Journal of Controversial Ideas: Interview with the founder of the pseudonym newspaper

Philosophers Jeff McMahan, Peter Singer and Francesca Minerva plan to launch a publication titled Journal of controversial ideasan interdisciplinary academic outlet where researchers will be allowed to present arguments and results under a pseudonym, without fear of damaging their reputations.

Almost immediately, the newspaper was released as a new volley in wars for freedom of expression and politically correct on college campuses. Reviews laughed at him as an attempt by privileged white academics (while Minerva is a postdoc, Singer and McMahan are among the eminent ethicists applied in philosophy) to smuggle reactionary and fanatical opinions as academics would not feel comfortable to broadcast under their own name. McMahan's statement to a journalist that he was prepared to publish an article on the defense of eugenics, if his arguments were of sufficient quality, did not help.

"It's essentially a safe space, a place where writers do not have to face the criticism or criticism of those who are at the limit of their" controversial "ideas," warned Nesrine Malik about the newspaper. a Guardian column. "It's publishing without the responsibility that arises from it."

But the controversial views of Singer, McMahan and Minerva are quite distinct from the anti-trans and anti-feminist jeremiads that have made psychology professor Jordan Peterson a right-wing celebrity. All three are known to defend the morality of infanticide under certain circumstances, and Singer and McMahan in particular are known to suggest that it might be less wrong to kill humans with certain cognitive impairments than to kill non-disabled human beings. These positions have earned them the understandable wrath of disability rights activists, as well as the objections of anti-abortion religious conservatives, some of whom have protested against the hiring of Singer at Princeton.

Sign that the academy's battlegrounds on freedom of expression have changed, Robert P. George, one of Singer's most savage critics and a keen Catholic curator, joined the Journal of controversial ideas& # 39; board. In a conversation with me, Minerva also cited two articles that generated anger mainly on the left – Bruce Gilley's "The Case of Colonialism" and Rebecca Tuvel's "Defending Transracialism" – as reasons for the need for new outlet.

McMahan, Singer and Minerva claim no ideological motivation for the newspaper or any desire for a troll. "The magazine will have credibility only if its articles meet the highest standards of academic rigor," wrote the authors in reply to Malik in The Guardian. "The ideas in the articles must therefore pass an unusually meticulous review process."

To find out more, I've collaborated with Minerva, a bioethicist at Ghent University, on the journal, its causes, the problems it's trying to solve and its ability to solve them effectively. The transcript has been changed for length and clarity.

Dylan Matthews

Tell me a little about the origins of this project: Who had the idea in the beginning? Was there a spark that convinced you that it was necessary?

Francesca Minerva

I have co-authored an article in 2012 published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and it was an article discussing the similarity between the moral status of newborns and fetuses. This attracted a lot of attention, and I received a lot of death threats, insults and problems.

I started to think about the implications of this new phenomenon: people threatened with death because of what they write in specialized journals. So I wrote another article that was published in bioethics in 2014, should people start publishing anonymous newspapers to avoid these consequences, to avoid facing attacks not directed against their arguments, against their newspaper, but especially against themselves?

There was an academic symposium on the article; Michael Tooley, among the respondents, suggested creating a website on which writers can send articles that they wish to publish but that they find too controversial.

I thought maybe there should be a diary combining these elements so that people could directly send these documents. We do not suggest that people should publish anonymously. We suggest that people, if they wish, should have the opportunity. Philosophers have published anonymous works for centuries.

I started thinking about that and talking about it with Peter and Jeff, and we also kept track of what was going on. There have been some other similar cases of people who have had problems because of what they have published. You have probably heard of the Tuvel case, the colonialism document, and so on. We thought we should create this magazine where people can send articles that they are afraid they can not be published in other journals.

Dylan Matthews

You said that the journal will be interdisciplinary, but you are all three moral philosophers. What kind of disciplines do you want to include? Will it just act on normative arguments, like your controversial article, or empirical work?

Francesca Minerva

I hope it will be a truly interdisciplinary journal. I hope it will not even be a majority of philosophers. If people want to send an article and work in astronomy, they should be allowed to do it. There are controversial issues in many areas, but many philosophers are not involved.

Articles submitted should have some relevance to society. Theoretical mathematics and physics without impact on society would not be the type of article we were looking for. We are really interested in interdisciplinary research and hope to have contributions from a very large number of countries. We are not only interested in what is happening in Europe, North America or Australia, but around the world.

