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In her 2023 book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, the psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that university campuses could be incubator sites for restorative justice practices because universities have a mission to promote egalitarian principles and societal innovation. Restorative justice practices are often associated with abolitionist feminism, a movement that aims to free women and all people from the reach of the prison system. Abolitionist feminists contrast their aims with those of carceral feminism, a project to exact punishment that abolitionists argue backfires on the most vulnerable, especially victims of sexual violence.
When I present work on the problem of sexual misconduct in academic philosophy, an audience member usually asks me where I position myself vis-à-vis these two camps. "Where," they ask, "does proposal x, y or z fit in the dichotomy between abolitionist and carceral feminisms?" I have never argued for perpetrators of sexual misconduct to go to prison (nor, for that matter, that they be isolated, or even shamed), so the question might seem odd. I have, however, argued that consequences for perpetrators of sexual misconduct are appropriate and necessary for the health of everyone involved in academic philosophy. In some cases, permanent consequences—such as perpetrators being fired with transparency about the reasons—are fitting. Transparency helps protect against the well-documented "pass the harasser" phenomenon, where perpetrators quietly move from university to university with the ability to re-offend.
This permanence is what audience members view as potentially carceral, because such consequences do not allow perpetrators to fully redeem themselves professionally. Significantly, permanent consequences do not necessarily preclude the perpetrator from apologizing and working to restore the victim and the community they harmed, practices which abolitionist feminism values.
When I was most recently asked about carceral feminism, I explained to the questioner, a senior woman in the profession, that perpetrators seem largely uninterested in issuing apologies, let alone working actively to rectify the wrongs they have committed. As a result, there are no examples to pull from in order to build a model of restorative justice. She replied, “speak it into existence!”
Easier said than done. Nevertheless, that is what I will do here: speak about the conditions that need to be in place in order for restorative justice measures to work in philosophy. Specifically, I will focus on the condition that perpetrators must be willing to take an active role in repair.
In recent years, "carceral" has undergone a concept shift from a word pertaining directly to prisons, to one encompassing any and all consequences for sexual misconduct. Sara Ahmed has helpfully analyzed this development. Following Ahmed, it is relevant to my argument here that when a default attitude is one of undue entitlement, losing that entitlement can feel like a harsh punishment.
I use Colin McGinn as an example because he has offered a clear articulation of his own perspective as someone who faced consequences for alleged sexual misconduct. McGinn was not fired, but he resigned from his position at the University of Miami in 2012 after allegations of sexual misconduct against him surfaced. (The Miami New Times supplied a detailed timeline of the incidents and McGinn’s defense.) Recently, McGinn took to his blog to reflect on over ten years of “professional cancellation” by his former community of philosophers.
The post, titled “On Cancelling”, opens with the following thought experiment:
Suppose your top ten philosophers had all been cancelled: removed from pedagogical employment, prevented from publishing, and generally shunned. This possibility could cover the philosophers of the last hundred years or of all time. Suppose that their thoughts had therefore never seen the light of day. Suppose too that no one else had ever had them. No Plato, no Socrates (who was rather drastically cancelled), no Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant (you can make your own list). Philosophy would have had a very different history. […] Meanwhile other second-rate individuals formed the philosophical tradition, perhaps those most responsible for doing the cancelling. Nobody worries much about this, however, since the cancelled philosophers never had the chance to do their work and hence never became known as the great thinkers they could have been. Do you think this would be a tragedy for philosophy or just a negligible historical hiccup?
All of this is written in a critically distant tone. Yet in the next sentence, McGinn explicitly positions himself as the canceled one: “I have existed in a state of professional cancellation for over ten years now.” McGinn thinks he is the great man wasting away his potential on the sidelines of professional philosophy—and that this is a tragedy for the profession.
Where to begin? I could write about overvaluing the work of men and devaluing the work of women; about men’s contributions being deemed indispensable while women’s are deemed worse than dispensable, indeed a nuisance. Leave philosophy to women (and men who don’t commit sexual misconduct), McGinn suggests, and it will become second-rate. Though McGinn flatfootedly, or perhaps provocatively, chooses an all-male canon to populate his thought experiment, he allows us to fill in the blanks with our own list of favorite philosophers. Regardless of any one reader’s inclinations, we can reasonably conclude something about McGinn's inclinations from his list: he thinks the best philosophy has been done by white men, and that their status as great philosophers should be protected.
