Regardless of your feelings about Nietzsche, you have to concede that his On the Genealogy of Morals was a novel and refreshing approach to the study of the institutions of praise and blame. In that lyrical and dialectical text, Nietzsche aims to ferret out the historical vicissitudes of the meaning of the terms “good” and “bad/evil.” It strikes me that a new moral criterion for assessing actions has ripened to the degree that it also warrants a genealogy. I am here referring to the emergence of “comfortable” and “uncomfortable” as terms of moral evaluation.
I detected a “signpost to the right road” to understanding the evolution of the comfortable/uncomfortable dichotomy while listening to the complaints about the touchy-feely behavior of former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The women who bemoaned Biden’s tactile proclivities stopped short of charging him with harassment. In fact, they even refrained from questioning his intentions, save to say that Biden made them feel “uncomfortable.” But let’s not mince words—the reproach was that Biden did something wrong.
The Biden case aside, when it comes to someone who insists that they have been made to feel uncomfortable, it would be parlous in the current climate to ask, “Well do you think this should have made you uncomfortable?” Jabbed with this question, the aggrieved party might clench his or her jaw and retort, “How dare you question the validity of my experience!” But are judgments about being made to feel uncomfortable infallible, in the sense that anyone who makes them cannot be requested to justify their discomfiture?
It is hard to avoid a sense of culpability when charged with making someone feel uncomfortable. Decades ago, I started an appointment as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT. When I strode up to the secretary’s desk to pick up my keys, she snapped her hand up and commanded, “Stand five feet away, you’re making me feel uncomfortable.” I obeyed her request but was chagrined by the much less than welcoming attitude. After all, I made no attempt at a handshake or any form of physical contact but only muttered something like, “Hi, I am the new postdoc and was told that I could get the keys to my office here.” I have no idea why she laid down an invisible fence around her desk, but her sternly stated, “You’re making me uncomfortable” certainly made me feel like a creep.
Genealogically speaking, I suspect that the sneakily evaluative term “uncomfortable” is an outcropping of what the late Philip Rieff baptized the “triumph of the therapeutic.” On my reckoning, it was in the world of the couch that therapists first started gently asking their clients if talking about such and such made them feel uncomfortable. As Rieff predicted, this language and much more of the therapeutic mindset would seep into the culture at large. More to the point, however, it was in the therapeutic context that we began to talk not just about chairs and beds being comfortable or un-, but language, claims, and behavior as well.
The terms comfortable and uncomfortable are aesthetic in their origin; however, they now often resonate with normative implications, which seem to me to be a category mistake and a cause for confusion. After all, when you grumble that I have said or done something wrong, it is perfectly in order for me to defend myself; however, when instead you furrow your brow and say that I am making you feel ill at ease, what am I to do? Deny your experience? Or even worse, hint that you are wrong to feel the way you do?
Considered as value judgments, comfortable and uncomfortable can also be poisonous to our capacity for relatedness. Last week, I gave a talk on Kierkegaard to a study group at a church. Afterwards, the pastor approached to thank me. We began to stretch our arms out towards one another, but with the Biden episode in my short-term memory, I instinctively pulled back and asked if she was “comfortable” with a hug. She smiled and replied, “Of course.” But the feeling that compelled me to ask her not only detracted from the spontaneity of the gesture, but it also created a waft of slimy resonances. At the risk of conflating the issues of comfort and consent, I have no qualms with someone who uses their agency to indicate that they would be uncomfortable with an embrace. And yet many believe that it would be unfair to expect people to state their disinclination so directly.
Nietzsche characterized moralists, both theoretical and otherwise, as a stealthy clan. However, with the terms comfortable/uncomfortable being elevated to their present status, he would rightly observe that in many cases the individual who protests about being made to feel uncomfortable is putting doors and curtains around their true intent, which—let’s be clear—is to claim that some statement or behavior is morally wrong.
Photo: Vice President Joe Biden and Mariska Hargitay watch as an advocate demonstrates the new web chat feature, at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, in Austin, Texas, Oct. 30, 2013. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)
Gordon Marino
Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. His The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age will be published by HarperOne in April.
