A reply to Agnes Callard

Hi, thanks for writing this, someone linked me to it on twitter and I wrote a reply there: https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1277274771735089152?s=20

I forget who responded with the kernel of this argument, but it wasn't mine:

Saying the incentives should be different doesn't mean pretending they are different. In an ideal world, news organizations would have good standards and would not give in to external pressure on those standards. In our world, news organizations have some bad standards and give in to external pressure from time to time.

Reaching a better world has to come from making de-escalation treaties or changing the overall incentives. Unilaterally disarming (by refusing to even sign petitions) has the completely predictable consequence that the NYT will compromise their standards in directions that we dislike, because the pressure would be high in each direction but ours.

"Allowing mobs influence..." If the nyt had decided to publish an article advocating killing blacks for talking in public, I doubt anyone would have an issue with an online mob pressuring the nyt to retract the article.

Certainly Callard would not be questioning whether the article was worse or allowing mobs to influence the nyt to take the article down was worse.

Not all 'mobs' are created equal. Neither are all attempts at influence. The influence being exerted here is purely benign - this is not an attempt to influence the culture war or get soneone fired, all that is asked is that someone be allowed keep his pseudonymity, with good reason.

Edit: After reading the full text of Callard's OP I don't think what I wrote above addresses their full position.

As others have noted, this is not an instance of philosphers taking off the philosophy hat when dealing with other philosphers. The NYT isn't a group of philosphers, it is a business.

This business is acting in a harmful way, either because it is acting as a bureaucracy (reasoning will not make red tape go away),or in hostile fashion (or a higher up decided on this action just because I suppose).

None of these possibilities lend themselves to looking at this as a simple mistake of ethics (unless you frame it as a mistake of normative ethics/bottom line ethics, in which case a petition is an actual argument), where you can discuss and reach a conclusion.

In regards to philosophy needing to come into play in real life too - philosophy needs to recognize that conflict exists in real life.

If a man is coming to kill someone you know, the proper response should be reached through mistake theory internally, but stopping the aggressor physically should not be out of bounds when deciding on a response. Mistake theory needs to be aware of conflict theory. (Of course, if the man is a mistake theorist in regards to the one who woud stop him and would like to discuss before either takes action, one would be remiss not to)

The NYTimes spread lies to the American people about WMDs that supported the mobilisation towards war. Afterwards it faced public criticism and as a result it had reforms to the way it publishes the news. They created the office of the public editor to increase their ethical standards.

Was it bad that public pressure changed their news-making in that regard? It seems to me obvious that it's good when public critcism leads a news outlet to increase their ethical standards.

Whenever an organization has the choice to engage in an action that brings them short term economic benefits (clicks) at the expense of social value for broader society, it's important when public pressure can change the organization to engage in more ethical behavior. 

From Agnes Twitter:

I believe that the arguments in this op-ed--about why philosophers shouldn't use petitions to adjudicate their disputes--also apply to those non-philosophers who, for independent reasons, are committed to the power of public reason.

The kind of means you use to adjudicate disputes depends on both parties. 

If I would believe that the NYTimes is commited to the power of public reason, then I would grant that reasoned argument is a better vehicle then a petition. I do however believe that the NYTimes cares more about making money for it's shareholders then it cares for public reason.

If anybody wants to make an argument that public reason is more important for the NYTimes then profits, I would be happy to see examples where the NYTimes decided to engage in actions that were neither good for clicks nor their reputation and that can be explained by caring for public reason.

Lastly, I think that philosophers as a class should exert more public pressure on institutions that engage in behavior that violates the knowledge that the philosophers gathered. Philosophers should do petitions about how the ontological assumptions of the DSM-5 are appalling. 

And so the question becomes: when an editor at the New York Times makes a decision that seems wrong-headed and cruel, what interface do they present to the world, and how should we make use of it?

I think the interface involves pageviews and subscriptions.

With subscriptions, the right strategy would be to threaten to unsubscribe if NYT proceeds with the story. I heard that the process of unsubscription is quite complicated, so publishing a step-by-step manual would be a nice threat.

With pageviews, it is more complicated. The strategy "let's make the entire internet angry about doxing Scott" could easily backfire. NYT could simply publish a story without doxing Scott, which everyone would obviously carefully read... then another unexpected story about Scott, again without doxing him, again many readers... and again... and again... and when the stories would no longer get enough pageviews, then they would publish another story where they would dox Scott, so again tons of views... and afterwards some meta-stories like "why we believe it was ethically correct to dox Scott"... heck, even stories "reader's opinion: why it was wrong to dox Scott", the opinion doesn't matter, there are pageviews either way... etc. This is why online advertising is such a force of evil. It is not obvious to me whether losses from subscriptions would outweigh the gains from views.

