Consider a counterargument: Doctors cause bodily harm all the time, for instance to themselves if they engage in risky sports activities. Or consider the doctor who punches someone in the face, breaking his nose, in a bar fight. Whatever he is guilty of, it won’t be medical malpractice. Doctors are not always acting in their capacity as doctors; they needn’t always be out to maximize health. Likewise for philosophers. So what if petitions don’t employ philosophical methodology?

This is a reasonable point. Plausibly, the philosophers who write and sign petitions needn’t conceive of that activity itself as a philosophical one — they wouldn’t use petitions as teaching tools in their philosophy classes. I grant that philosophers should sometimes take off their philosophical hats. Nor is it plausible to insist that we employ the same methods inside and outside the classroom.

But ask yourself, in this case, why philosophers would be removing their hats. It’s not a matter of the audience’s being unwilling or unable to entertain a philosophical mode of argumentation — they are speaking to philosophers. Nor is it a matter of philosophers engaging in extraprofessional activity — on their off hours, on summer vacation, maybe philosophers don’t feel like arguing; we are talking about an intramural, professional discussion of the ethics of the profession.

We’d never approach questions such as “Are possible worlds real?” or “I s knowledge justified true belief? ” by petition, so why are we tempted to do so in the case of questions around sex, gender and hurtful speech? The answer is that the latter question involves real feelings and real people, and it is about something that is happening now — for all these reasons, it strikes us as being of grave importance. The petition writers are thinking to themselves, this time it really matters. I think it is a mistake for a philosopher to take the importance of a question as a reason to adopt an unphilosophical attitude toward it.

One thing that is distinctive about philosophy is that unlike other disciplines, it is philosophical all the way down. “What are mathematical objects?” and other such foundational questions fall under the purview not of the discipline in question but of philosophy. Science doesn’t ask, “What is science?”; philosophy asks this, as well as asking, “What is philosophy?”

I am not saying that philosophers should refrain from engaging in political activity; my target is instead the politicization of philosophy itself. I think that the conduct of the profession should be as bottomless as its subject matter: If we are going to have professional, intramural discussions about the ethics of the profession, we should do so philosophically and not by petitioning one another. We should allow ourselves the license to be philosophical all the way down.

“But I need to get people to see that excluding certain voices is not the way to create an inclusive intellectual environment.” Then argue for it! If you strip the list of signatures off your petition, you’ll find that you have an argument on your hands. The argument was there all along, but only when shorn of the appeal to authority does it invite counterargument — as opposed to counterpetitioning. Philosophers value having opponents worth listening to; we shouldn’t be trying to sort people into teams of the like-minded.