What happened here is that a bunch of young people got interested in doing serious academic research in ethics, and they didn't get the memo that they're not supposed to apply their findings to established academics and the far right organisations they helm and participate in.

This is an optimistic thought, because it means the conflict wasn't produced because the discipline got worse, it was produced because it's improving and the backlash is all the people that never took it seriously responding with confused aversion to the prospect of a moral life.

It's perfectly ok for a philosopher to claim that someone's views are false, that they are very badly argued, that they are pernicious, that they produce disvalue, that they shouldn't be argued, that their decisions are immoral and/or unjust and their character is vicious.

None of this is silencing, none of this is rude, and none of this is disrespectful, in fact honestly and openly charging someone with any of this is the highest sign of respect for their moral personhood as a practically rational being that can judge and make choices.

Arguing that moral appraisal of your actions is wrong is asking to be treated like an animal that does not have the capacity to judge according to concepts and make reasoned choices and hence lacks the responsibility to judge and act correctly. *This* would be disrespectful.

You can not validly claim this for yourself, and others are multiply bound by the moral law not to give it to you. If you're a moral philosopher and you don't get this you are not merely doubly vicious (for this and your original behaviour) but also an awful moral philosopher.

As practical philosophers *this is what we do*. We think about the validity of arguments, about the moral norms that someone must conform their practice to, and about the norms that specify good and evil, vice and virtue in the real world. It's literally our job description.

We blame and condemn droves of people, droves of situations, and droves of actions every time we say anything at all that is substantive in our field. Stock and Bri Bri and their cohort are not special.

(it goes without saying: everyone, every rational being has the supreme right of criticism. So this is applicable to literally every last reflective being in the universe, but it's especially absurd to say moral philosophers don't have it)

Incidentally, this right of criticism, moral and theoretical, used to be considered the absolutely indispensable core of the freedom of speech, but here we are.

I confess I find it horribly unpleasant to have to treat people like this as "peers" and I can not wait for the newer generation to throw them out. The process is tortuously slow. I feel like someone is meticulously disinfecting a gushing wound while I'm still conscious.