To me, both the original tweet and your reply seem to miss the point entirely. I didn't sign this petition out of some philosophical position on what petitions should or shouldn't be used for. I did it because I see something very harmful happening and think this is a way to prevent it.

Of course, anyone is free to look at this and try to judge it by abstracting away details and looking at the underlying principle. Since the tweet does that, it's fine to make a counter-argument by doing the same. But it doesn't mean anything to me, and I doubt that most people who signed the petition can honestly say that it has much to do with why they signed it.

Changing sites with a reply is always a fraught business; my defense is that I don't have a Twitter account, and Twitter is horrible for longform discussion. If exactly one person wants to post a link to this post in that Twitter thread, I'd appreciate it.

Yeah IDK. There's a slippery slope from "This is the interface this institution has with the world, so of course we should use it" to "Our enemies use tactic X, so there's nothing wrong with us using tactic X too," which then becomes "Our enemies used tactic X once, so now we are justified in using it a lot." We need to find a shelling fence or avoid the slope entirely.

Here is a brainstorm of suggestions:

--Our petition should have a clause talking about how terrible it is for the NYT to bow to mobs of enraged internet elites but that it would be hypocritical of them to choose now as their moment to grow a spine. At least this gets the right ideas across.

--We also take some action to encourage them to grow a spine, so that they become more resistant to this tactic in general in the future. That way, we are using tactic X now while making X less viable for everyone in the future.

--We don't do our petition at all, since that's an example of the tactic we dislike, but instead we do some tactic we like, such as challenging the NYT to a third-party moderated public debate on the matter, or simply raising tons of awareness about what's happening, with the goal of convincing third parties of the rightness of our cause rather than the goal of directly influencing the NYT.

--We take some steps to make our petition a non-mob. Like, maybe we require that everyone who signs it restate it in their own words or something, or that everyone who signs it be someone initially skeptical who changed their mind as a result of hearing both sides.

On the question of whether we should have one:

I think I have different expectations when engaging in reasoned discourse than when publishing to an un-responsive semi-entity (the NYT is not a reasoning agent, it's an institution comprising both individual and shared history and decision-making). I also think that BOTH the object-level and the overall principles are important, and communication should show how they align.

I would strongly prefer that the NYT _not_ publish unnecessary and harmful identifying information about people who don't want it. That applies to everyone - list them by their public, common moniker, not necessarily their legal name. I would separately like Scott to feel safe in continuing to publish his excellent works. These are in complete alignment.

The tactics for focusing some organizational attention on the issue are varied, but I agree they're ambiguous between a petulant demand for this specific object result, and an altruistic punishment to bring attention to a harmful (IMO) overall policy. I hope the NYT is a sane enough organization to take the useful parts and ignore the harmful ones. And I don't think our group is big or powerful enough that we're going to force the NYT into any unacceptable (to them) solution.

tl;dr: the document doesn't need to say explicitly that the NYT should make it's own reasonable decisions, as that's implicit and required by the position the NYT holds. That's the very nature of groups protesting against large organizations - the organization gets to and has to decide how and whether to change their behavior, and 'FU' is a valid and not-uncommon response.

I was able to read the op-ed in a private window (I don't have a subscription to the Times anyway). The article is written in the context of a petition "opposing the deplatforming of philosophers on the basis of their views on sex and gender." Callard chose not to sign. She argues herself back and forth a few times about why before settling on the opinion that philosophers should not engage in political behavior (such as petitioning) to convince each other about the ethics of their profession because doing so is unprofessional in the context of academic philosophy, a field that she asserts must remain dedicated to "belief acquisition [that is committed to being] intellectually honest, conducive to knowledge, nonaggressive, inquisitive, respectful."

News outlets would probably tell you their interface is facts. Seems to me that "facts" and "carefully reasoned argument" should be compatible modes.

When using the public interface explicitly presented by an institution fails to produce any apparent effect, it seems reasonable to try another. NYT also has an obvious corporate interface (purchase and sale of articles) and, as a publisher, a related political interface (exchange of news for views provides a vote-like structure on the content of the stories that the corporation would probably respond to in the absence of other factors).

Unfortunately, this corporate/political interface is a slow and post-hoc way of communicating with a large organization. The traditional actions when seeking a rapid response from a corporate or political entity are collective bargaining and petition respectively. Formally unionizing doesn't seem immediately useful in this situation.