Don't Cancel Philosophers

More musings, months after the fact, on the Kershnar affair and similar cases

Part 1: Incentives, Heuristics, and Careful Thought

I wrote a while ago about the disgraceful Kershnar affair . For those who are unaware, Kershnar said some controversial things in a YouTube video, which lots of people heard and got very upset about. This lead to his employment being jeopardized and his livelihood threatened.

There are lots of good, principled reasons to be in favor of free speech. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, one who has the truth has nothing to fear, echochambers are bad, and so on. Yet there’s another very good reason to oppose cancelling philosophers—or any serious thinkers for that matter.

The problem is, our societal heuristics for determining when a statement deserves cancellation are just not that good. People’s attitudes about a statement being unacceptable are in large part shaped by their feeling of uncomfortability when they hear the statement. This just isn’t a great way of determining if statements are actually outrageous.

There’s an obvious reason why this is the case. If one is intellectually serious and has a modicum of intellectual depth, they will have some views which they’d be uncomfortable trotting out, sans context, at dinner parties with woke crowds. If one really thinks—drives their own intellectual rudder, rather than letting it be steered by the winds of their acquaintances, they’ll have some views that are controversial and that sound indefensible out of context.

I’ll give some examples of views that I hold that I wouldn’t be happy defending at a dinner party.

1. There are an infinite number of possible worlds in which one should torture infants for fun.

2. There are plausibly many examples of even the most heinous crimes—rape, murder, torture, and so on—that ended up being for the best.

3. The utility monster should be permitted to eat people.

There are more views, some of which I’m hesitant to share, given that many people know the person who runs the blog.

The views expressed above—especially the fourth one—are certainly the types of things for which people get cancelled¹.

If one really has never had a thought that they’d be uncomfortable expressing in a woke crowd, I think very little of them. They clearly have never had an interesting, original thought. If one actually, truly thinks, they will necessary break from the intellectual orthodoxy on at least some issues.

So cancelling philosophers has a truly devastating chilling effect. It requires that philosophers either don’t have interesting thoughts, or, if they do, they must keep those thoughts relegated to the recesses of their own mind—never shared or challenged.

This is a very effective propaganda method. Causing people to fear expressing views that break from the intellectual orthodoxy is a recipe for disaster. Ideally, we want people to produce hard to refute, heterodox views. If views like those of Singer about the moral salience of animals get silenced, on the grounds of being ableist for comparing mentally disabled humans to animals, then the argument from marginal cases—one of the best arguments against our treatment of animals to date—will be ignored.

David Lewis’ modal realism is a truly bizarre idea. It says that every possible world is as real as ours—they all exist concretely. Lewis argued for this thesis admirably in his 1986 book, On the Plurality of Worlds. While I don’t think his view is correct, it significantly improved the way in which philosophers think about possible worlds, properties, and much more.

Lewis’ modal realism is the type of philosophical idea that is relatively inoffensive. But let’s imagine that it had been offensive—so offensive that it would be scoffed at. In that case, it would likely not have been published, and there would have been very valuable advances that would never have been made.

The truth is often very weird, and even when weird arguments aren’t true, they often raise important points. If we bar all ideas that are as strange as modal realism, whenever they have results that make us slightly uncomfortable, we’ll miss out massively on important ideas.

We can’t just deduce a priori which weird views will be correct. Sometimes, the truth isn’t as it seems. We should expect this to be the case in the ethical domain, just as much as it is in the scientific domain. Thus, we can’t trust our intuitions about which ideas are too crazy to be worth considering. If modal realism is worth considering, despite its craziness, then other theories are too! The history of philosophy shows that the weird views often turn out to be correct.

But it’s even worse. As I pointed out in my original article, Kershnar’s views about adult child sex aren’t actually that far outside the orthodoxy. The real problem was that he poorly phrased the point that he was making to be maximally blunt. This is a disaster. Philosophers shouldn’t have to be make the types of caveats befitting politicians or drug companies before they make a controversial point.

The rational lesson to draw from the Kershnar affair, for one who is a philosopher with controversial views, is that it’s unwise to state ones controversial views, especially when one is outside of the echochamber, in academia. If they do state controversial views, there’s an incentive to say them in as dispassionate and muddled ways as possible, so to avoid controversy. This incentivizes adopting the moldbug approach—wrapping all controversial statements in a layer of rhetoric and irrelevant digressions so that only one’s most avid fans will actually read the controversial bits.

It’s important to consider the secondary effects of a cancellation. The typical thought process seems to be

1. This person has said something that is vaguely problematic.

2. Therefore, they should be cancelled.

However, not only does the second not follow from the first, when we treat people saying bad things as a sufficient justification for cancelling them, it creates terrible incentives. Cancellers thus need to think more like economists.

Part 2: Defending the Indefensible

When analyzing a cancellation, the most common accusation is that a person has views that are indefensible. The cancel mob takes this to be a sufficient justification for cancelling people. After all, if their statements are indefensible who would defend them.

However, the litmus test shouldn’t be whether we can immediately think of a defense of their statement. This is actually a really terrible standard for a few reasons. First, lots of things that we do all the time are indefensible. Today, while I was eating dinner, someone said a word and I repeated it quietly for no reason. I don’t know why I did that—I didn’t plan it out in advance. I just did it.

That action is indefensible. If I were on trial, I’d have no defense of why I did it. Fortunately, while that action was a bit strange perhaps, it’s not offensive. Yet the same principle holds. Generally, whenever one makes a statement, they don’t plan out in advance their statement before they make it. Many statements could easily be phrased better. If one in every ten thousand statements that a person makes are “indefensible” then anyone with zealous enemies will be cancelled in short order.

I can think of many times in my life when I’ve done embarrassing things—things that are indefensible in the relevant sense. We should be at liberty to do things—even minimally indefensible things—without being put into serious jeopardy. Given the ubiquity of banal interactions, not all the things we do can be defensible.

And yet there’s a second reason to defend the indefensible. It turns out that people are generally better at defending their statements than third parties. I couldn’t defend modal realism at all, prior to reading Lewis. Yet that didn’t make modal realism indefensible. Indefensibility is relative to an observer—an omniscient being could successfully defend any hateful view, no doubt.

Thus, without the full context, we really don’t know if a view is defensible. I recently was defending a person who had made a somewhat objectionable statement, and I only later realized that their statement had been a joke. The fact that it was a joke clearly exonerated the statement. However, having not been the person who made the joke, I had no idea that it was a joke.

Bentham had the idea of the panopticon, a clear center of a prison, where guards could watch the prisoners. Bentham thought that if the prisoners were constantly watched by police, eventually they’d police themselves. This is, in large part, how many of the norms around cancellation work.

No guards need to watch from the center of universities to make sure people don’t express controversial views. Instead, as long as people are unwilling to defend the views of those with views they’re uncomfortable verbally expressing and defending, they behave as if watched by guards.

Given robust first amendment protections, the chilling of speech comes less from explicit government censorship, and much more from the ways in which social norms chill speech. Thus, one should defend Kershnar’s right to speak his mind, even if they find his views indefensible. For in a free society, we must defend the indefensible.

1. Being Jewish, I’d be less likely to be cancelled for anti-semitism