tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56733822024-03-07T19:59:28.098-08:00There is some truth in thatJonathan Jenkins Ichikawa's blogJonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.comBlogger788125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-85303194461404140502019-11-29T07:05:00.003-08:002019-11-29T07:05:52.307-08:00Rape Cultures and Loud PubsI've been thinking for a while about the relationship between structural oppression, individual actions, and individual responsibility. Today I was having lunch in a loud pub, and it occurred to me that there might be an instructive analogy between a loud pub and a rape culture (or a racist country, or an ableist society, or a patriarchy, etc. etc. etc.).<br />
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A rape culture is a society that is conducive to sexual assault. Some of the elements of our society that make it one include: slut-shaming, normalization and valourization of seduction tropes, excessive empathy towards privileged individuals accused of sexual misconduct, 'stranger rape' myths, toleration of abuse against complainants, etc.<br />
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Societies don't have features like this <i>ex nihilo</i>; they emerge from individuals' behaviour. But individual behaviour is very much conditioned by the societies in which they exist. When someone focuses on what a rape victim was wearing, or says that <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html">if someone was attracted to someone they couldn't have been raped by them</a>, they are both reflecting and contributing to rape culture. Insofar as rape culture is something everyone has to figure out how to live with, it will impact individuals' behaviour — even if they resist it, that will be an action, perhaps a costly one, requiring effort. This complicates the relationship between structural oppression and an individual's responsibility for an action that contributes to it. It also makes actions that further rape culture the default, so that people will often perform them unwittingly. This doesn't always or usually get people off the hook entirely, but it is very relevant contextual background.<br />
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Loud pubs are a little bit like rape cultures. The pub's being loud might not be attributable to any one individual's decisions. There are many people in there, and they each feel the need to speak loudly to be heard, because it is a loud bar. But their speaking loudly is also what <i>makes </i>it a loud pub. Each person's raised voice both reflects and contributes to the loudness of the pub.<br />
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One can, with some deliberate countercultural decision-making, refuse to contribute to making the pub a loud one, but this has costs. For example, one might not be heard. This might well frustrate one's broader social interests, like having a conversation with one's friends. This complicates the relationship between the loudness of a pub and an individual's responsibility for an action that contributes to it. It also makes actions that further the loudness of the pub the default, so that people will often perform them unwittingly.<br />
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My example has been rape culture but I think these issues play out in exactly the same way if you swap out other forms of structural oppression. Racist societies have the same relationship to individual behaviour as rape cultures and loud pubs do too.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-51575766660528772562019-01-02T13:50:00.001-08:002019-01-02T13:52:35.744-08:00Professorial Guidance and Student AutonomyOne of the big-pictures questions I often struggle with when designing my courses is about how much specific guidance I should coerce in my students' study. In favour of a broad exercise of professorial power (i.e., using grading incentives to require attendance, regular homework, etc) is the undeniable fact that students will learn better if they do that work, and that most students are much likelier to do the work if I penalize them for not doing it on a particular schedule. On the other hand, I am also moved by the argument that university students are adults who should be allowed, even encouraged, to make their own decisions about how best to learn. They also often have many more competing obligations than I did when I was an undergraduate, such that requiring a lot of homework, or penalizing missing class, is a significant hardship.<br />
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When discussing this issue with colleagues, I find that opinions and practices vary dramatically. Some offer a maximally flexible approach, always accepting work that is completed well after the deadlines (even after the course is complete); others have strict syllabus requirements—treated like laws of nature—that mandate exactly what must be done when.<br />
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Here's an example. In my introduction to formal logic, I set weekly homework exercises. I also use some classroom technology for in-class responses to questions, so that I can gauge comprehension along the way. (The product I use is Learning Catalytics; it is similar in various ways to iClickers and Top Hat.) In both cases, I face a choice about whether to require students to use those elements, or whether to make them optional. One semester I made the homework optional, simply putting the questions up as practice exercises, and telling students that I recommend that they do them. But as you might predict, very few students did them regularly—some crammed at exam time, and some didn't do them at all—and performance suffered as a result. But when I turned around the next year and made it required, some students complained that they shouldn't be forced to do practice work that they may or may not need, or that the particular schedule on which my homework was assigned was too onerous, given their particular circumstances. I don't necessarily conclude that student complains mean the system isn't a good one, but some of the critiques rang true to me. And very similar issues apply for required attendance. (In the latter case I have an additional incentive to require Learning Catalytics use — I need to see how the class as a whole is doing during lectures, so I know which ideas do and don't need further explanation and illustration.)<br />
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My strategy in this instance, for the past few years, has been to let students decide for themselves. I don't mean that I just make homework and participation optional — that's the system I tried once that I know to lead to worse learning outcomes — I mean, I let students decide themselves <i>whether </i>homework and participation are optional. I show them my default system, which requires weekly homework and gives credit for participation in a way that requires attendance, and then I tell them that they can opt out of either or both requirements if they wish. I explain that I don't recommend this for most students, and that most students do better when required in this way to do the work, but that, since they know themselves individually better than I do, if they want to be excused from those requirements, they may; the other course elements will be weighted proportionally higher. This is a decision they have to make at the beginning of the term; once they sign up for the requirement, it is a requirement. (If you'd like to see the details, see my PHIL 220 syllabus <a href="http://bit.ly/phil220">here</a>.)<br />
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On the whole I am happy with this compromise stance. Most students follow my advice and sign up for weekly homework and assessed participation. (Last semester, 103 of my 133 students had assessed homework, and 122 of them had assessed participation.) It's not perfect — I sometimes hear from students late in the term who opted out of homework and are struggling because they haven't been working through the exercises. But I have found it to be a good way to balance psychologically-informed pedagogical aims with respect for student individualism and responsibility.<br />
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I'd be interested to hear how other professors handle these kinds of questions, especially others' experiences giving students individual choices about how they will be assessed.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-66325610613225696082019-01-01T11:50:00.000-08:002019-01-01T11:50:48.945-08:00Welcome 2019<span style="font-family: inherit;">As you'll see below, one of my New Year's Resolutions is to start blogging again. So, first post of the year: New Year's Resolutions. In my line of work September tends to feel more like the start of a year than January does, but there's still something about the turning of the calendar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>(1) Facebook, Blogging, Social Media</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm going to cut way back on giving my content to facebook in 2019.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t currently plan to leave — I still get more value from it than I’m willing to give up — but I want to be more conscientious about when and how I contribute proprietary value to facebook. One of the strategies I intend to employ more often this year is to write more of my thoughts in my own spaces like this blog. I can still link it on facebook, which is important for visibility, and where a lot of the discussion still tends to happen, but at least I’m not doing as many things that you need to be on facebook to see and engage with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The one thing that facebook is good at, and that I don’t have a great alternative for, is sharing with a broad audience that isn’t the entire world. There are two reasons it’s good to be able to do this. One is that there are some things I’m happy to share with those who are interested in my life, but which I wouldn’t want to presume everyone cares to know about. Another is that sometimes I have things to say that I’d like to have reasonably broadly heard, but where I know that some individuals would make my life difficult if they saw it. I’ll continue to think through my options in these cases, and I may well continue to rely on facebook some, but I want at least to make sure I’m being deliberate and conscientious about how and why I am contributing to facebook’s social media dominance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's likely the tone of this blog might change a bit, as it is in this post, if I decide to share more personal things here. (This post is only interesting if you care about me and my life and my goals. Not all of my posts are like that.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>(2) Photography</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BsGhYZLAwTD/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_medium=loading&utm_campaign=embed_loading_state_script" style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Happy New Year! (Photo from November 2016)⠀ ⠀ One of my New Year's Resolutions is to take and post more photographs. Can I post a photo (new or old) every day? Let's see how it goes.</a></div>
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A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jonathanichikawa/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_medium=loading&utm_campaign=embed_loading_state_script" style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" target="_blank"> Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa</a> (@jonathanichikawa) on <time datetime="2019-01-01T18:24:43+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Jan 1, 2019 at 10:24am PST</time></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have gotten out of my photography habit. (I have thousands of photos that I’ve taken that are waiting for me to process and post them, and I've slowed way down on taking new ones.) I want to get back<span class="Apple-converted-space"> into the habit. I set up a <a href="https://500px.com/jichikawa">new 500px account</a> and I'm gradually uploading to it, mostly from my archives so far. I plan to let my flickr photostream go. (They're going to start deleting soon if I don't pay.) I'm going to try to see whether it's feasible to post a photo a day to <a href="https://instagram.com/jonathanichikawa/">Instagram</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"><b>(3) Research</b></span></div>
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2018, especially the second half of it, has been incredibly busy with things other than my philosophical research; I’ve produced less writing so far than I’d hoped. I don’t regret my 2018 balance, but I want 2019 to be weighted more heavily towards research, and I hope a year from now I have some pretty concrete results to show for it. I intend to finish my defensiveness paper and my contextual injustice paper, and to have significant new work related to <a href="http://jichikawa.net/epistemology-and-rape-culture/">my rape culture project</a>.</div>
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<b>(4) Fitness</b></div>
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2018 was a phenomenal running year for me. I met all my race goals. In 2019 I plan to continue running, but less, diversifying my fitness strategies. The resolution is to get into the habit of regular strength exercises. I also plan to get a new half-marathon PB.</div>
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<b>(5) Van</b></div>
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Carrie and I bought an old RV last year but haven't gotten around to getting into adventure shape. In 2019, I'm going to make sure it happens.</div>
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</style>Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-12180337121802537892018-02-23T13:35:00.001-08:002018-02-23T13:35:34.029-08:00When to engage
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Elizabeth Barnes has a <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arguments-That-Harm-And/242543?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=7b717112e5334f2b97b3624ea0dd4078&elq=54fd282621714f57a20fb19aa034e48b&elqaid=17904&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7928">nice piece in the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i></a> on an important topic: when is it a good idea to engage in a serious way with harmful and offensive ideas? Barnes draws a distinction between, on the one hand, Peter Singer’s discussions of the value of disabled people, and on the other, a hypothetical philosophical argument in favour of rape. She finds both stances morally problematic, offensive, and pretty clearly false, but sees value in engaging with the former, but not with the latter. The difference lies the opinions of people at large. As Barnes puts it: “A pro-rape argument isn’t an important ‘option on the table’ in debates about sexual ethics unless (by repeatedly discussing and citing it) we make it one”; by contrast, Singer’s view about disabled people reflect widespread assumptions.</div>
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I like Barnes’s piece, and I think her strategy of looking beyond views’ intrinsic features to social facts about how views are distributed, is a sensible and correct one. (I wrote <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2016/09/platforms-free-speech-and-boundaries-of.html">something making a similar point</a> a little while back.) That said, I think I have a couple of points of disagreement about how this kind of framework plays when we look to specifics.</div>
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First, consider again the contrast Barnes draws between the view-to-be-engaged (disabled people are less valuable) and the view-to-be-shunned (rape is fine): Singer’s views follow naturally from widespread casual remarks; pro-rape arguments aren’t really on the table. But this isn’t a dichotomy. It is possible for a view to follow naturally from widespread remarks and thoughts, and also to not really be on the table in academic discourse. Indeed the example of a pro-rape stance is I think quite a lot like this. Barnes is right that it’s not “on the table”—it is a sociological fact about academia that it’s the kind of view that a lot of people will feel fine <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonathanichikawa/11-ideas-philosophers-refuse-to-take-seriously-2mes5?utm_term=.kbGJW3KDm#.qpVvMQ61B">rejecting out of hand without even listening to arguments about it</a>. But this isn’t, I think, because it is so alien to many ordinary people’s unreflective assumptions.</div>
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It is true that, in polite company, people don’t go around saying outright that sexual assault is fine. But as Barnes points out, this is no contrast with the disability case:</div>
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“Most people would, of course, be far too polite to say what Singer says. But Singer’s claims about the comparative value of disabled lives follow naturally from the casual remarks that disabled people and caregivers hear <i>all the time</i>.”</blockquote>
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Barnes is surely right about this, but this does not seem to mark a difference from the rape case. Just as every disabled person, and everyone engaging in public discourse about disability, has heard casual remarks that reflect something like Singer’s ideas, so too has every sexual assault survivor and anti-rape activist heard many casual remarks reflective of the tolerance, or even the celebration, of sexual assault. (This pretty much just is the idea that we live in a rape culture.)</div>
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And I’m not only talking about the dark corners of 4chan or the metablog. I’m also talking about the President of the United States. Also the professional philosophers in good academic standing who argued that lots of us were overreacting to the Al Franken allegations, because after all, she had <i>voluntarily </i>posed in sexy photoshoots on other occasions. Published work in academia isn’t insulated from rape culture either. While it’s true that nobody who wants to be taken seriously can run around literally saying “rape is good”, there is no shortage of people of academic stature pushing the boundaries—witness <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTglME9rvQ&feature=youtu.be">Jordan Peterson</a>’s charge of hypocrisy against women who say they don’t want to be sexually harassed, and yet wear makeup to work. Witness <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-assault-allegations.html">Laura Kipnis</a>'s reflective distrust of students making harassment complaints against professors.</div>
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So insofar as there is a difference between the cases Barnes mentions, I don’t think it’s that one of them fails to tap into an important set of widespread scripts and assumptions. I suspect that the difference may be more contingent than that. Here is my hypothesis: the difference is Peter Singer himself. When an eloquent and celebrated, highly credentialed Ivy-league professor with a serious track record of important scholarly work says it’s better for a disabled infant to be killed, this by itself has the effect of putting that view on the table. This is one of the social powers of public intellectuals.</div>
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If someone of Singer’s stature were explicitly defending rape, I do think that would have the unfortunate result of entering that view into the domain of ideas competing for our attention. We can ignore it on r/TheDonald, but if it’s published in <i>Ethics </i>we’d better show up. I’d also like to add a word about what I mean by ‘showing up’. I think I’m interested in a slightly different category of responses than Barnes is. Here’s how she puts her topic:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“When I talk about engaging with ideas, I mean taking ideas seriously — discussing and citing them, having them presented at conferences, responding to them in print or at symposia, and so on. There are separate questions that arise, such as whether academic freedom should protect them (surely it should) or whether they should be taught in the classroom (surely that depends on all sorts of complicated factors, including the size and level of the class, the students enrolled, your pedagogical aims, and your teaching style). And there’s also the issue of how non-academics respond to scholars who defend controversial ideas. (Disability-rights organizations regularly protest Singer’s public lectures, for example.) Here, though, I want to focus specifically on how scholars interact with ideas that many consider harmful, demeaning, or offensive.”</blockquote>
<div class="p2">
Scholars are people, and what we do and how we respond isn’t exhausted by what we say in print and in colloquia. So in addition to the question about what we’re going to cite and publish in our academic output, we also face the question of what we’re going to say to our colleagues on facebook, or how we’re going to discuss other scholars’ views with our students. Collectively there is a lot of ‘soft power’ to be wielded concerning what we as a discipline consider to be a normal defence of a philosophical stance, and what we consider to be beyond the pale.</div>
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<div class="p1">
Barnes is exercising some of that power in her <i>Chronicle</i> piece when she calls Singer’s views offensive, and describes the emotional toll that comes from engaging them. She, like the disability rights activists who routinely protest Singer’s talks, is contributing to a cultural pressure against defending such ideas. (I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing for her to be doing.)</div>
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<div class="p1">
One last observation. (This is already much longer than I intended it to be!) I think that the central questions here about when it is valuable or important to engage with offensive ideas, and when it is better to ignore them, declining to “feed the trolls”, also comes up when reacting to nonacademic public discourse that is offensive or harmful, including cases in which the harm done more a matter of personal interactions than the defence of particular views. Enforcing social norms—for example, by publicly stating that some behaviour is unacceptable—is how those norms are created and maintained. Conversely, if bad behaviour is treated with silence—even if that silence comes along with private whispered disapproval—then it is collectively treated as acceptable.</div>
<div class="p1">
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In other words, I still feel like <a href="https://csi-jenkins.tumblr.com/post/90563605390/day-one">this is a pretty good model to emulate</a>, for those of us in a position from which it's secure to do so.</div>
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-42405547649350497582017-07-05T16:01:00.001-07:002017-07-05T16:01:20.083-07:00Kipnis on believing rape survivors<div class="tr_bq">
There have been several recent feminist reactions to Laura Kipnis's book that I've found pretty insightful. <a href="http://jezebel.com/laura-kipnis-sued-for-defamation-over-book-that-charact-1795303051/amp">Here</a>'s a Jezebel piece focusing on the lawsuit; <a href="http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166252">here</a>'s a very solid review by Jeremy C. Young, focusing on the harm the book does to university culture. I started blogging at length about this book a couple months back because I felt like no one was publicly articulating some of the obvious feminist perspective; I'm glad to see that others have started to write about it too. I had thought that my previous post would be my last on the topic, but I did have a new thought today in response to something I read in <a href="http://signsjournal.org/unwanted-advances">this series of "Short Takes" by <i>Signs</i></a>. Unlike the other critiques I've read, this one included a response by Kipnis herself.</div>
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The exchange I want to discuss is about rape and rape culture and involves some specifics. So consider yourself content advised.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>One of the <i>Signs </i>critiques, by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, begins with a description of her own experiences of sexual assault, both as a child and as a young adult. She includes this description:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I was on a study abroad program and broke all of the university’s rules to go out, very late at night, with the man who would become my rapist. I was raped in the hotel room for which I paid. I told the man who raped me, “I don’t want to do this. Please stop.” I didn’t violently fight back. I didn’t scream or yell at the top of my lungs because I was afraid. I didn’t want to make a scene. I blamed myself for saying yes, for breaking the rules about spending the night away from where we were housed, for paying for the hotel room, and for asking the man who raped me to put on a condom.</blockquote>
Afterward, she told her friends that the experience had been consensual. She withheld that she'd been frightened, and that she'd changed her mind, and that she'd asked him to stop. Even in her private thoughts, she didn't think of what had happened as rape. Simmons writes: "I thought rape was when a strange, unidentifiable man lurking in the bushes grabs you in the middle of the night. I didn’t know that rape could happen under circumstances like mine or that I could have the audacity to change my mind." She continues:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I share a part of my story because for many people who don’t have any understanding of what rape is, they would not define what happened to me in March 1989 as rape. Frankly, after reading Kipnis’s deeply troubling <i>Unwanted Advances</i>, I’m not sure she would define what happened to me as rape.</blockquote>
