There are few movies that I truly hate, but Deep Water (2006) is one of them. The documentary follows Donald Crowhurst, an over-leveraged, under-prepared British yachtsman who, in 1968, hoping to salvage the costs of a disastrous round-the-world race, falsified his logs and lingered off the coast of South America. The idea was to let the competition circle the globe and lap him, allowing him to limp back to port near the back of the pack and go home quietly. Unfortunately, shortly after passing Crowhurst, the race leader forfeited. Another boat finished but, because of a staggered start, remained far behind Crowhurst’s posted time. The only other competitor sank in rough weather. Suddenly, Crowhurst was going to win by default, and his logbooks were bound to be scrutinized. That never happened. His sailboat was found weeks later, empty and adrift in the Atlantic. The last fifteen minutes of the film use journals and radio transmissions to show how Crowhurst lost his mind, succumbing to isolation and the prospect of financial ruin before flinging himself overboard. Deep Water is not a tragedy in the style of Sophocles or Shakespeare or Arthur Miller. It does not reveal much about the human condition and is hardly (as the New York Times described it) “fascinating.” It is ugly, vulgar voyeurism.

Suicide represents a failure of human bonds—an inability to sustain a world of value—and it should not be taken up lightly. Indeed, it should not be “taken up” at all, if that phrase means exploiting someone’s death to advance a talking point. The weighty commitments that it seems to call forth—sincerity, empathy, reflection—were all equally weighty beforehand: suicide has no bearing on them, any more than it bears on a victim’s innocence or an antagonist’s guilt. One always has a duty to speak the truth in a spirit of honesty and humility.

I have been thinking a lot about duty since the Jason Arday affair, which dominated headlines in August and ended, tragically, with the death of the man at its center. There have already been plenty of criticisms of Arday, his accusers, his publisher, the British press and Cambridge University. I have nothing to add to these. I do not even have opinions about some of them, as I know little about the ethics of newspaper reporting or publishing. I work in a college of education (as Arday did), so I have some questions about the academic side of the scandal—the university’s hiring process, supervision, mentoring and responses to criticism, as well as the role of peer review in Arday’s subfield—but answers will have to wait for a real investigation. In the meantime, I would like to reflect on the responsibilities of academics like myself in cases like this one, and to suggest that, if we hope to sustain human bonds or a world of shared value, clear thinking is the only way to do so.

Thinking often gets lost in storms of outrage and accusation. Since Arday’s death, people I deeply respect have endorsed statements that strike me as inflammatory, misleading or plainly false. They are not alone. In print and online, scholars have made impassioned but wildly irresponsible claims about the Arday scandal. Some advance genealogical fallacies, using the fact that the story was broken by Nathan Cofnas (a so-called “race realist”) to downplay basic facts. Others insist that the whole affair was baseless because Arday was previously “cleared” of plagiarism by Liverpool John Moores University, an appeal to authority that flies in the face of mountains of subsequent evidence. Some describe Arday’s ordeal as a “lynching” or a “death sentence,” or declare that the only paths available to Black professors are to “be perfect or dead.” Some scold academics for being “gossipy” or a “great giggling mob.” The scandal, they allege, is vulgar voyeurism all over again.

I suppose others can reflect on their own motives, but I do not think that academics who took an interest in this case have anything to be ashamed of. There were massive, consequential failures across multiple institutions in our field, followed by cover-ups that only became apparent with outside reporting. We need frank and collective consideration of those failures. More than that, we need moral grounds to hold individuals responsible. Those grounds erode with every wave of special pleading and tortured logic, leaving our field intellectually and morally adrift.

I understand that people are upset in the aftermath of a public tragedy. Like others, I am saddened by the whole affair and worried about colleagues whose work might be targeted going forward (Black teachers and researchers, as well as sociologists and those studying race and education more generally). But that is exactly why we must hold ourselves to higher standards than clickbait columnists. It is our duty to model good epistemic practices and to ensure that our emotional appeals are aligned with truth-seeking. We cannot rely on motivated reasoning or intellectually corrupt forms of moral equivalency.

One type of equivalency that has been ubiquitous since the Arday scandal is called “whataboutism”—as in, “Sure, the thing that you care about is bad, but what about this worse thing that I care about?” In this case, proponents claim that we cannot think about the Arday affair without first addressing racism, public civility, immigration, militarism, capitalism, sexual assault or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As that list should make clear, whataboutism encourages imprecision and moral grandstanding while attenuating any basis for real, concrete judgment. Everything matters, so nothing does.

