I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand you’re right that a textbook style should be more referential and less polemical as a rule. On the other hand, as you also point out, pretty much every philosophy class I’ve ever taken is made entirely of primary source readings. In the rare cases where something more referential is assigned instead, generally it’s just something like a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. I’m not certain how all introductory EA fellowships are run, but the one I facilitated was also mostly primary, semi-polemical sources, defending a particular perspective, followed by discussion, much like a philosophy class. Maybe utilitarianism.net is aiming more for being a textbook on utilitarianism, but it seems to me like it is more of a set of standard arguments for the classical utilitarian perspective, with a pretty clear bias in favor of it. That also seems more consistent with what Chappell has been saying, though of course it’s possible that its framing doesn’t reflect this sufficiently as well. Like you though, I’m not super familiar with how this resource is generally used, I just don’t know that I would think of it first and foremost as a sort of neutral secondary reference. That just doesn’t seem like its purpose.
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand you’re right that a textbook style should be more referential and less polemical as a rule. On the other hand, as you also point out, pretty much every philosophy class I’ve ever taken is made entirely of primary source readings. In the rare cases where something more referential is assigned instead, generally it’s just something like a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. I’m not certain how all introductory EA fellowships are run, but the one I facilitated was also mostly primary, semi-polemical sources, defending a particular perspective, followed by discussion, much like a philosophy class. Maybe utilitarianism.net is aiming more for being a textbook on utilitarianism, but it seems to me like it is more of a set of standard arguments for the classical utilitarian perspective, with a pretty clear bias in favor of it. That also seems more consistent with what Chappell has been saying, though of course it’s possible that its framing doesn’t reflect this sufficiently as well. Like you though, I’m not super familiar with how this resource is generally used, I just don’t know that I would think of it first and foremost as a sort of neutral secondary reference. That just doesn’t seem like its purpose.