Brian Leiter's Christmas Present: Threatening Colleagues with Defamation Suit for Signing "The September Statement" and Carrie Ichikawa-Jenkins with Exposure of Intimate Health Details

Remember The September Statement from earlier this year, signed by 648 academic philosophers in North America and elsewhere against Chicago philosopher and law professor Brian Leiter's unacceptable treatment of his UBC colleague Carrie Ichikawa-Jenkins, ending in Leiter's statement of resignation from the institutional ranking operation he had founded and coordinated up till then, the Philosophical Gourmet Report? If not, a recapture of some of the essential of this sad and disgraceful story is here (start at the bottom to get the adequate chronology). This detailed chronological account is also rewarding.

One would have thought that after this, Brian Leiter would prefer to lay dead and lick his wounds for a while, waiting for the memory of the scandal and his own disgrace to settle, and maybe find new pathways to having himself feel good about himself besides bullying and threatening (apparently mostly female) academic colleagues for one of the other, more or less fathomable, reason found by him to justify such behaviour. Maybe do something meriting a minimal portion of admiration and respect from academic colleagues, perhaps?

Not so at all.

As revealed on Christmas eve by Jonathan Ichikawa-Jenkins, Carrie's husband, Leiter has recently had a Canadian lawyer send a letter to them both, threatening with a defamation lawsuit unless they publicly post a "proposed statement" of apology to Leiter, with the specifically nasty ingredient of a specific threat that such a suit would imply " “a full airing of the issues and the cause or causes of [Carrie’s] medical condition;”. Moreover, the letter asks the Ichikawa-Jenkins to apologise not only for the personal declaration of professional ethos that made no mention of Brian Leiter whatsoever but that for some reason – to me still incomprehensible as long as a deeply suppressed guilty conscience or outright pathology is not pondered – to to be an attack on his person, but also for the actions of other people, such as this post at the Feminist Philosophers blog, and The September Statement itself – implying obviously that all the signatories to that statement would be in the crosshairs of professor Leiter. The full letter of the lawyer setting out these threats is here. The (expected) response from the Ichikawa-Jenkins' lawyer is here, stating the simple and obvious claim that all that's been publicly communicated on this matter – such as making public bullying emails of Leiter –  is protected by normal statutes of freedom of speech.

Following the quick uptake of this news, with comments by The Daily Nous, and Jon Cogburn pointing out the perversity of an academic promoting the abuses of free speech by UK libel law standards, Leiter has posted a comment of his own. He states that Jonathan Ichikawa-Jenkins' brief recapture of Leiter's lawsuit threatening letter is "misrepresenting" it, which – in want of any specifics from leiter's side – seems to mean not disclosing it in full (making every academic book, including Leiter's own works, commenting on the works of others into a "misrepresentation" as defined by Leiter himself). He moreover states that the Ichikawa-Jenkins's dismissal of his legal threat means that "we now have an effective admission by Jenkins and Ichikawa that they misled the philosophical community with their claims in the September Statement". The argument for this bizarre claim seems to be that their legal response is not responding to his lawyers' statement of the September Statement as factually inadequate. What Leiter forgets, however, is that this response is already all over the internet, in the form of Leiter's own emails and public remarks on this affair. On this matter, the onus is on Brian Leiter to prove that he hasn't as a matter of fact written or said the things attributed to him. All that remains beyond this, as noted by The Daily Nous, is apparently that Leiter wants to question that Carrie Ichikawa-Jenkins was as a matter of fact harmed by his behaviour towards her, conveniently forgetting that what his professional colleagues reacted against was his own unacceptable bullying behaviour, and the implications of having him getting away with such breeches from the position of power bestowed on him by being in charge of the PGR. As we now know, this assessment was shared by a sizable enough portion f the PGR advisory board to eventually produce the mentioned resignation of Leiter from his position of influence over this institution.

