view its publications, as its editors should view its submissions, with a gimlet eye.
References
Anomaly, Jonathan. 2014. “Public Goods and Procreation.” Monash Bioethics Review 32(3-4): 172-88.
Anomaly, Jonathan. 2017. “Race Research and the Ethics of Belief.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 14: 287-297.
Anomaly, Jonathan. 2018. “Defending Eugenics: From Cryptic Choice to Conscious Selection.” Monash Bioethics Review 35(1-4): 24-35.
Anomaly, Jonathan. 2018. “What’s Wrong with the American Academy.” Quillette. June 7, 2018.
Anomaly, Jonathan. 2018. “Public Goods and Education.” Forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Policy. Ed. Andrew I. Cohen. Rowman and Littlefield.
Barnes, Elizabeth. 2016. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Oxford University Press.
Bartlett, Tom. 2018. “Here comes ‘The Journal of Controversial Ideas.’ Cue the Outcry.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 12, 2018.
Clare, Eli. 2017. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure. Duke University Press.
Midgley, Mary. 2011. The Myths We Live By. Routledge Classics.
Sears, Matthew. 2018. “Anomaly and Academia: Is the Left Really Afraid of Honest Inquiry?” Conatus News. June 13, 2018.
*Alison Reiheld is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville.
posted by Shelley
The most interesting point seems to be that there is a guy called ANOMALY who defends eugenics.
Posted by: Justin | 11/17/2018 at 12:55 PM
Justin,
I hope that comments like the one you have contributed will remain confined to Daily Nous where the recent thread about the coincidence of author names and associated subject matter ran. In this context, that is, with respect to the matter of this prospective journal and this philosopher and on this blog in particular, your remark seems dismissive, condescending, and uninformed about so-called liberal eugenics, philosophy, bioethics, and the apparatus of disability. In short, the contents of Alison Reiheld's post deserve to be taken more seriously than you have taken them.
Best regards,
Shelley
Posted by: Shelley | 11/17/2018 at 01:49 PM
I have a genuine question for people who would prohibit work like Anomaly's work on eugenics from being published: Isn't it perfectly appropriate for people to publish *criticisms* of eugenics? After all, lots of important work on this front has been published (and understandably without objection). I take it this is how the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work--namely, bad ideas are subjected to trenchant criticisms. Assuming the ideas really are bad--that is, indefensible--then critics ought always to be able to make this clear in their responses. This dynamic allows good ideas to win out in the public sphere.
But if bad ideas are prohibited, this very important process of debunking and refuting is stymied. If the only articles that are allowed to be published about eugenics, for instance, are criticisms of eugenics, this won't expose people to the full spectrum of ideas about eugenics. This asymmetrical silencing seems problematic as it doesn't take the public seriously. It also undersells the power of anti-eugenic arguments. If eugenics is an easily refutable idea, then what's the fear in putting the issue to the court of popular opinion? For every bad argument for eugenics, anti-eugenicists can publish good arguments for rejecting the practice. Is the worry that eugenics has a seductive allure that outstrips its plausibility? If so, why not think the solution is more high-quality responses to those who defend eugenics poorly? In short, I suppose I find myself in the camp of researchers who think controversial ideas ought to be openly contested in the public sphere. To shield people from these ideas by prohibiting their publication is to sell people short. Perhaps I have too much faith in the efficacy of rational persuasion.
Posted by: Thomas Nadelhoffer | 11/19/2018 at 08:38 AM
Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva and I are in full agreement with Alison Reihold's final paragraph. Our aim is to publish work that presents significant ideas with the rigor demanded by the leading academic journals but might not, for various reasons, otherwise be published. We have no desire to provoke controversy for its own sake. We will indeed view the submissions we receive with a gimlet eye, and we will instruct our reviewers to do the same. We appreciate especially the sentiment that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we wish all potential critics would follow that maxim.
Posted by: Peter Singer | 11/19/2018 at 09:54 AM
One of the many things I appreciate about Prof Reiheld's analysis here is that she shows how Anomaly's paper is poorly researched and fails to engage with the relevant literature. That critique is importantly different from saying that his paper contains "bad ideas" or that any paper defending eugenics should be prohibited. It's a critique that asks questions not so much of Anomaly himself but of the reviewers and editors who approved this paper for publication.
