The Braindead War on Perry Hendricks

"I cannot with the state of the field of bioethics"

I. What Happened

The other day, Perry Hendricks—philosopher, nice guy, and now officially “Dr. Hendricks” (he’ll machete you to death if you call him that)—uploaded his 600th academic paper on abortion, available on PhilPapers.org as a pre-print. A screenshot of the abstract was tweeted out, and people got angry because, well. . .

Responses ranged from the self-righteously exhausted (“so. very. tired. of this.”), to the Very Virtuous Indeed (“Seeing this after speaking with We Testify yesterday [my italics] is really pissing me off. It’s exhausting to continuously be laboring for reproductive autonomy [mine again] and be met with utter bullshit that continues to get platformed”), to the maybe-just-maybe-you-should-consider-switching-your-phone-off unhinged (“I…am feeling my blood pressure rising right now with this. My anger is truly going on an uphill climb fvvking quickly. Holy mother fvvking shit.”)

One user, Ashley, tweeted: “Lemme gather my group chat so we can do some witchcraft on Perry.” Another user, an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Judaic Studies, thought it helpful to post a photo of Hendricks’s face—maybe so people would know who to cast their spells at—, compassionately censoring the faces of his children “bc they’ve no part on this”.

Most of the outcry was pretty funny, at least to me. (Over email, Perry told me he’s been signed up for five pro-choice mailing lists, which is hilarious.) But one development was less hilarious:

The New Bioethics—possibly at the say-so of the publisher, Taylor & Francis—took a paper that had already passed peer-review, placed it on hold, and have subjected it to review again, in response to pressure from an angry mob that hasn’t read the paper in question.

One Twitter academic—thanking Taylor & Francis for “responding to concerns”—offered to review Hendricks’s paper for them. A cynic might wonder if the reviewer(s) selected this time will be as level-headed as whoever accepted it previously.

(Prediction: the paper will almost certainly be rejected, in the manner of the reviewer who rejected Hendricks’s currently unpublished book manuscript on abortion, who included no criticisms of the book’s arguments, but recommended rejection anyway after noting, undogmatically: “It strikes me as no coincidence that the small pool of scholars who are engaged by his “theory” are all relatively junior white men, citing to one another’s work. Perhaps it takes that level of insulation from reality to remain blind to the offensiveness of this “thought experiment’.”)

II. What Hendricks (Actually) Said

Of course, most people who hated the paper never ended up reading it. (The number of Hendricks-haters far outstrips the roughly three-hundred downloads the pre-print has since enjoyed on PhilPapers, some of which will have been re-downloads by single individuals.) So it’s worth briefly summarizing what Hendricks (“Dr. Hendricks” to you) really wrote.

First, he cites a litany of pro-choicers making claims to the effect that abortion restrictions are acutely harmful to Black¹ women and women of colour.

Second, Hendricks argues that if you’re going to perform a wrong action, it’s good for you—in your interests—for someone to prevent you from doing so. For example: if you’re about to kill someone, rob someone, or drive drunk, but someone prevents you from doing it, that person would’ve benefitted you, since they’ve saved you from doing a bad thing. And the worse the action you were prevented from performing was going to be, the better it is for your own sake if someone stops you.

Third, Hendricks applies this lesson to abortion bans. Since abortion is wrong—Hendricks claims—a woman who’s prevented from getting one is being benefited, since she’s being prevented from performing a morally wrong action. Since (in the US) Black women in are likelier to solicit abortions than White women, abortion bans are especially beneficial to Black women. (Hendricks also throws in, for extra spice, the more familiar argument that Planned Parenthood was founded in the context of the eugenics movement, and so—insofar as one thinks the disproportionate number of abortions solicited by Black women is a product of this—it’s plausible that abortion restrictions also benefit Black women by slowing this trend.)

Fourth, in section five, Hendricks takes the mask off. Obviously, the thought readers will have had up to this point is: But you’re just assuming abortion is wrong. If it isn’t wrong, abortion restrictions aren’t good for Black women. Hendricks’s reply? “Guilty as charged” (p. 7). It’s common for pro-choicers to claim that abortion restrictions are harmful to Black women. But when they make such claims, they don’t argue that abortion is permissible first. Hendricks was merely parodying them. If Hendricks was question-begging by assuming that abortion is wrong in his argument that abortion restrictions are good for black women, pro-choicers who assert that abortion restrictions harm Black women without arguing that abortion is permissible are question-begging just the same.

In other words, he got everyone with this.

Well done Perry.

III. Online Criticisms of Hendricks

Before I get to my own worries, here are some points against Hendricks other people have made online:

(1) Hendricks is a bad writer.

Reply: False, false, a million times false. Perry Hendricks is a spectacularly good writer, as everyone who has read his papers knows. He’s clear, unpretentious, and funny, all of which are virtues of good writing. Consider the opening of this book review he wrote:

Louise Antony calls Laura Ekstrom’s book “courageous” (backcover). I have no clue what it means for a work of philosophy to be courageous, but Ekstrom’s book is certainly good. And despite the fact that I think there are about a million problems with it, I recommend it to those interested in the problem of evil or skeptical theism: it's well researched and clearly argued—undergraduates as well as professional philosophers will find this book useful. (Well, this recommendation comes with one caveat: the book—through no fault of the author—is priced at $99, which is worth roughly 90 McChickens. I cannot in good conscience recommend any philosophy book over 90 McChickens.)

