Last week Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosophy professor with a column at The Point magazine and the author of the book Aspiration, wrote an editorial in The New York Times arguing that philosophers should not sign petitions.

This was no idle or theoretical argument: it’s a live issue in the world of philosophy after two warring petitions about issues of gender, the philosophy of gender, and transgender people appeared recently.

One, authored by Ned Hall and John Schwenkler, was published at Inside Higher Ed and was signed by notable philosophers and public figures, like Cordelia Fine and Peter Singer. The other was a response published at the American Philosophical Association blog and signed by Sally Haslanger, Kate Manne, and other prominent feminist philosophers.

Callard’s piece led to a flurry of discussion among philosophers about what it means for philosophy to be “political” or “politicized.” On Twitter, philosopher Justin Caouette ran a pair of polls, asking first whether something can be value-laden while being apolitical, and second whether there is a difference between pushing an agenda and being political. Callard herself made a distinction between politicization as “using philosophy to advance a particular political program” and as “use, within philosophy, of methods only appropriate within politics” (the latter sense also came up in an anonymous Daily Nous post about gender issues).

The politics and the politicization of philosophy is the theme that started my career in public writing, during the Hypatia affair in 2017, and to which I returned last May and again last month. It seems that many philosophers are using these terms in different ways — differently from each other and differently from me. And if these differences can’t be cleared up, then it’s hard to see how we can come to any conclusions about “politicization” and what’s “inherently political” at all.

So, what do the terms mean?

When I say that some area of philosophy is “politicized” (which I generally mean negatively), or when others say that some area of philosophy is “inherently political” (which they generally mean positively or neutrally), it is likely that none of us is thinking of petitions, programs, agendas, or activism. Activism in the more normal sense, in the political sense, is aimed at securing political results—the activism that takes place in academia is far more effective academically than politically.

What I want to do is offer three possible uses of the terms “political” and “politicized”: political effects, political causes, and political methodologies.

Political Effects

One approach is to identify something as being political if it has undoubtedly political effects. We can see this approach working in arguments to the effect that parts of law and science are political.

I think that climate scientists are objective researchers and that their consensus that climate change is real and anthropogenic is correct. But people who share my view could still believe additionally that the science of global warming is political, because climate science affects public policy, as well as the politically important decisions of private individuals, corporations, and other entities. Similarly, someone might come to the view that it is impossible for jurisprudence on abortion or gun control to avoid being political, because it goes on to play a role in political discourse and public life regardless of how apolitically a legal decision might be made.

Is there an analogy for such effects in academic philosophy? There might be, if we include a certain kind of conceptual effect in our notion of “effects.” There are often (probably always) political ideas downstream of philosophical ideas. Philosophers more than most are aware of what arguments imply even if implications go unstated.

So, for instance, two philosophers recently discussed the politics of philosophical writing on free will, and the question of whether such writing is necessarily or inherently political. Well, free will classically has a conceptual connection to moral responsibility and hence to the ethics of punishment—hence a book like Derk Pereboom’s Living Without Free Will. (We’re only worthy of punishment for a wrong we commit if we commit that wrong freely, the intuition goes.) So it’s generally thought that the question of free will is the prior or more fundamental question, despite the immediate ethical issues raised by probing that deeper question.

Similarly, although metaphysics was traditionally studied as a very general subject, the metaphysics of gender is the political issue du jour of American philosophy. Grand theories of metaphysics might be (and indeed have been) judged on whether they have the right implications for the rather specific questions that have become politically salient.

The effects here could be more than conceptual. One might worry that certain philosophical positions give license to “the baddies.” Writing in favor of the existence of full-fledged free will might, under this view, be taken to excuse “bad” positions on criminal justice. Claiming we have free will could be seen as giving license to the supposed depredations of the penal system. And analogously, writing in favor of a certain metaphysical stance might, under this view, be taken to be acting in solidarity with those who would oppress trans people. This could be seen as “giving comfort to the enemy.”

Or the effects could be on “the good people.” The theory is that trans professional philosophers reading “politicized” philosophy are hurt by the doctrines that, often by some long and winding path of alleged logical implication rather than any direct claim about trans identity, would deny some crucial premise of their self-conception. One position that has been gathering steam among philosophers for the past few years is the idea that you can harm someone just by believing something about them — Rima Basu, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, wrote an Aeon article about this.

But can we discuss the “politicization” of philosophy by considering the effects or implications of various stances?

I don’t think we can. The effects of philosophy, politicized or not, are quite a bit harder to discern than the effects of law, science, and other endeavors. And when it comes to the downstream “conceptual effects” of some idea on another, to call the premise political because the conclusion is political seems strange.