This utterly bewildering attempt by a philosphical academic at constructing an argument that wouldn't even pass for a 101 essay reminds somewhat of the attempt of Leiter to have me retract statements on my own blog that his harassment of Ichikawa-Jenkins was unprovoked. Apparently, Leiter believes that the fact that he feels something (such as provoked) implöies the existence of something (in this case a provocation) that justifies the behaviour he exhibits due to this feeling. Maybe it is the same thing going on with this lawsuit threatening business of his – since he feels he has the right to treat colleagues as pieces of crap when he feels like it, this is also "factually adequate"? Or maybe he just likes to annoy other people, who knows?

Brian Leiter ends his comment by clarifying ...

Legal remedies may yet be pursued against others among the original signatories and authors of the September Statement.  As I have remarked previously, I do not begrudge those who signed subsequently for doing so given the misleading statements that were presented to them.

As one of those subsequent signatories, I do wonder whether or not the implication that I didn't have the wits to check the relevant facts, such as Brian Leiter's own original bullying email to Carrie Ichikawa-jenkins, before signing could perhaps constitute libel. Perhaps me and the 647 others should open a class action defamation suit against Leiter for soiling our academic reputations by ill-meant slander? Or perhaps not. Perhaps we should stand by the minimal decency standard of civil academic discussion not to try to resolve either factual or normative disputes by threats of force towards opponents.

Special issue of Bioethics: Ethical Implications of New and Future Technical Developments in Prenatal Testing and Screening

One of  my core research fields over the years has been reproductive ethics, especially the ethics of genetic and reproductive technology. In my postdoc period, I published a study on the moral roots of prenatal diagnosis, followed by a number of further explorations of the ethics of reproductive technology, genetic testing and medical screening programmes in general. The last two years, this process has come full circle, due to new revolutionary technical developments regarding prenatal testing and related genetic analysis, and the last year or two, I have been busy presenting and discussing issues related to this several times with Swedish medical professional and medical ethical organisations and actors. In the spring of 2013, I was invited to present my views on this topic at a specially convened international symposium at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. Out of that event now comes a full special issue on the ethical implications of new and future technical developments in prenatal testing and screening of the journal Bioethics, edited by Wybo Dondorp and Jan van Lith, of Maastricht and Leiden universities, respectively:

The content, of course, features a developed version of my talk at the Brocher meeting – A New Ethical Landscape of Prenatal Testing: Individualizing Choice to Serve Autonomy and Promote Public Health: A Radical Proposal – arguing that the technical advances of prenatal testing should herald the beginning of the end of of large societal prenatal screening programmes. But the issue also features a large number of other contributions from leading names in the field, e.g. Angus Clarke, Zuzana Deans, Ainsley Newson, Steve Wilkinson and Guido deWert, and the full table of content reads as follows:

EDITORIAL

1. Dynamics of Prenatal Screening: New Developments Challenging the Ethical Framework (pages ii–iv)Wybo Dondorp and Jan van Lith

PAPERS

1. 1. Prenatal Screening: Current Practice, New Developments, Ethical Challenges (pages 1–8)Antina de Jong, Idit Maya and Jan M.M. van Lith
      
      
   2. Psychological Aspects of Individualized Choice and Reproductive Autonomy in Prenatal Screening (pages 9–18)Jenny Hewison
   3. For Your Interest? The Ethical Acceptability of Using Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing to Test ‘Purely for Information’ (pages 19–25)Zuzana Deans, Angus J. Clarke and Ainsley J. Newson
   4. Prenatal Screening, Reproductive Choice, and Public Health (pages 26–35)Stephen Wilkinson
   5. A New Ethical Landscape of Prenatal Testing: Individualizing Choice to Serve Autonomy and Promote Public Health: A Radical Proposal (pages 36–45)Christian Munthe
   6. Prenatal Screening: An Ethical Agenda for the Near Future (pages 46–55)Antina de Jong and Guido M.W.R. de Wert
      