Simmons goes on to raise a number of critiques about Kipnis's book, relating it to the rise of Donald Trump and questioning her treatment of race and Blackness. It's all well worth a read (as are the other pieces), but it is the discussion of her own rape that I want to focus on.<br />
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In her response, Kipnis expresses incredulity at Simmons's description of her view. "Is <i>Signs</i> seriously asking me," she asks, "to respond to ... Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s [charge] that I’d deny she was raped? For the record, my central concern throughout the book is the content of sexual consent. If you tell someone to stop and they don’t, it’s rape. Rape is a crime."<br />
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I was surprised by this particular display of indignation. Based on what I've read and heard from Kipnis, it seems to me extremely plausible that she would have denied that Simmons was raped. Two details about her story stand out in this context. First, Simmons returned to her dorm after sneaking out to see a man, paying for a hotel room, and spending the night with him, then told her friends that she'd had an exciting and consensual evening. It wasn't until later that she even herself conceptualized herself as having been raped, or described it thus to others.<br />
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This looks quite a lot like the kind of situation Kipnis describes in her book as "<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html">retroactive withdrawal of consent</a>", where she writes with scorn about the idea of someone deciding, months or years after the fact, that they'd been raped, thus "transforming" the experience "retrospectively" into a rape. She mocks the idea that the relationship between Ludlow and "Hartley" was nonconsensual, asking, "What would it mean to not consent to sending <i>a thousand texts and emails</i>?" (p. 95) One might as well ask, "What would it mean to not consent to sneaking out, renting a hotel room, and inviting a man to stay with you?" It would be just as irrelevant. On pp. 97–8 Kipnis also makes much of the fact that, shortly after the alleged rape, Hartley denies that she'd been raped—just as Simmons did. Kipnis thinks that accepting Hartley's story would require one "<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html">to expunge all female intelligence, agency, autonomy, and desire from her calculations</a>" (p. 122). To her credit, Kipnis doesn't seem willing to say the same to Simmons in the face of her story. Perhaps the difference lies in which side of the story was made salient to her.<br />
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Second, Kipnis's self-attribution of the view that "if you tell someone to stop and they don’t, it’s rape," and her professed emphasis on consent, does not reflect the book. Nowhere in <i>Unwanted Advances</i> does Kipnis define "rape". On p. 16 she quotes with derision a university finding that "consent had to be voluntary, present, and ongoing." She mentions on p. 40 that there isn't a general scientific standard for what counts as rape. On pp. 120–1 she expresses some confusion and mistrust about the notion of "consent". On pp. 198–9 she describes categories that fall between consensual sex and rape, where ambivalent feelings are susceptible to multiple interpretations. On p. 202 she describes a "crazy expansionism about what constitutes rape and assault", mentioning the view that rape does not require penetration, but nowhere in the book does Kipnis articulate her own preferred—presumably more restrictive—view.<br />
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She has, however, articulated a view on the question in a <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/05/professor-laura-kipnis-she-faced-title-ix-charges-for-writing-an-essay/">May 2017 interview with Cathy Young</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
<b>CATHY YOUNG:</b> So, in a way, this whole debate over “is this rape or is it not rape” is taking us in the wrong direction, isn’t it?<br /><b>LAURA KIPNIS:</b> I would have to say, and maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned on this point—I think the dividing line is the use of physical force to [make someone] have sex, and I do think that’s a criminal matter.<br /><b>CATHY YOUNG:</b> Or if we’re talking about someone who is not just intoxicated but physically incapacitated, to the extent that they are unable to remove themselves from the situation.<br /><b>LAURA KIPNIS:</b> Absolutely true. But then you get into questions that are complicated—how drunk is too drunk to consent, the fact that people can be in a blackout state and seem conscious. I think people are trying to draw hard and fast lines, and Title IX investigators are in that position of making pronouncements in fuzzy situations.</blockquote>
This is the only place I've seen Kipnis say what rape is. And what she says is, it's what happen when someone <i>uses physical force</i> to compel sex. (Given the remarks about penetration mentioned above, I'm guessing she's restricting "sex" to penis-in-vagina.) When pressed, she concedes that it's also possible to be incapacitated to the point where sexual activity would be rape, but emphasizes immediately that it's very difficult to know where to draw the line.<div>
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Simmons says she didn't use violent force to attempt to stop her rapist. She used her words. She told him to stop, but she didn't attempt to use physical force to make him stop.</div>
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(I hope this is 100% clear without my saying it explicitly, but just in case: I am not remotely skeptical about whether Simmons was raped. I take her at her word, and I think the case she describes definitely counts as a case of rape. I'm arguing that, from the perspective of someone who is skeptical about a lot of these cases, as Kipnis is, it would make similar sense (and be a similar mistake) to be skeptical about Simmons's case.)</div>
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So I think Simmons was perfectly justified in suspecting that her case was the kind of case Kipnis might say wasn't a rape. It looks quite a lot like many of the kinds of cases Kipnis spins into narratives about hysterical snowflakes who retrospectively some to regret their sexual decisions. Kipnis is certainly wrong to find this interpretation of her work to be shocking. It is the natural interpretation. Indeed, it follows from the things she's said.</div>
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In the book, Kipnis never seeks out the victims' side of the story. Her descriptions of cases—both the central ones involving Peter Ludlow, and the many briefer anecdotes throughout the book—are based entirely on what she's heard from people who were accused of wrongdoing. Under those circumstances, it's perhaps unsurprising that Kipnis doesn't experience much empathy for those on the other side of the stories. She never heard those versions of the story. It is telling that, when she starts on the survivor's side, as she does here, her sympathies shift. <i>Obviously </i>a case like <i>that </i>would be a rape. How <i>dare</i> you suggest I'd think otherwise?</div>
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But cases like that really are just like the cases she discusses. So of course victims of sexual assault who read Kipnis's book will think she doesn't stand with them. I'm glad Kipnis recognizes their humanity and their experiences when confronted directly with their stories. I just wish she'd exercised her imagination a bit more in writing the book; maybe she would have realized that stories like the ones she discusses look just like Simmons's, when seen from a different angle.</div>
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-88893037128812122192017-06-11T18:05:00.000-07:002017-06-11T18:05:16.640-07:00Kipnis on EpistemologyLaura Kipnis's <i>Unwanted Advances</i> is, in important ways, a work of epistemology. It's not an academic monograph—don't file it in the philosophy section. But many of its most central questions are epistemic: given the murky circumstances, psychological complexity, and private details that characterize sexual misconduct allegations in academia, how are investigators or members of the public to know, or to come to reasonable beliefs about, what has happened?<br />
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Kipnis’s view is that the prevalent practices among student activists and campus administrators are epistemically faulty: we are, Kipnis thinks, far too quick to believe students' allegations of sexual harassment and assault. On p. 1 of the book she describes the campus status quo as "officially sanctioned hysteria" and a "sexual paranoia" akin to McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials. ("As in Salem," Kipnis quips on pp. 66–7, "the accusations of post-adolescent girls still factor heavily.")<br />
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In this post I’d like to express disagreement with some elements of Kipnis’s epistemic outlook. All the usual content warnings.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Kipnis starts making epistemological assumptions on p. 1, when she writes that irony "helps you think because it gives you critical distance on a thing". The idea that critical distance is an epistemic virtue tempts many, but it faces important limits that are too often overlooked. Some things are nearly impossible to understand from a critical distance—lived experience is epistemically critical in some areas; experiences of sexual harassment and institutional betrayal are very plausible candidates. Taking a detached and ironic view of them is not a better way to understand them. But claiming the rhetoric of objectivity is a classic technique for brushing aside one's opponents' perspectives. (And "hysteria" is textbook misogynistic propaganda.)<br />
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— Alex Forrest ☝🏻️ (@380kmh) <a href="https://twitter.com/380kmh/status/867494576382033924">May 24, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Kipnis also often uses the rhetoric of "honesty" in a potentially question-begging and propagandistic way:<br />
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<ul>
<li>"the educational system is failing to educate anyone, largely because speaking honestly about sexual realities has become taboo." (17)</li>
<li>"Campus life has gotten so ludicrous and censorious that it hardly seems worth caring. It’s far more impossible to have an intellectually honest conversation about sex on campus on an American campus than off these days, which is nothing short of bizarre if you’re someone who was drawn to academia in the first place because talking about difficult stuff was supposedly what went on there." (33–4)</li>
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Kipnis thus takes on the mantle of "telling it like it is." Like <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/halim-shebaya/trump-tells-it-like-it-is_b_9836974.html">many</a> who frame their ideas in this way, she gains credibility in many readers' eyes for saying what they want to hear, whether or not it really amounts to honesty.<br />
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When she starts talking about specific cases, Kipnis brings in more explicit epistemological assumptions. In a passage spanning pp. 66–71, Kipnis questions the methods of Joan Slavin, a Northwestern University Title IX officer who investigated allegations that Professor Peter Ludlow had gotten an undergraduate student (“Cho” is her pseudonym) drunk, pressured her to come to his apartment, and groped her. Kipnis goes over competing descriptions of several elements of the night, expressing disagreement with Slavin's judgments of Cho’s credibility. E.g.:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For instance, according to Slavin, Ludlow told Cho that he thought she was attractive, "discussed his desire to have a romantic and sexual relationship" with her, and shared sexual information, all of which was unwelcome to her. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I’m dying to know how Slavin came to the conclusion that Ludlow wanted to have a romantic relationship with Cho. Because an evening spent drinking and going to galleries indicates a man’s desire for a relationship? If so, single women of America, your problems are over. (71)</blockquote>
Kipnis wonders how Slavin came to the conclusion that Ludlow said he wanted to have a romantic relationship with Cho? The obvious answer is: Cho told her. Kipnis often reaches for strange explanations for simple conclusions when she disagrees with them. Here, Slavin listened to Cho tell her that Ludlow said he wanted to have a relationship with her, and concluded that Ludlow probably told Cho that he wanted to have a relationship with her. Kipnis hypothesizes that Slavin is employing the implicit premise that <i>an evening spent drinking and going to galleries indicates a man's desire for a romantic relationship</i>. This is the kind of premise one might need if young women's testimony carries no epistemic significance. But if we don't assume that, there's no need to reach for such bizarrities.<br />
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Kipnis's move here is similar to one I <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html">discussed a few weeks ago</a>, where she attributes to campus officials and activists the assumption that, e.g., female students have no sexual desires. Kipnis was assuming then that sexual assault is inconsistent with any role for the victim's agency. I think her similar maneuver here is a denial of victims' <i>epistemic</i> significance. She describes investigators who are speaking with the people involved as making decisions "based on nothing but their own suppositions" (p. 162). This is something that would make sense only if people's word carried no evidential weight at all.<br />
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On p. 85 Kipnis writes that "[a]bsent Slavin's prejudices about male behavior, there simply isn't a preponderance of evidence supporting Cho's story." The "prejudices" Kipnis is referring to are manifested by Slavin's taking Cho's testimony to be credible. Kipnis goes on to offer an alternate theory of the evening in question:<br />
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Let's say, just as a thought experiment, that Cho came on to Ludlow, and he told her to chill—that he was willing to spend an evening having drinks and going to galleries, but had no interest in taking it further. Is it inconceivable that a professionally ambitious young woman, after spending months emailing her famous professor about this and that, finds herself in his company and decides to test the waters? Let's go further: if we're cynical enough to think Ludlow offered to promote Cho's career in exchange for sex or romance, why aren't we cynical enough to think that Cho spotted a potential gravy train and decided to play it for what she could get? After all, the gold digger and the predatory professor inhabit the same universe of crude stereotypes. </blockquote>
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Kipnis is writing as if the only way to figure out what happened is to imagine a hypothetical scenario and think about whether it is "inconceivable". She concocts a competing stereotype and assumes it's thereby equally credible, thus undermining the finding that Cho's story was more credible than alternatives. She assumes the testimony carries no epistemic weight.</div>
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(And talking of embracing stereotypes as evidence, let's not forget Kipnis's intial reaction to Cho's story. She started out skeptical because "<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-assault-allegations.html">single non-hideous men with good jobs (or, in this case, an international reputation and not without charm) don't have to work that hard to get women to go to bed with them in our century.</a>" On pp. 67–8 & 71 Kipnis also casts Cho's testimony as incredible because Cho describes Ludlow as drinking "disgusting student drinks" instead of proper professor beverages, and using language that, in Kipnis's opinion, sounds more like the vernacular of a "rapper" than that of a "mid-fifties philosophy professor".)</div>
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On p. 87 Kipnis writes: "In Joan Slavin's slippery-slope evidentiary standards, if he'd paid for drinks, it meant he'd groped Cho; if he was male, he came on to her." But Slavin thought he groped her <i>because she said so</i>, not because he'd paid for drinks. If you ignore the relevance of her testimony, then Slavin's decisions do look rather odd. Perhaps this is why Kipnis so often interprets conjunctions as entailments and inferences, as in this case. She did the same thing in an email to me in April. She'd read my <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-assault-allegations.html">blog post</a> pointing out that, contrary to her claim, attractive and charming men certainly do sometimes rape people, and citing Bill Cosby as an example. In her email to me, she described the argument of my post as "because Cosby, then Ludlow". But obviously I'm making no such argument. To give one more example: on p. 117, Kipnis describes "Hartley" (a pseudonym for another student accuser of Ludlow) as telling Slavin that "Ludlow was 'a serial sexual predator who targeted vulnerable young women'"; on p. 122 Kipnis asks, "Did dating younger women make Ludlow a serial sexual predator, as Nola Hartley assured Joan Slavin?" Hartley says "he's F and G" and Kipnis retorts, "does being F <i>really </i>make one G?"<br />
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A similar dismissal of complainants' testimony characterizes Kipnis's discussion of "<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html">retroactive withdrawal of consent</a>." She takes pains to argue (as if anyone denies this) that sometimes, sexual agency can lead to sexual choices one regrets. (One representative passage spans pp. 95–6.) On these grounds she says we should reject later reports that earlier sexual activity was nonconsensual. But the fact that something <i>sometimes </i>happens is no reason at all to discount testimony to the effect that it didn't happen on a given occasion. I sometimes forgetfully leave my phone in public washrooms; that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe me if I tell you someone robbed me of my phone in the washroom today.<br />
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At the end of the book there is a chapter called "Coda: Eyewitness to a Witch Trial" (also published in a slightly edited version in the <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/Eyewitness-to-a-Title-IX-Witch/239634">Chronicle of Higher Education</a>). There, Kipnis glowingly recounts Jessica Wilson's testimony as a character witness at Ludlow's Northwestern termination hearing. As she does throughout the book, Kipnis places evidential weight on assumptions about what "kind" of person would commit sexual violence. At the hearing, Wilson described Ludlow officiating her wedding. Kipnis writes that "[h]earing about Ludlow presiding over a marriage ceremony came as a small shock, I think, to a roomful of people who'd been told he was virtually a predator." (227) I don't want to sound overly inflammatory, but I also don't want to understate this point: the idea that respectable people who do things like preside over weddings couldn't be sexual predators isn't merely contrary to the evidence—it's actively harmful. It has contributed to the rape of tens of thousands of children.<br />
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More plausibly relevant is Wilson's testimony that her personal knowledge of Peter Ludlow is inconsistent with the behaviour he was accused of. Herself a survivor of sexual assault, Wilson described herself as "very sensitive to these issues. If Peter had a predator bone in his body, I would know it." (229) Kipnis describes her saying that "she never heard a single negative comment or even a whisper about Ludlow in fifteen years (and she would have, she said, because people came to her about this sort of thing)." (227)<br />
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I'm willing to believe that Wilson went fifteen years without hearing negative rumours about her friend's behaviour. But epistemically speaking, I think that tells a lot less than she suggests. As Sandy Goldberg lays out nicely in <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/GOLROO">his book on testimony</a>, for the fact that one hasn't <i>heard</i> something to be evidence that it hasn't <i>happened</i>, two conditions need to be met: first, you need the people around you to have reasonable access to the facts, and second, you need to be in a social environment such that, if it had happened, and people around you did know about it, they'd be likely to tell you right away.<br />
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I think it's very implausible that Wilson satisfies the second condition here. If someone knew that Peter Ludlow was sexually harassing students, whether firsthand or because someone chose to trust them with that knowledge, I'd imagine that Peter Ludlow's intimate friend who asked him to officiate her wedding would be the <i>last </i>person they'd choose to divulge to. They'd guess—rightly, as it turns out—that Wilson would be an extremely unsympathetic confidante.<br />
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Kipnis herself did hear about earlier rumours about Ludlow's behaviour. On p. 80 she mentions that the Northwestern Philosophy department chair had heard uncomfortable rumours about Ludlow's behaviour at a conference in South America in (I think) 2009. But it seems these rumours escaped Wilson's notice—refuting her assertion that if people had had concerns about Ludlow, she would have heard about it.<br />
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Kipnis describes Wilson as a specialist on inference to the best explanation, which she glosses as "how do you know what happened when you yourself didn't see it happen?" (229) Wilson's research focuses mostly on metaphysics, but I think Kipnis is referring here to a series of recent papers Wilson has co-authored with Stephen Briggs, exploring the role of non-deductive reasoning in <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/STEATA-9">theory selection</a> and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/BIGCTN">the determination of content</a>, and emphasizing that <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/BIGTAP-2">some forms of inductive reasoning can be a priori</a>. I'm pretty sympathetic to this line—the central thoughts there are actually extremely similar to some things Ben Jarvis and I published in <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/ICHTRO">our 2013 book</a>—but I don't think it's accurate to say that it represents any particular research expertise relevant to the question of how to decide whether to believe someone's report. Their work concerns how we should theorize <i>about</i> inference to the best explanation—not which inferences are justified. (For one explicit statement to that effect, see the last paragraph of §1 of <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/BIGTAP-2">this</a> paper.)<br />
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So I don't see anything in Wilson's research that puts pressure one way or the other as to whether, in a given instance, we should consider an allegation of sexual misconduct to be credible. (It's actually a controversial matter whether inference to the best explanation is even relevant to this question at all—<a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/">non-reductionists about testimony</a> might well think it's not.) Nothing in her work, to my knowledge, supports the idea that if two students say a professor assaulted them, even though some of the professor's friends can't imagine him doing that, the best explanation is that the students are deluded or lying. So I don't see Wilson's discussion here as anything more than a statement of her opinion as Ludlow's friend:<br />
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Another panelist quickly countered, "It seems very clear the students feel they have been harmed. That is definitely the message that the university is presenting, at least from the interviews with the investigators: that they feel harmed." </blockquote>
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Wilson's solution, again, was inference to the best explanation. "What's the best explanation of all of the data? It's a delicate position. But, I mean—we're aware of human nature. Sometimes a person's memories can be distorted. There are psychological and other motivations that need to be brought to bear." (232)</blockquote>
Nor does Wilson's research—nor any other plausible story that isn't radically skeptical—support the assumption that one can't know things on others' testimony. But that's what's implicit in Wilson's rhetorical question about even her own story of sexual harassment. Kipnis describes her as asking: "Yet didn't the panelists have to ask whether she was telling the truth? They hadn't been there, so how would they know?" (231)<br />
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This is also the kind of skeptical intuition implicit in the rhetoric of a "he-said/she-said" situation. I think this phrase is tied up in a kind of skeptical propaganda—it pulls us, non-rationally, towards the assumption that there's no way to know what really happened. It suggests a kind of epistemic proportionality: one piece of testimony on one side, one perfectly balancing it on the other. It's a call to give up on the project of figuring out what happened.<br />