I understand morality in a Kantian way, and ethics in an Aristotelian way. I think that morality and ethics are two distinct domains (Plato’s Euthyphro makes this point), and thus, it would make sense that two different sets of criteria determine what is right or wrong in each domain. Historically, we, in the West, have conflated these two domains. But this is wrong.
I think morality is a set of rules that applies to individuals qua individual, and ideally, the rules should also come from each individual. Depending on what each individual’s starting principle or premise is, each person can end up with a very different set of rules and conclusions about what sorts of actions are morally “right” or “wrong”. That said, this type of right/wrong is like math; it isn’t about good or bad. It is about a conclusion being logically true or false based on accepted premises.
On the other hand, ethics are guidelines for interpersonal engagement. In ethics, comfort levels and customs and even cultural/contractual expectations can determine what is good/bad behavior.
So, in conclusion, I don’t think that ‘comfort’ is a new way of evaluating whether something is ‘morally’ praiseworthy or blameworthy. Rather, it can be a way of evaluating whether an action or behavior is ethical or good/bad in the ethical sense. And different people just have different comfort levels about certain things. Just deal with it, I’d say. This is what it is to live in a multi-cultural environment.
Creepy is creepy.
We know it when we see it!
We might expand this topic to a reflection on the role of the philosopher in society.
Most people will be content to chant the group consensus in unison with their neighbors. Such a comfortable safe process is likely necessary to maintain a stable cultural environment which everyone can count on, and anyway, it may be all most people are capable of.
Such a stability agenda would ideally be balanced by those who can explore the boundaries of the group consensus in an intelligent thoughtful manner. The group consensus is not always correct, and without some process of inspection and challenge it may remain incorrect for a long time.
A problem for the professional philosopher is that challenging the group consensus tends to make people uncomfortable, and making people uncomfortable tends to be bad for business. And so what often happens is that professional philosophers will strike a rebellious pose in relation to some topic that almost everyone in their social class already agrees with, such as the need for diversity, or support for the environment. It strikes this reader that there is a great deal of group consensus worship being published which is attempting to brand itself as philosophy, when really it is just safe preaching to the choir.
The question you raise, Dr. Marino, on whether feelings are a valid context or means for navigating questions of morality, certainly speaks to the flavor of the day: the vast world of the postmodern sensitive self, with all its good news and bad news.
Since this is a comment section and not a college paper, for the sake of brevity on my part, I am going to post this excerpt by Ken Wilber, which speaks to this postmodern pluralistic soup of feelings (particularly mine) over objectivity, exemplified in the question, “How dare you question the validity of MY experience?”
Ken Wilber:
“Pluralism, multiculturalism, and egalitarianism, in their best forms, all stem from a very high developmental stance, a postconventional stance (early vision-logic, postformal cognition, green meme, etc.), and from that postconventional stance of worldcentric fairness and care, the green meme attempts to treat all previous memes with equal care and compassion, a truly noble intent. But because it embraces an intense egalitarianism, it fails to see that its own stance – which is the first stance that is even capable of egalitarianism – is itself a fairly rare, elite stance (somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population). Worse, the green meme then actively denies the hierarchical stages that produced the green meme in the first place. Pluralistic egalitarianism is the product, we have seen, of at least six major stages of hierarchical development, a hierarchy that it then turns around and aggressively denies in the name of egalitarianism!
Under the noble guise of liberal egalitarianism – and under the sanction of the intense subjectivistic stance of this pluralistic and relativistic wave – every previous wave of existence, no matter how shallow, egocentric, or narcissistic, is given encouragement to “be itself,” even when “be itself” might include the most barbaric of stances. (If “pluralism” is really true, then we must invite the Nazis and the KKK to the multicultural banquet, since no stance is supposed to be better or worse than another, and so all must be treated in an egalitarian fashion – at which point the self-contradictions of undiluted pluralism come screaming to the fore.)
