假设你编辑一份受人尊敬的期刊。And suppose that journal focuses on politically fraught issues: development, tensions between countries, legacies of colonial atrocities, racial injustice, poverty . . .

你试图发表前沿的、经过充分研究的、道德高尚的学术成果。但尽管你尽了最大努力，一些较弱的文件还是漏网了。

Most of those weak papers are bad in banal ways. The numbers aren’t up to date. The argument has gaps. The writing is clunky. Etc. Worth trying to improve upon—but not worth losing sleep over.

但现在，假设有一篇论文以某种方式发表了，它不仅学术水平低下，而且在道德上令人憎恶。这篇论文溜进了你的视线——也许你这周很忙，没有好好考虑裁判的报告——却在你编辑的期刊中找到了一席之地。

但你可能很幸运。在当今的互联网时代，纸张是在线预印后才出现在油墨中。它目前只以电子形式存在。你很想让它消失，因为已经有了很大的反弹。

So you ask yourself:

Should I retract the paper?

To retract would be a breach of standard publishing practice: once a piece is out, it’s supposed to be out (save for minor corrections). So publishing norms favor leaving the paper in place. On the other hand, the piece says things that are morally despicable, and publication, though it doesn’t say a view is correct, does suggest a professional level of scholarship. So not to retract would seem to leave the terrible piece with a nebulous endorsement.

This scenario, as you probably guessed, is not merely hypothetical.

Third World Quarterly最近发表了一篇名为《殖民主义的理由》的文章，作者是布鲁斯·吉利(Bruce Gilley)，他是普林斯顿大学(Princeton)博士，现为波特兰州立大学(Portland State University)政治学副教授。

You may be thinking, “Wait, someone’s making a ‘case’ for . . .thatcolonialism?” Yes, he defendsthatcolonialism: the one where Western countries for over four centuries violently subjugated millions of humans all over the globe, extracted their resources, forced them into labor, deprived them of self-governance, destroyed natural habitats on which they depended, and pervasively committed atrocities like massacre and enslavement.

Yes, Gilley defendsthat. Except his paper astonishingly manages to leave out the bad parts. How is that possible? Gilley basically does two things. First, much of the paper isn’t an argument for colonialism so much as a dismissal of anti-colonialism, which he seems to think is just too much politically correct intellectual fashion. So the paper is short in length and short on specifics about what actually happened during colonialism. As Nathan Robinsonpoints outin his excellent response, Gilley’s paper contains basically no information about colonialism before 1800, which is a three-hundred-year omission. Second, Gilley points to some things like colonial hospitals or medicines and then basically says, “See, that was good!” To which the response should be that a handful of hospitals doesn’t outweigh centuries of brutality. He also seems to think that colonial governments were good because they provided services, which is much like thinking that slavery was good because it provided employment.

You’d probably like to look for yourself to see if it’s really as bad as I say.

The problem, however, is that youcan’tlook for yourself. Or you can’t by going to the website ofThird World Quarterlywhere itinitially appeared(聪明的网络搜索会找到它)。那是因为这幅画被"撤回"了

In fact, it was withdrawn due to a death threat to the journal’s editors on account of this very piece. The existence of the death threat is highly disturbing and has been the subject of muchdiscussion. But the people who made the death threat did it with certain thoughts in mind; they must have been thinking that retraction wasthe right thing呼吁。So instead of focusing on the threat itself, I want to get back to our initial question of whether it’srightto retract such a bad piece just due to its badness.

The general style of thought here, which is shared many people who are not so extreme, is that there must be some threshold of badness, below which retraction is the right thing. See petitions such asthis one.

但我想换个角度。

I think that no matter how bad an article is it should not be retracted.

The reason for this is that published pieces are not just items meant to convey information. They areevidenceabout how some set of individuals was thinking at a certain point in history. Academic journals, with their meticulous preservation standards, are crucial guardians of the evidence, and I think that is one of the very functions of publication. If I want to know what philosophers were thinking about in 1905, I can look at what’s contained inMindfrom that year. If I am considering a view about what anthropologists were thinking about, I can look inAmerican Anthropologist. Any given article is evidence for how someone or some group was thinking, even if what they were thinking was wretched. Ironically, one way we know colonialismwasbad is by looking at “scholarly” publications that discuss it.

Suppose some investigator 100 years hence wants to know whether and how colonialism had support among academics in 2017. The erasure of Gilley’s article is a disservice to that future scholar.

So all in all, I am against retraction. This contrasts with myposition on monuments, whose social function is quite different from that of journal articles. Importantly, this opposition to retraction is invariant across the whole range of the moral spectrum, from praiseworthy to despicable. We should of course vigorously rebut bad ideas. But we shouldn’t attempt to destroy the evidence that those bad ideas exist.