Anti-Climacus

I'd like us to dwell for a moment on this paragraph (and note that I haven't read the book in question and take no position on its proposals, but suggest the language of the review is meaningful in its own right):

But all that said, McCormick’s proposals are as plausible as the genre will allow. Any institutional novelty looks questionable on paper—any clever graduate student can quickly throw out a thousand objections—and this one is no exception. Yet our status quo institutions are hardly perfect either, and in any event McCormick is only starting a conversation and hoping for an experiment. The details can be improved as his proposals swim up the salmon-run of politics. (But if his diagnosis is correct, the proposed remedy will probably be blocked by the elites who create the problem in the first place.)

...and request that we, Nozick-style, focus on the throwaway line, enough of a commonplace, and ask what it's really supposed to mean. "Any clever graduate student can quickly throw out a thousand objections." It's a well-understood idea that grad students are first taught how to read serious academic work by learning how to pull it apart. By one's second year, one quickly learns that a very large percentage of what is out there is of dubious value, if the purpose of scholarship is to increase our overall knowledge of the world. The lesson of the second half of grad school is, ideally, that constructing a positive argument is very hard, the ultimate upshot of which is, so I gathered, that we should be accordingly forgiving of the weaknesses in other academic work, the better of others to forgive us our faults. And, Lord knows, that's what I learned.

While that's tidy from a disciplinary perspective, I do wonder if it's too easy, if our self-interest as academics leads us to accept a weaker (and perhaps wrong) argument because it is more congenial to do so. This is the equivalent, approximately, of finding Descartes' last meditations to be as powerful as the first two: even we theists know better than to think good ol' Deskrats has made his argument. Perhaps the thousand objections just mean it's not a good idea. Perhaps they just mean it's not a practicable idea, and we believe we live in a world where practicability is an important criterion for what makes a successful normative theory. Perhaps the grad students are on to something after all.