I am not really surprised that someone somewhere feels drawn to eugenics and has decided to write a defense of it (especially given the political moment in America). What's surprising is that the paper was published without the author needing to more fully defend his premises and without having to engage with the existing and very strong counter arguments. Especially if you are going to write about something with as disturbing a history as eugenics, you need to take the existing literature far more seriously. I'm disappointed and embarrassed that such a poor paper was published by a journal in my field.
Posted by: Josephine Johnston | 11/19/2018 at 11:51 AM
Hi, folks. This is the author of this blog article. I know it was long as such things go, but it would have been woefully inadequate were it any shorter. Or as Horace once said "In struggling to be brief, I become obscure." So, many thanks for reading fully and responding thoughtfully.
Josephine Johnston: I am glad that the nature of my critique of Anomaly's paper came across so clearly. This is precisely the function I hoped it would serve.
Thomas Nadelhoffer: I understand your position, and it is one that is common in our field. Indeed, my own position is not wholly against it. What I want to see is not no papers ever defending eugenics [not no papers ever investigating the merits of colonialism, not no papers ever considering gender identity and racial identity], but rather--given the weight of the topic--only carefully reasoned papers which engage relevant literature thoughtfully and well. A great deal of the job of doing philosophy is considering and addressing relevant objections from the breadth of literature on a topic in advance. And while no one can do this perfectly--thus the value of hermeneutics that comes from multiple persons discussing and analyzing a published work--it is nonetheless critical that with weighty topics philosophers take care to pay special attention to literature generated by those most affected and pay special attention to how their premises might be rooted in myths or widespread social stigma. The author's own responsibility in their work, and the responsibilities of peer reviewers and editors, is to ensure this. I am no fan of ill-founded, bad arguments in favor of positions I agree with. I am no more a fan of them when they support positions with which I disagree. We can, and should, do some of this work on the front-end BEFORE papers hit the public sphere.
Peter Singer: Thank you for taking my argument seriously. Having not had the opportunity to interact with you or Profs. Minerva and MacMahan, I was not sure how my words would be received. But in particular, I hoped that this would get back to you all. The main point I wanted to make in this blog entry, after all, is the importance of pre-gaming these issues. We will all be watching the JCI, to see if it is better than we fear and as good as might be hoped.
On another note, I have often appreciated the American Journal of Bioethics' format of publishing a long-form Target Article alongside a number and diversity of Peer Commentaries that respond to and critique the Target Article. It does a nice job of airing both sometimes-controversial arguments and responses to them in a single place, and demonstrating that the point of publishing a possibly controversial argument is to engage in discussion of the topic. Few journals employ this format or anything like it even though it is common in our field at conferences to have Papers and Respondents/Commentaries presented to the audience in a single session. Perhaps this might be something to consider, in terms of publication ethics for a journal devoted to publishing controversial ideas?
Thank you all for diving in. We do our best work when we take each other seriously.
Posted by: Alison Reiheld | 11/19/2018 at 12:40 PM
I would like to make one quick addendum to my blog post, here.
I firmly believe that if anyone seeking to defend eugenics were to fully engage the relevant literature they would find themselves unable to defend eugenics at all. And that eugenics is in fact indefensible by any actual serious engagement with the issue. Thus, it is unsurprising that any paper in defense of eugenics will fall short on criteria such as engaging relevant literature. But this is not because I cannot stomach the claim so much as that the claim is indefensible if it takes account of the required concepts. So, we need not attempt to prohibit the publication of defenses of eugenics per se. We need only set a rigorous bar. And they will fail to meet it.
Posted by: Alison Reiheld | 11/19/2018 at 04:11 PM
If the purpose of humanity is to maximize production then Anomaly has many solid points in his article.
If purpose of life is to live a happy life, then Anomaly's whole thesis falls apart.
Posted by: Low IQ Kid | 11/21/2018 at 08:44 PM