This poster, and the event it describes, appears to be causing a ruckus. The poster advertises the 2007 Veroni Memorial Lecture in Philosophy and the Humanities, to be delivered by Peter French, Lincoln Chair in Ethics, and Director, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. The talk's title is On Being Morally Challenged by Collective Memories, and the paragraph-long description reads:
During the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Serbian men described themselves as compelled to rape and murder Kosovar women and children. This felt necessity was provoked and sustained by collective memories nurtured in Serbs for seven centuries. The basic question I hope to answer is whether group members caught in the throes of collective memories should be held responsible for their actions when they "can do no other."One person e-mailed me asking how this may create a legally actionable "hostile work environment" for people of Serbian extraction; a serbianna.com "activism" Web page reasons that "Peter French starts from a premise that Serbs are rapists and killers because, according to French, Serbian morality is handicapped by collective memory that was nurtured in Serbs. In other words, French believes that Serbs are morally deviant people because of a false collective memory of their past in Kosovo and as a result of their own delusion have collectively accepted morality of a rapist and a killer."
As I read the poster, French is not arguing that all Serbian men feel compelled to rape and murder, or even that most do. Rather, he is discussing a particular set of Serbian men who did rape and murder, and who supposedly gave "collective memories nurtured in Serbs for seven centuries" as an explanation for that argument. This is reinforced by the fact that the next sentence is hardly an anti-Serb rant, but a question about whether group members should be held responsible for their actions, which is obviously a question about those group members who actually acted.
This is much like, if we wrote, "During the L.A. riots, Korean shopkeepers armed themselves to defend their stores against rioters; this felt necessity was provoked and sustained by their sense of being embattled and victimized by crime," we likely wouldn't be talking about all Korean shopkeepers or even most, but about those Korean shopkeepers who did arm themselves. I think arming oneself to defend oneself and one store during a riot is generally more proper, and rape and murder of course is not, but my point here is that the term "Serbian men" or "Korean shopkeepers" may in some situations refer to those particular Serbian men or Korean shopkeepers that the rest of the paragraph describes.
Perhaps given the bad acts being described, the poster author should have put things more carefully, to avoid the risk of misunderstanding. But while philosophers have a reputation for being very precise writers, a reputation especially easy to nurture when you have a whole paper — nursed over months or years — in which to be precise, quickly boiling things down to three sentences (something that may well have been done not by Prof. French but by someone else) may indeed sometimes produce misunderstandings.
I anticipate that the speech will indeed go as I conjecture, and I hope the controversy will then fizzle. Still, it does seem like a brewing academic controversy, so I thought I'd note it. And of course I naturally think that even if Peter French is a raving anti-Serb bigot, his speech should be constitutionally protected, including against a "hostile work environment" lawsuit. (If the speech were raving anti-Serb bigotry, the university would have the power not to invite him to give a special university-promoted lecture on the subject, and should exercise that power; but that's a separate matter.)
Nick
Pretty typical in the academy.
The writeup also doesn't say what view he is going to defend. As far as the writeup says, he is probably arguing that people in such circumstances are indeed responsible for their actions. French is committed to the idea of collective responsibility. But he is also a proponent of rehabilitating vengeance as sometimes a good thing, because of that collective responsibility. So I'm not sure where he'd take this particular issue. But it's not clear at all from the description of this talk that he's going to be endorsing the self-description of these rapists. He may well just be seeing what follows from such a claim.
This is but the latest and most ridiculous essay in victimology. The lecture itself assumes an unproven and, at least on its face, blatantly stupid premise.
"The basic question I hope to answer is whether group members caught in the throes of collective memories should be held responsible for their actions when they 'can do no other.'"
First for those who may be blessedly unaware, "collective memories" is an academicese longhand for what anyone else would likely call "shared culture." Before Prof. French starts trying to figure out whether raping/killing/looting Serbs ought to be held morally blameless, he needs to establish that popular culture really did turn them into mindless automatons, bereft of free will and incapable of moral reasoning.
1. whether rape & murder is justified by the standards of any particular culture depends on what the standards in that culture are.
