Virtue and Vice in Scholarship

The dangers of an activist orientation

The New Digest is thrilled to feature Dr Khomotso Moshikaro as a guest author and co-contributor for this post. Dr Moshikaro is a lecturer in law at the University of Cape Town.

Scholars, like all people, are engaged in a constant process of self-constitution. We are what we do repeatedly and sustainedly. This is because this sort of repetition helps us create and inhabit certain practical identities or ‘roles’ such as parent, citizen, or scholar. It is therefore particularly important to be aware of the habits one is forming and to be attuned to the danger that these habits may inhibit our ability to do scholarship well.

Because our practical identity as scholars always has a point or end, the manner in which we constitute ourselves as scholars must properly cohere with the ends of scholarship. Scholarship is properly ordered towards the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge. Activism is properly ordered towards the effective pursuit of political change and/or the prevention of change.

This means that there will be times when the pursuit of scholarship and the pursuit of activism conflict. When they conflict a choice must be made. There is therefore a clear danger that scholarly activism poses to scholarly integrity: when truth and efficiency conflict, the scholar activist may be tempted to choose to be effective, rather than to be truthful.

Role morality is a useful framework within which to discuss the phenomenon of scholarly activism, but it must be supplemented by an analysis of thevirtues and vices of scholarly inquiry, properly understood

Scholarship is concerned primarily with first-order questions of truth and knowledge. For academic freedom to be valuable it must be tied to something good, certainly for the individual engaging in it, but more importantly, if it is to receive heightened support and protection within law, for the community as a whole. That good is the unity of truth seeking and knowledge dissemination. Their pursuit is what defines the academic endeavour. This is the virtue of scholarship.

Activism on the other hand is a more pragmatic art. Its primary focus is second order, socially oriented prudence. Activists must first have settled the first-order moral, social and political questions necessary for them to identify the object of their activism before they can engage in it. Only then can an activist start to work towards implementation, change or resistance

Someone attempting to do both scholarship and activism must therefore be alive to the risk that they may prioritise politics over truth. This is not to say that scholars cannot take a view, even a politically or morally contentious view. The requirement to be impartial is not a requirement to be neutral. It is a call towards fairness in the pursuit of truth, a call away from bias or pre-judgement.

It might be tempting therefore to presume that an aversion to the truth or the risk of ideological blindness are also dangers for activism. But they are not. If it stands in the path of achieving one’s social goals, truth can be directly oppositional to the ends of activism

At times, it may even be in the interest of activism to fudge the truth, to say that something is complicated when it isn’t or to say that something is simple when it’s complicated. The simple but not quite true will sometimes be preferred over the true but too complicated to explain.

Activists are in the realm of prudence, not truth. If successful activism can coexist with being truthful all of the time, then that is ideal for the activist. But a good activist pursuing just, and noble ends should exercise a degree of judgement in how they approach knowledge dissemination and truth claims. She may even be justified in lying, presenting a complicated picture as actually quite simple. When done in order to achieve a social or political outcome, this is a virtue of good activism because it is both prudent and effective. But it can be a vice for scholarship - one that scholars must be particularly attuned to when their scholarship takes an activist turn.

This all being said, it is not our intention to argue that scholars should never do activist work or that a scholar who does not do activist work is somehow more pure or virtuous than those who do. Scholarly activism can be seen as an attempt to combat a particular vice of scholarship: apathy. The ivory tower is not somewhere that many academics look to as a place of pride. It is now associated with privilege and a lack of compassion for the problems facing our world.  If scholar activism is becoming a term of derision, a similar attitude exists, directed towards scholars who refuse to engage in activism or who think they can remain morally, politically, or socially neutral in their work.

Here we can see a separate vice which can affect scholars as scholars: cowardice. Academic freedom exists to protect scholars from censorship or punishment resulting from their research. Where this is genuinely protected, scholars may nevertheless avoid writing or speaking about politically contentious topics, even when it falls squarely within their scope of research, out of fear of the social or political consequences of doing so. This must be recognised as something which is as much of an issue for scholars as scholarly activism is. Regardless of whether one approaches this issue through the lens of virtue, duty, or consequences, the failure of a scholar to engage on a topic they are expert in which is crying out for scholarly analysis is serious. The virtues of good scholarship can be best seen in areas where scholarship can play a vital role of combatting misinformation or threading a careful path through a thorny issue while taking opposing views seriously. A scholar may, at the end of this, form a view one way or another. But the application of scholarly methods, directed towards truth and knowledge dissemination, can serve an important public good. Failure to do this work out of fear of social consequences is understandable. But it is also cowardly.

