The Journal of Controversial Ideas: An Interview with Jeff McMahan and Francesca Minerva

Recently, Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer created a new Journal of Controversial Ideas where scholars concerned about possible reactions to their work could publish anonymously. This idea has received both positive and negative reviews. To learn more about the journal, it’s purpose, and the reasons for its existence, I talked to McMahan and Minerva. Below, they address these topics as well as their response to the worries others have raised.

What led you to begin this journal?

Jeff McMahan: The idea for the journal came from Francesca Minerva.  Her motivation for creating it probably originated in her experience of receiving many death threats after publishing a co-authored paper defending the permissibility of early infanticide in a limited range of cases.  But she was also prompted to pursue the idea by the increasing number of incidents in which academics have been the targets of protest, personal abuse and vilification, boycotting, and other efforts to silence or discredit them because of ideas they have published or expressed in lectures or other media.  She asked Peter Singer and me if we would help her to create the journal and we agreed to do so.

Francesca Minerva: What Jeff said.  After I started thinking about threats to academic freedom coming from both the public and other academics, I became increasingly worried about the possible consequences of such state of affairs.  On several occasions, I had spoken with people working on climate change, and they had told me about the frequent hostile emails (and sometime even death threats) they had received from climate change deniers. I started wondering if perhaps research on climate change could have moved faster if people didn’t have to worry about this kind of reactions. And I started wondering about how often people choose not  to work on a certain topic because of fear, and about the possible implications of these choices for society at large.  I think academic freedom  has instrumental value . We need academic freedom in in order to get closer to the truth,  make progress, make the world a better place. So if researchers don’t feel like they have academic freedom, the implications for society  can be serious.

Some have voiced concerns about having a journal with anonymity, saying that it could be misused by people who want to put forth ideas without merit just to create trouble. How do you respond to this concern?

Jeff McMahan: Our aim in establishing the journal is simply to enable people to publish ideas that they reasonably expect will be regarded by some as offensive, immoral, or dangerous without fear of harassment.  Our main concern is that some people – particularly younger, untenured, or otherwise vulnerable academics – will be deterred from publishing important contributions to the discussion of controversial issues by fear of threats to their lives, well-being, or careers.  We intend to do all we can to ensure that articles in the journal will neither antagonize people nor increase the already alarming levels of polarization in contemporary Western societies.  As I have written elsewhere, we will publish only articles that are well and carefully reasoned and that provide necessary evidence for their conclusions.  We will not publish papers that are intentionally inflammatory or provocative, are written in a polemical style, or criticize or attack individual persons or groups.  It will be editorial policy to insist that criticisms advanced in articles be directed only against ideas and arguments and be articulated in a civil manner.  We also intend to have an unusually scrupulous process of peer and editorial review that will guarantee the intellectual and academic integrity of the work published.  Only if we enforce these editorial guidelines will the journal serve its purpose and establish its credibility.  We thus have strong incentives to ensure that our aims are not undermined by people who seek to exacerbate the very problems that have prompted us to establish the journal.  Anyone who doubts that our aims are as I have indicated should consult our own published work, in which we have tried to adhere to the precepts I have sketched.

Some of the criticisms of the journal that I have seen have claimed that pseudonymous publication allows people to circulate ideas without “taking responsibility” or “being accountable” for them.  In some cases, critics add the insinuation that the failure to accept responsibility is a symptom of cowardice.  I am uncertain what people mean by these suggestions, which are usually offered without elucidation.  I will assume that they do not mean that people should always be sufficiently courageous to publish under their own names, no matter how threatened they may feel – or, indeed, however threatened they may actually be.  I trust, for example, that our critics would not have rebuked the authors of anonymous samizdat in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  It is also doubtful that these critics mean that authors should accept legal responsibility and legal liability (for example, for libelous assertions).  The journal itself will do that.  If they mean only that authors should be willing to defend their arguments against objections, pseudonymity is no obstacle to that.  We will be willing to publish well reasoned replies to articles and to allow authors to respond to them.  Sometimes critics say that authors should take responsibility for their work seem to mean nothing more than that they should put their name on their works so that readers can judge by the author’s reputation whether the work is worth reading.  I agree that there is some value in this but I also think that ideas and arguments must ultimately stand or fall on their own merits.  Good ideas do not require custodians to take responsibility for them.

There is sometimes a certain irony in the criticisms that have been directed against the journal.  In the UK, for example, The Guardian published two different opinion pieces that were harshly critical of the journal and of anonymous publication, one of which said that authors should “be accountable for their ideas, willing to defend them in public, able to take criticism, even disparagement.”  Both suggested that authors who publish anonymously are seeking “freedom from consequence.”  Yet only a couple of weeks before these articles appeared, The Guardian itself published an article by a German student living in Saxony that describes how anti-fascist activists there feel threatened by the increasingly neo-Nazi culture that surrounds them.  The anonymous author writes in that article that “I prefer not to show my face, or to name the town I live in or the activist group I am part of – because there’s no need to put people at further risk.”  One wonders whether the two Guardian columnists who criticized us for seeking to offer anonymity for certain authors also criticized their own editors for providing it in this case.