2. Rape and murder may or may not be justified in some aspect of Serbian culture, but are not justified in our culture.
3. Hence, the Serbs who raped and murdered were not justified in what they did.
4. If you say, "well they were justified in their culture," then the obvious reply is that that standard of their culture is wrong.
5. If you say, "well, you say that standard of their culture is wrong, but by the higher standards of their culture that standard is right," then the obvious reply is that this higher standard, that says the lower standard approving murder and rape is OK, is wrong, since it leads to an erroneous conclusion (that rape and murder is OK).
6. Etc., up the chain.
7. The only way to end this is to agree on the relevant culture. If we agree, the argument will end. If we fail to agree, the argument will also end as there is nothing to discuss.
There. That wasn't so hard.
1. Yes, of course they can be held responsible. We want to deter anyone else motivated by their collective memories from committing murder and rape, so we should punish anyone who commits murder and rape. Of course it is a bit unfair to punish someone for a crime they cannot help, but it is necessary to stop far more crimes being done in the future. It's like sending a soldier to his death to protect the enemy breaking through.
2. If Serbians cannot be held responsible due to collect memories for committing murder and rape, then surely any person who comes from a country that draws on a legal tradiition like England's has more than seven centuries of collective memories of punishing murder and rape and holding murderers and rapists accountable for their actions, and therefore equally cannot be held responsible for holding murderers and rapists responsible. (Or to put it another way, if criminals don't have free will, then surely no one else has it either).
(I include Canada, the USA, Australia, NZ, etc as countries that draw on England's legal tradition).
It's to gather audience, which audience will be sorely disappointed.
It's the alternative to actually requiring student attendance.
(Though lectures were always much better when the ``all invited'' meant the philsophy dept staff and me, and zero students. Then one year instead of five attendees, there were seventy, and I stopped going.)
I imagine it's the new form of free will vs determinism.
I'd refute this one with Levinas, but who has the time, and nobody wants to hear it anyway
It's also perfectly legitimate to assume things in argument. Assuming that proposition X is true (the collective memory thing), then the members of the group should still be held responsible because . . .
There's nothing illegitimate about that, or about it's opposite, so long as you aren't saying that your argument is to prove that X is true or false.
I'm not sure about the implications of "should" there, whether it means that is the way you would have it or that is the way courts would find. But can you find many who know anything at all about the First Amendment would think otherwise, that such speech is not or should not be absolutely protected by the First Amendment? This is so far from a close question that I see no reason to even pause to consider it. Things get more interesting when one considers what "academic freedom" (AF) does and/or should mean, maybe not in this case, but in others involving "scholar activists."
Recently, you posted about an essay by Romirowsky that appeared in the Washington Times, but gave it remarkably short shrift, skipping over its first eight paragraphs and launching into an impassioned defense of "free speech." That missed the main point of Romirowsky's essay, which was about how "activism" did or not warrant the protection of AF. The Peter French matter doesn't entail "activism," so would easily fall within what most would accept as the proper bounds of AF as well as protected First Amendment speech. But when "activism" is distinguishable from activities bound up with "scholarship," ought academics be protected by AF? For example, a biology professor has a religious experience and insists on teaching Creationish rather than evolution in his classes - protected by AF. Faculty member seeks to "indocrinate," refusing to deal with and allow other points of view in classroom - protected by AF? Some in academic community conspire to damage other scholar by throwing them off editorial boards, blocking publication of their work, denying them tenure, etc. -their perogative to do so if they see it as the right thing to do - protected by AF?
I will go back to read what you posted recently about the First Amendment as it applies to academia, since I only glanced quickly at it before. You ought to go back to re-read Romirowsky and engage with the question about "scholar activists," which he didn't fully develop, but which isn't too hard to flesh out. No need to ask self-evident questions like whether Peter French's lecture should enjoy First Amendment protection whatever its merits, or if a "hostile workplace" claim would go anywhere in other than an idiot court. (BTW, does he think the individual responsibility of Nazis was less because there was a "group think" going on and it drew on what could be seen as "collective memory"?)
(If the speech were raving anti-Serb bigotry, the university would have the power not to invite him to give a special university-promoted lecture on the subject, and should exercise that power; but that's a separate matter.)