Thus, the very high developmental stance of pluralism – the product of at least six major stages of hierarchical transformation – turns around and denies all hierarchies, denies the very path that produced its own noble stance, and thus it ceases to demand hierarchical transformation from anybody else, and consequently it extends an egalitarian embrace to every stance, no matter how shallow or narcissistic. The more egalitarianism is implemented, the more it destroys the very capacity for egalitarianism.”
No “comment,” just a hearty “like”
The online realm can do a great job of making us feel uncomfortable. The anonymous nature of communications can liberate the secret inner jerk of many participants and all kinds of unpleasant barbs can be hurled in our direction. Sure, the Net often smells somewhat like a septic tank as a result, but there is a silver lining which can be mined.
In an environment where we typically will never come face to face with those shoveling insults towards us, we are most often freed from physical safety concerns, and thus can focus on taking responsibility for our own emotional state.
Did you just type that this is the stupidest comment you’ve ever read and I’m an imbecile who should just give up trying to say anything interesting?
Excellent! Thank you for that, because you’ve handed me an opportunity to examine the hole you just punched in my ego, and perhaps if I look closely enough I’ll see that it was really me who punched that hole.
And if I see that it is me who is hitting my emotional self with a hammer by choosing to experience your inconvenient words that way then I’m in control, and could perhaps decide to stop doing that.
Taking responsibility for our emotional experience of the Net often makes us feel uncomfortable, and so we typically take the easy way out and holler back, and thus remain a prisoner of every rude person we encounter online.
When we shift the blame for our emotional experience on to those who won’t support the nice little story we’ve created about ourselves what we’re really doing is giving them control over our minds, and making ourselves their bitch.
Such a needless surrender should probably makes us uncomfortable.
I agree that it’s accurate to look beyond words to what is being shown. But I also think that, while some people may game these new speech acts, the major issue is missed in this post.
It’s this: we have a communication problem in U.S. society. And some of the major roots of this problem are historically inherited positions of domination, mostly implicit and born out through effects that are anti-republican (in Pettit’s sense). Justifiably, many people – especially people ill-positioned – are queering the historically inherited norms and demanding a space of non-domination.
In the process, with norms being queered, communicative expectations are destabilized and unsure. Some things are ill-expressed or wonky. But what is being shown is legit. Yet part of the larger communication problem is that people who benefit from the privilege of the historical forms of domination don’t want to be inconvenienced.
Well, tough.
Where I agree with this post is that all too often, judgments fly as one-liners or simply just fly in diatribes, without the relational and practical capacities being developed to carry on communication and to work through disagreement. We absolutely do need to develop these capacities as a society. Both those who are un-self-aware and are privileged to remain that way and those who write them off in one-liners contribute to a general poverty of communication, that is, of working through disagreement in relationship.
That being said, it’s not on those who are dealing with historical domination to blame for bad communication. It’s the historical domination, those practices, and the people who willingly or indulgently repeat them. But not a whole hell of a lot is going to improve unless we all cultivate the thing we should be aiming for, which is good communication, working though disagreement in moral accountability to each other. So those who are privileged have an obligation and those who are not might find that it is prudent to point the confrontation with norms toward rich practices of communication (I think here of Kristie Dotson’s “open consolidation processes” extended to allow the privileged to come to terms with their moral situation).
Philosophers should be making the opposite case of whatever the group consensus is assuming at a particular moment in time. They should be doing this whether or not the group consensus is right, because we often don’t know what is right until the group consensus is challenged and tested.
Philosophers seem to be looking for a role to justify their existence. Performing a continual challenge to the group consensus seems a valuable role for philosophers to play, because key aspects of the group consensus are literally insane. But the price tag for performing this function will be unpopularity and perhaps unemployment.
To try to do myself what I’m suggesting others should do, here are two challenges.
1) Professional philosophers don’t seem very well positioned to play the role of challenging the group consensus, because doing so effectively threatens their ability to make a living as philosophers. And so it seems professional philosophers so often take the safe path and write eloquent marketing pieces on behalf of the group consensus of their academic community.