Francesca Minerva: Nothing to add here, I completely agree with Jeff

What sorts of ideas are you hoping will find a voice in this journal which are not expressed elsewhere?

Jeff McMahan: I, for one, have no preconceived preferences for the sort of work that will be published in the journal except that it should have the usual virtues of originality, imagination or creativity, argumentative rigor, clarity, and so on.  Some people who have learned about our plans for the journal have made various unfounded assertions about what the contents will be.  One post on Twitter cited in a discussion on the Vox website reads “Hey y’all – a journal in which to anonymously ponder racist, sexist, transphobic, pro-colonialist, pro-exploitation ideas without fear of backlash.”  Other discussions have claimed that real purpose of the journal is to publish articles that defend eugenics.  In general, critics on the left assume that it will be a venue for the dissemination of conservative views while those on the right assume that it will be a vehicle for the propagation of left-wing views.  Both suspicions are mistaken.

Francesca Minerva: I hope the journal will attract very interesting submissions on topics we don’t know much about. We would like the journal to be quite inter-disciplinary, but we are mostly interested in topics that have relevance in society.  The goal of the journal is not to publish controversial papers qua  controversial. The goal is rather to publish interesting, original, well-written papers that discuss important ideas that happen to be controversial (therefore authors struggle to publish them in other journals)

Are there ways for people who value this work to get involved? If so, what are they?

Jeff McMahan: Because the Journal of Controversial Ideas will be an academic journal, I doubt that there will be ways for people to be involved other than those offered by academic journals in general.  The one exception I can think of would be for people with expertise in fields other than our own – philosophy – to volunteer to serve as reviewers for submissions in their areas of specialization.

Francesca Minerva: I think that supporting the journal, for instance talking about it on social media, sharing articles considered interesting once we start publishing is also a way of showing support and contributing to the success of the journal.  These are exciting times for academics, we now have more opportunities to share the results of our research and have more impact than we did in the past. I hope the Journal of Controversial Ideas will attract a larger public than just professional academics.

How will the submission process of the journal work?

Jeff McMahan: This will be determined by our publisher.  We have not yet issued a call for submissions.

Francesca Minerva: The journal will surely be at least double blind, perhaps even triple blind review if the publisher allows that and we have the necessary resources. We are considering the possibility of publishing the reports of the reviewers, as different people suggested.

What steps did you have to take to get the journal started?

Jeff McMahan: Really only three: (1) determining what our aims and editorial policies would be, (2) assembling an ideologically diverse but distinguished editorial board, and (3) selecting the best publisher or “platform.”  The latter process is still in progress.

Francesca Minerva: We have waited for quite a while before actually getting started. I have been thinking about this project since 2013. I had started being interested in academic freedom because of what had happened to me, so I wanted to make sure the problem didn’t look so big to me because I was personally involved. So I started observing, taking notes,  reading and writing about academic freedom. And only when I felt confident that this was not about me, but a very widespread issue, I decided that it was time to start this journal.

I imagine some people may say that while threatening scholars for voicing their views is wrong, the solution should involve changing this practice (i.e. threats). Creating this journal protects the contributors from direct attack, but doesn’t deal with the underlying cause of the problem. What is your response to this concern?

Francesca Minerva: I think that the journal will contribute to deal with the cause of the problem, or at least it’s our hope. I think the journal will prove that it’s important to discuss interesting ideas even when they are controversial. I hope it will show that trying to prevent controversial ideas from circulating is not helpful to anyone, and that learning to disagree gracefully is a key skill to develop.

Jeff McMahan: It is true that the journal does not directly address the underlying problem.  We hope it will be a temporary expedient that will eventually cease to be needed.  At the moment, however, intolerance of ideas that threaten certain dogmas or violate prevailing taboos seems to be increasing.  It may be only a matter of time, for example, before journalists in the US who criticize Trump begin to be physically attacked by people inflamed by Trump’s repeated claims that they are “enemies of the people.”  This rising intolerance on both ends of the political spectrum cannot be eliminated overnight and there is no single best means of ameliorating it.  We hope that the journal will contribute, if only by setting an example, to the establishment of a public culture in which controversial issues are addressed by reasoned argument rather than by intimidation and coercion.  But until that happens, we want to offer potential authors the option of pseudonymous publication of well-defended ideas that they might otherwise be deterred from publishing.  Do our critics really wish to deny people that option?

Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford.  He is the author of The Ethics of Killing and Killing in War.

Francesca Minerva is FWO Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Ghent (Belgium), Faculty of Philosophy and Moral Sciences.  She recently published The Ethics of Cryonics.