with controversial ideas because it's important

that those ideas be discussed.

We can never know for sure when we're mistaken.

There've been such a lot of beliefs

that people have been certain of

and persecuted people who oppose them

that we now regard as false.

- It's quite possible that we are all agreed

on things that we believe to be true, that are false,

and if we prevent them being critically examined

and scrutinized and prevent people putting arguments

against them, we are not going to discover

which of our beliefs are false and which of them are true.

I founded the "Journal of Controversial Ideas"

together with my co-editors

Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan

because all three of us were troubled

by the narrowing climate of ideas

that could be openly and freely discussed.

When a young philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel,

published an article

in which she accepted the idea that people

who wish to be transgender should be able to identify

as a gender different from that with which they were born-

but she asked the question, if people can do that

with gender, why can't they do that with regard to race?

She gave us an example of somebody

who had not been descended from African ancestry,

but was working for an organization

in the United States that was helping Blacks

and herself identified as Black.

And when it was exposed that she was not really Black,

she lost her position and there was a lot of condemnation.

And in fact, a lot of that condemnation came

from people with the same politics

as those who strongly supported the idea

of anybody to identify as a gender different from that

that they were assigned at birth.

So simply for raising that question about trans-racialism,

there was a petition to the journal calling for it

to be withdrawn

and criticizing the editors for publishing it.

It was directed against a young woman

who was an untenured philosophy professor at that time.

So we felt that the article was one

that raised a good question

and an appropriate response for those who disagreed

would've been to show why they thought it was wrong.

To attack the article

and say it ought to be withdrawn seemed

to us to be completely the wrong reaction.

And then there've been a number

of other instances since then.

It seems like university administrations have been very weak

in standing up to defend academic freedom.

And the idea

of university administrations following a Twitter storm

of protest against one

of their professors having said something seemed to us

to be completely wrong.

And our concern was that people

would stop publishing controversial ideas.

So we thought it would be good to have a journal

that we reviewed anonymously,

so people are not biased, and then publish good articles.

And if the authors did not want to put their name on it,

we would accept anonymous publication.

The argument is mostly put

against the controversial articles that we receive

that they are going to harm disadvantaged

or marginalized groups.

But against that, we weigh the importance

of having an open debate on issues

and the importance of an issue doesn't disappear

if you suppress discussion about it.

People will still think these things

and some people will say these things

and because there is no open discussion,

there won't be any good understanding

of how best to refute the things that people have said.

We stick by the view that

John Stewart Mill put forward that:

In the early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham,

the founder of the Utilitarian School,

wrote essays strongly attacking the idea

that it should be a crime

for anyone to have sex with someone of their own sex.

But Bentham never published those papers

because he felt that to publish them at that time

would've brought discredit

on all of the other things that he

and the early English Utilitarians wanted to do-

so those essays remained unpublished until this century.

That's an example of something

that people firmly believed in

and did not allow a real debate.

Maybe if they had been more open to controversial ideas

and they'd had debates about that,

then many decades of repression

and discrimination against gays could have been avoided.

Freedom of thought and expression

is a very important basic good for any society

that hopes to progress,

that hopes to improve the world's situation-

and hopes also to progress in knowledge

and understanding of what is true.

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