      
      
      

Three Tales On Research Citation, Funding and Freedom

It is an ever growing development in the world of academic research, that researchers are being measured by various criteria of performance output. Two of these are citation – how much fellow researchers refer to your work, how much you have - as the saying goes - "academic impact", and ability to attract external funding. A third, that's been coming strong recently is the "societal relevance", which has prompted governments and purpose specific public as well as private financial backers of research to allocate money more and more within restricted programmatic schemes aimed to support research in (allegedly) pragmatically important areas. There is a lot of discussion of these developments among academics, and in the arts and humanities there is often a complaint that the systems installed are rigged at the outset to strongly bias in favour of biomedical and technological science, to some extent a bit of selected natural science. However, I'm not going to go down that route here. Neither will I question to what extent any of these parameters are indicators of research quality, mostly because I don't believe there is any such thing as a ready-made clear concept of research quality to use for such an assessment. My rather profane view is that different parties may be interested in backing, having or doing research for a number of very variable reasons, and any assessment of the outcome would be best assessed in light of whatever such reason is thought to motivate the endeavour.

Instead, I would like to tell three brief tales from my own research career, complicating things for anyone who think that the three parameters mentioned have some sort of joint relevance for how to assess research. This is not to say that there aren't other parameters one might want to use or that these three are "quality indicators", then, just that I will concentrate on these three, currently in strong vogue. My point with the tales is to show how easily scoring on the three parameters may come apart. More specifically, I will use them to illustrate how citation may come apart from both external funding, and dependence on directive research funding schemes.

Tale 1: The Ethics of Gene Technology and Sports
This is a field that I was more or less lured into by my friends and colleagues at the time, Torbjörn Tännsjö and Claudio Tamburrini. Claudio was pursuing an interest in the ethics and philosophy of sports, in particular the ethics of doping regulation, and him and Torbjörn has secured a book contract with Taylor & Francis to produce an edited collection on that topic, underscoring the impact on elite sports of technological development. I, at the time, had just started my tenure as senior lecturer in practical philosophy at the University of Gothenburg, had no research funding to speak about and was busy as hell with teaching many new courses, as well as working on various research proposals to secure some funding. Then Torbjörn and Claudio asks me if I want to contribute a chapter on the possible application of gene technology for enhancing sports performance, using the background of my former research on biomedical applications of gene technology undertaken in my post doctoral work. Hungry for merits as I was, and also a bit intrigued by the topic,  I accepted, and then spent quite a bit of my private time researching and writing up the piece the following months – I had no special funding of any sort, and the little faculty funding within my appointment for research was already more than fully claimed by other work. The book, Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacture of Winners came out in 2000, and can be downloaded in its entirety for free from this source, including my contribution: "Selected champions: making winners in the age of genetic technology"

Pretty quickly, my chapter attracted attention among other scholars in philosophy, ethics and sports studies, I was invited to conferences and workshops, and a few years later I was again invited to contribute to a follow up volume edited by the same people, eventually published in 2005, and available for free download from here, and featuring my chapter "Ethical aspects of controlling genetic doping":

 
Once again, I wrote this chapter without any purpose specific funding, although by this time, I had secured a few projects on partly related areas and also been allocated a slightly better slice of faculty funding. However, writing this contribution was a direct result of the former chapter and would have been impossible to undertake withoput the existence of that former investment of work.

Later, both chapters have been reprinted in state-of-the-art edited collection volumes for use in academic teaching, here and here, and the first one is now my second most cited piece of writing ever, using the Google Scholar Citation tool, having collected 44 citations so far, and continuing to cited up during this year. The follow up chapter is not as well cited, being less radical in its main thesis, but also that one continues to attract interest.

