Academic Freedom and Morals

In many places around the world, academic freedoms are viewed as being under threat from moralism, intellectual taboos, and ‘cancel culture’. But is moral outrage in the face of certain scholarly positions – for example on genetics and IQ, on gender and biology, or on disabilities and infanticide – always an ideological and paternalistic infringement on what should be an autonomous field? Or can there be legitimate moral critiques of academic theses? Philosopher Tim Henning looks into these questions in this highly topical and original book.

On the one hand, Henning defends a strong conception of academic freedoms, defining academia as an autonomous field of activity that should be respected as such. It should be guided purely by the criteria that arise from the immanent nature of a systematic search for truth – by data and evidence, truth and falsehood. On the other hand, he stresses the possibility of a non-moralistic form of moral critique. He finds evidence of this within the confines of the supposedly pure field of scientific criteria, as recent analyses in the fields of epistemological theory and linguistic philosophy show. It is the practical costs of scholarly errors that prove to be relevant in terms of epistemological theory and morals. As such, the question of whether a thesis is scientifically tenable can be a thoroughly moral one.