Apologies

Or how about we just all recognize that Krauss is a dick? I’m not sure what the point of pushing for an apology is here.

I can’t say that I agree with you that Whelan has adequately, or straightforwardly, apologised. It’s the subject of my Master’s dissertation, so I’m pretty genned up on what is considered to be the minimum required for a sincere apology, and I’m afraid his doesn’t qualify. I suppose it’s possible that he did better in the email he mentions.

Or how about we just all recognize that Krauss is a dick?

The post already did so, with the phrase “professor at GMU’s law school.”

Oh, and just like Whelan, Krauss publishes at a blog which doesn’t allow comments. It’s not that these guys don’t like pseudonymity in and of itself; it’s that they get punked by random internet guys.

Wrong thread.

– Interesting that opinions on this issue do not seem to correlate with being on the left or on the right.

– Not sure that Krauss’s behavior is really reprehensible. If, as Wheelan alleges, Blevins made basic mistakes about the law in his posts, a case could be made that this is relevant for the tenure committee. One can agree or disagree, but it doesn’t strike me as an obviously wrong statement.

There is little intellectual life in the comments section of this blog, which was the point of my comment

Res ipsa loquitur, as Jeeves would say.

Henry, re my accusations against the Manhattan Institute – who was it who hired Charles ‘Bell Curve’ Murray after he published that book?

Professor Farrell, I am not quite sure how to interpret this lengthy response. My comment to which you linked was not relevant to the issue for which you were criticizing me. That I (and my readers) comment on philosophically incompetent work in the New York Times is also of unclear relevance to the question of whether or not pseudonymous blogging is a good or bad thing, justifiable or not.

My view of the quality of comments here on philosophical topics is shared by some of your philosophically informed co-bloggers, even if they (as regular residents here) tend to be more cautious about how they express those concerns in public. I concede that there may be other comment threads in which the quality of the intellectual discussion is much higher, so I retract the too-broad generalization that I posted last night.

I have no objection to vituperative criticism (as long as it is sound), but it is a silly and cheap shot to link to a brief comment I posted on your blog and describe that as my “intellectual” contribution.

I spend no time at all “patrolling the boundaries” of philosophy. Philosophy has no clear boundaries, and even if it did, I do not set them and could not exclude anyone from them. Commenting on incompetent writing about philosophy is commenting on incompetent writing about philosophy: the comments are either sound or not. Deploring the association of Derrida with philosophy is expressing the worry about the effect on the discipline if intellectual charlatans are identified with the field. (I am as comfortable with my co-blogger Jason Stanley’s judgment that Derrida is just a bad philosopher, but I think it would be good for the field if he were not generally associated with the intellectual discipline by the educated lay public.) Producing rankings helps prospective students make well-informed choices that can affect their professional careers and thus their personal lives. All of the latter accounts for perhaps 2-3% of my time. What I spend most of my time doing is teaching and scholarly writing.

I wasn’t asking for your opinion on my professional qualifications which would, as you note, be irrelevant in any case.

But the real puzzle is how your strange detour into the boundaries of philosophy bears any relationship to the issue of pseudonymity in cyberspace, which I honestly thought was your subject. Here’s what I have to say about that:

http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2009/06/thoughts-on-anonymity-and-pseudonymity-in-cyberspace.html

I still have no idea whether you have any interesting thoughts on the subject, or whether you just want to wag your finger at me. I am not at all interested in the latter, but would welcome any substantive contribution you want to make to the debate about anonymity in Cyberspace prompted by the Whelan/Blevins incident.

As a taster for Brian’s “thoughts” about anything, these various posts are monumentally self-important whiny fail, aren’t they, kids? He can’t write and he can’t read.

My view of the quality of comments here on philosophical topics is shared by some of your philosophically informed co-bloggers, even if they (as regular residents here) tend to be more cautious about how they express those concerns in public.

That’s funny. I thought that it was “a norm of fairness” that if you want to criticize “someone’s ideas, knowledge, and competence, do so under your own name, so that you are as vulnerable to critical scrutiny as the person you attack.” But maybe it doesn’t count if Professor Leiter does it for you?

Ooh la la, Mr Entitlement Issues pulls rank. He only shares his “substantive thoughts” with the titled intellectual nobility, you know! What a gent!

Matt-

My point, which Brian understood quite clearly, is that by saying that unnamed CT contributors had criticized the quality of philosophy comments here, he was either saying they had engaged — if they asked him to announce their views — or engaging on their behalf — if they didn’t — in behavior that he himself had just said was unethical. To his credit, he corrected this.