Philosophy of science isn’t all scientific; philosophy of mathematics is mostly not mathematical; philosophy of music is almost never musical. But all of these bear on the areas that they’re philosophies “of.” What is the special power of the political such that it can reach back into logically prior inquiries, or reach across into logically separate inquiries, and alter their nature — a power not shared by the scientific, the mathematical, the musical, or virtually any other adjective of this type? This is a tough question for theorists of the “inherently political.”

Political Causes

There is a different and “stronger” sense in which philosophy or some other domain of inquiry could be political. And that is if we view politics as a cause and not an effect of ideas.

Let’s look to science and law yet again. The claim that law is ineluctably political might, in some contexts, mean that it is psychologically unlikely, or even psychologically impossible, to divorce one’s legal reasoning from one’s political views. This is not so implausible: If law and politics were really so distinct, legal reasoning and political goals wouldn’t tend to predict one another so well. We would probably see far more progressive originalists and far more conservative living-constitutionalists, for example. And the claim that science is political might mean that politics plays a role in determining how we approach scientific questions and how we evaluate scientific research. Depending on a person’s politics, a biological explanation of some fact might seem plausible while an environmental explanation might seem implausible, or vice versa. So goes this approach.

Analytic philosophy — the kind of philosophy most often practiced and taught in Anglophone colleges and universities — tends not to bother with the causes of people’s beliefs. The answer to the question of why we believe what we believe is regarded as logically irrelevant and distracting from the more core question of whether the belief is true. A focus on the causes of people’s beliefs is, however, a common approach in European philosophy — it was a theme in Nietzsche and in Foucault—as well as in psychological subdisciplines that touch on philosophy, such as moral psychology and political psychology. It is often called the approach of genealogy. Its attempts to undercut someone’s beliefs on the basis of where they come from are often called genealogical debunking arguments. (The most notable contemporary Anglophone source for philosophical arguments about genealogy is Amia Srinivasan, recently named Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.)

The relationship between genealogical debunking and the idea that philosophy is political can be seen in the following exchange:

Alphie: “I have the philosophical belief that free will exists. I offer the following philosophical reasons for this belief: [x, y, z].” Beth: “Hold it right there. You just believe free will exists because of your political belief [b]. Hence the whole issue of free will is political.”

One problem we might have with Beth’s response is that it seems like a fallacy. In other words, even if what Beth says is correct, it’s not an argument against what Alphie claims. “Alphie believes in free will because Alphie believes b” is a fact about Alphie. But Alphie’s argument for free will rests not on b but on his arguments x, y, and z, even if it’s caused by some political belief b. Judging Alphie’s argument based on a fact about Alphie that is not part of the argument’s logical structure simply is the ad hominem fallacy. Of course, in a more basic way all genealogical debunking arguments commit the genetic fallacy. But learning about fallacies is, as I covered for a prior piece at Arc, “how people learn to become annoying libertarian boys.” Since that is apparently discrediting, is there a way to evaluate the structure of debunking arguments without falling back on fallacy-mongering?

Let’s try to evaluate these arguments without mentioning fallacies. I think there are at least two further problems with the genealogical debunking or causal approach to “politicization,” especially for the crowd that claims philosophy is “inherently political.”

One is related to our ad hominem concern. To know the causes of Alphie’s stance about free will is not to know anything deep about the truth or falsity of whether free will exists, nor about the topic which free will falls under, nor the academic discipline that studies claims like “free will exists.” Even if that discipline is full of people like Alphie, the psychological facts about why he thinks what he thinks don’t inform us about free will and whether it exists. Psychological facts don’t give much evidence for philosophical conclusions. To see how distant the two are from each other, consider that it could be the case that everyone who believes free will exists believes it on some unreasonable basis, and the question “does free will exist?” would nevertheless remain entirely open. We would still want to know: Is the belief actually true?

A more fundamental problem is that it’s not clear what the upshot of some philosophers’ stances having political causes ought to be. People who talk a lot about “politicization” seem to think the upshot is that we should all try our best to make sure our philosophical beliefs aren’t caused by our political beliefs. People who claim things are “inherently political” seem to think the upshot is one of two things: either that we should counterbalance existing political biases (usually taken to be relatively conservative) with biases in the other direction (usually taken to be relatively progressive); or that we should stop worrying about whether political bias is creeping into our philosophy and worry more about whether the politics that does enter is the right sort of politics — quite literally, whether our work is “politically correct.” But this just recapitulates the debate at a different level.

So the genealogical debunking arguments don’t seem to make much progress. And yet something like this debunking argument is at work in a lot of the discussion involving terms like “politicization” and “inherently political.”

Consider the “philosophy of” cases I discussed above. When we say that inquiries are politicized, we often mean something like “people are making philosophical judgments on political grounds.” So, let’s imagine that people started making judgments in the philosophy of science on scientific and not philosophical grounds. And let’s say they did the same on mathematical grounds in the philosophy of mathematics and on musical grounds in the philosophy of music. We might call these processes “scientization,” “mathematicization,” and “musicization.” All of these could at least plausibly be taken to be objectionable in the same way that “politicization” is objectionable.