McGinn thinks the best philosophy has been done by white men, and that their status as great philosophers should be protected
Being fired—or in this case, resigning—from an academic job does not mean being banished from the community of academic philosophy. Blogging, for example, is one means of staying connected with the philosophical community. Submitting to blind peer-reviewed journals is another means of staying connected to philosophy without holding a professional position. McGinn’s claims of cancellation are a smokescreen, tantamount to crying wolf, since he mentions in the comments section of his post that he has published four books with a major academic press since the cancellation started. He also says that he only refrains from submitting to peer reviewed journals for “the usual reasons” having nothing to do with being cancelled (I take those usual reasons to be long wait times, annoying comments from reviewers, etc.).
I am struck by McGinn’s sense that what he does is a gift to the world. It is a beautiful thought, passionate and quasi-religious. He later describes his talent for philosophy as “God-given.” I wish victims of sexual misconduct who leave philosophy had the same sense of their own gifts and what the world loses when those gifts go uncultivated. If only we could redistribute hubris.
I also wish perpetrators understood what is lost when victims leave philosophy, and aimed to prevent that from happening by seeking repair for their victims. Responding to McGinn’s blog post, the Twitter user @iHateCogsci put it well: “It's interesting that men ‘cancelled’ for sexual harassment never see their own misconduct towards women [sic] a 'tragedy for philosophy’ which prevents these women from having a chance to do their work and hence become known as the great thinkers they could have been.”
Instead, what most often happens is that the accused double down on their innocence, besmirch their accusers and, in extreme cases, even take to men’s rights forums to air their grievances, as with philosopher Jeffrey Ketland speaking at an International Conference on Men's Issues. These tactics work: universities are cowed into keeping perpetrators on faculty, other philosophers continue to tolerate the accused, and victims silently leave the profession.
Universities are cowed into keeping perpetrators on faculty, other philosophers continue to tolerate the accused, and victims silently leave the profession
Restorative justice is meant to focus on repair to the victim of an offense. The concept of restorative justice is thought to have originated with the psychologist Albert Eglash. In a 1958 paper on "creative restitution," Eglash set out to expand the concept of restitution beyond monetary compensation to victims. One critical point in Eglash’s approach is that creative restitution is ultimately self-determined, or led by the perpetrator: “While punishment must be painful or uncomfortable, it need not be a constructive contribution. The essence of restitution, on the other hand, is a constructive effort, an offender giving something of himself.” Though the offender is compelled to make amends, he chooses what form the amends will take. The end result of restitution is that the situation for the victim and her community is improved from its state before the harm occurred (a tall order, no doubt).
Similarly, the central conceit of restorative justice today is that standard criminal justice procedures focus on punishing the perpetrator but ignore the needs of the victims. Restorative justice focuses on repairing harm to the victim and restoring them to a safe place in their community. Mariame Kaba, for example, considers restorative justice as an approach in which community and human relationships are made central.
Though restorative justice measures have been tested in a variety of contexts, the university may be an especially promising setting, as Judith Herman argues. Herman strikes a note of optimism. Egalitarian principles and societal innovation sound good! Yet, when Herman starts to get into concrete cases, her analysis is driven more by concern that male perpetrators not be punished than that victims see repair to their lives. This is a rare misstep for Herman, whose survivor-centered work on sexual violence paved the way for much of today’s feminist discourse around trauma.
In Truth and Repair, Herman gives a counterintuitive reading of a hypothetical scenario of "gray area" rape. College student Kevin escorts a “quite intoxicated” Amy to her dorm room after a night of partying on campus. Once in her room, Amy initiates sex. Amy soon becomes “quite unresponsive”, and Kevin wonders if she has passed out, but he nevertheless has sex with her. While maintaining that his behavior is a violation, Herman describes the male perpetrator as a passenger in a drunk driver’s car, and the victim Amy as the drunk driver. Just as Amy would be too drunk to drive, she is too drunk to consent to sex; Kevin’s mistake was getting in the car in the first place. Casting the perpetrator as a passive and even endangered victim, however, does not appear to hold much promise for a fair disciplinary process. Perhaps worse, Herman motivates the use of restorative justice measures in this scenario with the claim that Kevin might become resentful and defensive if he is harshly disciplined. But surely restorative justice should be motivated by care for victims and commitment to principles of fairness, not a desire to placate entitled men?