Brian-

I’m afraid Lemuel Pitkin is a pseudonym. Some of us have (or used to have, in my case) jobs that absolutely preclude taking part in public online discussions. I can’t accept a set of rules for the public sphere that would ban many (most?) people from equal participation. There are some plausible arguments that people should have to use their real names in these discussions (I’m thinking of dropping the pseudonym myself, now that I’m back in grad school) but they’re a bit too close to the arguments for restricting the franchise to property owners for my tastes.

Lemuel- to my mind it was completely clear that Leiter was referring to the criticism made by the philosophers who are members (it’s easy enough to see who they are) in actual threads. I suppose he could have said this even more explicitly, but it hardly seemed necessary. Referring to someone via a description, especially when it’s an obvious one, isn’t like using a pseudonym at all. Even if the criticism had been made to him personally and not on this very site, and he was reporting it, it wouldn’t be the same thing as being attacked by someone using a pseudonym, as the philosophers here are all easily identifiable. So, I really don’t think the cases are at all similar.

Lemuel- since it was quite plausible to understand him to be referring to comments made within the last few days on posts still on the main page by these three, I’ll say yes. But still, even if not, even if he was referring to private conversation, it still doesn’t at all fit with the behavior he’s criticizing. I think that’s perfectly obvious and that you’re letting your disagreement with that position get in the way of your reasoning here.

This is a rather strange argument. As far as I can see, there’s basically one argument for pseudonymous blogging (it may allow more voices, since some people who would be punished or fear they would be punished for their views or writing can contribute to the conversation) and one argument against it (it may lower the quality of discourse because people are not required to stand behind their words*). Both these arguments may be true, in which case one makes a judgment about which effect is more important–the increased participation or the decreased quality.

But this argument is really besides the point. The question Whelan’s actions (and Leiter’s attempted actions) raise is whether people have the right to enforce their judgment on others. Perhaps Whelan and Leiter are right that pseudonymity drags down the level of discourse in the blogosphere, but I fail to see how it follows that they should attempt to destroy the careers of their intellectual sparring partners. Even if Publius and Juan Non-Volokh were wrong, even if, in the opinion of Whelan and Leiter, they should have been using their own names, why should Whelan and Leiter’s judgment prevail? If they don’t want to engage with pseudonymous bloggers, they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t impose their choices on other readers (who may be deprived of commentary they find valuable) or on their interlocutors.

Frankly, I find this obvious.

*I say “may” in both cases because I am not convinced of the empirical truth of either claim. Given the quality of Brian Leiter’s contributions to blog conversations, I doubt the correlation between blogging under one’s own name and a high level of discourse. I’m rather more sympathetic to the first claim.

For example, Brian, in the recent post that he links to above, casually outs another academic who has adopted a blogging pseudonym, under the excuse that this academic’s real identity is “no secret.” As it happens, I am aware that this academic doesn’t mind that many people know their real identity – but has repeatedly tried to ensure that their real identity isn’t published on the WWW, where it could be discovered by students or others in a casual Google search.

Henry- Hilzoy herself has now posted that her identity is “no secret”, liking to the claim on her wikipedia page. See here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_06/018518.php at the bottom

and here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Bok

Given this, I think the charge that Leiter “casually outs another academic” in his post, which came after Hilzoy’s, is at least misleading.

Also- I can’t say for sure since the link to Lieter’s old blog at Texas from the Virtual Stoa isn’t good (I think the archives moved to his new blog but I’m not going to bother to check if you aren’t) but I’m about 99% sure that the reference in the Virtual Stoa link is to Kieth Burgess-Jackson, a tenured professor who, among other things, developed a web page at one point devoted only to personally attacking Leiter, including saying things about his family and children. To say that that site demonstrated an unstable and disturbed mind would be a serious understatement.

“but I’m about 99% sure that the reference in the Virtual Stoa link is to Kieth Burgess-Jackson”

If it’s Keith Burgess-Jackson – I remember something about this myself – then it should be said that the case seemed potentially clinical. I also think that, at this point, Leiter can be pardoned for identifying Hilzoy by her real name. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, after her outing, that there was any point in not doing so. I might easily have put the two items together in a post about the pseudonymity issue.

I’m firmly with Henry and Hilzoy on the pseudonymity issue. It seems clear to me that the cost of having lots of pseudonymous nonsense (which you can just ignore) is low, compared to the benefits that pseudonymity can bring (to individuals and to the public sphere) which can be very high. It’s good for academics, but it’s really good in other areas, where pseudonymous bloggers can act as whistleblowers in potentially more important ways. (There are areas where punishments from those with professional power over you are even more severe than in academia.)

