Questioning Questions

I struggle mightily with the question of what it’s fair to explore in a philosophy class. First, I teach in a state that recently made news for weighing in on what is and is not appropriate for a college classroom. Second, the material I teach—social and political philosophy with an emphasis on contemporary questions of justice—means that I’m often exploring questions that are deeply personal and sometimes quite frightening, either to me or to students in the room. Third, I teach at a large state university that is repeatedly recognized for its commitment to diversity among the student population and leadership. Thanks to both general and discipline-specific requirements, especially among pre-health departments, my department teaches a significant percentage of all undergraduate students. I teach mostly large, 100-level classes with about 50 students each. I also teach a few upper-level courses in rotation, where the class size ranges from 25 to 30. Although those students tend to be minors or majors, our major is non-linear and has very few prerequisites, so it is not uncommon to find students in upper-level classes who have never taken a philosophy class before. Perhaps as a result, violinist-style thought experiments are inside jokes to some students and entirely perplexing to others, and the distinction between what the law says and what the law should say isn’t something that’s obvious to everyone in the room. Fourth, questions can mean a loss of control. When we toss a question out there for students, we give up at least some control over the direction of the conversation because we have no way of knowing what students will say in response. If students ask the questions, we can’t possibly predict how they’ll frame it or how others will react. For me, the combination of these four things feels like serious responsibility on good days and fully terrifying on bad ones. If I’m being honest, I very rarely feel like I am navigating it well.

A couple of years ago, I designed a project in a small, honors-level course. At the beginning of the semester, they’d write me 250 words in the “I can’t believe anyone still thinks X” category. The assignment was to take a moral view they consider to be so obvious that anyone who disagrees must be evil or stupid. Then, my plan was to give them objections, and they’d come back with 500 words. More objections from me, followed by 750 words. Finally, they’d have a meeting with me to go over lingering objections, and then they’d submit 1000 words and present to the class on the experience of the project rather than on their view specifically. They were asked to reflect on what it felt like to get those objections, whether they seriously considered changing their mind, whether they viewed objections with an eye toward rebuttal, and so on.

But there’s a catch to the assignment: because my role is semester-long interlocutor, and because there are some positions I will not entertain even as an academic exercise because I believe doing so is harmful, their topics were limited. I said that they couldn’t debate the humanity of their fellow humans, even to defend it. For example, they couldn’t say “Obviously gender-based discrimination is wrong” because that put me in the position of saying “Hold on a second, have you considered that women may just be inferior to men?” Hard pass. (My own view is that playing devil’s advocate is a bad way to go. I mean, it’s right there in the name.) There are some views I simply will not entertain because I think it is wrong to behave as though there is an open question there.

I feel strongly about this constraint, but my strong feelings, it turns out, don’t make the constraint any less vague and problematic. Unsurprisingly, I hit a glitch. A student asked if they could write about abortion. Sure, I said. She tilted her head to the side and just waited until I realized what I’d done. Then it hit me: what I consider acceptable to discuss or off limits reflects my own values and blind spots, and the privilege of being the professor means that I get to decide what questions are fair game in a context where reasonable people may very well disagree with my decisions.

In the long run, I’m not sure I’ll ever feel at peace with the decisions I make about these things. In the short run, though, I think I’ve found a way to invite students into this process of questioning questions.

The first thing I do is explicitly acknowledge the privilege inherent in being the professor in this setting. I get to choose what we talk about, what we read, what’s fair game, and what isn’t. I tell them that there are some topics I don’t discuss because I believe them to be harmful, and there are some topics I don’t discuss because they hit too close to home, and I can’t do my job well in those arenas. I tell them that designing a syllabus is a moral enterprise and given the power dynamics baked in, professors ought to have good reasons for what we do. I encourage students to let me know if they think I’ve blown the call, perhaps by exploring a question that I can explore only because my lived experience makes it safe to do so, or by framing a discussion in a way that smuggles in harmful or dangerous assumptions, or by excluding a question that we ought to be discussing.