The result of this dissatisfaction with scholarly apathy and cowardice is an encouragement and defence of scholarly activism, sometimes framed as scholarship directed towards activist ends; Understood as such, scholarship is a way of doing things but need not be ordered or directed towards any specific end. On this view, the ends in question are supplied by the scholar and so can be activist in nature, such that scholarship becomes a specific means of advancing political ends.

In our view, this is a perversion of scholarship. It moves beyond the idea that scholarship directed towards its proper end of truth and knowledge dissemination might nevertheless have beneficial activist outcomes. When the end that scholarly activity is directed towards no longer has the discovery and dissemination of truth and knowledge as a constitutive element of its own success as scholarship, it ceases to be genuine scholarship. Scholarly means directed towards activist ends, without the constraining end of truth or knowledge undermine the point of scholarship. What is produced from this may well be good, thorough work. It may even all be true. But it wasn’t written to reflect truth; it just so happens to be true. Whatever this is, it is not scholarship.

It is crucially important to stress at this point that ordering, and motivation are not synonymous. One may be motivated by activist reasoning to engage in scholarship that is directed towards truth and displays the virtues of a good scholar without contradiction. The issue here is not what motivates a scholar, nor even the fact that she, in engaging in scholarship, hopes to influence the world for the better. Rather, it is in the danger that she might cease to pursue truth and knowledge in her quest for impact

This tension may only reveal itself when truth and efficacy conflict, but it is something that all scholars who do with that may have a social impact should be alive to. What is more, this is not simply about the morality of what one does in discrete instances. This is about the habits one forms when doing so. It is the building of one’s character such that it aligns with and augments the role morality of what one is trying to be that matters. The role or practical identities we occupy affect our practical reasoning by being a source of reasons for our decision-making, especially when we are tempted to choose some alternative course of action. As roles are underpinned by a value which we must pursue for its own sake, they often call on us to reject instrumental, pragmatic considerations that threaten the value.

Consider when you wish to skew or slant data for a higher cause and your conscience (or a good colleague) reminds you ‘but you are a scientist!’ Consider further, when you want to leave your six-year-old son alone at night for a night out with friends and are reminded ‘But you are his father!’. Developing unscholarly vices threatens the very role itself, even if those vices may be virtues of activism. The same is true of activist vices which may be virtues for a scholar.

Thus, the vices of scholar activism are not simply a consequence of the possible coincidental conflict in the ends of scholarship and activism. Virtues of activism, when sincerely and effectively pursued, are prone to distort the role of the scholar, not in spite of the passion or effectiveness of activism, but because of it. Virtue can become vice, as Aristotle taught us, due to excess (or due to a deficiency of virtue).

Similarly, the image of oneself as a champion for a cause can easily distort one’s perception of one’s own conduct, leading to poorly excused instances of inapt anger or unjust contempt for one’s interlocutors.

It is sometimes said that the anger that fuels activism may in turn help to provide scholarly insight and clarity into understanding particular forms of injustice and social disorder. This is undoubtedly true. However, this statement needs a significant qualification. Insight is only possible when anger itself is apt.

Apt anger has certain conditions. First, apt anger responds to a specific moral violation – a claim about how things ought to be according to a moral standard. Second, apt anger requires not only that one be motivated by the reason to be angry, but also that this anger be proportionate to the violation.

Importantly, proportionality should not only be understood as a condition you violate only by excess, but also by underplaying the scale of an injustice. Thus, in responding to, say, the legacy of Apartheid or present structural injustice, one can have a disproportionate response either by underplaying the scale of the injustice in order to dismiss the issue or by making excessive claims where one is free of all normative constraints in one’s response to such injustice. Recall that a vice can be rooted in excess or in a deficiency in virtue. Therefore, to minimise an injustice is a vice. In turn, to respond with excess anger is a vice too.

The academy is not simply a vehicle to be co-opted for specific and admirable activist ends. Again, we must stress that this does not mean that the academy is some neutral ivory tower. Instead, it is a public good with specific ends that demands of its members a commitment to truth and grants academic freedom and protections for such members in the pursuit of such truth. To subordinate truth-seeking to specific activist goals is to privatise a public good. One only avoids doing so not by lacking any activist goals, but by subordinating them to scholarly conditions of apt anger that provide insight. The scholar acts in a public capacity pursuing a public purpose unique to scholarship that an activist who pursues some other public purpose need not prioritise in the same way. Therefore, we do not argue against the co-existence of activist goals in the academy, but rather for the right ordering of such goals so that they are subordinate to and, aptly contribute to, scholarly ends.

This post is an abridged version of the paper, “The Virtues and Vices of Scholarly Activism” available here.