Philosophers Adopt the Ronald Reagan Pledge

Reagan famously issued the 11th Commandment: Republicans should speak no evil of fellow Republicans. (Not counting injunctions to obey the previous Ten, the actual 11th commandment seems to be : "And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them [the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Cannanite, the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites] before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.")

Now, in response to Brian Leiter's over-the-top letters to various philosophers, a group has proposed that philosophers should never level negative public assessments of the competence or intelligence or philosophical acuity of any other individual philosopher or of the value of any philosophical subject or methodology.

I can go with the first and bite my pen. But a great deal of philosophical writing is trivial, or vague, or just badly done, and there are areas of philosophy that are dismal. Much of philosophy has become (or maybe long was) parochial and defensive. Witness Tim Scanlon's latest, reviewed on this blog. Scanlon holds that metaethics should not be--cannot be--challenged by outsiders. The new group generalizes: no area of philosophy can be challenged by insiders.