Tale 2: The Morality of Scientific Openness
This story takes us even further back in time, to the period of my post doc days, which I spent in the now defunct Centre for Research Ethics, at the time run by the Royal Society of Arts and Science in Gothenburg, funded by a research project on the ethics of prenatal and other genetic reproductive testing. During that time I and the year following receiving my PhD, I had been sketching a text book on the ethics of technology that eventually never saw the light of day. One chapter in that book had been planned to be about the ethics of openness, secrecy and sharing as well as withholding information in science and research. I happened to mention this to the director of the CRE and my senior colleague in the project, Stellan Welin, who asked me if I had thought about this as a possible venture for a more advanced text, mentioning the angle of patent regulation and a context of scientific history I had been unaware of. Excited, I made some preliminary probing and, based on that, we submitted an abstract to the Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, which was accepted and eventually presented in the Florence edition of this major event in the philosophy of science in 1995. Having received encouraging response there, back home we decided to draft an article, at the same time discovering the rather new journal Science and Engineering Ethics, which seemed perfect for the piece we planned. Thus submitting there, the resulting article "The Morality of Scientific Openness" (free online postprint), was published the following year in the second volume of this journal.

This entire work was the result of spontaneous impulse, lust and the time used for it was not funded in any way, especially not by any purpose specific allocation of money, besides a little bit of extra support from the Wennergren Foundation to cover some of the expenses to attend the CLMPS congress. Less sensationalist and more dryly scholarly in its tone, the piece hasn't rocketed to the top as the first chapter of the previous tale, but it is among my better cited works, and also this one continues to attract interest all through up during this year.

Tale 3: The Philosophy of (Free) Improvisation
This story takes us even further back, to time of my PhD candidate days. having always had a side-life as an improvising musician, I was asked by my two good friends in that area of activity, Mats Gustafsson and Raymond Strid, to assist in the production of a special section on free improvised music of the Swedish periodical of contemporary (non-popular) music, Nutida Musik, among other things an essay of what is special about free improvisation. Doing this in parallel to finalising my doctoral thesis on the morality of abortion, in turn undertaken within a weak funding scheme, I used whatever sources I could find at the time, and wrote what turned out to be a seminal academic analytic piece on the concept of free improvisation, called (in Swedish), "Vad är fri improvisation?", published in 1992. A few years later, I was asked by Peter Stubley, who was then setting up the web resource "European Free Improvisation pages", whom I had some contact with through an emailing list for free improvisers in the 1990's, asked me if I could translate this text to English. I did so, and Peter published it on the EFI site, where it remains accessible for free. Another stretch of time later, this text was translated into Polish, and published in the Glissando magazine in 2005. All of this work was done completely outside any of the funding available to me during this time. As this work was from my standpoint not in any way central to my academic endeavours, but rather a spin-off of my musical interests, I paid scant attention to what then happened.

But, in fact, if the Swedish, English and Polish versions of this short essay are combined (1, 2, 3), it is in fact one of my decently cited works (total of 15 citations), having attracted scholarly attention from philosophy, and the general studies of music and arts, up to and including 2012, so far.

*

So, to round off, all of these three tales document how (relatively) well-cited (in my world) works of research appears without any sort of significant connection to pre-existing funding, even less funding for the specific purpose of the work in question. Rather, the three examples illustrate how cited research may appear despite the lack of funding, as well as despite of the presence of funding claiming a research time for more purpose specific undertakings. As I recall, the same pattern holds (without any claim to comparability in other respects) also to the story told by James Watson in The Double Helix about how the discovery of the DNA molecule came about.

FIFA's Next Step: Hell 2026!?

This is related to my recent post on the atrocities surrounding the preparations for the Qatar football / soccer World Cup in 2022, and the associated obviously morally defunct organisation of FIFA. Just yesterday, following another pathetic round of attempted FIFA whitewash of the recent awarding process of the World Cup to same Qatar and, before that, the stellar beacon of human rights and democracy that is Russia, The Sunday Times revealed fresh evidence of corruption, to no surprise of anyone.   