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But not all testimony is equal—many potentially tie-breaking features can be considered. For example, what motivations would be served by lying, and who might have them? Is there relevant history? (Is there a history of false allegations? Is there a history of complaints?) Many such factors are epistemically relevant. Especially when questions matter, we should resist the skeptical temptation to just throw up our hands and suspend judgment. <i>Sometimes</i> that's going to be necessary, because sometimes there's really just going to be no way to figure out what happened. But the idea that this is so <i>whenever </i>there is competing testimony with no other direct evidence is both mistaken and harmful.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-5017150688907634442017-05-18T11:33:00.001-07:002017-05-19T07:04:45.780-07:00Guest Post: Kipnis on Title IX<b><i>The following is a guest post by Kathryn Pogin, a graduate student at Northwestern Philosophy and an incoming student Yale Law. She is a colleague of the student who is <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/laura-kipnis-and-harper-collins-have.html">suing Kipnis and Harper Collins</a> —Jonathan</i></b><br />
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Since the release of <i>Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus</i>, a recurring theme in public disagreement regarding the book has been that if critics believe the book is in error, they should be specific, and provide evidence, while critics were hesitant to do so when it seemed that would only further violate the privacy of those depicted in the book. Whether or not there were errors in the representation of events at Northwestern <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/books/author-is-sued-over-book-on-campus-sex.html">may be adjudicated in a more appropriate venue than blogs and Facebook now</a>, anyway – but one thing I’ve found odd about this dynamic is that there are errors in the book about matters of public record. <br />
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Consider this passage:<br />
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“In 2011 the Department of Education’s office for Civil Rights (OCR) expanded Title IX’s mandate from gender discrimination to encompass sexual misconduct (everything from sexual harassment, to coercion, to assault, to rape), issuing guidelines so vague that I could be accused of ‘creating a hostile environment on campus’ for writing an essay. These vague guidelines (never subjected to any congressional review) take the form of what are called, with faux cordiality, ‘Dear Colleague’ letters—note the nebulously threatening inflections of overempowered civil servants everywhere.” (p. 36 of <i>Unwanted Advances</i>)</blockquote>
This is false. The 2011 Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) <i>is</i> controversial — but it’s not because it expanded the scope of Title IX to include sexual misconduct. Title IX <i>already</i> covered sexual misconduct. Rather, it’s because in that letter, OCR issued guidance that schools should use the preponderance of the evidence standard when adjudicating sex discrimination complaints, including complaints of sexual misconduct.<br />
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As background for folks who aren’t familiar with the history, Title IX was passed by Congress in 1972. The full text of the law <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix_dis.html">reads</a>:<br />
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"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." </blockquote>
It’s a common misperception (and one Kipnis seems to suggest in various places) that Title IX was passed in order to address funding equity in athletics, but it actually <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/104237/how-title-ix-became-our-best-tool-against-sexual-harassment">wasn’t written</a> with <a href="http://www.espn.com/espnw/title-ix/article/7722632/37-words-changed-everything">discrimination in athletics in mind</a>. Regulations regarding its applicability to athletic programs weren’t issued until 1975. The <a href="https://www.si.com/vault/2012/05/07/106189983/title-ix-timeline">NCAA challenged the legality of Title IX a few months</a> later as a result (the suit was dismissed). In the following years, the increase in women’s athletic opportunities as a result of Title IX was one of the most salient effects of the law, which is probably why so many folks came to associate Title IX with women’s sports. The intent, though, was to prohibit sex discrimination in federally-funded educational programming generally. But — and here’s the relevant historical point — in 1980, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/10/title-ix-yale-catherine-mackinnon_n_5462140.html">an appeals court affirmed that sexual harassment constitutes a form of sex discrimination under Title IX</a>. The famous case, <i>Alexander v. Yale</i>, had been brought by five Yale students who were advised by Catharine MacKinnon. They lost the case, but got what they were asking of the court anyway (that Yale implement sexual harassment grievance procedures) as well as a place in landmark legal theory.<br />
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In other words, sexual misconduct on college campuses has been legally recognized as a Title IX matter for nearly four decades, and not just since 2011. Sexual harassment is prohibited by Title IX because it’s a form of sex discrimination, and sexual assault is prohibited because it’s an <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/womensrights/titleixandsexualassaultknowyourrightsandyourcollege%27sresponsibilities.pdf">extreme form of sexual harassment</a>.<br />
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To be clear, I am by no means a Title IX expert. I am no expert of any kind on any legal matter; I’m a student (in philosophy, at Northwestern), not an attorney. But that’s sort of my point about the oddness here — I’m not an expert, I’m not writing a book about Title IX matters, and even I know that the 2011 DCL did not expand the scope of Title IX to include sexual misconduct. <br />
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If you read the <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201104.html">2011 DCL</a>, some of the evidence that this is false is contained within the letter itself (e.g., some of the case law it cites demonstrates sexual harassment was prohibited by Title IX before 2011). The 2011 DCL also refers to earlier guidance from the OCR regarding sexual harassment (sexual harassment is referenced in Title IX guidance from <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/sexhar01.html">1997</a>, <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/shguide.pdf">2001</a>, <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/firstamend.html">2003</a>, etc.). Some of the most notable instances of criticism of the 2011 DCL also include references to this same information. For instance, <a href="https://www.thefire.org/fire-letter-to-office-for-civil-rights-assistant-secretary-for-civil-rights-russlynn-ali-may-5-2011/">the letter sent to the OCR by Will Creeley on behalf of FIRE</a> shortly after the 2011 DCL was released, makes clear that FIRE’s concern with the letter was not that Title IX should not be understood to protect students from sexual misconduct but rather centered around questions of due process and appropriate evidentiary standards. Responses to those criticisms of the DCL by organizations like the <a href="https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/nwlc_ltr_to_ocr_re_prep_of_evidence_std_2_8_12_2.pdf">National Women’s Law Center</a> make the more narrow scope of disagreement regarding the guidance clear, too.<br />
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In addition to being odd, it’s unfortunate, I think, that this is now being confused in discussion following the book (e.g., <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/04/09/522909041/laura-kipnis-tackles-campus-sexual-politics-in-unwanted-advances">here</a>). The controversy surrounding the 2011 DCL is a serious matter of public concern, and misrepresenting the subject of that controversy is unlikely to advance serious public discourse.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-12665316154254244872017-05-16T17:55:00.001-07:002017-05-17T00:20:20.111-07:00Laura Kipnis and Harper Collins have been suedI have just learned that the graduate student Laura Kipnis discusses at length in <i>Unwanted Advances</i> has sued both Kipnis and the book's publisher, Harper Collins. She's suing for public disclosure of private facts, false light invasion of privacy, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.<br />
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As I mentioned in a <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html?showComment=1494594801324#c6493545587798040810">comment</a> in a recent post here, I do believe that Kipnis dramatically misrepresented the student in dishonest and harmful ways. I am not surprised that there is a lawsuit alleging this. All of my blogging so far has bracketed those issues, since getting into the details of the misrepresentations would involve further violations of privacy. I have been trying to make the case that <i>even if the specific evidence she cites is correct</i>, her case is both uncompeling and harmful. But since <i>Jane Doe vs. Harper Collins and Laura Kipnis </i>is now public, some of Doe's specific complaints can now be discussed. (Many commenters have expressed <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html?showComment=1494871746089#c3475538864481581308">frustration</a> with people saying that the book is inaccurate without saying how. They may now be in a position to relieve some of their curiosity.)<br />
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The lawsuit puts in public, for the first time, Doe's version of the story. You can read it <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/mn7zspnhwzaajiw/%5B1%5D%20Complaint%20and%20Jury%20Demand%20-%20filed%2005.16.17.pdf?dl=0">here</a>. (It's a 23-page pdf.) This is of course her <i>allegation</i>; the evidence is something that will presumably be considered in court. A few highlights follow. Consider the usual content warnings to be in place.<br />
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According to the lawsuit, Ludlow targeted Doe immediately during a prospective visitors' weekend, offering to pay her way to stay at a house in Scotland with him, but asking her to keep the offer a secret. She felt it was inappropriate and declined, and told other professors about it at the time. (¶¶14–18)<br />
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When Doe arrived at Northwestern, she alleges that Ludlow sat in on a class she was taking—she later presumed this was a way to get close to her. (¶20) Despite her stated preference not to have a sexual relationship with him, he kissed her and exerted additional pressure over months. According to the complaint, "Plaintiff was increasingly unsure of how to handle this pressure. She wanted to stave off any romantic relationship while maintaining the academic and intellectual relationship with her mentor, who was teaching one of the classes she was attending, writing an academic paper with her, and would have a role in her career and evaluating her progress towards her PhD." (¶27)<br />
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The lawsuit also alleges that one night, Doe became intoxicated, and woke up to discover that she had apparently had sexual intercourse with Ludlow, although she had no memory of it. The complaint says: "Plaintiff was extremely upset. But as she was still a student in his department and they were working on a joint academic paper together, Plaintiff tried to maintain a sense of normalcy. She felt love for Ludlow as a mentor and had grown emotionally intimate with him, and his injection of physical intimacy was confusing and upsetting to Plaintiff. Increasingly uneasy about the relationship, Plaintiff departed campus as soon as possible for the holiday break. Once she was out of Evanston and away from Ludlow, it became clear to her how inappropriate the relationship was and that she had to end all personal contact with him. On or around January 6, 2012, Plaintiff returned after a month away, and Ludlow met her at the airport. While on the taxi ride home, Plaintiff told him that she felt he had taken advantage of her and had manipulated her and that she couldn’t have any sort of personal relationship with him. He became upset." (¶¶31–33)<br />
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According to the complaint, Doe declined to make any official complaint against Ludlow at first, because she had "fear and reluctance to do so given Ludlow’s position in the academic community and in the department where she was being evaluated for her PhD." (¶¶36–38) But two years later, when she learned of another similar case, she was eventually persuaded to come forward. The investigator hired by Northwestern found that Ludlow had sexually harassed Doe, but did not find evidence sufficient to determine whether he sexually assaulted her. (¶¶41–47)<br />
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This story is not consistent with the picture Kipnis gives in her book. As I mentioned <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html">last time</a>, Kipnis is emphatic in asserting that Doe and Ludlow were in a consensual romantic relationship; the lawsuit denies this. Kipnis says that Doe make "a retrospective retraction of consent to a relationship ... two years later" (95), but the lawsuit alleges that she told Ludlow that he'd manipulated and taken advantage of her right away, years before making the complaint. It also explains why she came forward later. Kipnis says that this was a relationship in which "it wasn't Ludlow calling the shots. His role throughout had been the supplicant, not the seigneur." (119) Her evidence for this is some texts in which Ludlow seems sad after Doe cut off contact. The lawsuit alleges that Doe was awkwardly attempting to navigate intense inappropriate pressure from her mentor the entire time (and that she cut off contact after being raped).<br />
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The lawsuit also alleges some other complaints about false claims Kipnis makes about Doe—for example, concerning what Title IX complaints she filed and what they said.<br />
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The lawsuit certainly changes the conversation about this book. I was already planning to write at least one more post about Kipnis's book, continuing my strategy of bracketing out these specific factual worries. The allegations in this lawsuit seem very credible to me. (I should say that I am working on more than just the publicly available evidence here.) But I don't consider it my place to try to convince people of that—especially now that it seems it will literally be adjudicated in court. I do think I still have a couple of things to say that do not depend on these claims. So I'll likely write more about them soon.<br />
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Here, again, is a recap of what I've tried to argue so far:<br />
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<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-assault-allegations.html">Kipnis is reflexively sympathetic to dangerous myths about what kind of person commits sexual assault</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html">Kipnis has strange ideas about sexual agency, thinking that tolerating harassment and assault is a more genuine exercise of agency than is filing a complaint about it</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/administrators-and-snowflakes-on-sexual.html">Kipnis wrongly takes student activists to support unfair Title IX procedures</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html">Kipnis wrongly supposes that administrators and activists believe in "retroactive withdrawal of consent"</a></li>
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<i>(Edit to add: this thread is not the place to dispute these arguments. Follow the links and discuss them there if you want. I'm going to keep the comments to this post on the topic of the lawsuit.)</i><br />
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None of those posts, which are about general cultural matters, depend on the allegations made in this lawsuit, which concern a specific individual.</div>
<br />Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-85122922056225073452017-05-11T02:30:00.000-07:002017-05-16T19:10:17.263-07:00Retroactively Withdrawing Consent<div>
Following are more of my thoughts on Laura Kipnis's discussions of university sexual harassment and assault policies in <i>Unwanted Advances</i>. All the obvious content warnings.<br />
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I had an opportunity to hear Laura Kipnis speak about her book at Simon Fraser University last week. Most of what she said was a repeat of material from the book, but I noticed a few new things. In the Q&A, for example, she made a few comments about a couple high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault allegations in academia I hadn’t previously heard her speak about—she thinks Geoff Marcy was “hung out to dry”, and that he wasn’t a sexual harasser, just someone who “touched people in ways that made them uncomfortable”. (You can read about the "uncomfortable touching" alleged <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/famous-astronomer-allegedly-sexually-harassed-students?utm_term=.knj6YE7gj#.kcKB6D3v4">here</a>. One instance perfectly matches President Trump's famous self-report.) She also cautions against rushing to judgment against John Searle, since accusers sometimes lie. (You can read some of the many, many allegations she thinks might all be lies <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/john-searle-complaints-uc-berkeley?utm_term=.bhlJ564VG#.vwdwEmkXV">here</a>.)</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Side note: read <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/how-harassment-stays-secret?utm_term=.iwLglmO9E#.ktZp0WYRn"><span id="goog_666666188"></span>this piece on Marcy<span id="goog_666666189"></span></a> on the challenges to bringing complaints. It is a useful corrective to the picture Kipnis paints of overzealous administrators jumping at any chance to punish accused wrongdoers. It also connects to <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/administrators-and-snowflakes-on-sexual.html">my point last week</a> about how many of the problems Kipnis finds with Title IX processes—e.g. transparency—are things student activists are on her side about, e.g. here:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A cynical take is that the forces that allowed Marcy to harass women for so many years — his prestige; his ability to bring in funding; the employment protections he enjoyed as a tenured professor; t<b>he outdated, onerous, and secretive nature of sexual harassment investigations</b> — are not anomalies of an outlying department, but in many cases defining traits of academia. Undoing these advantages, some experts say, will spur the next big wave of legal battles on college campuses. (emphasis added)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">End side note.)</span></div>
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I took the occasion, at Kipnis's talk, to ask a question about a running theme in the book, which she also discussed in Vancouver—the idea of “retroactively withdrawing consent”. According to Kipnis, contemporary sexual panic has codified this dangerous possibility. “Sexual consent can now be retroactively withdrawn (with official sanction) years later,” she writes on p. 91, “based on changing feelings or residual ambivalence, or new circumstances. Please note that this makes anyone who’s ever had sex a potential rapist.” (See also her similar remarks on p. 122.)<br />
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Kipnis often describes sexual assault allegations in these terms. She says that there was a consensual sexual encounter, and then, months or years later, someone “retroactively withdraws” consent, converting what had previously been a permissible sexual encounter into an assault. Her language suggests a kind of "backwards causation"—one can reach back into history and create rapes that weren't there by removing the consent. The implication: this absurd metaphysics is being embraced by campus activists, demonstrating both their intellectual depravity and their danger.<br />
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But why is Kipnis so confident that, in these cases, there was consent in the first place? After all, there is <i>such a thing</i> as a nonconsensual sexual encounter where the victim doesn’t think of it as such at the time, or doesn’t decide to report it at the time. There <i>is</i> such a thing as being coerced, manipulated, or bullied into a sexual relationship. When this happens, one is quite likely to keep quiet about it at first, either for fear of repercussions, or out of failure to understand what has happened.<br />
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Take an example. Suppose someone is coerced into a nonconsensual relationship by a manipulator. She feels awful about it, but only gradually realizes the violent nature of the harm she’s suffered. She is ambivalent about making a report—once she understands how she was abused, she doesn’t want to let them think their behaviour was acceptable. But she knows that many people won’t believe her story, or will blame her for it, and she doesn’t want to go through all of that in public. But eventually—when she sees someone else telling a similar story about the same manipulator, say—she does decide to make a report.<br />
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These are my stipulations about a hypothetical thought experiment. My view is that these are pretty realistic stipulations; I think stories like this are common. But everyone should agree that they are <i>possible</i>. But—and here's the challenge I put to Kipnis at her talk—cases like this will look, from the outside, just like the cases Kipnis describes in which a party to a consensual relationship "retroactively withdraws" consent. So I asked her: how can you categorically assert that the cases you discuss are cases where there was consent?<br />
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Kipnis agreed that "there are tough questions about what is and what isn't consent," admitting that she's not sure where to draw the line, but took it to be obvious that in the cases she discussed, there had been consent. She recounted a story from her book (pp. 15–6), about a male student who was found by his university to have verbally and emotionally coerced a female student into performing oral sex on him. "This was a case," Kipnis said, "of consent where somebody changed her mind and decided that it had been a nonconsensual experience." (This was new—consent was not asserted in the book. Kipnis also said in the talk that the male student was expelled—the book said he was temporarily excluded.) She also repeated her characterization from the book of Peter Ludlow's relationship with a Northwestern graduate student as a consensual one. But the considerations she cites in favour of this interpretation are ones equally consistent with the coercion hypotheses.</div>
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Kipnis is not very impressed by worries about coerced sexual activity. (In <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/05/professor-laura-kipnis-she-faced-title-ix-charges-for-writing-an-essay/">this</a> interview, she endorses the "old-fashioned" view that it's only rape if you use physical force to compel sex.) About the student found to have verbally and emotionally coerced another student into oral sex, she writes:</div>
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The ruling was that he should have known that consent had to be "voluntary, present and ongoing." For campus officials to find this kid responsible for "emotional coercion" not only means prosecuting students for the awkwardness of college sex, it also brands an eighteen-year-old a lifelong sex criminal—all college applications now ask if a student has been found responsible for "behavioral misconduct" at a previous institution, and demand the details. ... If incidents like these are being labeled sexual assault, then we need far more discussion about just how capacious this category is becoming, and why it's in anybody's interests. (16)</blockquote>
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I don't know the specifics, but even from Kipnis's one-sided description (as she says on pp. 15–16, she never includes the complainants' sides of the stories), this student doesn't come off looking good. Verbal and emotional coercion is absolutely a thing. <i>Maybe </i>the complainant just made up these allegations. It's <i>possible</i> to be a vindictive liar who wants to hurt your ex-boyfriend. <i>Maybe </i>he was just being "awkward", and he wasn't being a threatening and manipulative asshole. But Kipnis hasn't given any reason beyond her own assertion, based only on one side of the story, to think this is so. It seems she doesn't think she needs to—she thinks that putting the phrase "emotional coercion" in scare quotes is enough to show that this student was treated unfairly. Speaking as someone who knows a thing or two about emotional coercion: it's not.</div>
