Miss Morals Speaks Out about Publishing

Ludwig Wittgenstein once likened doing philosophy to swimming under water—there is an almost irresistible temptation to come up for air. Many of us, I daresay, feel the same way about writing for publication. We're tempted to surface when we stare for an hour or so at that blank first page, when the dreadful suspicion grows on us that everything we're saying has already been said much better by everybody else, and when we hit the point where, in the vivid image of Margaret Urban Walker, we've set our hair on fire and are trying to put it out with a tack hammer. What keeps us going is our desire to participate in the ongoing debates and discussions in the discipline, intellectual curiosity about some topic we want to understand better, or a rash promise to an editor. The standing expectation at our various institutions that we will be productive scholars doesn't hurt, either.

As a reasonably well-broken-in author, the current editor of Hypatia, former editor at the Hastings Center Report, editor of a number of collections of essays, general coeditor of two book series, and—worst of all—a moral philosopher by trade, I've developed some tolerably fixed views over the years about the ethics of academic publishing. I therefore devote this Musings to unloading these views on Hypatia's unsuspecting readership. In what follows, I'll identify what I take to be the more important, commonly shared understandings of the responsibilities attached to the five roles that make the wheels of publication go round: the author, the publisher, the editor, the reviewer, and the graduate student mentor. I begin with the most important role—that of the author, without whom all is in vain.

Authors

As Alasdair MacIntyre might have said but didn't, academic publishing is a practice—a settled, socially recognized, rule-governed activity involving a number of people in the exercise of a set of skills aimed at some specific end. MacIntyre argues that unlike such external goods as money and social prestige, a practice's internal goods can only be attained by exercising the virtues that inhere in the practice (MacIntyre 1984, 187–91). If that is so, authors can't have the satisfaction of getting the argument just right, understanding something difficult, contributing to a growing body of knowledge, and the like unless they possess the requisite virtues.

The ancient Greek virtues of courage, practical judgment, and temperance surely attach to publishing: it takes courage to subject one's work to the scrutiny of peers and to keep writing even when reviewers have panned one's most recent book. It takes practical judgment to structure one's arguments properly and to be a good critic of one's own work. And it takes temperance to refrain from becoming self-important and to allow for the reasonableness of other opinions. Add to these the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love—faith in one's work, for example, hope that the scholarly enterprise increases understanding, and love of the written word—and it becomes clear that she who would reap the benefits internal to publication must be well steeped in the virtues.

Because virtues are qualities of character, however, they can't show authors their responsibilities to others except in the most general terms. To understand more specifically what authors owe the other participants in the practice of publishing and to the reading public, it's necessary to identify the socially normative expectations that seem to be operating at the moment and then assess those expectations to see whether they withstand moral scrutiny.

First, a diatribe about something that authors are not expected to do. If they are philosophers, authors are not expected to understand how gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other abusive power systems work, even though its been demonstrated, repeatedly, that this inattention distorts philosophical inquiry. By the same token, authors are not expected to acknowledge that these power systems are themselves pressing topics for philosophical reflection. Could everybody please cut this out right this minute? It is a kind of treason to...