Some people apparently think you don’t need any good argument at all. You just decide it.
Who could that be? You might well ask. However, we have a politeness rule here and we refrain from calling out people who are offensive about us on other blogs. So my lips are sealed and my fingers are still. Sort of.
If you think it is worth finding out, you could look for the pingback on a discussion with a time-stamp after March 12 at 2 pm. That is, the pingback is on a post after 2 pm on March 12. There must be about 10 or 12 posts since then. If you do locate the pingback, which will be in among the comments, and go to the other blog, you might feel you have really wasted your time. It is actually pretty bad.
On the other hand, you might discern a person fairly desperately ignorant of things we have pretty thoroughly discussed. If you decide to comment to be helpful, do use the opportunity that blog affords. And if you decide to be unhelpful, please also use that blog.
Feminist Philosophers 
So I went to look to see if there was much in the way of discussion happening on that blog. I do seriously think that if I were given to generalizations, I’d say that what’s going on could make one despair of the profession. That is, there appears to be little or no understanding of why one might find problematic a philosophy example that treats a fat person as a potentially useful way to stop a train. There’s some mention of “subtexts,” which I would have thought it unlikely to be the right way to understand the objection. In addition, there’s lots of discussion of obesity and addictions and a total lack of knowledge of what fairly recent research in these areas is saying.
Still, there is one Borat moment, as a Lithuanian Jew says she wouldn’t mind if the example had throwing a Jew
down the wellin front of the train.The L.J. feels she is rejecting our concerns by saying that we don’t need philosophy examples to give positive role models. Honestly, one just can’t make these philosophy discussions up.
I am completely ignorant about pingbacks, and now I am worried that there could be a blog somewhere representing the loyal opposition, and poor me is unable to benefit from their discussion of topics that concern me greatly.
Can someone please point me in the right direction so that I may continue my education in such things and become slightly more knowledgeable in the ways of the world?
I also ask so that, in case I have some small point to add to the discussion, I might exercise my ability to contribute to such a surely vibrant discussion.
OK, arm twisted. Here’s the link, purely in the spirit of sharing information.
J. Jarvis Thomson, eh? Maybe we should change “fat man” to “guy with a really huge stand-up bass”? ;-)
Love the Borat skit. I’s actually a form of back-handed anti-Islamic sentiment, though, not a form of anti-semitism. It’s one of those brilliant perceptual flips that I as a thick dichotomizing gentile have to give up on trying to analyze within SECONDS and just fall down laughing over. I ADORE!!! Jewish comedians. Sasha Baren Cohen could kill me with hilarity. He’s A GOD!
HISS! CUSS!#!*@! It took me a minute to see past that woman’s (if the blogger was who&what s/he claimed to be) messed up sentence structures to catch that racist comment near the end. I’m seriously starting to doubt that person’s “Jewishness”. Did anybody else catch that?
Passive-aggressive, much?
BW, who’s passive aggressive? Borat/Cohen? JJ? “Lithuanian Jew”? Me?
not sure why the comments there would make you want to despair over the profession per se. the comments there aren’t impressive to say the least, but they also aren’t clearly by people actually in the profession, are they?
Did I actually read this?
“This is a little ridiculous (and so are feminist philosophers).”
Lol curious, I can definitely see how the level of discussion at that other site is of a total different level of daftness than what we poor sods have.
I think.
1. About passive-agressive. Taken literally, it refers to failing to meet obligations through a variety of means, including procrastination, inefficiency and so on. It’s often used informally to mean “being a pain in the ass (or arse, in the UK)”. It’s hard to see how it applies here in the literal sense, so I’m going to get really sad in thinking it might apply in the informal sense.
If we think, as I do and frequently say to commenters here, that people writing in a philosophy blog have an obligation to present arguments, especially in the case of labeling others with negative terms, then there is a very clear case of being passive agressive in this whole episode. The case I have in mind consists in declaring that we’re daft and then going on to another blog to say the same thing time and again without any arguments whatsoever.
2. Just to clarify about Borat: I take one point of the movie, and in particular of the clip above, is to show how easily and quickly people can be brought to display really pretty awful behavior.
3. mm – you’ll notice that I said “if I were inclined to generalize,” but you are right to point out that we don’t know the participants are professional philosophers. There are, unfortunately, some signs of philosophical training. At least, I hope we’re the only discipline that allows people to sit in judgment on whole groups on what only just counts as empirical grounds. The discussion is very like recent discussions on philosophy blogs about why there are so few women in philosophy or whether philosophy is class conscious.
Come to think of it, though, plenty of scientists are capable of the same sort of rifts on women in science. And some social scientists on blacks in academia can be unbearable, so I’m probably wrong.
What struck me is that the post never gives any inkling of the range of positions that were taken in the discussion over here; there were some questions and worries raised, and some back-and-forth about those (some people were more inclined to think it problematic, others more skeptical), and that was all.