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Kipnis says more about the Ludlow case. Although she is well aware that her description of Ludlow's relationship with a graduate student as consensual and romantic is contested, she repeats the assertion many times in the book (and again in last week's talk). She is clearly under the impression that she has strong evidence that there was a consensual relationship. For example, she has, via Ludlow, a copy of the email and text correspondence between him and the student. "What would it mean," Kipnis writes, in one of the more bizarre non sequiturs in the book, "to not consent to sending <i>a thousand texts and emails</i>?" (p. 95) I don't know how seriously she intends that flippant remark, but it is suggestive of that pillar of rape culture—the fallacy that if one has consented to <i>anything</i>, then one has consented to <i>everything</i>. The fact is, all of the evidence offered in the book about that relationship is consistent with the coercion hypothesis. (I'm also in a position to assert—though not to argue—that some of the evidence offered is given in an extremely misleading way, given the broader context that Kipnis choose not to share.)</div>
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So the fact that in these cases universities sided with the complainants does <i>not </i>imply that they're countenancing notions of "retroactive withdrawal of consent". They are taking seriously retroactive <i>reports </i>of non-consent. (And "retroactive" there doesn't add anything interesting to the meaning—reports about things in the past are always in the relevant sense "retroactive". If my bike gets stolen today, I may make a "retroactive theft report" tomorrow.)</div>
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Contrary to Kipnis's scaremongering rhetoric, if you've ever had consensual sex, that <i>doesn't </i>mean you're<i> </i>at risk of becoming a retroactive rapist due to a partner's retroactive withdrawal of consent. That's not a thing anyone real believes in.</div>
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Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-31926372838136730102017-05-08T14:19:00.001-07:002017-05-08T14:19:11.320-07:00CommentsA number of people have asked me about my blog's comment policy. As some readers may have noticed, in recent posts I have had many comments by anonymous commenters with minimal or negative value. I rarely delete comments, and I sometimes reply to them even when it is obvious that my interlocutors aren't engaging in good faith. Many people have asked me why I do this. As they point out, one result is that the comments sections of my posts end up being very unwelcoming to many of the people I might wish to be engaging with. This is absolutely true, and a serious cost to the current procedure.<br />
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One reason I haven't disabled anonymous comments, or engaged in more significant comment moderation, is that I don't only want to be discussing these issues with people who already agree with them. I'm spending quite a bit of time engaging with the Kipnis book in part because I am amazed that so many people find it compelling. But I don't just want to gawk at them with members of my own tribe. That doesn't get us anywhere. I want to assume that many of them are thoughtful humans it's possible to have a real conversation with—to have a chance of changing their minds, or to have a chance to correct any of my own errors.<br />
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Many people who are skeptical about the things I've been writing about sexual assault are unwilling to say so under their own names.<br />
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Not all of the comments I'm talking about are productive conversation of the form I'm talking about. Indeed, the majority are not. For example, there's no value related to the intellectual common ground in comments that do nothing but comment on my personal appearance, or comments that do nothing but lie about what someone has said. There's absolutely a case to be made for screening or deleting such comments. I guess there are two reasons I don't do that.<br />
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First, the line between comments that are and are not potentially productive is not always an obvious one; putting the bar for speech super low means I won't mistakenly exclude things that could have been useful. I'm letting in more garbage, but there's at least that advantage.<br />
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Second, I think it's important, for those of us who spend most of our time talking to people who agree that, e.g., a workplace where employers habitually let their hands linger on their female employees contributes to rape culture, to be aware of the cultural backlash to the advances of recent decades. We shouldn't forget that we live in a world where, if you say that a good exercise in female agency can be to report your boss's sexual assault, or that student activists aren't the force behind unjust Title IX investigation procedures, you're likely have commenters crawl up and tell you that you're a snowflake narcissist who doesn't deserve his job, maybe with some speculation about your sex life thrown in for good measure. I think this is a gross fact, but it is a fact that I think it'd be a mistake to ignore or forget.<br />
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Gratuitous insults from anonymous commenters don't really bother me personally—so I'm not suffering myself from the abuse (aside from the not-trivial time it takes to respond, on those occasions when I decide to respond). Obviously many people in different professional and social positions are different from me in this respect—I'm not saying how anybody <i>should</i> feel about this kind of thing, just how I do. The main cost, from my point of view, is the one mentioned at the top: letting the toxic voices in disincentivizes some people I'd like to be talking to from participating in the conversation. My compromise solution so far has been to open public facebook threads for posts, so that anyone with a facebook account can discuss it there. That's imperfect for a lot of reasons, but it's the compromise I've landed on so far. I may well change my mind at some future date.<br />
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(In case it wasn't obvious: this is not intended remotely as a criticism of blogs that use heavier moderation. I think they do so for very good reasons. Different spaces are, and should be, different.)Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-65711110228371349862017-05-02T23:27:00.001-07:002017-05-18T06:32:42.743-07:00Unwitting Rape<br />
This is a spin-off of a thread in <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html">this</a> post. Content warning for rape. Probably not necessary or recommended reading for most readers.<br />
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In a long and wide-ranging comment thread a commenter called Thomas expressed some disagreement with some of the things I said about sexual assault and rape culture. In the comment that most directly led to this post, <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html?showComment=1493787589785#c8890649192941551954">Thomas wrote, in part</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Part of the trend we [Thomas and Kipnis]'re worried about is the emergence of a category of crime without mens rea. Some Title IX advocates go so far as to say it is possible to rape someone without knowing it.</blockquote>
<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html?showComment=1493789060290#c1522137335215380699">I replied</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I think it is completely obvious that it is possible to rape people without knowing it. Beyond question.<br />
If you think it's pretty obvious that it's <i>not</i> possible to rape people without knowing it, then we may not have enough common ground to have a fruitful discussion.</blockquote>
<a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html?showComment=1493789731128#c6487306053489020299">Here's Thomas again</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Given the seriousness of rape, both for those that it happens to and those that stand accused of it, I don't think we should just accept this lack of common ground. I think intelligent people like you and I should work to establish it. The best way forward is for you construct a clear hypothetical case; think of this like a Gettier problem.<br />
To just not have this conversation misses an important opportunity. After all, my ethics and epistemology is presumably that of the typical "unwitting rapist". If we get this right, we might be able to prevent some rapes.</blockquote>
I decided to take the bait. I agree that this is an important topic. So let's try. I'm answering in a new post in part because I thought this might be of broader potential interest, and in part because when I was typing I exceeded the character limit for a comment.<br />
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I think that rape is sexual activity with someone who isn't consenting to it. That's a pretty standard definition. One can fuss about what <i>exactly</i> counts as sexual activity, but that doesn't matter for this question. Take as clear a case of sexual activity as you can imagine. Someone puts their penis inside someone's vagina and ejaculates, say. Call that activity "P". (I don't want to keep typing it.) All parties agree that P is sexual activity, so if P is done without consent, that's sufficient, according to my definition, for rape.<br />
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So, can one P without consent, without knowing that one is raping? Certainly. One obvious way this is possible is for someone not to know what rape is. If one has never heard of rape, or has false views about rape—if, for instance, one thinks that it doesn't count as rape if it's your wife—then one may engage in P without consent without knowing that one is raping. If so, one rapes without knowing that one is raping.<br />
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This isn't the only way.<br />
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Since P without consent is sufficient for rape, there can be unwitting rape if there can be cases of P without consent, where the subject doesn't know that they are cases of P without consent. I think it's obvious that there are such possible cases. This is to be expected on general grounds, and it's also the intuitive thing to say about some particular cases.<br />
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First, the general grounds. It would be very surprising if P-without-consent was the kind of thing that one can only do if one knows that one is doing it. (Indeed, I'm pretty well convinced by Timothy Williamson's arguments that <i>no</i> non-trivial state is such that one can only be in that state if one is able to know that one is in that state.) Almost everything you can do, you can do without knowing that you're doing it. Why would P without consent be an exception?<br />
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What would such a case look like? We can imagine cases where one doesn't know that one is doing P. That's a little far-fetched, but it's conceivable. (You want a Gettier case? OK, imagine a "fake prostitute" brothel, with lots of realistic robots, but our subject just happens to be in the room with the one real woman.)<br />
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It's much easier to imagine cases where one doesn't know that one's partner does not consent. Here's a simple case: the partner says "no, I don't want to have sex with you," and our rapist doesn't believe her. He thinks—genuinely, honestly <i>believes</i>—that, her protestations notwithstanding, she wants it, so he does P. That's a rape he doesn't know (or even believe) that he committed.<br />
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I would have thought these were obvious cases anyone would agree with. Even Kipnis, I would have thought, would countenance these examples of unwitting rape. At any rate, I didn't notice her saying anything to the contrary. And that's something I think I would have noticed.<br />
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There are other kinds of important cases, where I'd expect more people to disagree. Suppose X just assumes without asking that Y wants to have sex with them, and so does P without asking. This will be a case where X doesn't know whether or not there's consent. But if there's not consent, it's rape. You may wonder, why didn't Y say something to make it clear that they didn't consent? There are lots of possible answers to that question—a common one is shock and fear—but they're not relevant to the question of whether this was a rape. Maybe X guessed right, and Y did consent. Then it wasn't rape. But X's action was a pretty terrible idea. They did something that could easily have been rape. So whether one is a rapist can be in part a matter of luck. (You may think that's weird, but it's totally normal. Whether one is a murderer can also be in huge part a matter of luck. Did the victim survive?)<br />
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Related:<br />
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Notice, in light of the very general challenges facing luminosity (the idea that there are conditions C such that being in C guarantees being able to know that one is in C), <i>any</i> conception of rape is going to have this feature—the feature of being such that it's possible to do it without knowing that you're doing it. (Maybe you think in order to rape, you have to KNOW that there's not consent. OK, but sometimes one is wrong about whether one knows that there's not consent. There are always going to be examples.)<br />
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Thomas also asked me:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But let me ask you a completely serious question: do you think *you* could commit a rape without knowing it? Or is this something that you imagine only a different kind of person could do? What kind of person is that? How would they be different from you ... and, I hope you'll grant, I?</blockquote>
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This is a very personal question about my own sexual dispositions. I'll just say this: I certainly hope that I am the kind of person who is pretty careful not to rape people. But I sort of think anybody can screw up in pretty much any way. There's no mistake I'm sure I would never make in any possible circumstance. I don't really care to talk about different "kinds of people" in the way suggested.</div>
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Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-9326572554336976832017-05-02T10:06:00.001-07:002017-05-02T18:07:00.636-07:00Administrators and Snowflakes on Sexual Assault PoliciesWow, there were a lot of comments on my last post about Laura Kipnis's book. (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/jichikawa/posts/10101397109163841">Here's</a> a bit of meta-commentary about them, for anyone interested.)<br />
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Let me start this post by saying something I'd've thought would be obvious: in attacking some of the things Kipnis says, I'm not thereby attacking all of them. I have many important disagreements with the book, both on general cultural matters and on particular conclusions she draws about cases she discusses. I think that, her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the book perpetuates rape culture. I think I made that case in my last post, and I plan to make it again in future ones. But that doesn't mean I think she's wrong about <i>everything</i>.<br />
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Several people have taken me to task for defending the Title IX status quo. I have a quick retort: I don't defend the Title IX status quo. One of the several central conclusions of Kipnis's book is that universities' reflexive legalistic instincts contribute to injustices, including injustices against people who are accused of wrongdoing. The way Kipnis tells her story, respondents are often not told what they're being accused of until investigations are complete; they're also, she says, often denied the possibility of legal representation, despite the severity of the matter under investigation. If this is true—and I suspect that it is—it is not just.<br />
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Kipnis also insinuates vaguely that these processes are used disproportionately against gay people. (Some of my anonymous commenters have also embraced this talking point.) She quips on p. 23: "Apparently no one has mentioned to [student activists] how many of the professors being caught in these widening nets are, in fact, queer—or suspected of being so, anyway." On p. 24 she admits that she has no way of knowing whether queer faculty are targeted at a disproportionate rate. But since in general, queer people tend to be targeted at a higher rate than others for most negative things, I'm very willing to believe that's happening here too.<br />
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The really frustrating thing about the book, in this context, is that Kipnis is imagining that <i>student activists </i>are the ones driving the university administrators to behave in this way, and that this is what they want. She describes, on p. 19, "a new generation of social activists" who, "rather than looking to revitalize the socialist or left-emancipatory traditions, are instead joining arms with campus administrators as the fast track to empowerment." (There's some speculation throughout the book, e.g. on pp. 22 and 29, that because today's students are so deeply attached to their parents, they want administrators to step in and play parenting roles as well. Infantilisation of student activists is a motif that runs wide and deep in this book.) Kipnis paints a picture of student snowflakes and power-hungry campus administrators conspiring giddily together against hapless faculty, revelling in the Title IX wonderland of their shared creation.<br />
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Based on my own experiences with student anti-rape activists, university administrators, and discussions around sexual assault policies, Kipnis's picture is deeply misleading. To the extent to which Kipnis's problem is with unfair, opaque, and generally illiberal university policies, student activists are Kipnis's natural <i>allies</i>. These kinds of complaints about universities—that they only care about covering their own asses, that they just want to make the problems go away with as little attention as possible, that they're more interested in maintaining a veneer of normality than they are of making fair and correct decisions—have been talking-points for student activists for years.<br />
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As Jennifer Doyle puts it in <i>Campus Sex, Campus Security</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Victims of sexual assault, harassment and intimate partner violence are encouraged to report. A minority file complaints and try to see the process through: doing so takes material and emotional resources. Few will tell you that this process provides resolution. There is no policy adequate to these crises. Victims report because they need help; a campus receives reports because it is bound by law to do so. This asymmetry warps their interaction. (p. 33)</blockquote>
Universities' liability-focused approaches don't end up treating <i>anyone </i>humanely—neither complainants nor respondents, faculty nor students. The blunt and secretive process Kipnis describes from the faculty complainant perspective just <i>is</i> the flip side of <a href="http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutionalbetrayal/">institutional betrayal</a> suffered by many complainants.<br />
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Kipnis writes at times as if what student activists want is for universities to just do <i>something</i>, so long as it's big and invasive, no matter how well it enacts justice or protects students. But this is far from the truth, as some of her own anecdotes demonstrate. For example, on p. 40 she ridicules a lawsuit she describes thus:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Harvard is currently being sued by a female student who said her ex-boyfriend abused her and Harvard hadn't done enough, despite interviewing her six times, the accusee three times, speaking to seventeen other witnesses, and reviewing text and email messages. The woman charges Harvard with showing "deliberate indifference" to her case.</blockquote>
The fact that Harvard has done a large number of <i>things</i>—many of them sure to be invasive and re-traumatising to the student, by the way—stands in no tension whatsoever with the allegation that they are being negligent with the case. Only someone with a very simplistic conception of what students are seeking would think it does. (Kipnis writes on p. 30 that "a campus's success in 'combatting sexual assault' is measured in increased accusations"—a strange assertion. I don't know many universities that brag about their high numbers of sexual assault accusations.) My discussions with students at UBC, where we've been having a conversation about sexual assault policies for a couple years now, have also emphasised the importance of noncarceral, survivor-centred care. (I wrote a <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2016/01/a-few-more-thoughts-on-university.html">bit</a> about this last year.)<br />
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And even in punitive/disciplinary contexts, many of the student activists that Kipnis aligns herself against have also been emphasising the need for fairness and transparency. This is clear to me both in my personal interactions with them and in what I've read of the positions they are staking out. Here, for example, is a passage by Kathryn Pogin, a student activist well-known in both in philosophical circles and in Title IX circles:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
People absolutely should have the charges in writing, with whatever complaint is filed against them. … They should be allowed to record all their interactions with any investigator or university administrator. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen. Universities are not going to allow people to record conversations, because university Title IX processes by and large are constructed not actually to protect students or faculty or staff from discrimination or harassment. They’re designed to protect the university from legal liability. And the more you allow people to record conversations, the more you’re going to catch administrators screwing up how they handle cases. If you look at Title IX coordinators across the country, a huge number of them, their legal background is not in advocating for students, not working in sexual harassment, not working in sexual discrimination. It is protecting corporations from discrimination complaints. … So they’re all coming at this with an eye toward how to protect the university from legal claims. And in order to protect the university from a legal claim, you just have to show that they did not treat it with “deliberate indifference.” So you take some kind of action, no matter how bad the outcome is. Unless you can show that it was deliberately indifferent, it’s really hard to file a Title IX complaint. (<a href="http://people%20absolutely%20should%20have%20the%20charges%20in%20writing/">PEN campus report</a>, p. 61)</blockquote>
This <i><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/31/laura-kipnis-essay-northwestern-title-ix_n_7470046.html">Huffington Post</a></i> piece from May of 2015 sounds a similar note, explicitly drawing the connection to Kipnis's procedural complaints:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The complainants said they side with Kipnis on a number of issues she raised about the Title IX procedure in her essay. For example, they don’t understand why Kipnis had to jump through hoops to find out the charges against her and couldn’t get them in writing, or why it took two weeks to inform her of the complaint. They were similarly upset that the investigators prohibited recording interviews.<br />
“I don’t get why they’re so insistent on that, it adds protection for everybody,” the graduate student said, noting she also found errors in the notes taken by investigators.<br />
Kipnis offered a more succinct remark about the control against transparency by investigators: “Secrecy invites abuses.”</blockquote>
This is not just empty rhetoric. Pogin, a Northwestern student activist, told me that during Peter Ludlow's termination procedure she noticed a procedural irregularity that, she thought, might generate a bias against Ludlow. In Kipnis's caricature, this would have been cause for activist celebration. In reality, Pogin wrote to Peter Ludlow's legal team, informing them of the worry—purely in the interests of fairness and transparency. Incidentally, I'm not just taking this on Pogin's word—I've read the email to Ludlow's lawyer.<br />
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I don't know whether that email was among the documents that Ludlow provided Kipnis about his case, but the anecdote cuts between two of her book's central themes. This story confirms<i> </i>the "Title IX procedures are often unfair" narrative, but it<i> </i>disconfirms<i> </i>the "snowflakes run amok" narrative. I think Kipnis was mistaken to tie them so closely together as she does. It is rhetorically effective—it combines genuine instances of injustice with a powerful cultural trope that many people are very ready to believe. But I think it's a very misleading picture.<br />