We believe that this journal should really give a voice to people from countries where academic freedom is worse than that of Western countries. We hope this is something that will give voice to people in countries where academic freedom is a right that is violated very often.

[Ed. note: In a follow-up email, Minerva clarified, “We talked a bit more with the other editors about how interdisciplinary it should be, and I think the journal in the end is going to be less interdisciplinary than I thought, at least at the beginning, since indeed we don’t have competences to evaluate articles in astrophysics at the moment.” She said she hoped it would not be “only” philosophers, even if they are a majority.]

Dylan Matthews

You are also involved in Jonathan Haidt's Heterodox Academy, which tries to fight what it sees as a closed-minded, mainly left-wing academic bias. Do you think the goals of both efforts are similar or different?

Francesca Minerva

I am only a member, so I do not actively contribute, but I support their project. I think they are, in a sense, motivated by the same kind of concerns about academic freedom, that they have different points of view.

What they are trying to do is to ensure that students, particularly in universities, are exposed to many different points of view and learn to deal with disagreements. I think they are right, that it is important to teach students to disagree gracefully. If they are not exposed to opposing points of view, it is very difficult for them to learn. The goal is more educational and is aimed more at university students.

Instead, our journal has more to do with research. We try to promote academic freedom at the research level. But I can see a lot of interests that overlap and share.

Dylan Matthews

I ask you because Haidt often tells me that right-wing ideas or conservative ideas are not sufficiently represented in the academic world, which seems to me to be a somewhat different kind of concern with respect to academic freedom than To try to prevent attacks, McMahan. , and Singer have received for your writings on infanticide and disability, which did not come from the academic left, but from a mix of Catholic social conservatives and disability rights groups.

How much do you think these problems are similar?

Francesca Minerva

I'm not really concerned about the percentage of conservative or progressive ideas on campus. Haidt works in the United States and I have never worked in the United States. I've always been based in Australia or Europe and I think the environment is very different.

Honestly, I do not think you need conservative teachers to teach conservative arguments. A good teacher is a teacher who can present both arguments, or a variety of arguments or different points of view on each subject. When I teach abortion, I'm not just asking students to learn the arguments for choice, my own point of view. I also explain the pro-life arguments, which I do not share, but it does not matter. Students must be exposed to all approaches to a given problem. Otherwise, they can not understand its complexity.

Dylan Matthews

You alluded to Rebecca Tuvel's paper, which argued that the arguments for transgender tolerance should also apply to "transracial" people like Rachel Dolezal, and to Bruce Gilley's paper defending colonialism. How much do you consider these explosions to be similar to those of your work? From the outside, the forces that pushed back in each of these cases seemed to me quite distinct, in their political valence and their motivations.

Francesca Minerva

This is true. The paper I co-wrote, most of the people who reacted negatively to this question were conservatives, religious, right-wingers and non-academics. That does not mean that people on the left D & # 39; agreement with us. We managed to upset everyone, probably.

We have not had the kind of very negative reaction in the university that Tuvel and others have had, and that seems to be more from progressive left-wing academics. I do not think Tuvel has received a lot of hate mail and death threats from the public.

But that's the point, I think. People tend to focus on "it's the right, it's the left, who are the bad guys?" This is not the right question. The important question is: what is the motivation of these people, whatever their political convictions? The desire to silence people who do not agree with you is always bad. It does not matter if it comes from the left or the right.

Many people ask me this newspaper: what are you fighting against? I just think people should try to engage in discussions and avoid silencing the people they disagree with.

The value of academic freedom is purely instrumental. It is fundamental to get closer to the truth. If you can see things from a different perspective, you will better understand your own arguments and how the world works. It can never happen if people are silenced.

I think some people have a somewhat opportunistic approach to academic freedom, saying, "Oh, academic freedom is good, but we need to silence people who are going against my views." I do not think that's the right attitude.

Dylan Matthews

Do you think that the journal risks becoming a place where more privileged academics cater to vulnerable groups? Rebecca Tuvel's newspaper has been criticized for providing transphobic help; Bruce Gilley's paper has been criticized as an apology for colonial violence; your co-founders, McMahan and Singer, have both been criticized for their attitude toward people with disabilities.

And by reading some of the reactions to the newspaper, I see a lot of concern that the paper will lead to more: white (often male) people who use anonymity to undermine the causes of vulnerable populations. I am curious to know how you react to this criticism.

Francesca Minerva

I think one of the problems with the examples you mentioned is that there was a misunderstanding of what they were actually saying. I have read the work of Peter and Jeff with precision, and their books and articles do not contain any articles aimed at aggravating the situation of vulnerable groups.