2) The traditional victim groups are now off the table as targets, but the urge to rank ourselves above somebody else still remains, so new targets must be found.
As example making a Hollywood movie which insults blacks or gays is now out of bounds, so instead we make movies which insult old white men or people living in trailer parks. The very same psychology which has long caused so many problems is still with us and is just adapting to a new environment. And so long as that psychology lives on the traditional victim groups are still in danger.
Political correctness is so often just another form of aggression which lacks the insight to see itself accurately in the mirror. Philosophers might help with this, if they weren’t so focused on being politically correct themselves.
Brave post. Refreshing.
Biden enjoyed a world in which powerful, nice guys don’t have to think about what it is like to exist in a situation where you are a target of sexual predators and at risk of sexual harassment simply by virtue of being a woman. That’s not a politically correct statement — that’s true.
Letting him and other nice guys know that they have to think twice about touching a woman’s body is completely reasonable in such a cultural situation, and they should welcome it. Reminding them that people exist in relationships, not as manipulable objects, is also reasonable and morally accountable.
What Prof. Marino got wrong is that comfort is part of relationship. He didn’t look past the awkwardness and frozen communicative environment of US society to see that voicing discomfort is part of demanding a real relationship born of equality. What he got right is wishing that there is thicker, more accountable, and more capacious communication that involves being forthright and open. But is he going to point fingers at the women who felt creeped out by Biden and blame them for not being more forthright? That wouldn’t be right and risks becoming victim blaming.
What Prof. Marino also got wrong is what we can learn from therapy. His view of therapy is inaccurate and plays again into conservative reactivity. Good therapy increases people’s ability to work through conflict with relational maturity. It doesn’t make one thin skinned and unable to handle discomfort.
Feeling creeped out does not automatically make one a victim.
In the Biden case, each of the women filing a complaint could have simply turned to Biden and said something like, “Thank you for your good intentions but I’d prefer not to be touched” a request I’m sure Biden would have immediately honored with apologies. Biden may be a little clueless sometimes, but he is not a creep, and thus there is no need to be creeped out by him.
It’s reasonable to wonder why such communication didn’t happen until a critical moment in Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. I don’t claim to know, but do claim it’s reasonable to ask this question. But, let’s notice how the political correctness police will not tolerate such common sense questioning.
Political correctness runs rampant on this site I’m afraid, and that’s not a very appropriate role for philosophers, imho. In fact, I’m creeped out by it! Yea, I’m a victim now too!
Mr. Tanny,
You’re missing the point. Biden doesn’t strike me as a creep either. But he is a guy who has enjoyed his male privilege.
That privilege is disintegrating, and that it is is morally right. In the process, parts of the privilege are coming back on him through ways he missed having fully good relationships with women.
Focusing on the women and blaming them for being cowards or inept is bad moral judgment.
Biden should, as he did, own that he operated in an old, unjust world and didn’t see things clearly like a lot of guys. And he should commit to good relationships going forward.
That’s where our focus should be, too, and where Prof. Marino’s essay missed the mark.
None of this is political correctness. That’s a term used to deflect attention away from what justice demands. I’m arguing for moral clarity and saying that Prof. Marino’s vision was blurry on this one — part in focus, part out.
Sincerely,
Looming over women and children from behind and sniffing/nuzzling their heads and necks in public where they can’t escape or protest seems like more than historical cluelessness–it strikes me as a symptom of some kind of behavioral disorder. What could his wife and children have thought of
those pictures?
Dear Dr. Bensick,
It could be in the particular case, and if so, then I defer to your judgment.
I took the general issue Prof. Marino raised to be about the language used to express discomfort when men touch women’s bodies without invitation, yet not in a way that is explicitly sexual harassment, in a way that occupies a vague area. I think Prof. Marino’s response wasn’t, ironically, capacious enough. I think he should have taken in the whole situation differently and focused on what is missing from good relationships in situations shaped by historical inequality.
How did you see the general issue and the response? And how did others in your center for the study of women?
