Public Intellectuals and their Pathologies
Public Intellectuals Too Should Endorse the Ethics of Responsibility
What is the role of intellectuals and academics in the public space, and how should they practice it, is a difficult issue that I’ve generally found to be not properly addressed. The intervention of academics in the public domain displays the kind of tension that Max Weber’s vocation lectures marvelously emphasize.[1] The tension, at least as Weber characterizes it, comes from the fact that science and politics correspond to two different justificatory endeavors. Science is basically devoted to the search for truth, independently of how exactly you conceive truth. Even if you’re not a hardcore Weberian regarding the strict distinction between judgments of facts and value judgments, you nonetheless have to acknowledge that the practice of science is impossible if there is no way to assert that some facts are false, or others are true. You don’t need to be a positivist for that – and this is fortunate. You just have to acknowledge that the regulative epistemological ideal of science is the quest for some form of objectivity, however compromised by the fact that value judgments cannot be fully escaped.
Politics is a quite different activity. Politics is the source of legitimate coercion. Truth is not the source, or at least not the only one of political legitimacy. As Weber famously put it, politics is a realm where two distinctive ethics confront. The “ethic of absolute ends” is the pursuit of an ideal, of the realization of core values that one takes to override any other ends, considerations, and principles. The “ethic of responsibility” is guided by the serious consideration of the consequences of one’s acts. It tries, as much as possible, to decipher the complex web of empirical relationships and values in which one’s actions are embedded. The two ethics are not mutually exclusive, and indeed for Weber, someone who has the “calling for politics” is able to articulate them. Nonetheless, the very nature of politics implies that ultimately the ethics of responsibility must prevail. Values are plural and incommensurable, making life “an unceasing struggle of the gods with one another.”
Academics who choose to engage in public discourse have no choice but to face the tension between these two kinds of endeavor. Academics who choose to enter the public space are de facto practicing politics. Ultimately, their goal is to provide reasons justifying actions that are directly or indirectly coercive. Even though they will not be those who make the coercive decisions, their intellectual contribution is nonetheless motivated by the willingness to influence the course of actions. This has implications. Because of the plurality of values, truth is only one of those “gods” that individuals in the public space can choose to worship. As persons-qua-persons, academics are no different than the rest of the population, they face the same agonistic choice between values, and this choice should not be fixed in advance.
On the other hand, it can be argued that academics who choose to become “public intellectuals” are not subjected to the same requirements as the rest of us. This is because academics who enter the public space do so as academics with particular expertise on a set of problems. What makes their voice potentially valuable and distinguishes the reasons they bring to the public discussion from those brought by other individuals is that they are (or should be) more likely to “speak the truth.” This is this particular status that is at play when, for instance, a group of academics signs a letter addressed to a government, calling for particular actions. If academics choose to group in such a way to make their voice heard, instead of mixing it with the voice of other citizens, that’s because they think that their academic status gives them particular legitimacy. The tacit assumption is that they are able to bring truth-related reasons to the public debate that no one else is able to bring.
There is absolutely nothing objectionable to that. Quite the contrary, scientific and, more generally, intellectual expertise is a valuable and indispensable input to the public justificatory endeavor. However the Weberian account of science and politics indicates that the behavior of public intellectuals should be guided by a small set of considerations. First, as I mentioned above, truth is only one of the values that can justify actions, and ultimately coercion. When speaking as public intellectuals, academics should acknowledge that their expertise, whatever its value, does not automatically provide conclusive reasons to act in a specific way. For sure, it is relevant to guide the exercise of coercive power and probably sufficient to disqualify reasons based on obvious falsehoods that may justify actions with adverse consequences.
Second, public intellectuals should also be plainly transparent with respect to the limits of their own expertise. Besides the incommensurability of values that is constitutive of politics, science itself is subject to uncertainty. More generally, the complexity of the issues that academics are tackling means that at any given moment, the actual scope of knowledge is quite limited. You may know that in a given experimental setting, intervention I will cause effect E. But you may have no idea or not be confident that I will cause E in a different, real-world, setting. There is nothing new here. More than anyone else, academics should be aware of the value of epistemic humility and negative introspection (i.e., to know that we don’t know) because they are the most well-placed to understand the limits of the knowledge they produce.