So, with that in mind, today's tongue-in-cheek "revelation" from The Telegraph, does not seem at at all unrealistic. As a good friend of mine commented spontaneously: "why didn't we see that one coming?":

The report gives you the background to this very plausible forthcoming development, where 'Fifa was particularly impressed by “Hell’s well-organised system of circles where fans can listen to vuvuzelas” and watch England take on Germany in a penalty shoot-out until the end of time'. And, it continues:

Indeed, Lucifer, who has asserted control over the nascent Infernal Football Federation, is now regarded as a Blatter protégé and a leading candidate to take over from the Fifa president, should he ever wish to step down.

“Sepp Blatter has been a wonderful role model,” confirmed Lucifer. “But he still has so much to teach me before I can make the step up from running Hell to being the Dark Lord of an organisation as demonic and demented as Fifa. He is a constant inspiration.”

Amen!



 

'The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled': Exploiting 'Jewishness' for the Sake of Violence: The Core of Israeli Hardliner Political Rhetoric

This is of some interest in the aftermath of developments globally following the longstanding and growing global criticism of the Israeli apartheid politics and the latest round of Israeli state run carnage in illegally occupied Palestinian territories, and the official Israeli responses to my own country's recent decision to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state. For me as a philosopher interested in reasoning on value issues, including political issues, this development is of particular interest, as it has gradually unfolded what seems to be a core of Israeli political hardliner rhetoric all the way back to the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 that laid the foundation for the state of Israel as we know it today. The core is this:

Political decisions made by Israeli state representatives implying violent or restrictive action towards Palestinians or in occupied territories are ...

1. Necessary for the persistence of the state of Israel, thus any opposition is against the state of Israel and willing its destruction.
2. In the interest of "Judaism", "Jewishness", "Jewry" or "Jewish people" defined as an ethnic category, bound by a certain mix of religious and cultural tradition, thus any opposition is antisemitic in terms of racial discrimination on ethnic/religious grounds and wills the destruction of these people, and if you are a Jew and mount such criticism you're a "self-hating" Jew.
3. Ditto, defined as a genetic or heredity category, encompassing all people who are eligible for Israeli citizenship in accordance with the Law of Return, thus making any opposition antisemitic also in a biologically racist sense, and opposing Jews ditto "self-hating".

Of course, for all Jews (identified in whatever way you may prefer) and Israelis who have for many, many years been opposing and working against the hardliner policies which have brought the political situation related to Israel and Palestine to its current sorry state, the falsity of these assumptions has been crystal clear for a long time. However, the Israeli hardliners have kept on using the rhetoric built on it, and it has had a particular pull and persistence, not least in the USA. This is where the recent developments come in, as now even official US top politicians have stopped accepting it and a sort of criticism against Israeli policies in occupied territories have become possible to wield, without the predictable slandering about "antisemitism" sticking. It has gradually become obvious also across broad spectra of the US political landscape, what has been accepted across Europe for a few decades now, that current Israeli policy is not identical to or necessary linked to either the existence of the state of Israel or the interests or opinions of Jews, however identified. It is simply nothing more than exactly that: current policy; and just as any other current policy of any other state, it could have been different in a number of ways and it can be revised in a number of ways. Thus the "not in my name" movement has recently been starting to catch a surge of support and acceptance after for a long time having been denounced as traitors to their people.

The most fascinating thing with this course of change, however, is not the direction of it, but how long the formula has been able to stick. It should have been obvious from day one, shouldn't it, that Bibi (Benjamin Netanyahu's popular nickname in Israel) ≠ Israel's interests and Israel's interests ≠ what's in the interest of Jews and, in particular, Bibi ≠ what's in the interest of Jews. It is, of course, a genius propaganda move of the Israeli hawks, though, to have people tacitly believe the opposite, thus being blinded to criticism of whatever carnage is mounted in the occupied territories. That's the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, and it would make up fascinating study material for politically oriented social psychologists for some decades ahead.