Sincerely,
Dear Professor Bendik-Keymer,
Thank you for your comment. I wasn’t really judging, just wondering. I can’t think of any other instance of a public figure hanging over strangers in a public arena in an intimate way like this. By chance, I had the experience recently of being nuzzled by a stranger who believed or pretended to believe that spending time in the same public venues made us acquainted. He did this in public just because it was only in public he had access to me. It didn’t make me uncomfortable it made me angry and frustrated that nothing I said or did (changing habits) discouraged him from these persistent attempts. It did upset my sleep/work/life for some months. Finally I went out of town which gave me the break I needed to regain perspective. When I came back I simply said (more than I should have )”I wish you well but I have no time.” In retrospect why should i have wished him well? The point was I didn’t know him. Anyway, from then on I ignored his attempts to converse. I also advised the waitress at my new cafe that he was not a friend, regardless of what he told her. Winter came and thankfully he disappeared (it had turned out he was homeless). Another of the local homeless people approached me to tell me that the toucher was a “grifter” who preyed on isolated women for their money. (Of course why should I believe him any more than the other?) I went to the police but they said they couldn’t do anything, that he just “liked” me. This is off the subject but maybe not too much. This person was also older–seventy-four. I have read about people with alzheimers being sexually inappropriate in public (and private). So in a sense my supposition was might be on point–behavioral disorder.
Closer to Dr. Marino’s point:
I think I agree that “comfortable” and “un” can’t do the work they’re being made to. That they are only self-reports. If a person wants to accuse someone they need to have a misdeed in mind. Otherwise it’s in a sense TMI! Just because I am uncomfortable doesn’t mean someone in the vicinity made me that way. Correlation, not cause. On the other hand, if they spontaneously handle me, or ask a personal question, I am more than uncomfortable. This is harassment.
The problem is trying to find a middle ground that isn’t there. Maybe the Victorian’s had something with the idea of “insulting” a woman’s “honor”. If dueling were still in vogue, there might be be less harassment!
Sorry to reply to your question with a Henry James novel. Thank you again for your comment.
Best,
Carol Bensick
By the way, I do not speak for the Center for the Study of Women. We Research Affiliates are independent contractors.
Dear Dr. Bensick,
I’m sorry to hear of the experience out in your local café. I always wonder, when hearing stories like the one you relayed, whether in a society with basic support for all people things would be different with respect to people who may be trying to use affection to gain money.
I agree with both you and Prof. Marino that if people cannot get underneath their feelings to talk about the moral judgments involved, then things are going to get arbitrary. Emotions involve judgments, and one has to be able to unpack them for emotions to be part of good relationships.
I think Prof. Marino’s post is most constructive as a misguided response to the general condition in U.S. society of having bad communicative practices and capacities resulting in arbitrarianism. Emotional arbitrarianism would be one form. But in the context of patriarchy, I think it’s secondary to the patriarchal structure, where attention should be focused.
Here’s what I mean by this criticism:
If the expression, “I’m feeling uncomfortable” or “he made me feel uncomfortable” were only a report, I’d agree with you both. But I think the cases mentioned are speech acts made in situations where it was hard for people to be forthright or where adaptive preferences once deformed the situation and where, moreover, the adaptive preferences are starting to be challenged and released from their hold (new non-adaptive preferences are coming into view). The speech act signals that someone is asserting a limit. That in turn signals that the relational conditions between the people involved were not good.
What bothers me about Prof. Marino’s post is that he didn’t take in the whole situation and read it as a bad relationship in conditions of historical domination. When one does that, one doesn’t get picky with words, especially not with the people who are on the downside of the situation. One reads between the lines and puts things in context. One aims for justice, which in this case should be focused on dismantling patriarchy. I just think Prof. Marino got the focus wrong and as a result played into a reactionary position.
Thank you for your response and clarification. Also, noted about the CSW.
Sincerely,
Hi Mr. Bendik-Keymer,
You are doing a good job of articulating the group consensus of the academic community you are a part of. While I can admire your case making skill, in my opinion flag waving for a group consensus is not the ideal job for philosophers, because we already have millions of other people doing that job.
