Episode post here. Transcription by Farjan Halim.
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an
unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today
(once again) is Greg Salmieri, Senior Philosophy Scholar at the Salem
Center, at the University of Texas at
Austin. He’s here to discuss free speech, “cancel culture,” and
“academic freedom.” Greg Salmieri, welcome back to Elucidations for
the fourth time.
Greg Salmieri:
Thanks; it’s great to be back.
Matt Teichman:
So, Greg, you’ve spent a lot of your career
researching objectivist philosophy, the movement started by Ayn
Rand. Objectivists are known for supporting free speech, and Rand
herself took some famous stands on that, but they also have a
reputation for being somewhat doctrinaire. How do you see objectivism
as offering a way into the issue of free speech?
Greg Salmieri:
Well more relevant to this topic than my being
a scholar of Rand, or of objectivism, is that I think of myself as an
objectivist, a member of this school of philosophy—
Matt Teichman:
—you believe it. You buy it.
Greg Salmieri:
Yeah. So I’m not thinking about it from this
perspective third-person-on; I’m thinking of it as a philosopher from
this school. What is its relevance to the topic of free speech? Well,
Rand herself had a lot illuminating to say on it, and rather than try
to summarize her views, I’ll just try to sort of embody them, or my
take on them in what goes forward.
Just as a summary, she thought it was a central political right, and it’s a political right that is the right to be free from forcible interference by others with your speaking. As opposed to a right to be liked, or given a platform, or not discriminated against for your speech. So it’s a right, in particular, against the government passing laws to limit your speech, but also a right against other people who might try to (for example) shoot you if you publish cartoons they don’t like.
Matt Teichman:
So if I get somebody in front of a news TV
camera, point a gun at them, and say I’m going to shoot them if they
don’t say XYZ in front of the camera, that might be an example of
violating this right.
Greg Salmieri:
Yeah; like all rights, it’s to do with force,
as opposed to other kinds of relationships of influence. But also,
Rand was—and those of us who think of ourselves in her tradition
are—moralists: people who take morality seriously, and people who
take ideas seriously. Where her reputation as doctrinaire sometimes
comes from is from our taking moral principles seriously—our taking
of them as having moral import. Some ideas are wrong and contribute to
(or are signs of) vice, in people. You can judge people based on their
ideas—you should be careful about how you do it and not do it too
quickly, but that’s true with judging people for their actions
also. The idea that we should all be perfectly tolerant of anybody
saying or thinking anything—that we shouldn’t be horrified by people
expressing certain views, that we shouldn’t judge them based on it—I
think certainly was an anathema to Rand, and it’s an anathema to me.
I think our ideas matter, and to say that, often in kind of free speech circles, or people who claim to be for free speech, or who describe themselves as ‘for toleration’ or the ‘exchange of ideas’—often the way those conversations go suggest that ideas should be tolerated because they don’t really matter that much. Even if that’s not what the person is saying, it comes across when you get the sense like: we could disagree vehemently, on the most fundamental things, about who has a right to what, about whether abortion is a right that a woman has, and restricting it is tantamount to putting her in some kind of involuntary servitude, or forcing pregnancy and motherhood on her, on the one hand, and somebody else thinks it’s murder to abort. To have those people reacting as though this is a difference of opinion, but it doesn’t matter too much, we could still be friends, and not just friends, but: this shouldn’t influence or put any pall on our friendship or relationship—the fact that one of us had a certain medical procedure that she views as important to her life and happiness, and having that be able to happen, and the other person thinks that that procedure was murder, but that’s just water under the bridge—we laugh about our differences over coffee, and congratulate ourselves on how tolerant we all are. There’s something really bizarre about that way of thinking about ideas.