The academics who criticized his writing probably aren’t aware that clarity, unpretentiousness, and funniness are virtues of good writing, though. Their papers on abortion probably sound like this:

Since the dawn of time, in many respects, scholars of feminism(s) have defended the powerful and spirit-godessly termination of unwanted pregnancies (Douglass 1993; Harriet 2001; Collingford-Snacketty 2015), and bewailed, in particular, though not exclusively, the manifold and grievous harms (hereafter ‘gertugrundishmench’) regarding wxmen of colour and latinx sister-folx (hereafter ‘queenly icons’), of the pro-forced birth/ethnofacist/centre-right Republican hegemony-qua evil itself on their collective solidarity and lived queenship(s). Before I commence, for completeness, I must first review all literature, beginning with the Odyssey (Homer (?) et al. (?)), and then. . .

This is the world these academics want. A world of jargonitis, Judith Butler, and mind-crushing academese. Hendricks is someone who stands athwart the tides of bad academic prose writing, yelling Stop.

(2) Hendricks was unwise not to advertise in the abstract the fact that he was merely parodying—not endorsing—the question-begging sloganeering he accuses pro-choicers of.

Fair enough. If this episode hurts Hendricks’ career, maybe that was unwise. But then again, that would’ve sucked the fun out of the paper and made it lame. Readers can decide which they care about more. But even if the move was unwise prudentially, it pretty clearly wasn’t immoral: Hendricks isn’t responsible for depraved academics hollering demonically into the TwitterVerse about a paper which none of them have likely read.

(3) Hendricks is a White Supremacist.

There’s no evidence that Hendricks is a White Supremacist. Maybe if “White Supremacist” is defined is someone whose actions uphold systems that disadvantage Black women and women of colour, then from a pro-choice perspective, Hendricks is a White Supremacist. But that’s a bad definition of White Supremacy. If the policies Ibram X. Kendi supports turn out, to his chagrin, to systematically disadvantage Black women and women of colour, it will turn out, on this definition, that Kendi is a White Supremacist. But Kendi is just a money-hungry salesman, not a White Supremacist.

(4) Hendricks is clearly race-baiting.

“Race-baiting” is “the act of intentionally encouraging racism or anger about issuers relating to race, often to get a political advantage”². To show it probable that Hendricks was race-baiting, his critics would need private evidence they don’t have about his intentions; the public evidence isn’t strong enough to bear that out.

To be sure: many people saw the screenshot of the abstract on Twitter and subsequently got angry about race. But the responsibility there lies with the original poster, who screenshotted a paper posted on a niche academic website and posted it on online with an angry caption, to a large following, with the predictable outcome that lots of people would get angry about it.

Also, the manner in which we hold academics responsible for the public perception of their work matters institutionally: if we condemn academics for writing perfectly sensible things in niche academic journals every time someone on the internet screenshots a part of it, without linking the full article or explaining the surrounding context, that will have a predictable and undesirable chilling effect, making academics more self-censoring, which is bad unless they’re not citing me.

One more thing: if it’s race-baiting to publicly declare that abortion bans are good for Black women, then, in equivalent contexts, it’s race-baiting to publicly declare that abortion bans are bad for Black women. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Clearly, both statements, stated publicly, have the power to gin up anger over race issues. And if Perry is right, then if presented in dialectical contexts in which the permissibility or wrongness of abortion needs to be argued for, presenters of either statement are question-begging in the process.

IV. My Assessment

I’m pro-choice, so I don’t think abortion restrictions are good for Black women. But Hendricks’s conditional argument—if abortion is wrong, then abortion restrictions are especially good for Black women as a group—is pretty convincing. (I was pleasantly surprised by this—I’m not always as convinced by the things Perry writes about abortion.)

At one point in the paper, Hendrick’s draws a link between his argument and the debate over moral luck. Moral luck (supposedly) occurs when events or facts that are beyond one’s control—like a child crossing the street when one is drunk driving—affects one’s blameworthiness or praiseworthiness. (Had no child wandered into your car, you’d have acted wrong by drunk driving. But—it seems to many—if you actually do hit a child, that makes you more blameworthy than if you’d got lucky and hurt no-one.)

On some days, I’m inclined to deny that moral luck exists across the board. How can facts outside your control possibly affect the degree to which you’re blameworthy or praiseworthy? On other days, I’m starstruck by at least one dizzyingly formidable challenge to deniers of moral luck, and find myself at a loss.

As Hendricks notes, he doesn’t rely on any particular account of moral luck. But if one denies moral luck across the board, then prima facie, that will put Hendricks back a few steps dialectically. For if one denies moral luck across the board, it’ll probably turn out that even in states where abortion is outlawed, women who would have solicited abortions were they ‘unlucky’ enough to live in a state where abortion wasn’t banned will turn out to be just as blameworthy as women who actually succeed in getting abortions. But if liberal abortion laws don’t harm Black women by making them more morally blameworthy, it’s hard to see in virtue of what such laws could harm Black women.

Still, the intuition behind Hendricks’s principle is ironclad. It does seem obvious that if you, say, prevent your friend from committing a murder, you benefit that friend. So even if I’m not clear on the underlying theory, I’m still happy to accept the obvious.

My other worry—more a flat out disagreement—is with Hendricks’s supplementary argument about Planned Parenthood being founded with eugenicist motives.

I accept the principle that if an institution was founded with an immoral goal in mind, but then all the original founders die and get replaced by people without that goal, then even if the practices of that institution are wrong, the wrongness of those practices is no longer explained—even partly—by the motives of the original founders.

Thus, even if Margaret Sanger did found Planned Parenthood with the partial goal of shrinking the Black population, or doing other sinister things besides, so long as Planned Parenthood today isn’t motivated by those goals, in my view, Sanger’s original motives don’t factor into Planned Parenthood’s wrongs against Black women, if indeed there are any.

1. Hendricks opts for the convention of using “white” and “black” in lower-case. While this is better than the risible “white/Black” convention, I prefer to capitalize both White and Black, since both function as proper nouns.

2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/race-baiting