A second type of equivalency appears with accusations of hypocrisy. Not real hypocrisy, mind you, because the target has actually violated not his own standards of reason but those of the accuser—something like, “If you believe [inaccurate version of] x, how can you also believe [oversimplified version of] y?” These accusations go after an opponent’s source of moral authority. In the Arday scandal, that means research ethics. Since critics pointed out the extensive plagiarism and fraud that Arday perpetuated and Cambridge suppressed, professors sympathetic to Arday have claimed that the categories themselves are meaningless (“The mere overlap of sentences!”), the behavior widespread or relatively unimportant (“Lots of people get away with plagiarism!”), or the scrutiny selectively applied (“Why do you care about this case so much?”). I hope I am not alone in finding these insinuations both self-defeating and profoundly insulting. Like most professors, I spend hours every semester reading my peers’ work, in formal reviews or just out of curiosity, and I approach that task with the same intellectual seriousness that went into the work itself—which is more than I can say for anyone willing to throw ethics overboard for a moment’s argumentative advantage.

Recourse to such rhetorical tactics, I suspect, does not merely represent personal weakness or emotion. It has become a reflexive feature of public discourse. When exchanges are thoroughly politicized, as they have become in so many spheres of our culture, every statement becomes a form of innuendo, freighted with symbolic rather than literal meaning. In his famous work, After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre interpreted this form of politicization as the symptom of a deeper malady: a society that had lost any shared standards of judgment. MacIntyre argued that, in modern democracies, what may seem like commonsense moral claims in fact conceal profoundly different conceptions of justice and goodness. Our values remain underspecified, yet they seem so self-evident that only an idiot or a villain would disagree with them. The result is deliberative deadlock. “The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protesters can never win an argument,” MacIntyre writes, while “the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protesters can never lose an argument either.”

Under these conditions, all that remains are a series of arbitrary assertions and non sequiturs. One makes emotional appeals before casting around for plausible reasons to back them up, but there is no way to discern the validity of the underlying values and no way to arbitrate between them when different goods (such as honesty and privacy) come into conflict.

It may be no surprise that politics is a sea of irrationality, but I am always shocked when academics plunge in so eagerly. I can only attribute this willingness to a third fallacy. In colleges of education, one often hears the slogan “all education is political,” which people repeat with the certainty of moral truth. And it is true. But it is also a truism, a phrase that one can utter without fear of contradiction: either others agree and confirm the statement, or they disagree, reveal their political bias and confirm the statement. The mistake is in the circularity. All education may be political, but it does not follow that politics is all education is, that power is the only or even the best criteria through which to evaluate teaching, learning and research. To imply otherwise is merely to beg the question. When students or colleagues inform me that all education is political, I sometimes ask whether all education is not also cultural, spiritual, artistic and moral, and why we never talk about those aspects? I have yet to receive a clear answer.

Focusing on politics not only narrows what we know but how we know it. It takes little scholarly insight to denounce money, status and power in popular terms. To the contrary, popularity usually corrupts scholarship with its own promises of money, status and power (or at least relevance). The latter are what MacIntyre calls “external goods,” which exist independently from particular sources of knowledge and value, and it is their liquidity that erodes standards of judgment. One can make a fortune as a sellout musician, a hack novelist or a celebrity professor, but only at the cost of challenging audiences and earning the respect of peers. In the same way, repeating the latest social media slogan puts one in the same position as any other partisan. The validation is cheap and the clichés replace richer, realer forms of knowledge.

Fortunately, academics are not condemned to the sound bites and shouting matches that surround us. Centuries of systematic inquiry and refutation have produced durable standards of reason within our disciplines and institutions—a recognition of what constitutes plagiarism, rigor and fairness, for one thing, as well as more general ideas about collegiality, worthy lines of inquiry, and the aesthetics of argument and proof. These are what MacIntyre calls “internal goods,” and for scholars they are closely tied to formal argumentation. As the political theorist Jonathan Marks writes, reason is our ultimate source of value, “the kind of authority that is an honor to obey and a disgrace to betray.” Unlike society at large, we can sustain moral discussions because we can sustain rational discussions.

It is not that academics are wiser or more levelheaded than other people. Every coherent community has operative standards of excellence. Professional associations, hobbyist groups, sports teams and religious congregations each generate internal goods that issue in meaning and value, shaping and binding their members in the process. The point is simply that academics, like these other groups, are, or should be, more thoughtful as a group than they are as aggregated, political factions.

