Philosophies 2017, 2(3), 17; doi:10.3390/philosophies2030017
The Unreasonable Destructiveness of Political Correctness in Philosophy
Advanced Studies Research Group and Fuzzy Sets Laboratory PIT, Production Engineering Program, COPPE, UFRJ P.O. Box 68507, 21945 972, Rio de Janeiro RJ, Brazil
Received: 14 March 2017 / Revised: 12 June 2017 / Accepted: 26 June 2017 / Published: 3 August 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Political Correctness—Towards a Global Ethos)
Abstract
I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct (“PC”) ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of epistemic adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology. View Full-TextKeywords:
cognitive biases; multi-criteria decision analysis; epistemic appraisal; epistemic values; ideology; metaphilosophy; multi-objective optimization; political correctness; social constructionism; social oppression
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Doria, M. The Unreasonable Destructiveness of Political Correctness in Philosophy. Philosophies 2017, 2, 17.
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