Peter Singer and Journal of Controversial Ideas aim to cancel the cancellers

Peter Singer is fighting ‘cancel culture’ with an academic journal that allows contributors to publish under a fake name.

Peter Singer says university students have become ‘quicker to take offence and also quicker to see offending someone as such a serious thing that it can override other considerations’. Picture: Julian Kingma

“Cancel culture” has become so prevalent and damaging to free speech one of Australia’s top phil­osophers has set up an academic journal in which contributors can publish under a fake name.

Peter Singer, a professor of philosophy at the elite Princeton University in the US, together with two other academics, will launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas later this month, to allow researchers to publish articles without risking their careers or suffering intimidation on social media.

“Clearly there has been an increase in various forms of behaviour that can intimidate people from writing on controversial topics,” Professor Singer told The Australian.

“We have noticed it in many fields, including in philosophical writing, and this isn’t a good thing. We’ve all had personal experiences with harassment,” he added, referring to his two co-founders Jeff McMahan and Francesa Minerva at the universities of Oxford and Ghent, respectively.

The journal, which will include renowned thinkers such as Lawrence Summers, Jonathan Haidt and Philip Tetlock on its editorial board, comes amid growing concern that universities — including in Australia — are increasingly dominated by and beholden to ­extreme and aggressive elements, typically from the left, who demand conformity.

“I certainly think that recently the majority of threats to freedom of thought have come from the left, and I regret that, of course,” said Professor Singer, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton’s Centre for Human Values, who once stood as a Greens candidate in the 1996 federal election.

Executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies, Tom Switzer, writing in The Australian last week, defined cancel culture as where “anyone in public life, the media or academe who refuses to subscribe to the extreme leftist orthodoxies of a militant and vocal minority are cancelled” by denying them a public platform and using social media to remove them from civilised society.

Professor Singer said social media in some respects had “dumbed society down”, given the proliferation of virtue-signalling, abuse and emoting, but it had also enabled people to become better informed.

He said university students, in his experience, had become “quicker to take offence and also quicker to see offending someone as such a serious thing that it can override other considerations”.

The Journal of Controversial Ideas says it will be “the first open-access, peer-reviewed, inter­disciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics”.

“Pseudonymous authors may choose to claim the authorship of their work at a later time, or to reveal it only to selected people … or to keep their identity undisclosed indefinitely.

“Standard submissions using the authors’ actual names are also encouraged,” the journal’s editorial policy states. The first issue will include articles on the “gender muddle”, whether “black make-up traditions can ever be justified”, and “the defence of stupid ideas at universities”.

Professor Singer noted, as an example, the brutal online attacks against feminist academic Rachel Tuvel, who in 2017 published an article that suggested identifying as a different race might be as ­deserving of acceptance as identifying as a different sex.

“We thought it was an interesting argument that she raised: why is it fine for people to think they are transgender but not to think they are a different race. She was just raising the question,” Professor Singer said.

Speaking of the decision to launch the journal, he said: “The three of us believe the value of freedom of thought and discussion is something that can’t be restricted merely on the grounds that somebody will be offended, because almost always somebody will be offended.

The editorial policy states: “We believe, with John Stuart Mill, that even if mainstream views are true or justified, if they are never challenged, they risk becoming dead dogmas rather than living truths.”