My understanding is that Biden’s personal political style has nothing to do with male privilege, because he physically engages both men and women with equal enthusiasm. It would be reasonable to argue his approach to politics should be less physical, but doesn’t seem reasonable to try to stamp the political correctness judgment upon him with accusatory phrases like “male privilege”. There are of course other very well known politicians where such judgments would be entirely appropriate.
You want us to educate men on appropriate behavior, but seem to reject that the women who objected to Biden’s style should be part of that process. You’ve not really made any case for why the women who found Biden’s contact unwelcome couldn’t have simply said so there and then on the spot, instead of waiting until years later to bring this up at a precisely critical moment in Biden’s campaign to liberate us from the current President, timing which doesn’t exactly seem like a favor to other women.
What I see is that every group consensus has a tendency to ride the ever swinging pendulum and eventually undermine itself with excess. As example, excessive enthusiasm for the political correctness blame and shame fad has in part caused almost half the country to vote for a now very powerful person who unapologetically brags about his assaults on women.
It seems that philosophers could make a useful contribution by subjecting every group consensus to a rigorous challenge to help us see both sides of every coin and avoid getting too carried away with simplistic “one true way” style thinking.
Mr. Tanny,
You’re still missing the point. There are power asymmetries built into our inherited practices. What your posts and Prof. Marino’s posts have done is to ignore them.
As to the rest, what I actually want is charitable interpretation and good moral judgment. What struck me with Prof. Marino’s post was how uncharitable it was and how much it missed the mark. At the same time, it did raise an important issue indirectly: the need for richer and more capacious communication between people.
Sincerely,
Sincerely,
You wrote, “There are power asymmetries built into our inherited practices.”
I don’t dispute this at all, though I’m not sure why this is the only valid point which can be discussed.
In the Biden case, the women involved had a great deal of power too, which some of them exercised in the precise timing of the announcement of their complaint. I see you are still ignoring this aspect of power, perhaps because to address it would put you at odds with the “women always right, men always wrong” politically correct group consensus of the moment?
What I see is that men and women have always competed for power. Men have typically done so in a crude simple minded manner, and because men had the physical advantage women evolved to become smarter than men.
What women came to realize, either consciously or instinctively, is that it’s not wise to confront a physically stronger competitor on their own terms when you can instead get men to fight themselves inside of their own minds, ie. manipulation by guilt.
I agree this procedure of domesticating men is a valid necessary process, just as it’s necessary to train the family dog. I’m arguing only that domesticating men is a sophisticated business which can easily be undone by taking it to extremes. The election of Trump seems clear evidence that the blame and shame pendulum has swung too far in one direction and is now in danger of swinging rapidly back in the wrong direction.
Mr. Tanny,
I’m not ignoring the power o f #MeToo. My view is that, given what we know of Biden’s behavior, that power was legitimate.
Also, if you go back to my original criticism, you will see that I agree with Prof. Marino’s concern with thin communicative practices. I criticize one liner judgment, tweet judgment, and the like.
So, no, what you attribute to me is not true.
Best wishes,
My point was, perhaps poorly put, you’re ignoring the issue that the women in the Biden case declined to do the simple obvious decent thing and simply tell Biden to his face that they preferred not to be touched.
Instead, they waited years and dumped their uncomfortable concerns on us at a carefully timed politically strategic moment. They had every right to do that, and I’m not arguing otherwise.
My argument is that this behavior merits inspection and challenge just as much as Biden’s behavior. Imagine that I became uncomfortable reading your posts (I’m not), and instead of saying that to you I said it to everyone else. Kinda lame, yes?
My further argument is that professional philosophers often seem unwilling to provide such an even handed examination of the subject, as so many of them appear to be locked inside of an academic community group consensus which does not permit much beyond chanting that group consensus, at least on these kind of subjects.
My bottom line argument is that being locked inside of any group consensus doesn’t seem to be an ideal role for philosophers to play. Whatever most of a community is saying, philosophers should be exploring the other side of the coin. That process is more important than any of our personal opinions on any particular issue.