I don’t really agree with Jacob that this cost-benefit analysis is beside the point. It seems to me precisely the point. It doesn’t seem to me that people have any general ‘right to pseudonymity or anonymity’ – a species of privacy right – to any higher degree than is generated, by implication, by other, encoded legal rights. (Like rights to have your medical records private, to vote privately, so forth. Not to have your ISP tell just anyone who you are. If someone were to pass a law, or hand down a legal judgment, that pseudonymous bloggers have a ‘right to privacy’ to preserve their pseudonymity, things would change, of course. But that would be a big legal shift.) Whelan didn’t commit any crime, by outing Publius. What he did was violate – and thereby weaken – a norm that is, I would say, clearly on balance a good one: tending to produce much more good than harm.

One thing that makes things complicated is that our intuitions about this are caught up in our sense of the ethics of ‘outing’, but there are actually big differences. We have a strong sense that sex is private. Period. (If you want it to be.) Sex is just special that way. (Hence our conventions about clothing, among other common arrangements, placements of walls and windows, etc.) Expressions of opinions about the law are not presumptively private in the same way. We also have a strong sense that hypocrisy and intentionally deceptive speech are the most plausible warrants for violating the general norm of protection for pseudonymity and anonymity. If you can make a plausible case, just by pointing to facts about an author, that the author probably doesn’t really believe what he or she is saying, then that is a pretty good argument that no one else should believe it, at least not on the basis of whatever this author has said. So these sorts of personal exposures are intellectually justified on grounds that it is always reasonable to rebut speech with excellent reasons for not believing it, if such can be provided. The thing is: sex and hypocrisy are often cozy bedfellows. So we get conflicted. On the other hand, in the case of the pseudonymous law professor: there is no strong privacy right on just plain ‘such things are private, like my private parts’ grounds. But there is obviously also no argument to be made that the facts about the author weaken the plausiblity of what the author is saying. Quite the contrary. The fact that he is a law professor can only incidentally strengthen the plausibility of what he is saying.

So we fall back on our cost benefit analysis, I think. On the whole the norm produces more good than bad, so it is a good norm, and should be observed. So I guess I’m a consequentialist about norms of pseudonymity.

The points jacob makes about the Whelan case fall under the general ‘cost benefit analysis’ rubric, as I was conceiving it. I was taking them to be part of that analysis. So I guess we don’t disagree.

I think it’s important to make the analogy with the sex case because, for some people, the joy of pseudonymity is a species of thrilling private fun. And I suspect they may feel (a bit vaguely) that it should be protected on ‘why shouldn’t I be able to do this thing I like in private’ grounds? I do agree that the fun of being pseudonymous is a good. (As the Cat said: fun is good.) But I think, ultimately, we should not think of the pseudonymity issue as one of privacy rights (set apart over and against cost-benefit analysis, in an apples/oranges sort of way). So it’s actually more helpful to identify the justification for the norm as a cost-benefit analysis.

It seems clear to me that the cost of having lots of pseudonymous nonsense (which you can just ignore) is low

But I think Brian Leiter’s argument is that you shouldn’t have to ignore nonsense directed at you. If someone fills pages and pages of hurtful non-sense about me on the web under a pseudonym, it seems that I should have the right to try to find who this person is, including by publicizing my efforts. Whether I have the right to publicize my findings is admittedly another matter.

Indeed, I think there might be a hint of contradiction in the position of the posters of Crooked Timber upon this: you guys (rightly, in my view) require a valid e-mail address in order to comment and that pseudonym do not change without notice, so you (again rightly in my view) ask that commenters be not pseudonymous (to you, even if they remain so for the community of readers). In that case, you apparently judged that this restriction was worth the slightly lower level of diversity this entails (and again, I agree with you). Now, the big difference is that you are at home here, while Whelan and Leiter seemingly wish to see the rules extended to the web at large, but isn’t the rationale fundamentally the same?

I don’t see hypocrisy either, and apologize if I somehow conveyed this message, only (maybe) a (small) contradiction between believing that pseudonymity and the assorted enhanced diversity is beneficial for the web at large but detrimental for the commenting section of CT. That said, I am in favor of freedom of speech, but would promptly kick out of my house someone whose speech I disapprove of, so I suffer from the same contradiction (if it exists). In the end, and in particular on practical grounds, I guess I broadly agree with you (I surely do about the case discussed here).

However, I must confess I could not say what level of abuse I would personally tolerate on the web before trying to figure out who was behind the pseudonym. It seems that it could be relatively low (and that’s one reason why I could not have a regular opinion blog).