Dialogue and Disputation: Towards an Ethics of Academic Discourse

This paper considers how to harmonize the demands of good scholarship with professional and ethical courtesy towards our colleagues in written and unwritten academic work. In the nineteenth century, W.K.Clifford and William James introduced the notion of an ethics of belief: a set of quasi-moral rules governing the formation of opinions. Using the Clifford/James debate plus J.S.Mill’s discussion of freedom of speech as points of departure, this paper takes some first steps towards formulating an ethics of argumentation: a set of principles governing the ways scholars critically dialogue with the views of others. Candidates for such principles in the philosopher’s or logician’s repertoire include the principle of charity, playing author’s or devil’s advocate, and injunctions against attacking ‘straw man’ arguments. The paper considers how to reconcile our duties towards certain intellectual positions with our duties to those persons proposing these positions.