Political Methods

Finally, some argue that it is a methodological necessity that some inquiry be political.

Again, let’s consider law and science. The claim that legal interpretation and jurisprudence often involve judgments made based on political values is a focal point of the debate between living-constitutionalism and originalism. Some critical legal theorists go so far as to say that law is somehow essentially indeterminate, taking a cue from the deconstructionist approach to literature. Philosophers of science similarly have emphasized for several decades now the fact that we must necessarily use our values in choosing among equally well-supported empirical hypotheses. Some of these values are the so-called epistemic values, like simplicity or elegance, but some may just be ethical values. It is a core contention of feminist philosophy of science, for example, that there is nothing particularly objectionable about using feminist values to choose among scientific theories.

How can we apply this to philosophy? It’s certainly the case that the answers to philosophical problems have proven largely indeterminate over the past two or three millennia. It’s not just that our theories are not determined by our data—sometimes it’s not even clear that we have any data at all. So why not use our political values to pick among philosophical hypotheses? Here are three potential reasons not to.

First, we might simply think that there is something anti-philosophical about imposing our values to remove doubts and ambiguities. Dealing with doubt is, after all, one of the central tasks of philosophy. And inculcating practices of doubting things we often take for granted is maybe the central didactic technique of a philosophy instructor. When Bertrand Russell sought to communicate the value philosophy can bring into a person’s life, he spoke of “liberating doubt”—the way philosophy can use doubt to help expand and enrich our hearts and minds. Chess commentator and grandmaster Jan Gustafsson jokes: “Chess is a constant struggle between my desire not to lose and my desire not to think.” We might say in full seriousness: “Philosophy is a constant struggle between my desire not to be wrong and my desire not to be in doubt.” Law and science need working answers. There are time constraints, and decisions must be made even when doubt and ambiguity remain. It’s not clear that such need for resolution is characteristic of philosophy.

Second, empirical psychology seems tentatively to suggest that the influence of political concerns may be to make our reasoning far less reliable. In a 2013 study, Yale psychologist Dan Kahan and coauthors showed that individuals who were highly disposed to and adept at using quantitative information became far less successful at doing so when the information was related to political questions in which they had some investment. Specifically, they found that “highly numerate” individuals experienced a greater drop-off in ability when examining politically-laden issues than the average individual did. Politicization went some lengths toward canceling out intelligence.

This corresponds to a basic fact about politically-charged philosophical disputes: philosophers involved in them frequently say that the smart people on the other side of these debates seem to have forgotten how to make and evaluate arguments, even though that’s what they do for a living. There’s plenty of reason to think that this sort of thing actually happens — to more or less everyone involved in these arguments.

Third, something might just seem off about using politics to plug holes in philosophy. Much of philosophy concerns the structure of things, what there is, what’s fundamental, how to reason, what can be known, and so forth. These are timeless inquiries with no satisfactory answers. Their pursuit is emblematic of intellectual life. Political views, however, are very much products of their own times, subject to the shifts of fashion, often themselves with deeply debunkable genealogies of class, country of origin, era, and so on. It’s hard to see how political values can resolve methodological quandaries in philosophy. They just seem to be the wrong tool for the job.

Also, Shouldn’t It Matter That Politics Sucks?

One of my favorite uses of the term “politics” is to indicate the worst aspect of some activity, the part with the most interpersonal conflict and tedium, and with the rewards doled out to the worst people. “Office politics” and “academic politics” are generally used in this manner — compare the very different phrases “identity politics” and “class politics.” I like this usage because the shittiness of politics, and the idea that it should be avoided when possible, is made into a bare linguistic fact in phrases like “office politics” and “academic politics.” That might seem like it doesn’t offer us much help here, since “office politics” and “academic politics” aren’t “political” in any of the senses that we have discussed. And yet I think the fact that politics is awful, and that it makes us awful to each other, should be an important part of our analysis.

One reason which seems both patently obvious and sort of beyond the pale to mention in current intellectual culture is that “politicized” debates in philosophy and elsewhere in academia are rancorous, unpleasant, and never satisfyingly resolved. The dominant orthodoxy valorizes political relevance as among the highest goods that academic work can achieve. Many of the philosophers I know who are involved in these debates — on all sides — confide feelings of exhaustion, hopelessness, suffering, and persecution. Perhaps trying to prevent such experiences from becoming even more commonplace is a good reason — maybe even a good political reason — to reject the trendy conclusion that philosophical work is inherently political.

Oliver Traldi is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a columnist for Arc Digital. His work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Review, Tablet, Quillette, Areo, and other places. Follow him on Twitter @olivertraldi.