E.G.

A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace in academia. In the comments to their post, I wrote:

It seems to me that diversity is probably more useful in philosophy than in many other fields, because of the way that philosophy treats intuitions as starting points. We should want to pay special attention to intuitions that are relatively widely shared. If our professional community is more diverse, we're less likely to be overly invested in intuitions that are peculiar to a narrow slice of humanity. So, even if we were to decide that prioritizing diversity in (say) chemistry departments is misguided, we might still have good reasons to think diversity is valuable in professional philosophy.

In what follows, I will try to think a little more about this.

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I would want to distinguish the view that

Intuitional diversity is lacking: The philosophical community (i.e., the community of people who do philosophy as a profession) should be more intuitionally diverse than it presently is, and we should take steps to rectify this,

from the cluster of convictions associated with what's called "viewpoint diversity."

An intuition is an intellectual seeming or appearance. I'm not exactly sure how advocates of viewpoint diversity will define 'viewpoint,' but I assume that, for them, a viewpoint is either a type of claim, or a type of belief.

If that's right, then I suppose there will be many viewpoints that aren't intuitions. For example, I take it that young-earth creationism is a viewpoint, but there still might not be any distinctively young-earth creationist intuitions. Those who believe that the world was created by God only a few thousand years ago do not usually defend their view on the grounds that it seems to them to be true. They may even acknowledge that their view, or some of its implications, are counterintuitive. Instead of appealing to intuitions, they defend their view by appeal to religious scriptures.

It has been said that

for many who advocate it—and certainly for many who are wary—viewpoint diversity boils down to one thing: the need for more conservatives on syllabuses, in the classroom and, perhaps most important, on the faculty.

I think it is indeed true that there are relatively few American-style political conservatives in the philosophical community. But I do not know whether adopting intuitional diversity as an aim in our discipline would or should mean trying to increase the number of American-style conservatives in the philosophical community. I suppose this would depend (at least in part) on whether American political conservatives tend to have different intuitions than others, or whether they simply have different views. 

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Our discipline could adopt intuitional diversity as an explicit aim. For example, there could be some kind of formal directive issued by the American Philosophical Association. The directive might outline steps to be taken in hiring, or in graduate admissions, etc., to increase the range of intuitions represented in the philosophical community.

What might be said in favor of doing that? I'll mention two potential rationales.

First, there is a straightforward epistemic rationale. One might argue that, if the philosophical community is more intuitionally diverse, then philosophy as an academic enterprise will be better equipped to (a) find the truth about the traditional questions of philosophy, or (b) appreciate the elusiveness of the truth about those questions, or (c) understand ways in which our questions have been ill-formed, or (d) discover new questions that deserve our attention.

Second, there is a kind of democratic rationale. It might be thought that the job, or proper function, of philosophy as an academic enterprise is to produce an evolving and ever-growing body of work that systematizes and clarifies the way the world appears, intellectually, to humanity. But humanity is diverse, and the intellectual appearances to which human beings are subject are accordingly diverse. So it might be said that, in order for philosophy as an academic enterprise to fulfill its proper function, the philosophical community needs to be a kind of intuitional microcosm of humanity, such that all of the major suites of intuitional dispositions are well-represented in the philosophical community.

I suppose these two rationales are in some degree of tension with one another. The first rationale is founded in a view of philosophy as having an essentially epistemic aim, whereas the second rationale is at least not committed to that, and may be inconsistent with that.

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I suspect that intuitional diversity as a disciplinary priority would be largely well-aligned with traditional DEI-style goals. That is, I suspect that DEI-style efforts to make the philosophical community more diverse in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, and so on, will probably have the effect of increasing intuitional diversity.

At the same time, however, prioritizing intuitional diversity might also mean being inclusive in various further ways that aren't traditionally associated with DEI. For example, if it turns out that political conservatives do indeed tend to experience different intuitions than others, then greater inclusion of political conservatives in the philosophical community might be seen as desirable from the perspective of an intuitional diversity program.