One thing is to discuss whether a severe disability can affect different levels of well-being and whether it would be better not to create a future disabled person, as argued by Peter and Jeff and many others, and another completely different. The point is to say that already existing disabled people should be targeted and aggravated, which no one in the right mind would say, because no valid argument could ever support such an opinion.

Of course, people disagree and argue that disability does not affect levels of well-being, or may diverge on the types of disabilities that negatively affect well-being and those who do not, or on measures that society should implement to reduce eliminate the impact of certain disabilities on well-being, otherwise people may not agree on the assertion that well-being is relevant to decide which individuals to create. These are all legitimate opinions that have been discussed and have contributed to enriching this area of ​​research and possibly improving the understanding of disability.

I do not think that censoring people who share these points of view would have improved the understanding of disability. It is through disagreement with others that we move forward, learning to look at things we may have overlooked in the beginning.

Dylan Matthews

You said in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "I do not think you should write an article about the political implications of what you write." This is a very interesting thought, and particularly interesting in moral philosophy, where & # 39; It is a question of thinking about the moral implications of certain actions, notably by publishing scientific articles.

Should moral concerns of this type affect academic investigations or should you stick to such questions as "Is it moral to publish this" as long as you seek the truth?

Francesca Minerva

What I meant was that I should not think, "Will this argument please right or left?" This is not the right way to address an issue. You should try to find the truth.

I can speak for my own paper on the moral status of newborns. I did not write my article thinking, "Who will be upset, pro-life or pro-choice?" It was not what I thought. I was trying to explain why I thought there were similarities and why I thought it was morally relevant.

Dylan Matthews

In fact, this paper could be a good example of the question I'm asking myself. Obviously, you were not writing it with the intention of saying that people were going to kill babies. But if you have learned, purely hypothetical, that somebody made kill a baby after reading, or a few people did, or if Kermit Gosnell, the doctor who kills children in Philadelphia, was inspired by the article – would that change your opinion on the moral correctness of the publication of the article?

Francesca Minerva

It was an article on different moral statuses. Why, at birth, do we think that the moral status of the baby changes completely? What are the properties that make it possible to have a moral status, and therefore a right to life? Philosophers have discussed this forever. There are a lot of papers on this subject.

I do not think anyone can read the newspaper – it's not a political document. There is a huge difference between discussing the moral status of newborns and applying it. There are countries where neonatal euthanasia is possible; this discussion will be relevant in these cases.

But I see a difference between what philosophers do and what scientists do. It is not as if you are informing, exactly, of a pragmatic practice. It is important to state the arguments and discuss them. The practical implications are a different problem.

People have to make laws and discuss them, they have to discuss them with the doctors – there is a whole concrete world. There are so many other things to take into account that it would be really absurd to say that someone was inspired by this document. Only a person who has not read the newspaper can draw this conclusion. Someone who reads the newspaper knows that this is a theoretical discussion about moral status.

Dylan Matthews

I am also curious about the reasons for anonymity in this journal. In some cases, this is perfectly legitimate: it makes perfect sense to want to avoid abuse and threats, especially in your profession.

But it seems that people could write papers for the Journal of controversial ideas just because they do not like to be criticized. This does not seem conducive to an academic inquiry.

I am curious to know if you feel the need to distinguish between articles written under a pseudonym because you think you are in danger if you put your name there, as opposed to articles written under a pseudonym because you do not want to to be fairly criticized.

Francesca Minerva

This is very unlikely, because of the obstacles that prevent publishing under a pseudonym. The university job market is extremely competitive. Your chances of succeeding are very low. And your status among your peers is largely determined by your publications. So, writing an article with a pseudonym will not help your career. You do not have an incentive to do so unless you think it's an idea to debate and you're generously using your free time, without the project you're being paid for, to discuss this idea that you think relevant. and should be discussed.

I think it's highly unlikely that anyone would use his free time to write a document that he does not consider important to write using a pseudonym, simply because he does not want to be criticized. It would be a bit of a strange choice. I'm not saying that this is impossible or will never happen. In practice, very few people would have the resources to do it.

As Editors, we will select only those articles that we believe deserve to be published, and will only publish one issue per year. This is going to be a hyper selective newspaper. This will probably go through the most difficult peer review practice currently in academic journals because we believe that quality is very important given the review we have in mind. Someone who is wasting his time writing a very bad article just to spark controversy seems very unlikely to me. And it seems very unlikely that this peer review process will succeed.

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