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And again, I want to emphasise, this is not purely academic. This is a misleading picture that is harming victims of sexual misconduct in universities. You don't have to think our colleges and universities are full of hapless student snowflakes manufacturing and inflating sexual assault allegations out of nothing to think Title IX has a lot of problems. Indeed, you shouldn't, because the former is both false and harmful, while the latter is true.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Note: I'm leaving this post, like my previous one, open to commenters, including anonymous ones. I know that some people who might otherwise wish to engage are put off by that kind of thing; if you have a facebook account and prefer to interact only with people putting their names behind their words, I invite you to discuss this post <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jichikawa/posts/10101401929164521">here</a> if you like.</span></i>Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com101tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-43836390338259622002017-04-25T08:57:00.002-07:002017-04-25T08:57:34.995-07:00Kipnis on Sexual Assault and Sexual AgencyThanks to all who engaged, here and elsewhere, with my <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-assault-allegations.html">post last week</a> about Laura Kipnis's book. I continue to have more thoughts about the book, so I thought I'd write more. My last post highlighted Kipnis's endorsement of a harmful stereotype. It was of course only one small passage, but in my opinion it's representative. I thought it might be helpful to offer some corroboration for that opinion.<br />
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I'll be discussing sexual assault and related harms below.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>One of the central themes in <i>Unwanted Advances</i> is Kipnis's suggestion that campus "sexual paranoia" stands in tension with a recognition of female sexuality and sexual agency. She attributes to the contemporary American university a Victorian sensibility, treating women as precious, featureless, sexless wards requiring zealous protection. I think this is a serious misreading of the cultural situation, and of the nature of agency.<br />
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Kipnis introduces this picture of her opponents early in the book, and returns to it many times. On pp. 15–16, she describes a male student who was found to have coerced a classmate into a nonconsensual blow job; Kipnis reports with disapproval a ruling that "he should have known that consent had to be 'voluntary, present and ongoing.'" She continues:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If incidents like these are being labeled sexual assault, then we need far more discussion about just how capacious this category is becoming, and why it's in anyone's interests. Including women's. What <b>a lot of retrogressive assumptions about gender</b> are being promulgated under the guise of combating assault! <b>Not only was the woman's agency erased</b>, note the unarticulated premise of the finding: women students aren't men's equals in emotional strength or self-possession, and require teams of campus administrators to step in and remedy the gap. Another unarticulated premise: sex is injurious and the woman had sustained an injury in that thirty seconds, one serious enough to require official remediation.</blockquote>
(Bold emphasis mine. Below, italics are Kipnis's own.)<br />
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I do not see why one should think an allegation of an emotionally coercive sexual encounter should "erase" anyone's agency. (Nor FWIW do I see on what grounds Kipnis posits these other enthymemes.) But she returns to this kind of attribution over and over again. These are quotes:<br />
<ul>
<li>Of course it's an <b>article of faith</b> at the moment that all such desires run strictly in the other direction: <b>old people desire young ones, not the other way around</b>. (29) </li>
<li>A crush on a professor used to be the most ordinary thing in the world. Now, <b>at least in public discourse, Eros runs strictly in the opposite direction</b>: predatory professors foisting themselves on innocent and unwilling students, who <b>lack any desires of their own</b>. (44)</li>
<li>In the official version of events, <b>causality can run in only one direction</b>: Ludlow alone can be the prime mover; Cho can only be someone things happen <i>to</i>. (56)</li>
<li>Sure, sexual freedom sometimes means consenting to things we later regret. But who wants a return to <b>nineteenth-century notions of true womanhood, which conferred moral superiority on females by exempting them from such corruptions and temptations</b>, placing them on a pedestal they finally (thankfully) refused. The pedestal was always a lie, and its twenty-first-century resurrection on campus is no less a lie. <b>Sexual honesty, about women as desiring beings, making our own sexual choices</b> (sometimes even terrible ones), can be painful, but no semblance of gender equality is ever going to be possible without it. (95–6)</li>
<li>Speaking of power ... Let's be honest. It's a well-known (if, to some, unpalatable) fact that heterosexual <b>women are not infrequently attracted to male power</b>, and for aspiring female intellectuals of a heterosexual bent, this includes male intellectual power. Even feminists (feminist philosophers included) aren't immune. What use to anyone is a feminism so steeped in self-exoneration that it prefers to imagine <b>women as helpless children</b> rather than acknowledge grown-up sexual realities? (105)</li>
<li>Patricia Bobb would ultimately conclude, splitting hairs with the impunity of a papal inquisitor, that Ludlow hadn't <i>forced</i> Hartley into a relationship, but—echoing Lockwood—he did <i>manipulate</i> her into having one. Of course, <b>to come to this finding requires Bobb to expunge all female intelligence, agency, autonomy, and desire from her calculations</b>. This is supposed to be in women's interests? (122)</li>
<li>In Lockwood's world, <b>women have no desires of their own</b>; they're strictly the passive receptacles of other people's (men's) desires. (155)</li>
<li>Yes, Ludlow was guilty-though not of what the university charged him with. <b>His crime was thinking that women over the age of consent have sexual agency</b>, which has lately become a heretical view, despite once being a crucial feminist position. (239)</li>
</ul>
I think these passages project an opponent of Kipnis's pure imagination. She does not argue or demonstrate that students or administrators concerned about sexual assault think female students are never attracted to male professors, that younger people are never attracted to power, that women have no sexual interests, or that young women lack sexual agency. These are all just things she asserts about her opponents' views. As these are all ridiculous things to think, once she puts these labels on her opponents, she attacks them with gusto.<br />
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Returning to the theme of unarticulated premises, Kipnis's line of thought would make some sense if we attribute the tacit premise that attraction, agency, causal efficaciousness, etc. are inconsistent with sexual assault. In other words, Kipnis's argument seems to be assuming a principle like this one:<br />
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<i>If the complainant's sexual agency is part of the explanation for what happened, then what happened couldn't have been assault.</i><br />
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I think something like this assumption is both necessary and sufficient for making sense of what would otherwise be a series of puzzling non sequiturs in the book. Kipnis goes to great length to argue that the students who would accuse the professor of sexual assault were very likely attracted to him. Set aside whether her case is compelling. (For the record: I think it's not.) Why on earth would it matter?<br />
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It would matter if the only picture you had of sexual assault was one of men too undesirable to win a voluntary partner, and so they had to take for themselves what no one would give. If so, photographs of a young woman smiling in the company of the same person she says assaulted her might be evidence that there was no assault (as is suggested on p. 65). This kind of picture could make sense of the assertion that, once we admit that women are sexual agents, the case for allegations of coerced sexual contact must collapse (as is suggested on p. 232).<br />
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If we do not make this assumption—which we shouldn't, because it is <i>obviously</i> possible to be attracted to someone without consenting to sexual activity with them—then we can maintain without tension all of the following: young female students have sexual interests, including, sometimes, sexual attraction towards older male professors; in a given case, a student may well have been attracted to a professor; in that same case, it is very credible that that professor coerced that student into an unwelcome sexual situation. There is zero contradiction between these claims, but Kipnis's whole book proceeds on the apparent assumption that this is impossible.<br />
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This is part of the reason why—as a number of readers have observed—it seems Kipnis isn't as clear as she should be about the distinction between sex and rape. Kipnis focuses a lot<i> </i>on what, in her opinion, young women <i>really </i>sexually desire (whether or not they admit it to themselves); she focuses barely at all on whether they are welcoming or consenting to sexual contact. I think this is the same confusion a lot of us <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rush-limbaugh-consent_us_57fee9aae4b0e8c198a6076d">mocked Rush Limbaugh for making last year</a>. Her own rhetoric doesn't help emphasise the distinction. Here, for example, in comparing Title IX to the HUAC, Kipnis completes the parallel by analogising communism, not to rape, but to sex.<br />
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No doubt there are people who'd say he had it coming ... though I tend to think that's like saying John Proctor in <i>The Crucible</i> had it coming. The reference is to Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials. (Proctor was one of the accused witches, hanged by the community.) Seen as a parable of McCarthyism when it was first staged in 1953, the play was recently revived on Broadway—apparently someone saw it as relevant again. The Cold War blacklist, too, is being plumbed for current resonances. A recent biopic about Hollywood Ten screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (forced out of work and imprisoned after falling afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee's witch hunt investigation of communism in the movie industry) left me reflecting that <b>sex is our era's Communist threat</b>, and Title IX hearings our new HUAC hearings. (31–32)</blockquote>
See also the line in the first quoted passage in this post about the assumption that "sex is injurious". The assumption is that <i>sexual assault </i>is injurious. But Kipnis seems invested in denying even this. She wishes that today's women would be more like those in her mother's generation, who would shrug off such assaults and laugh at them.<br />
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I'm not exaggerating.<br />
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I don't want to sound cavalier about sexually gross professors, but I've heard my own mother describe once being <b>chased around a desk, literally,</b> by her astronomy professor, for whom she was working part time and who was <b>trying to kiss her</b>. This would have been the 1950s. Her hands were covered in mimeograph ink, and she <b>left a mimeograph handprint on his forehead when she pushed him away</b>, she recalls laughingly. </blockquote>
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<b>[S]he was in no way traumatized</b>; in fact, she wasn't even particularly outraged. "What ever happened to an old-fashioned pass?" she exclaimed when I filled her in on the responses of today's grad students to similar episodes. ... (Today's campus statistics gatherers would count her as an "unacknowledged" sexual assault victim.)</blockquote>
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... [I]t seems worth asking why a woman of the pre-feminist 1950s <b>felt so much more agency</b> than grad students of today, so much more able to see a professor's idiocy as comic fodder, not an incapacitating trauma. (155)</blockquote>
I see this story very differently. In Kipnis's mind, her mother's laughing at occasions like these is an exercise of agency; why <i>can't</i> today's young women do the same, she wonders? I recently read a <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/STRTTS-2">paper</a> positing that humans have a tendency to attribute the values we approve of to someone's "true self"—when someone does something we disapprove of, we're more likely to look for incidental explanations for why they didn't do what they <i>really </i>wanted. Kipnis thinks a woman's <i>true self </i>will laugh at sexual assault; to do so is a pure manifestation of agency. If today's young women react in some other way, it must be because something is <i>interfering </i>with their own agency.<br />
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A different way of looking at things will treat a refusal to tolerate unwanted sexual contact as a purer expression of agency. And refusal can mean more than running around the desk and using one's hands to push someone's face away—it can mean calling out harassment and assault for what it is, and demanding accountability. Responding in that way would be, in many cases, a genuine expression of agency. This depends on the individual. I don't want to say it's <i>impossible</i> for someone, deep down, to not mind being chased around the desk by one's boss who is trying to kiss one—<i>maybe </i>Kipnis's mother was like this in the 1950s—but an alternative hypothesis is certainly available. Maybe her laughing it off <i>wasn't </i>an expression of her own agency. Maybe accepting her boss's violations of her autonomy was the only option available under the circumstances. On this way of framing things, women's increased space of options, and their willingness to exercise them, is indicative of their <i>increased</i> agency.<br />
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</style>Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com93tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-87653261438082225602017-04-20T23:11:00.000-07:002017-05-17T15:27:56.593-07:00Kipnis on Assault AllegationsSome of my colleagues around the philosophy world have recently been discussing Laura Kipnis's new book, <i>Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus</i>. I have a lot of thoughts about this book, but I'll start here with one. (I may write more later.) This is kind of a big-picture thought about Kipnis’s starting points and outlook—I find some of her thoughts about sex and sexual assault to be surprisingly retrograde. I know that some of my colleagues are impressed by this book; I am not sure if they share Kipnis’s general sensibilities on these matters, or whether they just like it for some of its conclusions. At any rate, I think some people would be surprised by Kipnis's sensibilities; the point of this post is to draw attention to some of them.<br />
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Discussion of sexual assault ahead.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>In a story spanning pp. 52–54 of her book, Kipnis describes her initial reaction to reading a news report about an undergraduate student’s sexual assault allegation against a professor. She doesn’t say which news report she read, but <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/art-show-led-to-sexual-assault-student-says/">this one</a> matches her description. It opens thus: "A Northwestern student says in court that she tried to kill herself after her philosophy professor plied her with alcohol and sexually assaulted her."<br />
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Kipnis will go to say a lot of things about why, in her opinion, this 19-year-old student was probably lying about the whole thing. Right now I want to focus on Kipnis's illuminating recounting of her initial thoughts before she looked into the matter. She read this story in the news about a student who says her former professor got her drunk, then pressured her into his apartment and sexually assaulted her, which led to a subsequent suicide attempt. And Kipnis’s initial reaction is “irritation” because “the story just didn’t add up.” “I simply didn’t believe,” Kipnis writes, “in a reality in which a professor can force a student to drink.”</div>
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I have a hard time relating to Kipnis here (as in much of the book). Her instincts about what is and isn’t plausible or conceivable are extremely different from mine. I grant of course that the use of the word ‘force’ here sounds like an exaggeration. But the idea that a professor might pressure a young student into drinking in order to take sexual advantage of her? My priors on that kind of scenario are way above the levels where this would be incredible.<br />
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Kipnis disagrees, in a passage that literally made my jaw drop:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let's say for the sake of argument that certain professors possess outsize <i>[sic]</i> charisma—having once been a young female student myself, I'm familiar with such lures (and the attendant attraction-repulsion they can engender), but even lots of charisma can't force a person to drink. I suppose a professor could pressure a student to drink. Still, there's the sinister implication that <i>if</i> a professor could, he'd <i>want</i> to. Why exactly? Oh right—so that he could force her into sex. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Not only was this forced-drinking tale rather tinny, it was a definite uptick in the already heightened tenor of sexual paranoia and accusatory mania on campus: if this kind of allegation could stick, anything would stick. It was also complete melodrama, this world of dastardly men with the nefarious power to bend passive damsels to their wills, a world out of storybooks. Let me interject a brief reality check: single non-hideous men with good jobs (or, in this case, an international reputation and not without charm) don't have to work that hard to get women to go to bed with them in our century.</blockquote>
I was amazed by this passage. Here's a reality check of my own: there are many, many examples of wealthy, charming, attractive men who have coerced, pressured, or outright forced women to succumb to their sexual desires. This observation isn’t an expression of sexual hysteria, it’s a plain fact that is entirely obvious to anyone who can name a rapist who's been in the news lately. I mean, think of the high-profile cases that are quickest to come to mind. Think of Brock Turner—young, attractive, athletic. Think of Bill Cosby—famous, wealthy, charming, funny. Nobody should take seriously for a second the idea that, because someone is “non-hideous” and charming, allegations against him are any less credible.</div>
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In my own opinion, the fact that Kipnis takes this line of thought seriously dramatically undermines her credibility as a trustworthy voice on these matters.<style type="text/css">
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<i>More posts on Kipnis's book:</i><br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/04/kipnis-on-sexual-assault-and-sexual.html"><i>Kipnis on assault and agency</i></a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/administrators-and-snowflakes-on-sexual.html"><i>Administrators and snowflakes on sexual assault policies</i></a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/retroactive-consent.html"><i>Retroactively withdrawing consent</i></a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2017/05/laura-kipnis-and-harper-collins-have.html"><i>Laura Kipnis and Harper Collins have been sued</i></a></li>
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Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-84391487049839829382017-02-12T18:35:00.001-08:002017-02-12T18:36:59.169-08:00On the Very Idea of a Religious MinorityA minority group is a group that comprises less than 50% of the total population. Draw the pie chart. If your part is defined by an acute angle, your group is a minority one; if its shaped like Pac-Man, you're part of the majority.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj56kqrBFm3lZd1WUcxLZj0vntyuN0u1PQTwIGYX4VmW6mZKAehAKs7_atGo9U1tCQaSLv4yi2KgnUPBuB_Q9y55s1uDsZMoLQVq-hz4VrNf0ZxIWBYeOopcdhlKN9ZS9y3llKm/s1600/pie1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj56kqrBFm3lZd1WUcxLZj0vntyuN0u1PQTwIGYX4VmW6mZKAehAKs7_atGo9U1tCQaSLv4yi2KgnUPBuB_Q9y55s1uDsZMoLQVq-hz4VrNf0ZxIWBYeOopcdhlKN9ZS9y3llKm/s320/pie1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Even holding fixed the total population, whether someone belongs to a minority group or not depends on what kinds of groups are relevant. For example, among faculty members in my department, I'm in a gender majority, because I'm male, and more than half of the faculty members in my department are male. With respect to certain natural ways of carving out dietary restrictions, I am a minority, because I'm a vegetarian, and fewer than half of the people in my department are vegetarians. This kind of 'minority-relativity' is obvious, and not something people get particularly confused about. There's no one absolute answer to the question of whether someone is part of a minority—it depends on what kind of categorization you're interested in.<br />
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But there's another kind of minority-relativity that's easier to overlook. Someone's status as part of a minority doesn't just depend on what kind of category you're talking about. It also depends on how finely you're carving up the distinct options. Suppose, for example, that you're interested in the question of whether someone is part of a religious minority, relative to their nation of origin. (Donald Trump attempted to make this a central question for many people's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-muslim-executive-order-trump.html">refugee statuses</a>.) If you're going to give special treatment to religious minorities, then it turns out that it matters quite a lot what you count as a religion.<br />
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Here's one way to characterize the approximate religious demographics of Syria.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGvxSQpmlXv65S_Xg1ig8wxwbTAuXqRcXy2QzYl-pMuFSIg2PvIOBaE535GI9wF3Qr4IjSwQcPYfUBt3s-oL7t43KdqmfGC6-Cpz6m5WBZiCZqT2JHg30E4hZsvTeMm8tQ6wea/s1600/pie2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGvxSQpmlXv65S_Xg1ig8wxwbTAuXqRcXy2QzYl-pMuFSIg2PvIOBaE535GI9wF3Qr4IjSwQcPYfUBt3s-oL7t43KdqmfGC6-Cpz6m5WBZiCZqT2JHg30E4hZsvTeMm8tQ6wea/s320/pie2.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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This chart is the same as that above. (I'm getting my numbers from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Syria">here</a>.) If this is how you carve up the pie, the Christians and the Druze are religious minorities, and the Muslims aren't, because they make up 87% of the total population.<br />
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But religions are complicated things, and their individuation conditions are not straightforward. This chart is assuming that 'Christianity' and 'Islam' are names of particular religions, such that everyone who falls under one of those titles has <i>the same religion as </i>everyone else who falls under it too. When I was a child, I grew up in an Evangelical Protestant Christian tradition. We were taught that Catholics had a different religion from us. (Certainly Catholicism was once considered a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-catholic-scare-20151209-story.html">religious minority</a> in the US.) We were actually taught that Catholics weren't Christians. As a semantic fact this seems implausible. But saying that Christianity isn't just one religion, but rather a name of a family of religions, doesn't seem obviously objectionable.<br />
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The same goes for Islam. People who fall under the category 'Muslim' fall into more specific subcategories, which include significant theological differences between them. For example, Sunni and Shia Muslims disagree about the proper successor to the prophet Muhammad. Should we think of Shia Islam and Sunni Islam as <i>two different religions</i>? Or should we think of them as two different branches of <i>the same religion</i>? It's not obvious to me that there's a metaphysical fact here; one can carve up religions in any of a variety of ways. It's purely conventional which way you choose.<br />
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The trick is, this apparently-arbitrary choice will matter a lot if, like Trump's executive order, you think the question of whether someone is a member of a religious minority <i>matters</i>. If all Muslims have the same religion, then the chart above is the right picture of Syria, and the Christians and the Druze are the ones who get special priority. But what if you think Shia Islam and Sunni Islam aren't the same religion? Then your chart looks like this.<br />