I am generally a fan of pulling back the curtain, showing students what goes on behind the scenes of teaching, and letting them in on how I’m thinking about things. The self-serving effect is that students begin to appreciate how difficult it is to make these decisions and they’re nicer about the ones they don’t like. But the more important effect is that they see how I think about my own ethical commitments, my own commitments to humility and charity, my ethical and professional responsibilities to them, and how I weigh these values when they conflict. I’m trying to figure out how to live ethically; that process includes struggling with questions about how and what I teach. Converting that struggle into class content gives everyone in the room the space to think seriously about how we all move through the world and interact with other people in it. These are ethics classes, after all! We’re all trying to figure out what’s right. Of course, I am a mere mortal, so my ethical worldview and how it shapes my course design could be mistaken. Maybe this is the right way for me to do things. Maybe not. But I invite students to talk it out with me, so we can all think seriously about who and how we want to be in the world.

The second thing I do is assign sections of Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi, in which he reflects on his decision to study the underperformance of women in high-level math classes following Larry Summers’ comments about women in STEM. (It’s worth noting that Summers himself said he was merely exploring hypotheses and that he hoped to be proven wrong about his now infamous second hypothesis.) Steele discusses his thought process at length, noting that although he was confident that he’d be able to point to stereotype threat as an explanation and thereby put to rest the innate inferiority hypothesis, he couldn’t ignore the implications of even asking the question. He writes, “For this experiment, we knew the stakes were high. We were excited but tense.”

In my experience, Steele’s reflection primes students to consider questions themselves—and not just proposed answers—as requiring scrutiny. We find that Steele focuses on the dangers inherent in seriously considering the possibility of genetic inferiority; my students follow him in that concern and often want to move on to ask even more questions, coming quickly to focus on questions about who “counted” as women and men in the study: is it self-identification, socialization, biological sex as assigned at birth based on external sex organs, or what? How did the categories get carved up, and how might that way of carving up categories impact the way we ask and answer the question? They wonder whether in exploring this line of questioning without a deeper examination of gender, Steele may himself have reinforced other harmful gender ideologies. Steele flags that his question may be morally problematic, and they’re on board with his concerns. But then, as though they can’t help themselves, they start to see other concerns he may have missed, other ways his question and approach to answering it may be morally loaded.

Once they see that questions are themselves targets of scrutiny, they’re off to the races. When we discuss immigration policy, students now often push back that the real question is who bears the burden of argument—state or immigrant? When we talk about Angela Davis’ work on prison abolition, students are again stuck (in the best way!) on the question of where the burden of argument is. If Davis is right that the status quo is itself indefensible, does the burden of argument lie with its defenders? Or, does the status quo pick up legitimacy in virtue of being the status quo such that Davis and others really do have to make a compelling case for a plausible alternative? Additionally, without fail someone will begin using the language of “deserving” to be in prison, and this lets us pause and get clear on what question we’re asking. Are we asking whether prisons ought to exist, or are we asking who should be in them? And when and why did we switch questions? This is especially useful since Davis herself argues that part of the problem is that we don’t ask the right questions. The list of examples goes on and on. They ask what questions we should be asking, how we should ask them, and—my favorite—who we should be asking. They question questions.

I can’t be sure it’s a causal effect, but I think that when my students watch both their professor and an esteemed social scientist grapple with the puzzle of what questions to ask and how to ask them, and who bears what cost when we put the question out there, they see that there are real stakes to what we do in a philosophy classroom—and beyond it—and we should all proceed accordingly.

Brynn Welch

1. Bio: Brynn Welch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has received several teaching awards during her career, including the Excellence in Teaching Award (Emory & Henry College), the Outstanding Faculty Award from Disability Support Services (UAB), and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (UAB). She is the editor of The Art of Teaching Philosophy, available August 2024 (Bloomsbury).