Our debate about debating – what it’s good for, when to pursue it – has become painfully confused, as that Harper’s letter shows. A thread trying to diagnose the problem:

First, distinguish two theses:

GENERAL: It’s best if our social norms permit open discussion of disagreeable topics, with some exceptions.

EXCEPT: Here are the exceptions: {X, Y, … }
1/N

Almost everyone agrees on GENERAL, including the need for exceptions. For instance, we all agree that it’s good to have norms against excessive discussion of the private family lives of ordinary people. Otherwise we’d have no privacy.
2/N

The problems come in specifying the list of EXCEPT. Along with privacy-protection, we tend to agree that libelous falsehoods and direct incitements to violent harm shouldn’t be welcomed. But after that, we start disagreeing about what else to add.
3/N

Our current debate stems from a movement to add some new items to EXCEPT. This movement wants to make it socially costly to debate the rights of marginalized people. Call this the Movement for Marginal Protections – MMP.
4/N

I think the MMP has a good point, though I also worry about *how* we revise. (If you want to learn about my worries: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-internet-is-an-angry-and-capricious-god/ ) But I want to figure out a compromise with the reasonable demands of MMP.
5/N

Meanwhile there’s another faction operating in this thoughtspace. They firmly object to revising EXCEPT. They are happy with the limits already in place (privacy, libel, etc) and oppose change. Call them Status Quo Warriors – SQW.
6/N

The SQW are behind most of the recent fulminations over ‘cancel culture’, that Harpers letter, etc. I do think that the SQW have a point – see my worries about revising EXCEPT. But I’m getting frustrated with the disingenuity of many SQW partisans.
7/N

Here’s the trick that some SQW are trying to pull: they refuse to acknowledge that their dispute with MMP is a dispute about *which* version of EXCEPT we should endorse. They pretend that it’s really a fight over GENERAL – the thing everyone agrees about.
8/N

In other words, they are conflating disagreement about *which* exceptions to open inquiry are valuable with disagreement about *whether* open inquiry is valuable. The pretend their opponents reject open inquiry itself, rather than their particular preferred list of exceptions
9/N

This is an effective and pernicious rhetorical trick. If you can make it sound like your opponents reject GENERAL – the thing everyone agrees about – then you make them sound unreasonable. And it also makes it easy for you to avoid having to provide good arguments.
10/N

Because the SQW do owe us some good arguments! They want to preserve some limits in EXCEPT (e.g. privacy) but not add new ones. What principle underwrites that *specific* set of limitations? What makes it better than the revision proposed by MMP?
11/N

I don’t know the answer, because SQW never give it. Instead, they chant platitudes in favor of GENERAL, the thing everyone agrees about. (See the Harper’s letter for examples.) But this is just the rhetorical trick of conflating GENERAL with their version of EXCEPT.
12/N

That’s why I’m so frustrated. Again, I think MMP have a good point, though I’m not sure how to accommodate it. I think revising EXCEPT is extremely fraught and difficult, some of the hardest conceptual work there is. I would *like* good arguments from SQW.
13/N

Instead we get question-dodging dreck like the Harper’s letter. A bunch of smart SQW people have been lulled into intellectual laxity by the ease of combusting straw men. They’re losing the ability to participate in hard cognitive labor.
14/N

So I don’t know what to do. I *welcome* the difficult and honest debate over how (much) to revise inquiry norms. But I don’t think we can even have that debate until the SQW folks quit playing scandalized puritan and acknowledge the messiness of social life.
/eNd