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Dividing the religions up more finely—what looks like an inconsequential, purely terminological choice, turns over 2 million Shi'a into a religious minority. Whether, on Trump's policy, Shi'a would be given preferential refugee treatment depends on how finely one individuates religions. And of course, one can divide things up even more finely. If you divide up the Sunni into Arabs, Kurds, etc., you count even more people as part of a minority. (If you keep going, and shrink the green wedge past 50%, <i>everyone</i> ends up in a religious minority.)<br />
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One possible reaction would be to decide that after all, there is one uniquely right way to decide whether two religious traditions count as <i>the same religion</i>. Going back to the Christianity case (because I'm much more fluent in talk about those traditions), this would mean that there's just an objective fact of the matter about whether Catholics and Protestants have the same religion, and, if so, whether it's the same one as that of, say, Mormons, or Haitian Vodouists. This seems to me somewhat incredible. I can't think of any plausible principle that has a good claim to being the <i>one true way </i>to individuate religions.<br />
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Consequently, there also seems to be no one true way to tell who is or isn't a member of a religious minority. So this is a category we shouldn't ask to carry too much weight. Maybe, for example, we'd be better off not making law in terms of that category.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-74700060971114027302017-01-30T23:04:00.000-08:002017-01-30T23:04:11.316-08:00Labeling lies and knowing mindsI don't have super strong feelings about whether news outlets should use the word 'lies' to describe Donald Trump's lies. As long are they're super clear about how he's saying that <i>p </i>even though <i>p </i>is false, that seems to me to be the important thing. The controversy over whether to use the 'L-word' doesn't really interest me all that much.<br />
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That said, I <i>did </i>find it pretty interesting to read <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511503605/npr-and-the-l-word-intent-is-key">NPR's description</a> of why they don't call Trump's lies 'lies'. The basic thought is this: in order for something to be a lie, it has to be said with an intent to deceive. So in calling something a lie, one is in part making a claim about the intentions behind it. As NPR's Mary Louise Kelly puts it: "without the ability to peer into Donald Trump's head, I can't tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn't, with facts."<br />
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This is an epistemological claim—a skeptical one. It's often tempting to say that you can never really know what someone is thinking, because all you really have to go on is how they behave. But skeptical temptations are funny things, and there's probably good reason to resist a lot of them a lot of the time. For example, notice that it's <i>also </i>tempting to say that you can never really know anything about the future, since it hasn't happened yet, or that you can never really know historical facts, since you weren't personally there. At an extreme, Descartes famously argued that you can never really know anything about the external world, since you might be the victim of an evil demon who is manipulating your senses in a way that doesn't correspond to reality.<br />
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These skeptical arguments do carry some intuitive force, but most of us—us epistemologists, and us people who do things in the world—are committed to their being wrong. You and I know lots of things about the external world. I know that my dog just left this room, for instance. We know many things we didn't see for ourselves, but instead rely on others to inform us about. For example, I know that Donald Trump fired Sally Yates today, even though I wasn't there. (I read about it via news websites.) We know many things about the future. For example, I know that I will give a lecture on rationalism in the morning. Do you know how you'll get to work tomorrow, or when you'll next see your best friend? I am confident that many readers do.<br />
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We also know many things about others' minds. I know that my dog noticed that squirrel—this is manifest from her behaviour. (If you ask me, "did she notice the squirrel?" I will say "yes"; I won't say "there's no way to tell without seeing into her soul".) I know, of some of my friends, that they are terrified by the Trump administration. I know about some people's romantic feelings towards other people. When I watch someone at a sports bar, I often know which team they want to win. When I watch someone struggling with their arms full of groceries fumbling around with their keys, I know what they're trying to do.<br />
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There are certainly interesting questions about how we're able to tell what people are thinking and feeling and trying to do, but there's nothing inherently mysterious or spooky about the idea. ("Mind-reading" is an active and lively area of study in psychology and philosophy of mind.) One of the traits of autism is a kind of difficulty in knowing others' minds—conversely, the ability to know others' minds is neurotypical. To use Kelly's term, we really <i>do</i>, in an important sense, have "the ability to peer into someone's head".<br />
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To be sure, I can't <i>always</i> tell what someone is thinking. Sometimes they're not giving the kind of outward signs it would require for me to tell. Sometimes I even go wrong, misattributing a mental state to someone. A con artist might deceive me about what they're trying to do, for instance. But this kind of possibility of ignorance or error does not mean we cannot often have knowledge of people's thoughts and feelings. (After all, it's possible to go wrong with our perception, too.)<br />
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So I don't think we should take our reluctance to ascribe knowledge to people's inner lives very seriously. If NPR doesn't want to say Trump is lying because it would be unhelpfully inflammatory, I have no problem with that decision. But the line that in general you can't know what's in someone's head is just bad epistemology.<br />
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It's also inconsistently applied. I took a look through a number of recent NPR stories, to find examples of reported claims that imply something about someone's inner life. It turns out, there are <i>lots </i>of examples where NPR seems willing to make claims that would require "peering into someone's head". Here are a few:<br />
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<li>Frauke Petry's "political allies <i><b><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/27/511644280/far-right-leader-aims-to-change-political-situation-in-germany-and-europe">are worried</a></b></i> enough to have taken stances against migrants and the European Union that sound a lot like AfD's positions." Worry is a feeling. Is NPR able to peer into the heads of those allies?</li>
<li>"<b><i><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/28/512158238/arrivals-to-u-s-blocked-and-detained-as-trumps-immigration-freeze-sets-in">In response to the order</a></i></b>, in Chicago, all remaining detainees were freed after being detained by Customs and Border Protection agents at Chicago O'Hare International Airport Saturday." Here NPR is making assertions about <i>why some people did some things</i>. This depends on their thoughts. What makes NPR so sure that they didn't ignore the order and just coincidentally happen to free them at that moment?</li>
<li>"Now many listeners<b><i><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511503605/npr-and-the-l-word-intent-is-key"> want to know</a></i></b> why Kelly didn't just call the president a liar." But to really make this claim one would have to be able to discern the listeners' true intentions. (Maybe they're just asking for NPR to answer that question, but don't want to know the answer!)</li>
<li>"It'll soon be the Year of the Rooster, and Yuan Shuizhen is <i><b><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/27/511782614/as-chinese-new-year-approaches-shanghais-bustling-streets-grow-quieter">preparing chicken feet in her tiny kitchen for the big meal</a></b></i>." The reporter can see her preparing the chicken, and they can see where she's doing it, but can they see <i>what she's doing it for</i>? This depends on her intentions.</li>
<li>"Obama oversaw a nation at war every day of his eight-year presidency... However, <b><i><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/29/512304675/trump-aims-for-big-splash-in-taking-on-terror-fight">he tried to deploy</a></i></b> a small U.S. military footprint, and the limited air campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere emphasized restraint and patience." In saying that he <i>tried </i>to do something, NPR makes a claim about his inner thoughts; by the standards Kelly articulates, they should have said that Obama took military actions that some people <i>interpreted as </i>an attempt to deploy a small footprint.</li>
<li>"Federer watched the replay on the tournament screen, and <b><i><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/29/512273064/roger-federer-takes-home-australian-open-title-in-five-set-classic">leaped for joy</a></i></b> when it showed his last shot was in." NPR seems willing to peer into Federer's head to divine the emotion behind his leap. If they were being more careful, they might have said that he leapt in a way similar to the way that joyful people sometimes leap.</li>
<li><i><b><a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/01/28/512201631/trumps-executive-order-on-ethics-pulls-word-for-word-from-obama-clinton">Trump "joked that</a></b></i> the senior staff standing near him for the signing had 'one last chance to get out' before they would have to stick to limits on lobbying laid out in the directive." Whether this was a joke depends on the President's intentions.</li>
<li>"Trump <b><i><a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/01/19/510628796/trump-prepares-to-take-office-under-appearances-of-unpredictability">knows</a></i></b> that many parts of Obamacare are popular with the white, working-class voters that put him in office." Knowledge requires belief, and belief depends on one's internal attitudes. Indeed, this knowledge ascription like it might imply enough about Trump's inner life to render certain possible actions (e.g., asserting that no parts of Obamacare are popular with those voters, lies). So if it's possible to know things like this, it should be possible to know about some lies.</li>
</ul>
<div>
My point isn't that any of these are unreasonable ascriptions. They seem perfectly natural, and I think that's right and good. But they reflect a commitment to anti-skepticism about others' minds. Kelly's claim that as a rule, NPR doesn't report on people's thoughts, is false. NPR is employing a more complicated practice—<i>often</i>, they tell us what people are thinking or feeling or trying to do, but not when it comes to whether the President is trying to deceive. This is not a good justification for declining to call things lies. Maybe there's a different good justification, but this isn't it.</div>
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-39024138722140909622017-01-27T18:10:00.003-08:002017-03-02T11:20:21.443-08:00Selective SamplingI think that Donald Trump is really dangerous.<br />
<br />
Here are some true facts.* These facts include moderately detailed descriptions of sexual assaults—skip past the bullet list if you like; the relevance of these facts will be explained below.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>In 2008, a 54-year-old New York man named Donald Bowen traveled to Texas in order to pursue a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy he'd been grooming on the internet.</li>
<li>In 2009, another New York man, one Donald Caban, was convicted of molesting multiple teenage girls in his home over several decades.</li>
<li>Donald Darwell, of New York, is a convicted rapist. In 1978 he forcibly raped a woman at knifepoint. She was badly injured in the attack, and was unable to work for nearly a year.</li>
<li>In 2006, New Yorker Donald Valentine was convicted on two counts of sexual assault. His victim was a 16-year-old mentally disabled girl.</li>
<li>Donald Brown, a 42-year-old New York man, was apprehended in the act of the attempted rape of a 10-year-old boy whose parents had left him in his care.</li>
<li>55-year-old Donald Glenn, of New York, convinced a reluctant acquaintance to go out on a date with him. That night, he overpowered and choked her before raping her both vaginally and anally.</li>
<li>Donald Jones struck a female stranger with his fist in 1993, then held her at gunpoint and attempted to rape her. When she screamed, passers-by stopped and he fled, before being caught by police and convicted of first-degree attempted rape.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">([*] These are not <i>quite</i> facts, but they're close. In the interest of privacy, I have changed the surnames of these individuals. Importantly, I have left all of their given names unchanged. I've embellished these stories slightly, to give a bit more detail to hang on them. (I did this for vivacity, and to make the fallacy more tempting. I didn't have easy access to the actual details, or I would have used them.) I found these facts via the <a href="http://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/SomsSUBDirectory/search_index.jsp">New York State Criminal Justice Services website</a>.)</span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
There's a real pattern to these facts, right? New York men named Donald are bad news! So many of them are sexual criminals! And believe me, folks, I just listed the first seven instances I found. I could give you a lot more.<br />
<br />
OK, end satire. Obviously this is a terrible argument for being worried about people from New York named 'Donald'. A long, colourful list of terrible things Donalds have done carries practically no epistemic weight at all with respect to whether Donalds on the whole are dangerous. I didn't tell you how I collected my facts, but it's pretty obvious that I wasn't sampling randomly. Here's what I did: I looked at the New York state sex offender lists, and searched for people named Donald. They're long lists, and Donald is a common name, so it's easy to find a lot of examples. I knew before I looked at the list, on purely statistical grounds, that I was going to be able to find a bunch of bad Donald stories.<br />
<br />
(This is an illustration of the same point I was making a couple of months ago in <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2016/11/probability-and-evidence-by-curated.html">this</a> post.)<br />
<br />
If I'd sampled sex offenders <i>at random</i>, and almost all of them turned out to be Donalds, that would be a striking fact, and maybe it would make us worry about that name. Or if I'd randomly sampled some Donalds, and almost all of them turned out to be sex offenders, that'd be telling. But if what I did—and this <i>is </i>what I did—is go through the list of sex offenders and pick out every Donald to add to the list, it tells you nothing at all.<br />
<br />
This week the Trump administration announced its intention to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-publish-weekly-list-crimes-immigrants-commit-refugees-aliens-executive-order-us-a7546826.html">publish a weekly list of crimes committed by non-citizens</a>. The point of this list is to make Americans think that immigrants are likelier than others to commit crimes. (This is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigrants-crime.html">very far from true</a>.) It may succeed in its aim, but it will do so only to the extent to which Americans fall prey to this fallacious form of reasoning.<br />
<br />
There are over <a href="http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states">40 million immigrants</a> in the United States. (There are about <a href="http://howmanyofme.com/people/Donald_Trump/">1.5 million Donalds</a>.) About <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States">1%</a> of the general American population is in prison, so if we took that as a very rough estimate (setting aside factors like systemic racial discrimination in law enforcement), we'd expect that there'd be at least 400,000 cases of relatively recent criminal convictions of immigrants. (And add in non-resident aliens, and we'd expect it to be higher.) Some of those alien criminals will have done some awful things. We know that in advance, on general statistical grounds.<br />
<br />
Publishing a list of these cases—and doing so by the same cherry-picking methodology used above—gives practically <i>no evidence at all</i> that aliens are likelier to be dangerous criminals. The Trump list will have the same epistemic significance as did my list of Donalds above. If we avoid this fallacy, we'll be immune to this particular bit of propaganda.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-41210032281308381792017-01-23T12:46:00.000-08:002017-01-23T16:22:37.360-08:00Facts, Alternative Facts, and DefinitionsOne of the courses I often teach is an introduction to epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions about knowledge and rational belief—how is it possible to know something, and why is it important, and what makes some beliefs more reasonable to have than others? I learned early on that one of the first things I have to do for my students is help them get very clear on the difference between, on the one hand, facts and truths, and, on the other, knowledge, belief, and support from the evidence. The former concern <i>how things are in reality</i>, whether or not we have any access to them; the latter concern how we thinkers try, and hopefully succeed, to put ourselves in touch with reality. Many students come into my course a bit fuzzy on this distinction, but getting it crystal clear is a prerequisite for thinking in a rigorous way about epistemology.<br />
<br />
This has not been a good winter for the distinction. To cite just a couple of the many examples, when Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes was asked on the Diane Rehm Show whether it's OK for Trump to post made-up lies about who won the popular vote, she explained that "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/theres-no-such-thing-any-more-unfortunately-as-facts/509276/">there's no such thing anymore unfortunately as facts</a>". Oxford Dictionaries named "post-truth" as the <a href="https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/press/news/2016/12/11/WOTY-16">2016 Word of the Year</a>. But early indications suggest 2017 will be no better for objective truth. Yesterday my social media feed was overrun with satire, disgust, and incredulity at Kellyanne Conway's description of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's blatantly false statements about the inaugration crowd size as expressions of "<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/wh-spokesman-gave-alternative-facts-inauguration-crowd-n710466">alternative facts</a>".<br />
<br />
I don't think Hughes <i>really thinks</i>, or even <i>really meant</i>, that there are no facts. I think she meant there are, within some restricted sphere of politically interesting claims, no facts that are generally accepted and can be assumed without contest. I don't think Conway really thinks there's a kind of fact other than the true kind. I think she was just spewing some garbage language in an attempt to obfuscate. (Note that later in her interview, she retreats from this metaphysical nonsense to an epistemic claim, saying that there's no way to know the size of a crowd. This is empirically (obviously) false, but it's at least not a denial of the idea of a fact.)<br />
<br />
Critics of the Trump administration have of course been all over this. I see that already, one can buy "Alternative facts are lies" t-shirts. Some have observed that the concept is straight out of Orwell. I think they're right, and that that's terrifying. But that's not really my point here. I want to take this in a different direction.<br />
<br />
The thing is, some of the anti-alternative-fact rhetoric is no less philosophically confused than this post-fact nonsense. Meriam-Webster tweeted:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
📈A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. <a href="https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c">https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c</a></div>
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) <a href="https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/823221915171061760">January 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
When I first saw this tweet, I didn't know what the hell it was trying to do. But most of the interactions with it on twitter (38K retweets as I write) interpret it as criticizing Conway's invocation of 'alternative facts'.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
Day 2 of year 1. The resistance is made up of thousands of women and the <a href="https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster">@MerriamWebster</a> online dictionary.</div>
— Mel Bergeson (@MelianBerges) <a href="https://twitter.com/MelianBerges/status/823225203316719616">January 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
And it's not just Trump critics who are reading the tweet that way.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/Federalist_10">@Federalist_10</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster">@MerriamWebster</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls">@KellyannePolls</a><br />
Liberals running this twitter account and dictionary are not the same thing, are they?</div>
— TRUMP#MAGA🐸 (@Ismail_Jahan1) <a href="https://twitter.com/Ismail_Jahan1/status/823231435070808064">January 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
But this is a <i>terrible </i>definition of facts, and one that does not obviously work against the Trump rhetoric. Look, suppose I tell a lie. I tell my students that the author of "Elusive Knowledge" was Barack Obama, writing under a pen name. And I tell them this in a v. serious tone of voice, and expect them to believe me. I'll announce that I plan to put that on the exam. This lie is a piece of information presented (by me) as having objective reality. So it counts as a fact.<br />
<br />
Maybe you think a lie doesn't count as a 'piece of information'. Only truths can be information. OK, in that case, why is M-W talking about presenting as objective reality at all? Truths don't become facts when people present them. And indeed, there are lots of facts that <i>haven't </i>been presented as having objective reality, because nobody knows them.<br />
<br />
On this definition, Conway's invocation of alternative facts makes perfect sense. If a fact is just an assertion, then the crowd-size experts have one assertion, and the Trump administration has an alternative assertion. Merriam-Webster has offered something more like a definition of a <i>purported </i>fact. But not all purported facts are facts, just like not all alleged murderers are murderers.<br />
<br />
This dictionary seems comfortable with the notion of 'objective reality'. It does use that phrase in its definition. Once we have a grip on that notion, we should define 'fact' much more simply. A fact is a part of objective reality. A fact is something that is true, whether or not someone presents it as true, and whether or not anyone or everyone recognizes that it is true.<br />
<br />
This is basic stuff. Literally first-day intro-to-epistemology-and-metaphysics material. Being clear on the idea of a fact is the first step to thinking about how we should go about trying to investigate what the facts are. Attacks on that clarity, whether by demagogic governments or by well-meaning resistance tweeters, make this crucial job that much harder.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-7153905649700221202016-11-18T19:12:00.000-08:002016-11-18T19:12:52.502-08:00Evidence by Curated AnecdoteSuppose I have a bag with a hundred balls in it. The balls are made either of wood or iron; I don't know how many there are of each, but I know that there's at least one iron ball and at least one wooden ball. I start out with no idea whether there are more iron balls or more wooden balls.<br />
<br />
Then I examine a ball, and see that it's iron. How should this impact my estimate of the number of iron balls? It's tempting to think it obvious that my estimate should go up—I've seen an iron ball, so that's at least some evidence in favour of there being a lot of iron balls in there.<br />
<br />
But not so fast. It all depends on how the ball was chosen. It depends a <i>lot </i>on how the ball was chosen. If the ball was pulled out <i>at random</i> and proved to be iron, that'd be evidence for more iron in the bag. But what if it was pulled out with a magnet? Then the selection method <i>guaranteed</i> it was going to produce an iron ball. And I already knew there was at least one iron ball in there. So the fact that I got an iron ball gives me <i>no new information whatsoever</i>. My estimate of how much iron there is in the bag should change <i>not at all</i>, if that's how the iron ball got selected.<br />
<br />
I think something like this situation, and its attendant tempting fallacy, applies in much more real-world cases with morally significant implications, too. In particular, I'm thinking today about estimates of the prevalence of bad behaviour among certain demographic groups. For example, there are many people who, when thinking about anti-Trump protesters, think of unruly mobs of violent people. There are also many people (mostly different ones) who, when thinking of America this month, think of people committing hate crimes against Muslims and black people.<br />
<br />
