The most vilified writer of modern times is back, and people are lining up to give him another kicking. Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work. The pop-neuroscience whiz-kid had, it appeared, simply stolen or made a lot of it up.

Well, we are living in an era of post-truth politics, so why not post-truth nonfiction? Four years on, and the disgraced author – after publicly apologising for at least some of the above – has managed to publish another volume, A Book About Love. Naturally, onlookers are suspicious. In a brilliantly disdainful review for the New York Times, Jennifer Senior calls the book a “nonfiction McMuffin” and “insolently unoriginal”. Worse, she implies that Lehrer’s work is still compromised by “intellectual dishonesty”, noting a sentence that seems to be an uncredited borrowing from one quoted in her own book. Has he “simply become more artful about his appropriations”? If so, Senior suggests, he ought to find a new job.

But Lehrer has his defenders. Booksellers tell the Wall Street Journal that the guy deserves a second chance (especially, one imagines, if it helps them sell books). And the New York Times columnist David Brooks handles Lehrer with kid gloves, offering excuses for the writer’s earlier misdeeds: “Success fell on Lehrer early and all at once – and it ­ruined him,” because he had too much work to keep up with honestly. This might seem insufficient justification, given that plenty of other people enjoy sudden success and do not start stealing and lying.

Lehrer himself is adamant that he has stopped all that, and his new book comes with a preface detailing a novel commitment to fact-checking and sourcing. The deeper problem, however, is that it was clear to some of us that his books were egregious even before it turned out they contained plagiarism and fabrication. As I and the psychologist Christopher Chabris have noted, for example, Imagine drew unwarranted conclusions from partial scientific evidence in order to promote an “uplifting moral” that was nothing more than syrupy conventional wisdom.

According to Daniel Engber, Lehrer’s new book follows the same model, cherry-picking results and distorting their implications. But of course, Lehrer is not the only one doing so. And there is a clear incentive to do it. Publishers love books that tell clear, simple stories sprinkled with cutting-edge science. Newspapers and magazines, too, are hungry for such articles. This is now, Engber argues, “less a Jonah Lehrer problem than a science journalism problem”. Jennifer Senior, for her part, says that it was all along: the “vote to excommunicate” Lehrer back in 2012 was not just about his lying, but was “a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new”. If so, however, the excommunication was surely unfair, given that other notable practitioners of this sort of thing have happily carried on. (Referendums do tend to have perverse results.) And while it is true that much pop-science writing works like this, there is also a lot that doesn’t, that is rigorous and cautious. If it’s unfair to hold Jonah Lehrer to account for the failings of others, it’s also unfair to damn a whole genre on account of its worst practitioners.

And what of second chances? Some are angry that Lehrer got another book deal after the fiasco of his last, or that he still refers to his misdeeds as “mistakes”. (What should he call them? Sins? Crimes?) It is true that money given to Jonah Lehrer for a book is money that is not being given to any number of honest and careful authors. But everything he writes from now on will attract much more severe scrutiny than most writers are subjected to. And the appearance of A Book About Love, however terrible it is, will probably turn out to be a public good precisely because of the more sophisticated debate about standards in science writing and general nonfiction that it is already engendering.

In the meantime, I doubt there will be a general outbreak of sympathy for Jonah Lehrer himself any time soon. But then, we all do well to keep in mind the wise and evergreen words of Dr Samuel Johnson: “He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the publick judgment. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour but at the hazard of disgrace.”