Whether or not perpetrators are on board with restorative measures, there is independent reason to doubt that universities will be moral exemplars
Whether or not perpetrators are on board with restorative measures, there is independent reason to doubt that universities will be moral exemplars. Experts characterize the university as a microcosm of wider society—not a moral exemplar so much as a reflection of society's strengths and ills, especially regarding gender-based violence (see, for example, The 1752 Group report on gender-based violence in higher education, “Is This Normal?”). Furthermore, abolitionist feminists, those who do not want to see an expansion of carceral logics into every justice system we have available—and I place myself in that camp—have good reason to be wary of restorative justice on college campuses. The worry is that restorative justice measures will lapse into the same old patterns as Title IX proceedings. As Nicole Bedera’s research on Title IX has shown, the default attitudes by administrators are sexist “himpathy” for the perpetrator and indifference to the victim. The trouble with restorative justice is that, short of profound cultural transformations, restoration too often looks like restoring the perpetrator back to the position that enabled the violence to occur in the first place. Himpathy abounds.
But even starting with the greatest optimism about restorative justice—the optimism, I take it, the audience member who said “speak it into existence!” wanted from me—there must be willingness on the part of perpetrators to participate. In cases of sexual misconduct in philosophy, perpetrators are all too intent on continuing to punish the victim well after the case is closed, as the blog “What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?” has documented. For restorative justice to work, the perpetrators’ delusions, entitlement, rationalizations, and smearing of victims must stop. As Eglash wrote back in the 1950's, the perpetrator must give something of himself.
In his blog post on cancelling, McGinn says that his spirit is generous. “I have never felt so altruistic in my life, so philanthropic, so generous (it is not a particularly good feeling)”. He is, of course, talking about the generosity in publishing philosophy for free on his blog, contributing his gifts to society. But what if he extended that generosity to rectifying harm? Rather than doubling down, distorting the facts, and looking for alternative explanations for why he lost favor in the profession, McGinn might take a clear-eyed look at his own behavior. Not only would that generosity of spirit enable the conditions for restorative justice, but it might also transform the field on the whole, cancellation be damned.
One might object that my point about perpetrators’ attitudes is moot: McGinn's post proves Herman right that we should motivate restorative justice with a view for the perpetrators’ feelings because consequences breed anger and unhelpful rationalizations. One man faced professional repercussions and look at the resentment it bred! Therefore, the reasoning goes, we should make sure men face no irredeemable professional consequences. But this is unconvincing. There is a through line from the behavior that got McGinn into trouble in the first place (including taking to his blog to defend his behavior, which sparked an open letter in protest) and the resentment he feels for being ‘cancelled’. The entitlement and exaggerated pride on display in the recent post is the kind of attitude that breeds sexism and sexual violence in philosophy. Merely placating those attitudes will do nothing to repair—or for that matter, end—the harms of sexual misconduct.
Further Reading
Ahmed, Sara “The Complainer as Carceral Feminist” feministkilljoys Blog. June 8, 2022.
Brown, Sarah & Katherine Mangan (2019) “‘Pass the Harasser’ Is Higher Ed’s Worst-Kept Secret. How Can Colleges Stop Doing It?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. June 27, 2019.
Bull, Anna & Hayley Turner-McIntyre, H. (2023) Is this normal? Students’ experiences of gender-based harassment and violence and attitudes towards professional boundaries with staff at a UK university. The 1752 Group, York, UK
Davis, Angela Y., Gina Dent, nia t. evans, Erica R. Meiners, Beth E. Richie, “Why Policing and Prisons Can’t End Gender Violence” Boston Review. January 24, 2022.
Saul, Jenny, “Letter From Concerned Philosophers” Feminist Philosophers: News Feminist Philosophers Can Use. July 28, 2013.
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Mary Peterson is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Website: https://marypetersonphilosophy.weebly.com
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