If challenged about why one should think anti-Trump protesters tend to be violent, or that there are a lot of hate crimes in America, people tend to point to examples: news features about anti-Trump protesters attacking Trump supporters, or about threats of lynchings against black teenagers. I think that most of the time, such news stories are <i>terrible evidence </i>for what they're being used as evidence for. Even setting aside questions about whether the stories are true—let's assume they are—they do not actually provide any evidence at all for their general conclusion. The reason for this is that the cases are structurally analogous to the magnetic drawing method described above.<br />
<br />
The world is a big place, full of all kinds of people. So even before we do any serious investigation at all, we know that there are some people who commit hate crimes against black people, and that there are some anti-Trump protesters who are violent. We should all agree that this is obvious. There are <i>some </i>people like that. We disagree about how prevalent these things are, but we all agree they exist.<br />
<br />
We also know some things about the media. Namely, that, since lots of people are interested in reading about violent anti-Trump protesters and hate crimes, various media sources will be motivated to find and report on at least some such cases. Furthermore, the media are good enough at finding these things that it's nearly certain they'll do so.<br />
<br />
In other words, the antecedent probability of there being some cases in question is practically 1, and the conditional probability of the media reporting on them, supposing they exist, is also practically 1. So when you read about a Trump protester being violent, <i>that should increase your estimate of how violent Trump protesters on the whole are by practically zero</i>. It's like the magnet pulling out the iron ball—it was going to find one, no matter how many there were, so the fact that it found one does not make it likelier that there are lots.<br />
<br />
Things would be different if the media worked very differently—if, for example, it picked Trump protesters at random, and then reported on what they were like, no matter what they found. If that is what happened, then reading reports of violent protesters <i>would </i>be significant evidence. But that is very unlike the way our actual media works.<br />
<br />
Our own anecdotal experiences actually work a bit (a bit!) better in this respect. If the anti-Trump protester you happen to be standing next to starts beating somebody up, that is evidence in favour of violence in that group. (It wouldn't be if in advance you'd somehow implemented a strategy of standing next to the person you thought likeliest to be violent.) For what it's worth, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jichikawa/albums/72157675084613612">I spent several hours at anti-Trump rallies in Philadelphia last week</a>. I observed no violence.<br />
<br />
I haven't seen comparative numbers about the frequency of hate crimes in America over the past week. As far as data goes, that would be the gold standard. But I am pretty confident they've gone up, probably by a lot. This isn't based on the many news stories I've read about examples—the USA is a big enough place that it's not implausible to me that there are dozens of such cases every week, and that they're being reported and disseminated more now. But I have more specific, more personal experiences that are a bit more similar to random sampling. I haven't been victimized myself, but I do personally know someone who was physically attacked and racially insulted. And, at the university where I happened to be visiting last week, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BMr0803BTGt/?taken-by=jonathanichikawa">black students</a> had that very day been <a href="http://billypenn.com/2016/11/11/n-er-lynching-group-text-shocks-penn-freshmen/">threatened with lynchings</a>.<br />
<br />
This isn't <i>super </i>definitive data, but I think it's a lot more telling than lists of stories turned out by media outlets motivated to turn out lists of stories. The main point is, if you want to know how much something supports a given hypothesis, it makes a huge difference how you found it.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-50162369000001875892016-11-07T14:10:00.000-08:002016-11-07T14:10:25.485-08:00The Mikado in the 21st CenturyLast week I participated as a guest of the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players in a <a href="http://www.broadwayworld.com/off-off-broadway/article/NY-Gilbert-and-Sullivan-Players-to-Host-Free-Public-Forum-THE-MIKADO-IN-THE-21st-Century-113-20161020">forum discussion on racism in <i>The Mikado</i></a>. After <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-city-production-mikado-draws-criticism-accusations-racism-n429546">cancelling their 2015 production</a> over concerns about racism, they've hired some new staff and brought in an advisory panel to put together a new version of the show. Because of my background as a performer and consumer of Gilbert & Sullivan productions, my own Japanese-American identity, and some things I've written (though not publicly) on the subject before, I was invited to give a keynote address as part of that forum.<br />
<br />
I thought it was a productive conversation—I had the sense that all participants (which included some NYGASP officials with significant responsibility about the new production) were well-motivated and sincere, and had some understanding of the issues. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to take audience questions, and lots of things didn't really get addressed. But I thought the forum was an encouraging step. I have found that these conversations are extremely difficult to have. But for at least a few hours last week, we were having a real one.<br />
<br />
For anyone interested, here are some of the things I said, along with some other things I hoped to say but didn't have time for.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>
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I speak for myself; I am no one’s representative. But I speak as a member of three relevant communities. First, I have been an aficionado of Gilbert & Sullivan since I was a young teenager. I’ve performed in about 30 G&S productions, including four <i>Mikados</i>. I founded Gilbert & Sullivan Societies at Rice University and Brown University. I’ve been a member of Savoynet—an email listserv dedicated to the discussion of Gilbert & Sullivan—for nearly 15 years. I have been a regular performer in England at the annual International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival. I’ve seen hundreds of G&S productions. <br /><br />Second, I am a person of Japanese-American descent. My great-grandmother Masano Ichikawa came from Hiroshima to California in 1915. My grandparents were removed from their homes by the US government to internment camps during World War II. (Grandpa left the camps to fight for the US in Europe. He came home with a Purple Heart.) I am American Yonsei—fourth-generation Japanese-American. Like many Asian-Americans, especially those like me who are of mixed descent, my Asian-American identity becomes more and less salient from time to time; sometimes I can almost forget that I have a distinctive ethnic identity; other times it is unignorable, whether I want it to be or not.<br /><br />Third, I am a professor of philosophy, specializing in epistemology—the branch of philosophy concerning the nature of knowledge: how is knowledge possible, how does one’s social position influence what one is in a position to know, and how can one person’s knowledge be shared with another? This third identity might be less obvious as a qualification for speaking about <i>The Mikado</i>, but I think it has an important role to play. I think that a difficulty in seeing others’ positions—especially positions rooted in somewhat deep differences in identity, is one of the biggest obstacles to productive conversations.<br /><br />Let’s start with what I’d expect should be some relatively uncontroversial observations. Observation 1: <i>The Mikado</i> was not intended by Gilbert and Sullivan, and is not intended by contemporary companies that produce it, to be offensive. This is the first thing traditionalists usually say in defence of <i>The Mikado</i>, and they are right. The point of <i>The Mikado</i> is not to offend anybody. I think this should be common ground. <br /><br />Observation 2: as performed, <i>The Mikado</i> sometimes involves racist Japanese stereotypes. These are offensive and harmful. <i>The Mikado</i> is itself a cultural phenomenon, and its representations contribute to the perception of Japanese and Japanese–American people. Common stereotypes include: Japanese as exotic and incomprehensible; infantilization; barbarism; dragon ladies; china dolls; excessive bows and shuffling of feet; yellow peril; caricatured accents; caricatured facial features. I was in a production once where our eyes were literally taped back. I have seen productions with buck teeth and violently shrill nasal singing. This is demeaning, insulting, objectifying, and harmful. <br /><br />We can and should hold on to both observations at once. You don’t have to be motivated by racial hatred to produce something racist—it is possible to be racist accidentally. So, (a) a racist production of <i>The Mikado</i> doesn’t mean the people who made it hate Japanese people, and (b) the fact that you don’t hate Japanese people doesn’t guarantee that you’re not going to put on a racist production of <i>The Mikado</i>. I think it’s more useful to focus on the adjective ‘racist’—racist ideas, racist caricatures, racist jokes—than on the noun ‘racist’ as applied to a kind of person. <br /><br />It’s also important to separate out the question of racism in particular productions of the show, and that of whether it is intrinsic to the work itself. The most egregious displays of racism I have seen have been relatively incidental. There’s nothing in the work as written that forces companies to pull back their white actors’ eyes. One can easily produce a <i>Mikado</i> that is free of ninja poses. Other potentially problematic elements are baked in somewhat more deeply. <i>The Mikado</i>’s gleeful joy in the painful execution of his subjects for trivial slights evokes racist ideas about Eastern barbarism and Western civilization. But a production doesn’t have to be perfectly free of every offensive stereotype. (Show me the production of any show that is!) I think 95% of the racism I’ve ever seen in productions of <i>The Mikado</i>, and 100% of the really blatant racism, can be avoided with minimal or no violence to the work itself.<br /><br />Here’s an argument I hear all the time: <i>The Mikado</i> is a satire of<i> British</i> culture, so it’s just a fundamental misunderstanding to suppose it has anything to do with Japan. Since it’s not about Japan or Japanese people, it couldn’t possibly perpetuate racist stereotypes about them. It is certainly true that the central targets of Gilbert’s satire are his own English contemporaries. But it’s just fallacious to suppose this means the work doesn’t or can’t engage in racist caricatures of Japanese people. <br /><br />This point is more obvious in slightly different contexts. Imagine, for example, if you’ll indulge me in a thought experiment, a possible theatrical production satirising the US Presidential race, given by performers offering caricatured versions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, in blackface. A white man and a white woman ‘black up’ with burnt cork or shoe polish, leaving big, exaggerated lips and white eyeliner. Then, using the kind of crude caricatures of English that used to be popular in twentieth-century minstrel shows, they act out thinly veiled versions of the 2016 Presidential election. I think we can all see that this would be super racist. We know better than to dress up and make up in exaggerated racist caricatures of black people. If we were doing it to make fun of our white Presidential candidates, that wouldn’t make it any better. In exactly the same way, the fact that <i>The Mikado</i> is intended as a satire of people who are not Japanese does not exempt it from possible worries about racist caricatures. Appearing in exaggerated and distorted dress and make-up, performing crude caricatures of Japanese stereotypes is no less racist than the blackface traditions that we’ve largely left behind. <br /><br />(I don’t have time to get into it today, but the historical relationship between <i>The Mikado</i> and blackface itself is interesting. I recommend Part II of Josephine Lee’s book, <i><a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-japan-of-pure-invention">The Japan of Pure Invention</a></i>, on this topic.) <br /><br />Perceiving racism is an <i>epistemic skill</i>. People can be better or worse at it. People of Asian descent are likelier than others to recognise racism that affects Asians. To some, this can sound threatening—it makes it sound like they have to leave their brains outside and think just as minority groups tell ‘em to. But I don’t think it’s like that. In all sorts of areas, some people have perceptual abilities that others lack. Trained musicians can recognise particular chords. Experienced bird-watchers can recognise particular birds. If you want to know whether something is a diminished seventh, or a martial eagle, if you’re not the kind of person who’s good at recognising the difference, you don’t have to stop thinking for yourself, but it’s a good idea to rely on those who are. <br /><br />Most people don’t get super worked up about controversies about whether something is a diminished seventh or a martial eagle. This, I think, is a big difference between music theory and racism. Lots of people—including people who aren’t great at recognizing racism—care a lot about whether things are racist. Decent people don’t want to do racist things—in part because they’re decent people who want to treat people with respect. That’s good. But one potential drawback—one epistemic challenge—is that people who benefit from a racist set of practices will have, at a subconscious level, an incentive not to recognize them. If you unwittingly do or say something racist, and I point that out to you, it’s very natural for you to become defensive—to question my sincerity or judgment. You might refuse to take my concerns seriously unless and until I can explain exactly why and how what you said was racist or harmful, and you won’t consider my explanation good enough unless it convinces <i>you</i>.<br /><br />Because we are situated differently in the world, we can all see different things. I know more about my life than you do; you know more about yours. To speak a bit generally, people who are members of racial minorities tend to know more than white people about racism. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for white people to disagree with worries about racism, but I think it would be a mistake to ignore the risk of dismissing concerns too quickly. It’s important to be epistemically humble—to recognize that we don’t know everything, and to be open-minded and ready to learn. <br /><br />Coming back to <i>The Mikado</i>, these epistemic differences can create misunderstandings. The obvious one is that some people won’t recognize racism that is obvious to other people. A slightly less obvious challenge happens a level up: when racism is so obvious to a member of the Asian community, and a member of the G&S community says they don’t see it, there’s a temptation to interpret that as disingenuous. But it might not be. Sometimes even very well-intentioned people won’t be able to see the problem—especially if the stereotypes have taken on the role of tradition. We must resist the temptation to attribute ill motives to all traditionalists who can’t see it. <br /><br />We must also resist the temptation, on the other side, to suppose that activists who raise complaints we don’t understand are just making up excuses to be offended. Being offended isn’t fun. I think that many people dramatically underestimate the emotional labor that goes into giving voice to marginalized perspectives. Talking about how something is hurtful or harmful, to an audience that has a hard time seeing it, is exhausting. It doesn’t feel good to have to speak up for one’s dignity.<br /><br />One source of resistance I have heard to taking concerns about <i>The Mikado</i> seriously is a kind of ‘slippery slope’ argument. If you stop using tape to make oriental eyes, what else will you have to change? I think it’s worth thinking a bit more explicitly about what this ‘have to’ means. Because the answer to the question: “how much do you have to do”, depends on what your aim is. What bar do you want to clear? Do you want to put on a production that is respectful, or is your aim merely to avoid being picketed? Or are you looking for a production that some individual would be happy with? In any case, there’s not going to be a list of simple rules you just need to make sure to follow. Racism is too subtle, and too pervasive, and too dynamic, to work like that. The thing to do, I think, is to take concerns seriously, to keep the conversation open, to be receptive to feedback, even when you don’t totally understand it, and to be willing to make changes accordingly. <br /><br />I know only a little about what NYGASP has been doing over the past year, but judging by the conversations I’ve had, and by the fact that we are here today, it seems to me like these are the right steps.
<!--EndFragment-->Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-31876802498647080722016-10-20T13:07:00.000-07:002016-10-20T13:07:38.776-07:00Donald Trump: trial balloon or vaccine?Let's assume that Donald Trump is about to lose the Presidential election. This seems overwhelmingly likely today, but there have been times when a President Trump looked like a real possibility.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiekBQCtClvItJ0lfP7fwC6yM2c5CpcMpi2s21a-fpFB4HWVPiYmrWpHaUCy7yP3r2ryI9OGF16qC4QDwCSAp7XdIZL2V05yYK5FXK5NA0X1yvKZCS6JoxOJVBSB8ty0LAMAYZ9/s1600/538.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiekBQCtClvItJ0lfP7fwC6yM2c5CpcMpi2s21a-fpFB4HWVPiYmrWpHaUCy7yP3r2ryI9OGF16qC4QDwCSAp7XdIZL2V05yYK5FXK5NA0X1yvKZCS6JoxOJVBSB8ty0LAMAYZ9/s400/538.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">538's polls-plus winning probability over time.</td></tr>
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Donald Trump has run an incredibly racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic campaign; he's elevated to prominence a dark underbelly of US culture. This has been clear from the very start of his campaign. Unfortunately, this by itself didn't stop him from being a halfway viable candidate with a real chance to win. The reason this race got away from Trump is that he is a totally inept politician. He has no personal discipline or ability to stay on message. Even recordings of his bragging about sexual assault, and <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/all-the-women-accusing-trump-of-rape-sexual-assault.html">over a dozen women</a> who have accused him of such actions, do not seem definitively to have shut him down as a viable candidate; among his base, there seems to be a widespread willingness to forgive and forget. A skilled politician who performed real remorse might conceivably have gotten similar favourable treatment from a decent number of middle-of-the-road Americans. People are surprisingly and depressingly fuzzy about a lot of these questions.<br />
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Hypothesis: Sex-shame is so deep on the Right, they think the problem w/ sexual assault is that it’s sexual. They literally don’t understand</div>
— TRIGGER WARNINGS (@jichikawa) <a href="https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/786741205417598976">October 14, 2016</a></blockquote>
Numerous serious allegations of sexual assault would be damaging—perhaps fatal—to any candidate in 2016. But Trump certainly did himself no favours.<br />
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Fortunately for civilisation, Donal Trump is a disaster of a politician who will lose an election unlikely to be even close. But the Trump candidacy does raise a sobering question: what if he <i>hadn't </i>been such a blatantly repulsive specimen of humanity? What if he had the discipline and common sense to stay on message and employ more moderately-palatable spin against his unpopular opponent? What if someone with Trump's politics had a gentle face and a kindly voice?<br />
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I had a chance to visit the Johannesburg <a href="http://apartheidmuseum.org/">Aparteid Museum</a> this past summer. One of the striking and disturbing things I saw there was footage of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd smiling and cooing the most horribly racist sentiments behind a friendly and grandfatherly tone.<br />
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As I remarked to my friend at the museum, if Trump had looked and sounded like that, I think Clinton would have had very little chance in this election.<br />
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The thought of a modern-day Trump-like demagogue who knows how to dress up his racist, authoritarian demagoguery in pretty propaganda is a terrifying one. In the counterfactual world where we had that instead of Trump in 2016, running against the same unpopular Hillary Clinton, I am convinced that this hypothetical candidate would have won. It might have been the biggest disaster in American history.<br />
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What I'm unsure about is whether in the actual world, the prospects for such a future candidate are greater or lesser in the wake of Trump. One theory is that Trump has been a <a href="http://politicaldictionary.com/words/trial-balloon/">trial balloon</a>. This was something of a test run, to determine what works and what doesn't work in a fascist, white supremacist candidate for US President. The alt-right learns its lessons from Trump, and comes back on another occasion with a candidate with similar politics, and similarly able to stoke its horrifying base, but who has never bragged on camera about sexual assault and who doesn't look and act like an impetuous 12-year-old when insulted. It's certainly a <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/07/trump_was_too_dark_scary_and_unhinged_at_the_rnc.html">worrisome thought</a>.<br />
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But here's the more optimistic possibility. The alt-right has learned a lot about the electorate this year—but so too has the electorate learned a lot about the alt-right. Given the resounding defeat Trump seems well on his way to receiving, it may be that his own disastrousness may tarnish the racist ideology itself. The future, more polished, version of Donald Trump may find himself much less viable than he'd otherwise be <i>because he reminds people of Donald Trump</i>. Rather than Trump as trial balloon, we have Trump as <i>vaccine</i>—after defeating the less dangerous version of this candidate, Americans are better-equipped to avoid succumbing to the sneakier one.<br />
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The latter, happier interpretation seems particularly plausible if Clinton runs up a big lead on Trump. Let there be no ambiguity about the disastrousness of this campaign. Let politicians be terrified for a generation or two of reminding people of Donald Trump. Here's hoping.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-9828532785145506052016-10-01T11:19:00.000-07:002016-10-20T13:11:27.704-07:00Why Don't More Faculty Speak Out About Sexual Assault?<div class="p1 tr_bq">
This is a (slightly modified for public consumption—links added, some personal bits and references to other conference speakers’ remarks removed) draft of remarks that I’ve prepared for a panel entitled “The Impact of Speaking Out: Graduate Students and the Role of Faculty”, as part of a <a href="https://ccsvconference.wordpress.com/">conference at UBC on conversations around sexual violence</a>.</div>
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Thanks very much to the organisers for putting this important conference together. My name is Jonathan Ichikawa. I’m a professor in the philosophy department here at UBC. I’m grateful to the organizers for inviting me to be a part of this event. But to be honest, when I received the invitation, I felt pretty conflicted about whether to accept it. Certainly I think that events like these are important, and that the more we can do to raise awareness and solidarity around the challenges of sexual violence, the better. The reason I wasn’t sure whether to participate was that I wasn’t sure if I really belonged in a spot like this. Unlike the other speakers here, I don’t have any particular familiarity or expertise in campus sexual assault. None of my publications are about this topic. I’ve never had a job, or even a volunteer position, working closely with sexual assault survivors. I don’t have a personal narrative that’s particularly interesting in these respects. Am I really someone who should be taking up this space?</blockquote>
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I assume the reason I was invited is that I have been one of the UBC faculty members who made a point of speaking out about some of UBC’s recent high-profile failures. In January, I was one of the organisers of an <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1A_ewHR2cb2_E-Zh2lEF8pF2bsiTVUz24pvSAh58_hjU/pub">open letter</a>, where about a hundred UBC faculty members acknowledged that UBC’s procedures for student reports of sexual assault were inadequate and harmful. As members of the UBC community, we apologised for our institutional failures, and pledged to work for improvement. There was a bit of media attention attached to that letter, and, for no deep reason—among the handful approached, I was the one free and willing—I spoke to a few journalists about it, and sort of accidentally became one of the faces of faculty interest in these questions.</blockquote>
