This week, my paper on billionaire philanthropy and academic philosophy was published in a special, open access issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, titled Philanthropy, Public Funding, and the Future of Academic Freedom. Along with over a dozen other excellent papers, my contribution underscores the corrupting influence of billionaire philanthropy on academia, focusing on academic philosophy. This corrupting influence is, as I have argued previously on this blog, ableist inasmuch as billionaires strategically fund neoliberal ideologies that harm disabled people. Billionaire donations are keeping higher education afloat while transforming it from a public good into a propaganda mill for eugenic ideas. 

Yet philosophers continue to take dirty money from ideologically-driven non-profits, such as the Koch Foundation. Recipients of this money argue that it doesn’t influence their philosophical practices – that they remain impartial, unbiased lovers of wisdom. But a substantial body of research on corporate donations in medicine casts doubt on this claim. 

I know this too well. When I was a kid, my family would go on all-expense-paid cruises and ski trips funded by pharmaceutical companies, all because my dad was a doctor. Why would these corporations be so generous? The answer is that pharmaceutical funding biases physicians’ prescription practices, and pharmaceutical executives knew it. Under the banner of “continuing medical education,” pharmaceutical companies financed expensive trips that allowed them to shape the curriculum by selecting speakers, choosing topics, and incorporating “industry-sponsored research” into the “educational” programming. They deployed pharmaceutical representatives to cultivate reciprocal relationships with physicians. They distributed stationery emblazoned with product names, triggering availability bias. While a free notepad may seem trivial, research shows that even gifts worth less than $20 significantly influence physicians’ prescription habits (Lexchin et al. 2020). In the 1990s, American and Canadian medical associations introduced guidelines banning large gifts. 

Philosophers have received donations worth much more than $20, and from donors just as corrupt as Big Pharma. Brandon Warkme and Justin Tosi are two examples. They have received funding from the Koch Foundation for their work on “moral grandstanding.” Why would the Koch Foundation’s sponsor, Koch Industries – known for funneling money into advocacy groups that promote climate change denialism, union bashing, white supremacy, and other right-wing causes (Mayer 2016) – want to invest in this project? What does the Koch family have to gain from philosophical research on “moral talk” and epistemic justice? 

At first glance, Tosi and Warmke’s book, “Moral Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk,” may seem unbiased. They define “grandstanding” as the use of “moral talk” for purposes of “prestige” and “dominance” (2020, 4) rather than genuine argumentation. How can we identify grandstanders?  According to the authors, “Many people use moral talk irresponsibly” (11). They add that “people who hold more extreme political views (whether right or left) are more likely to grandstand for prestige than centrists” (32), while there is “roughly the same amount of dominance grandstanding across the political spectrum” (32).  

According to popular opinion, “political extremists” include people like me – leftists, queers, Madpeople, disabled radicals. Tosi and Warmke’s book immediately casts doubt on the testimony of those most harmed by Koch Industries. So much the better for the Koch family! 

In terms of dominance grandstanding, there is the “same amount” across the political spectrum. Everyone grandstands for dominance – trust no one! This kind of “non-partisan” fear-mongering about ordinary people’s moral testimony serves corporations by sowing doubt about moral speech in general. According to Hannah Arendt, this is the path to authoritarianism. When public trust breaks down, people retreat into isolation, doubt their own convictions, and become less politically engaged. Democracies fail when we can no longer trust each other’s moral testimony. Authoritarianism benefits corporations because they can more easily escape regulatory oversight, influence policies, and suppress dissent. 

Koch Industries is one such corporation. In 2018, Ed Chapman was diagnosed with mesothelioma after working with asbestos-contaminated building materials made by Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Chapman was part of a class-action lawsuit against Georgia-Pacific, but the company used legal and financial maneuvers (known as the “Texas two-step”) to avoid paying compensation to victims. After Chapman died, his daughter, Lori Knapf, called the Koch family “evil” and “right up there with the Sackler family” in an interview for the Guardian. Was Knapf a sincere moral claimant, or a clout-chasing grandstander? The Kochs win if we can’t trust moral claimants like Knapf. Tosi and Warmke’s work benefits capitalists by casting doubt on the moral testimony of their victims. 

Meanwhile, corporations rarely use moral talk: instead, they influence public discourse by funneling billions of dollars into “dark money” networks that obscure their ties to political advocacy groups. Skepticism of moral talk disproportionally affects private citizens – individuals who cannot afford to manipulate the economy through shady backroom deals. 

When it comes to defining “moral talk” in contrast to other types of speech, Tosi and Warmke are characteristically vague. They conveniently fail to observe that the testimony of queer, disabled, and otherwise oppressed people is automatically moralized and politicized by “polite society,” whereas privileged people’s speech is viewed as “neutral” and “inoffensive.” When straight people talk about their marriages, their speech is not moralized in the same way as discourse on queer love. When nondisabled people celebrate their abilities, their speech is not met with the same moralizing scrutiny as discourse on disability pride. The moral dimension of moral talk is left untheorized, which serves the Koch family’s conservative agenda. Ignoring asymmetries of power effectively silences capitalism’s victims.   

Disabled people are harmed by Koch-funded propaganda presented as legitimate philosophy because this propaganda whitewashes the corporate sector’s eugenic ambitions, while silencing, smothering, and stigmatizing its critics. Corporate policies poison, kill, silence, impoverish, and stigmatized disabled folks. Koch funding floods the marketplace of ideas with eugenic propaganda masquerading as non-partisan argumentation. Charles Koch himself has said that if his beneficiaries don’t agree with his politics, he’ll pull their funding. 

This is just one dimension of the Koch Foundation’s disastrous and eugenic impact on academic philosophy. I discuss further examples in my paper. The UnKoch My Campus initiative urges us to divest from this (in my opinion) eugenic propaganda mill. Unfortunately, this initiative was not adopted in time at Bowling Green State University, which was cannibalized by corporate bootlickers. Don’t let the same thing happen to your department.  

The special issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom contains additional guidance on how to protect higher education from elite capture by ableist, racist, patriarchal capitalists. My paper is a simple call to action: professional philosophers must refuse dirty money from corporate oligarchs, thus showing solidarity to disabled people. It’s the least you could do.