Thoughtfulness suffers in mainstream political debates, where moral virtue seems to be less about reason than about fervor, rewarding strident claims (“Racism is bad!” “Bullying is bad!”) that are utterly lacking in specific standards of action or responsibility. Proponents sometimes try to specify moral expectations by codifying them, but a recent proposal for “Arday’s Law”—legislation that “[limits] the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame”—demonstrates why this is a bad idea. How many articles is too many? What time frame? What if the individual is a public figure? Variable circumstances will always require practical judgment on the part of courts, practitioners and the public, and law is a poor substitute for the type of virtue and evaluation developed in specific communities of practice. For example, writing a series of snarky articles about a young professor’s research might be wrong for a reporter but not a professor; indeed, it may be wrong for one professor (say, a mentor) and not another. Context, power, intention and articulated reasons are all important, but they can only be judged by similarly situated peers proceeding on shared norms. This is what accusations of “hounding” or “piling on” in the Arday scandal seem to miss: once one acknowledges that there are meaningful distinctions between academic critics, investigative journalists, opinion columnists and random online trolls, it becomes difficult to see exactly who is being blamed for what, and on what standard we should expect them to act differently in the future.

This is hardly to exonerate Arday’s critics, many of whom do not seem to realize that “Plagiarism is bad!” is also a vacuous, political statement. There has been a wave of plagiarism accusations in recent years, often aimed at Black academics in prominent positions. The script is familiar by now: a critic posts screenshots of duplicate text, acts as if they are self-evidently firing offenses, and proceeds to question the quality of related, non-plagiarized work, always in highly oversimplified terms. If proven, academics should not equivocate about whether these violations constitute plagiarism, nor should they avoid prompt and transparent investigations. (My own institution has handled this issue pretty well, but not perfectly.) What they should do is reject childish innuendo by explaining how they arrive at the appropriate consequences, allowing interested parties to weigh competing goods as the institution itself must—i.e., with responsibility to the whole community—and in the process helping them internalize the nuances of moral reasoning. (One can read Supreme Court decisions or honor code abstracts in the same spirit.)

MacIntyre argues that demonstrative and mature judgment from universities is ultimately what creates an “educated public” with the capacity for rational disagreement. He offers eighteenth-century Scotland as an example. The propagation of commonsense philosophy, presbyterian religion and canonical texts in the era’s classrooms allowed multiple generations—across numerous segments of society—to refine and meaningfully debate political questions. There have been similar moments in American history: with the proliferation of denominational colleges in the nineteenth century, for instance, when all students took a course in moral philosophy, usually taught by the college president; and with the expansion of higher education after World War II, when “vital center” liberalism promoted a particular version of the Western canon. One need not romanticize these periods to find in them the broadly dispersed moral judgment that drove the abolitionist and civil rights movements. Neil Dhingra and I have argued that affirmative action policies would benefit from the same type of judgment today. On our reading, MacIntyre’s emphasis on practical wisdom, public legitimacy and the common welfare makes universities (rather than courts) the best place to work through competing notions of fairness and rights. But that deference depends on their unique, internal forms of knowledge—in Sandra Day O’Connor’s words, those “complex educational judgments” that courts cannot discern and should not usurp.

For the same reason, demonstrations of moral judgment may be higher education’s best means of deflecting bad-faith attacks in the future. If it is shameful for universities to lower research expectations based on prior political commitments, it is no less shameful for critics to toss around lazy generalizations based on their own politics. I have little patience with journalists who know nothing about my field claiming that “the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that [Arday’s] inadequacies would remain unremarked there” or that education faculty are not “real scholars.” (There is no shortage of fascinating educational research.) Nor should a focus on the facts of the Arday scandal blind us to the ways in which Arday’s accuser, Nathan Cofnas, is engaged in his own framing exercise. Acknowledging wrongdoing does not mean making room for discredited racist nonsense in our classrooms, conferences and journals. That point becomes clearer, however, when academics offer not only indignation but defensible reasons. As Jonathan Zimmerman remarked about a similar case: “The problem with his ideas is not that they are racist and offensive, although they are surely that. The problem is that they are false.”

Falsehood, groupthink, euphemism, special pleading and other intellectual vices are demoralizing in every sense of the word. Resisting them demands intellectual integrity. In the face of sensationalism and cruelty, we must stand slightly aloof, ignoring the prevailing political winds and thinking for ourselves in hopes of thinking together.

Deep Water offers an evocative image of what that might look like. Before proceeding to its tasteless conclusion, the film spends a moment with the leader of the race, the French sailor Bernard Moitessier. Moitessier had been alone for almost a year, braving the roughest seas on the planet in his 39-foot sailboat. He stood on the cusp of the circumnavigation record, a cash prize and immortal fame. The entire world followed his progress with breathless expectation, anticipating the thrills and adulation of victory. But they would be disappointed. Without warning, Moitessier broke off the race in the South Atlantic, turned east, and sailed for another twelve thousand miles, landing three months later in Tahiti. The only explanation for this unfathomable decision appeared in a note that he shot onto the deck of a passing ship. Why had he turned away from public acclaim? “Perhaps,” he wrote, “to save my soul.”