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But I haven’t done much. I saw some things that were clearly unacceptable—I saw students saying that their experiences reporting sexual assaults to UBC were more traumatic than the assaults themselves—and I said so. It’s barely anything. But the sad truth is, it’s a lot more than many of my colleagues have done. This week I asked a friend—a graduate student involved in discussions of sexual violence at another institution—what faculty could do to be more supportive of their activism. My friend’s answer: practically anything. As they rather pithily put it: I speak out a couple of times and suddenly I’m qualified to be on a panel.</blockquote>
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So one of the questions I’m puzzling over is: why don’t more faculty members speak out? Let’s set aside the minority who knowingly sign on to deeply misognyistic tropes—those who think complaints about sexual assault are usually made-up lies intended to slander men. One might call that the basket of deplorables. They exist, but they’re not my focus now. Why do other faculty members remain silent? I have three ideas. I’ll frame my remarks around them.</blockquote>
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One simple factor that works against faculty activism is fear. Fear of offending colleagues; fear of saying the wrong thing; fear of being labelled a ‘troublemaker’. One factor is the very tangible fear of being denied tenure, or not having one’s contract renewed. A large and increasing proportion of the faculty at many institutions, including this one, works on an adjunct basis, with minimal job security. Even those on the tenure track often have much less security than one might think. I had a chance to speak this week with a remarkable woman at a university in the United States, who suffered severe retribution from her administrators and colleagues when she worked with students to organize a Title IX complaint. For example, her annual review admitted that her research, teaching, and service contributions were strong, but said her overall performance was inadequate, citing a class in which she submitted the grades 24 hours late, and some reimbursement receipts that were mishandled by the office staff. She’s tenure-track, but she doesn’t expect to retain her job.</blockquote>
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This is an extreme case—a nightmare scenario—but it illustrates the sorts of pressures many faculty members face. I have not faced repercussions of this kind at UBC. But it is certainly true that faculty members here worry about these things. When I began speaking out, I was cautioned by well-intentioned colleagues that I was putting my professional advancement at risk. I don’t know whether this was true. And I’m tenured, so I have less vulnerability. But I know that fear of this sort of retribution is a significant silencing factor among at UBC and elsewhere. This sort of culture of fear extends beyond issues surrounding sexual violence; it is a challenge for all kinds of advocates for university reform.</blockquote>
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You may have seen in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/29/uc-berkeley-sexual-harassment-blake-wentworth-sues-victims?CMP=share_btn_fb">news this week</a> that three students at UC-Berkeley, who went public with allegations that they’d been sexually harassed by one of their professors, are now undergoing lawsuit defamation lawsuits from him. This is not the norm, but it is a real thing, and it contributes to fear. (Side note: and people say that feminist <i>students</i> are the big threat to free speech these days!)</blockquote>
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This kind of fear is particularly fertile in solitary environments. It’s easier and safer to speak up when you’re doing it with your colleagues. When fear leads to silence, that silence amounts to isolation of those who might want to speak up, leading to more fear. This is why it’s especially important for those of us who are professionally and socially more secure to speak publicly. This applies both for professional status—especially tenure—but also for every other kind of social privilege. I know what happens to women who talk publicly about sexual assault on the internet.</blockquote>
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This interacts in a tricky way with the second reason I think a lot of my colleagues don’t speak up: feeling under-qualified. I did a twitter poll of faculty members about why they don’t speak up, and this was the plurality response. Fun fact: socially privileged people tend to be less familiar with sexual assault. The same features that tend to make you less likely to be a recipient of sexual violence also tend to make you more professionally secure. So the people in the safest position to speak are rarely the experts on sexual assault. And often they know it. (Ideally they know it!) Consequently, there is an inclination to defer to others. Let the experts on feminism and gender studies take the lead on these issues.</blockquote>
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I think this is right, as far as it goes. But it can be taken too far; when it does, it contributes to a culture of silence. There’s space between silence and dominating the discussion. Well-intentioned non-experts can easily err on the side of silence—this is especially true because self-serving biases about convenience and easiness also pull in that direction. But you don’t have to be an expert to be qualified to respond to what you see. You just have to be a human being who cares about justice and suffering. Any faculty member who cares about their ability to teach their students has an interest in their security, safety, and mental and physical health. Students can’t learn when they’re not safe.</blockquote>
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There’s a lot of expertise to be had on sexual assault, as the other speakers in this conference prove. People like me who don’t know a lot about it are right to think that other people know better than we do. But we’d be wrong to think we therefore shouldn’t speak up. Whether we intend it or not, failure to speak up so sends a signal: we don’t care. That message is oppressive. It tells activists they’re on their own. We faculty members don’t always remember it, but we make up a significant part of the culture of the university. What we’re like makes for quite a lot of what the university is like.</blockquote>
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This brings me to the third reason I think some faculty don’t speak up: they feel like it doesn’t matter. It won’t make a difference. This one I can honestly relate to. It’s easy to feel like, of COURSE I am opposed to sexual violence, and of COURSE I think it’s important that people shouldn’t be re-victimized in the process of reporting their experiences. I could stand up and say so, but what would be the point? </blockquote>
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I feel this frustration. I often feel like the many hours I’ve spent speaking out haven’t had a very dramatic effect. I was frustrated when UBC released its draft sexual assault policy, which, so far as I can tell, doesn’t address any of the challenges or shortcomings we’d identified. When I talk to UBC administrators, they say all the right things, but somehow it doesn’t seem to translate into action. I haven’t yet figured out a reliable strategy for converting good intentions into good actions and policies. And that is frustrating.</blockquote>
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But again, I think we should be careful not to overlook that first step: the speaking out. It’s an important shortcoming if it doesn’t translate in to university policy, but it’s still not nothing. It’s a signal to our community members: we see what’s happening. We hear you. We believe you. We care. We’re sorry. We’re trying. With a big institution like a university, an individual faculty member can feel irrelevant because we don’t have the ability to set the direction of the whole ship. But a university isn’t just a vessel being directed by people; it is a society made up of people. What I say doesn’t only matter insofar as it sets university policy; it is a small but significant constitutive part of what gives the university the culture it has. And I think that’s worthwhile. So I think more professors should speak out.</blockquote>
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OK I didn’t prepare a tidy wrapping up, so I’ll just stop now. Thanks.</blockquote>
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Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-18538319011032293302016-09-25T12:28:00.000-07:002016-09-25T12:55:33.701-07:00Platforms, Free Speech, and the Boundaries of the Pale: A Methodological RemarkSometimes people say things in public, and other people think those are terrible things to say, and so they complain, or protest, or distance themselves, or decline to invite that speaker for something else, or apologize on their behalves. And then, as we all know, sometimes yet <i>other</i> people get real offended by those first other people for a perceived threat to the free expression of ideas.<br />
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This is a super common pattern. (A pretty substantial amount of public hand-wringing about Millenials falls into this category.) Philosophers will recognize a <a href="http://dailynous.com/2016/09/25/tale-two-conferences/">recent high-profile controversy</a> of this form.<br />
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The argument against step two above—the argument that says you shouldn't protest or apologize or whatever—goes like this: free speech is important, even when (especially when!) it is uncomfortable and challenges your preconceptions. It would be both unjust and intellectually foolhardy to censor the expression of some ideas just because some people find them distasteful or threatening.<br />
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The argument on the other side goes like this: words matter, and the expression of some ideas is actively harmful; we shouldn't encourage or enable people to harm others, especially when those harmed are members of already-marginalized groups. No one is entitled to these particular platforms, and by the way protest speech is free speech too.<br />
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In most actual instances of the schema I come across, my sympathies are largely with the protesters. But there's something a bit funny about the level of generality at which the argument tends to take place. The details of the objectionable presented content make a pretty big difference.<br />
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For example, the principles often articulated against protesting, if taken literally, would generalize to defences of views that I think most of us would recognize as clearly beyond the pale. Like, if the keynote address at the American Society for Conservative Philosophers (a name I just made up but maybe it's real, it doesn't matter, it's a fictional case) were given by a white supremacist calling explicitly for, say, stripping the voting rights of Americans of colour, everybody would be making a tremendous fuss about it and they'd obviously be right. Maybe a few individuals would crawl out of the woodwork and say "we must be willing to encounter ideas that challenge our preconceptions" or "these ideas about racial purity have been around a long time don't you think there might be something to them?" or "are conservatives not allowed to talk about social and political questions about race?", but I think most of the people who say the parallel things about real-life cases wouldn't be much impressed. This example shows that the principles cited are not at all plausible in full generality.<br />
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I think something similar is also true of the other side. Suppose a local farmer is invited to give a commencement speech at a high school in their community, and students protest and demand that they be un-invited, on the grounds that such farming amounts to a morally indefensible program of animal suffering. I would have a certain amount of sympathy with these students. (I think most animal farming <i>does</i> amount to morally indefensible animal suffering.) But I think I'd ultimately be persuaded by the line that this isn't very good grounds for protesting the speech, even if the students make the case that the speech itself would cause harm.<br />
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One might try to locate the difference between these cases in the moral seriousness of the harm, or the amount of offence caused, but I'm inclined to look to more contingent social matters. Really blatant white supremacy is, in North American academic circles, rare enough and marginalized enough, not merely to offend, but to shock. It's not one of society's live options. It is beyond the pale. This isn't an intrinsic feature of the content of the view—it's a relational status to society more broadly. By contrast, the idea that it's fine to cause massive suffering in non-human animals for small human benefits is widely accepted. If one merely levelled the horrified stare (the moral cousin of the less incendiary incredulous stare) at everyone who thought it was OK to raise animals for food, one would only serve to alienate oneself from society at large. People who think farming is fine need to be convinced; people who think America is only for white people should be shunned.<br />
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The lines move over time, as some questions become settled. At the margins, there will be controversy, even among people who agree that a stance is morally objectionable, about whether it is beyond the pale. I think that many questions about the moral status of homosexuality are at present right around the margins. The idea that homosexuality constitutes a defect of some kind is rightly and rapidly becoming much more of a fringe position, but it is still widely enough held, by powerful enough people, such that many people will still be inclined to treat it as a view worthy of respectful disagreement, rather than the horrified stare.<br />
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The debates that ensue tend to frame the issue as one about free speech versus harmful attitudes towards marginalized groups. That's partly right, but I think that quite a lot of what's going on is best conceptualized as a fight about where to set the boundaries. It's a border skirmish in the culture war. If the progressives keep winning, this will all look very different in retrospect. Hopefully in twenty years we will look back with some shock at the idea that people were arguing in 2016 about whether it's OK to descibe homosexuality as a kind of disability. Maybe by 2036 the argument will be about whether we need to take seriously the idea that animal farming is morally permissible.</div>
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-77543084311770221302016-05-22T17:40:00.000-07:002016-05-22T17:40:58.144-07:00Presumption of InnocenceThe Universal Declaration of Human Rights has it that "everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence." This is a kind of legal protection against criminal conviction—you cannot be declared by the state to be guilty of a crime, or punished for it, unless your guilt has been proven.<br />
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The presumption of innocence is rightly considered a pillar of civilised society. But people have a tendency to over-apply it in irrelevant cases. The presumption of your innocence means that the state can't punish you for a crime unless it proves that you committed it. That's it. It has nothing to do with how one individual should treat or think about another, or whether an organisation should develop or continue a relationship with an accused individual. The presumption of innocence doesn't protect you from being unfriended on facebook, or shunned at conferences, or widely thought by other people to be a criminal. It just protects from being criminally convicted.<br />
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The weird world of academic philosophy this week is digesting an <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/yale-ethics-professor?">article</a> that includes serious allegations of sexual harassment by Yale professor Thomas Pogge against philosophy students. While most of the people whose reactions I'm reading are expressing disgust at Pogge's behaviour and gratitude for Fernanda Lopez Aguilar, the woman who has come forward with the story, there are some (<a href="http://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/pogge-response-to-the-allegations-by-fernanda-lopez-aguilar-1sve570.pdf">including Pogge himself</a>, as well as some of the People who Leave Comments on Blogs) who caution the broader world from jumping to conclusions, on grounds related to the presumption of innocence. Pogge's statement discusses "trial by internet"—but since "the internet" is not contemplating the use of state power against his liberty, whatever metaphorical sense in which he is undergoing a "trial" is not one where he enjoys the presumption of innocence.<br />
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The admonition not to pass judgement about the allegations is simply the admonition to ignore them. "Don't believe anything unless it's been proven in a court of law." But this is just a ludicrous epistemic standard. Do you care whether powerful men in academic philosophy are using their stature to coerce students into compromising sexual situations? Then you should be interested in credible testimony to the effect that this one has been. Don't be tempted by the <a href="http://blog.jichikawa.net/2016/01/knowing-about-sexual-assault-having.html">fallacious inference</a> from <i>it hasn't been proven in court</i> to <i>you have no way to tell whether it's true</i>. (This, incidentally, is also why it <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/news/opinion+campus+sexual+assaults+just+left+rcmp/11655629/story.html">makes sense for universities to have sexual assault policies</a>.)<br />
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Moreover, it's not in general "jumping to conclusions" to accept someone's word. We learn from other people about what happened to them <i>all the time</i>. Talk of courtroom standards of evidence can make us forget the fact, but in general, we can get knowledge from other people. There's a temptation to think "it's just a he-said–she-said situation, so there's no way to know what really happened". While there are of course some cases that are like that, it's not in general true that any time testimony is disputed it can't be known to be true. Sometimes someone tells me something, and I thereby come to know it, even though someone else denies it. This is especially likely when the thing told is generally plausible, and fits well with other things I know, when there's no plausible explanation about why the testifier would say it if it weren't true, and the denial is both weak and self-serving. All these features seem to me to be present in the current case (and in many similar cases).<br />
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I believe Aguilar's allegations. They are serious and credible. They cohere with other stories many of us have heard about Pogge. The asinine hypothesis that she'd make them up out of spite, or for some kind of personal benefit, is the risible product of a preposterously misogynistic imagination. I think it'd be an epistemic error not to believe them—and a <a href="https://philosophygoespop.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/testimonial-injustice-and-thomas-pogges-defenders/">moral error too</a>. It would be derelict for us as a community to ignore that which it's reasonable for us to believe—indeed, what which I think we know.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-84419533983178818322016-05-11T12:19:00.000-07:002016-05-11T12:19:56.478-07:00What is proof beyond a reasonable doubt?As I finish up a few long-standing projects on knowledge (check out <a href="http://jichikawa.net/contextualizing-knowledge">my draft monograph</a>!) I'm hoping to start exploring a few new-for-me areas. In recent years my philosophical discussions on this blog have been relatively esoteric, trying out a new objection to so-and-so's third paper on such-and-such; when I was in grad school I used it as an early thinking-out-loud forum about more basic stuff. If I can swallow my pride enough, I may return to that form over the next several months. One area I'm quite ignorant and naive—but also curious—about is law. In particular, I'm curious about how legal concepts like evidence and testimony interact with epistemological concepts like evidence and testimony. I'm a complete novice in this field, so if I'm overlooking things that seem totally obvious to any readers, I'd be grateful to have it pointed out, especially if it comes along with reading advice.<br />
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One of my entry-points into the literature here is my UBC colleague John Woods's book <i>Is Legal Reasoning Rational: An Introduction to the Epistemology of Law</i>. (I'm maybe 40% of the way through a first read of it now.) Here's one thing I've found interesting so far. Woods writes, on p. 103:<br />
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Spike cannot be convicted unless a jury unanimously finds that his guilt has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Certainty beyond a reasonable doubt is sometimes said to be moral certainty. Under either name, as Gifis writes, it is a conviction based on persuasive reasons and excluding doubts that a contrary conclusion can exist. This is much too strong a formulation. <b>There is plenty of case law that allows for conviction even in the face of a perfectly reasonable case to the contrary, recognized as such by the jury.</b> On an alternative formulation of the standard. A juror is said to be morally certain of a fact when he or she would act in reliance upon its truth in matters of greatest importance to himself or herself. Although better, this appears to omit the essential requirement of criminal proof that this readiness to act, this moral certainty, <b>be grounded in the juror's belief that the burden of criminal proof has been met</b>. In other words, it seems <i>not </i>to be sufficient for criminal conviction that a juror be in a state of moral certainty of the accused's guilt. It also matters how he came to be in that state. </blockquote>
So we have these notions:<br />
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<li>Proof beyond a reasonable doubt</li>
<li>Certainty beyond a reasonable doubt</li>
<li>A juror's being in a state of moral certainty</li>
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Woods slides between the first two without comment. Maybe the thought is that there is this tight relationship: proofs establish certainty. (In logic or mathematics, this seems plausible—if I have a proof of something, then it is certain for me.) But as Woods points out, it's another matter whether my psychology reflects this certainty. I might have a proof but doubt anyway; or I might be irrationally certain, even absent a proof.<br />
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I wish Woods had explained further what he had in mind when he discusses appropriate conviction in the face of 'a perfectly reasonable case to the contrary'. (I am not sure who Gifis is—I don't see a citation.) Can there be 'perfectly reasonable' cases that have been proven not to be the case? If 'provability beyond a reasonable doubt' is closed under deduction, then it seems like there must be. (If it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones committed the crime, then it's provable beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones wasn't framed.)<br />
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The alternative formulation mentioned seems to target the psychological state of being in a state of moral certainty. This feels at least analogous, maybe more, to the epistemological notion of belief or commitment. Some epistemologists, like Jennifer Nagel and Brian Weatherson, have emphasized that whether one is in this state depends (causally or constitutively, respectively) on the practical situation—when the stakes are high, one is less likely to believe. Maybe moral certainty is something like, being such that one would count as believing even in very high stakes cases. And although this state isn't, as Woods points out, sufficient for appropriate conviction, a normative connection seems plausible: one should only be in this state if one has a proof of corresponding strength. Don't be sure unless it's proven.<br />
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It's hard for me not to think in terms of knowledge. One contextualist way of mapping these thoughts would have it that, given a high standard for knowledge, all and only that which is proven beyond a reasonable doubt is 'known', and jurors should vote to convict if and only if they know the defendant guilty. I think this could make sense of these issues—although it'll probably be too simple in other respects, such as the restriction of admissible evidence. (Some things jurors know, they're not supposed to consider. (Or <i>maybe</i> a weird standard could count them as unknown? Something to think about.))<br />
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Anyway, I know I'm being really naive here, but I'd be interested in digging in a little bit, if anyone has ideas or reading suggestions.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.com5