Rebecca Kukla

While Rebecca Kukla’s comments on Leiter’s blog are much less stupid than most of what is out there, she again fails (or refuses) to grasp a simple fact about the relationship upon which she so confidently pronounces—that it was a reciprocal romantic relationship. What counts as “inappropriate” banter is obviously entirely dependent on the nature of the relationship that exists between two people. If a relationship is sexual, then sexual communication is scarcely “inappropriate”; and there are all sorts of gradations of intimacy between two people short of that. It all depends on the expectations of the people in the relationship, what they both regard as acceptable, whether there are any expressed misgivings, and so on. In my case people are making far too much of a couple of stray remarks made over a lengthy period of personal intimacy, failing to note the context and the recipient’s actual response (not even a hint of protest, indeed quite the opposite). There was no “tone-deafness to the power dynamics”—I am not that stupid—but rather a wry acknowledgment of the difficulty of the situation in which we both found ourselves. What Kukla finds “pompous and narcissistic” is merely my impatience at people who seem unable to think beyond cliché and stereotype, and who naively suppose that they can judge the tenor of a relationship between two consenting adults while knowing next to nothing about it. Kukla’s comments strike me as pompous, simple-minded, ignorant, poorly judged, and tone-deaf. How on earth does she think she can call my behavior “creepy” while knowing nothing about the student’s behavior, both verbal and non-verbal? What does she think is “appropriate” in the course of a consensual romantic relationship? And yes, this kind of foolishness seems endemic to large sectors of the philosophical profession, deplorable though it clearly is. Kukla needs to remind herself of elementary principles of justice—such as withholding judgment when you are not in possession of crucial facts. This is what I find despicable.