We all notice patterns. But we don’t all notice the same patterns. Here’s one I’m noticing. In defending the revised curriculum for schools subject to the authority of the Florida Department of Education, Ron DeSantis observed that at least some slaves acquired skills they otherwise wouldn’t have. To which Kamala Harris, predictably enough, said … well, you can imagine! In response to the TRC here in Canada, Frances Widdowson has observed that some indigenous kids placed in residential schools fared better than they would have had they been left to the devices of their own communities. To which … well, you can imagine! So the pattern is this:
SJW: X is an unmitigated evil.
Critic: Well no, it’s not unmitigated.
SJW: Only a defender of x would say its evil is not unmitigated.
I’m not sure a slave learning a skill to better serve her master is much of a benefit. But I am on record as saying that few descendants of slavery would trade places with the descendants of those who were left behind in Africa. Does that count as a benefit of slavery? It’s hard to see how it does not. I’m also on record saying not just that Widdowson is right, but that as a matter of inductive logic she pretty much has to be right. But I’m not sure that makes me a defender of slavery or of the residential school program.
Even to perform a strict utilitarian calculus one would have to be able to make interpersonal utility comparisons, which are notoriously difficult if not impossible to do. And one would have to evaluate the counterfactuals, which are even more difficult if not impossible to do. But I’m not sure either difficulty plays a role in the SJW moral calculus. X is wrong because the victims of x say it’s wrong. And if any of them don’t it’s because they’re suffering from false consciousness.
But I’m not sure nonfalsifiablity plays a role in SJW moral judgments. Certain facts just aren’t to be entered into the record, not because they’re false, but because they’re incompatible with repairing the evil, however mitigated, that has been done.
Few SJWs would come out and say this, so that’s why I’m saying it on their behalf. That is, I want to defend the view that though some x was not an unmitigated evil, it might nevertheless be an unmitigated evil to say so. And the reason for this is that all too often people do infer, however invalidly, that if x is not an unmitigated evil, then it’s not an evil at all. It’s not that talk of the benefits of slavery and/or the residential school program puts the kibosh on any call for reparations. But it does take much of the wind out of its sails.
This goes directly to Jonathan Haidt’s thesis that a university can seek truth, or it can seek social justice, but not both. Frances Widdowson is a political scientist. John McWhorter is a linguist. I happen to be a philosopher. All three of us – and a growing number of others – have been painted, via this sloppy infererncing, as rightwing racists, because we seem to be choosing truth over social justice. It’s sloppy to infer we’re rightwing racists. But it’s not sloppy to infer our obsession with ‘truth’, our pedantic knit-picking, our cutting holes in the sailcloth, is slowing the ship’s traverse. The ship needs to be slowed, because we’ve seen what happens when it’s not.
So though we cannot not do our jobs, it’s not that we don’t understand the impatience onboard. That’s why if you want to win a popularity contest, be a university President, not an academic.
Categories: Angst, Critical Thinking, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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