Mr. Tanny,
No, I’m not ignoring the issue. The issue is explained by power asymmetries. But I’ve said this already.
If you had good reason to be intimidated by what I can do, given my power, and were brought up to have to take unwanted advances as a social expectation, I’d have no problem with you telling others that you felt personally uncomfortable by my behavior or that you did it years later. I’d feel upset that you kept it in so long and felt unsafe or unaware that you could speak up.
We’ve been circling the same point for a while now. So, with due respect, I don’t think this conversation will be productive to pursue further.
With best wishes,
P.S. (I was reviewing my prev. post when I hit “post” by mistake.)
We disagree both about (1) the diversity of views in “philosophy” (the reference is vague) and (2) in what good philosophical practice demands or recommends.
(1) I’ve experienced a wide range of disagreement around the issues this post examines, even more so in the behavior of academic philosophers. It’s broader than in other areas of the humanities, in part because academic philosophy still has a lot of patriarchy in it.
More foundationally, I agree with Charles Larmore (in the Morals of Modernity, 1998) that conditions of reasonable disagreement produce a more views not more unanimity. I’ve found that to be true empirically. So the notion of “consensus” among people in academic philosophy strikes me as a hasty generalization on your part. I’m not sure to what you are referring. I’ve not seen much consensus. In fact, one of my colleagues (Prof. Chris Haufe) who does phil. of science thinks that the lack of consensus is what characterizes academic phil. and that this is a problem for knowledge.
(2) More importantly, we have a moral duty to tell the truth and we have an intellectual one as well. To be oppositional just for the sake of opening up debate strikes me as a flaw in a person’s character.
As I said before, this will be my last post on this topic, since the discussion is going around in circles.
With best wishes,
Bensick writes…
” I can’t think of any other instance of a public figure hanging over strangers in a public arena in an intimate way like this.”
If you’re referring to Biden, his “in your face press the flesh style” of politics has been very common for years. That doesn’t automatically justify it, and I agree Biden should dial it back a bit.
I’m just trying to put Biden’s conduct in to a larger context, it’s not a Biden thing exclusively, but a politician thing more generally.
Dear Prof. Bendik-Keymer,
Thanks for your own clarification. I think I understand what you mean by adaptation being in the process of changing. I haven’t studied speech act theory but if the woman concerned blurted out “You’re making me uncomfortable” I wouldn’t think of that as a speech act. But if in retrospect she stated, perhaps to an interviewer, “I was uncomfortable,” I’m not sure. As Dr. Tanny suggests the timing and circumstances of the statements need to be considered . Maybe all “I’m uncomfortables” aren’t equal. Be that as it may, thanks again for your thoughts.
Oops, just a FYI, I don’t have a PhD in anything, nor any kind of philosophical training or degree. Not a complaint, and thank you for the promotion. You can call me Phil if you wish, but please, not Dr. Phil, cause wow, that guy is annoying! 🙂
You wrote, “No, I’m not ignoring the issue. The issue is explained by power asymmetries.”
Yes, Biden had the power to kiss someone on the head, and they had the power to almost derail his attempt to replace President Blatant Molester.
So even if viewed purely from within the group consensus you are articulately, those who strategically expressed their discomfort at a precise moment did the cause of women’s rights no favor.
With respect, this is what happens when any of us chant any group consensus. We become easy rhetorical targets.
You wrote, “More importantly, we have a moral duty to tell the truth and we have an intellectual one as well. To be oppositional just for the sake of opening up debate strikes me as a flaw in a person’s character.”
We inch towards the truth, to the degree that is even possible, by examining all sides of a question. That is not possible within any community where participants are at risk if they articulate an unpopular perspective.
I’m willing to learn more about academic philosophy, that’s why I’m here. So please show us the articles on this site where it is argued that women are wrong and men are right about these kind of topics. I’m not asking you agree with such a perspective, only that you show evidence that such a perspective can be safely expressed within the academic community. If that is the case, that’s great, I’m happy to applaud such diversity.