As public intellectuals, academics should therefore bring these epistemic values into the public space. That it is not always the case in practice is not controversial. Quite often, when they participate in the public space, academics are essentially endorsing the ethics of absolute ends and play on their epistemic status to give weight to the reasons they bring to the public discussion. There are two ways this can be done. The first is relatively benign. It happens when academics just forget that the pursuit of truth is only one end among the many ones that are valuable. I say this is benign because, first, public intellectuals are not those who ultimately make decisions, and second the input can still be valuable. The second is however more problematic. It is the case where public intellectuals are mixing non-epistemic value judgments with their special knowledge in such a way that it becomes complicated to determine among the reasons they provide, which actually follow from their expertise.
Both are pathological cases of the way academics can play the role of public intellectuals. Very often, they are not easy to distinguish. This is well illustrated I think by a recent open letter written by several Oxford philosophers and addressed to the UK’s Prime Minister, regarding the current situation in Gaza. The philosopher David Enoch (himself teaching at Oxford) has criticized this letter in several publications.[2] Basically, Enoch is pointing out that the authors of the open letter fail to acknowledge the complexity of the situation and the corresponding limits of our knowledge. So, in the article published in Daily Nous, he observes:
“But you will find no complexities in the academics’ letter, no intellectual or epistemic modesty, no admitting of ignorance or uncertainty. Instead, while ignoring all of this, these academics assert that their one-sided conclusions will, ‘in the fullness of history [!], be obvious to all’… Sure, you may think, things are complicated, but one can’t acknowledge all complexities in a brief, effective letter to political leaders! That is correct, but irrelevant. If there’s a point to intellectual interventions in public discourse, surely it is to help make people—perhaps including those who have spent at least some of their lives doing other things—appreciate the relevant complexities. The academics’ letter, however, plays a role in hiding complexities from plain view, in keeping public discourse (to which it hopes to contribute) simplistic. This is why it is such a good example of how not to offer an intervention in public discourse.”
The same idea is repeated in the article published in The Economist:
“Some of the underlying principles of the morality of war are, then, straightforward enough. (Not all, by the way: for instance, it is not at all clear whether a state using force should be neutral between harm to its own civilians and harm to the enemy’s, and if it shouldn’t, how much priority it should give to its own people.) But what follows from this as far as real-life conflicts are concerned is an extremely complicated matter, about which most of us don’t have anything like the level of information needed to draw conclusions with any confidence… Intellectuals should comment on public affairs, and it’s okay if they sometimes do it in a way that is not quite as nuanced as their next academic publication. But when they do, they should highlight complexities, not hide them. They may be experts on some of the general principles of the morality of war, but if they do not appreciate how fact-sensitive any application of that knowledge to real-world scenarios is always bound to be, then they do not after all know the first thing about their subject matter.”
Enoch is definitely right that in general public intellectuals have a duty to be explicit about the complexities of the case they are commenting on and the related limits of their knowledge – whether the authors of the letter fail to do so in this specific case is not my point here. When the issue at stake involves moral considerations, two kinds of uncertainty should be transparently acknowledged. Empirical uncertainty on the one hand, moral uncertainty on the other hand. Hiding uncertainty to defend a normative position, while capitalizing on one’s status of expert,[3] betrays a lack of sincerity that is incompatible with the exercise of public reason. It is using one’s academic status to mask an inappropriate endorsement of the ethics of absolute ends.
This may not always be a problem of sincerity. There are cases where public intellectuals may sincerely – and justifiably – believe that what they know is enough to justify a given political action. But even in those kinds of situations, they should not forget the Weberian point that politics is an endless conflict between incommensurable ends. This was I think the point made by Raymond Aron in his Mémoires.[4] Remembering an encounter with a minister soon after his return from Germany in the early thirties, Aron tells us how he has been impacted by the minister’s question after he had exposed how dangerous he thought Hitler was: “What would you do if you were at my place?” This question forces one to take all the relevant considerations into account and to face the complexity and incommensurability that characterize the political realm. Academics can respond that this is not their problem – they are not politicians after all. But when an academic enters the public space and becomes a public intellectual, they cannot ignore the demands of the ethics of responsibility. In their case, this responsibility has force at two levels: to be sincere about the limits of one’s knowledge and to acknowledge the plurality of incommensurable values.
[1] Max Weber et al., The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2004).
[2] As far as possible, I’m not taking any stance here about the situation in Gaza. I tend to agree with Enoch that academics with have entered into the public space with these letters have done so improperly. That doesn’t imply however that, ultimately, their demands are not justified.
[3] Note the sentence “as academics who spend our lives thinking about events such as these” in the letter of the Oxford philosophers.
[4] Raymond Aron, Mémoires, (Robert Laffont, 1981 (2003)).