If ideas don’t matter, if they’re not something to get upset over—something that you might not want to be friends with someone over—if they’re not matters of life and death (which I think they are, and anyone who thinks seriously about moral and political ideas will see that they are)—if they weren’t that important, it wouldn’t be so crucial that they be kept free; that we have freedom in this regard. I think it kind of weakens the case for free speech if you don’t take how important the ideas are seriously, and to take how important the ideas are seriously means thinking that it’s appropriate to get upset over these kinds of disagreements. To have who you’ll associate with under what terms be somewhat determined by where people stand on these things, at least in some contexts.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, so sometimes I wonder whether when
people say stuff like: ideas don’t matter, a person’s beliefs don’t
matter, it’s a slightly off way of trying to capture the intuition
(which I do think is a good intuition) that there are certain
questions that reasonable people can disagree about. A classic case
might be: scientific questions where experts in the field, they’ve got
evidence going both ways, they come down different ends of things, and
there’s an ongoing debate happening, but it’s a question that’s hard
to answer. It’s hard to know the answer to with certainty, so
reasonable people can disagree about it. I wonder sometimes whether
this “well, a person’s beliefs don’t matter” talk is a way of not
quite correctly capturing the intuition that there are certain
questions where I can see where that person’s coming from, even though
I think they’re wrong.
Greg Salmieri:
In fairness, I don’t think there are that many
people who would say people’s beliefs don’t matter. That’s my
paraphrase of a certain attitude.
Matt Teichman:
Dave Rubin definitely comes to mind, having
Ben Shapiro on his show to talk about how he thinks gay marriage is
horrible and immoral, then going out to dinner afterwards and laughing
about it.
Greg Salmieri:
With Dave, his husband.
Matt Teichman:
Right; while Dave is married to a man.
Greg Salmieri:
I know Dave a little bit (I’ve been on his
show), and he is someone who seems to me a paradigm of this kind of
attitude, that I think is mistaken. There is a real danger of having
one’s hostility to a view shut down one’s thinking about it too
early. Either because you get so full of rage you don’t want to think
about the thing, you have the view stigmatized as immoral, and it
would only come from an immoral place, so I can’t consider it, and if
I start thinking there might be something attractive to it, maybe that
shows something. That’s something one has to work at, if one feels
that in oneself. It’s an occupational danger of taking the moral
status of opinions seriously. And also, not being willing to read, or
listen to, or study people who hold the views that you think are bad,
because you think they’re so wrong, why should I listen to that guy,
or study that guy. So there is a way that you can go wrong here.
But I think it’s important that the response to that isn’t to throw out the idea that there’s a moral dimension to what you believe, both in terms of what actions it leads you to, which are judgable, and in terms of the cognitive actions that led to the belief. It’s a kind of internal discipline. But you have to think about how, given all that, it makes it more important to know what’s true, to check things out, to check your premises, to test the ideas, to know where they’re coming from. Part of doing that is engaging with and learning about the views that you think of as awful—that you think of as bad—and I think it’s something we have to practice and learn to do. A good education should train you to confront, and think about, and read the strongest cases for ideas you disagree with, but without trivializing the disagreement. Without thinking of it as: it doesn’t matter too much. Only within the realm of reasonable ideas that good people hold can we think about and look at the other terms. You should even be looking at the ideas of people you regard as evil.
That said, there are clearly issues of degrees here with ideas, just as there are issues of degrees with action. If you think there are immoral actions, that doesn’t mean you think anyone who ever took one is a monster, and the worst thing ever. Likewise, you should think there are minor infractions and major ones. There are minor falsehoods and major falsehoods, and some are fairly trivial or venial, relative to others.
Matt Teichman:
How does this point relate back to the example
of two experts in a scientific field disagreeing?
Greg Salmieri:
That’s a good case. What I was reacting
against in what I was just saying was the idea that this kind of
disagreement is to be lauded, and each party should not view the other
badly, because the realm of ideas is outside the realm of moral
judgement. What I was suggesting instead is that the realm of ideas is
squarely within the realm of moral judgement, but we have to think
about issues of degree in how you judge someone. So if you have a
colleague who has a different opinion than you on an issue where your
expertise is really to bear, you might have a lot of background reason
to think that this person is reasonable. That his view, though
different from yours, isn’t worlds apart from yours—that the kinds
of good things that go into your thinking and so forth also go into
his. That there’s room for error that each of you could have made, and
you’re collegially trying to figure out which of you has errored. So
you might not hold any kind of moral judgement of him; it’s curious
that you guys have this disagreement, and you’re trying to sort it
out.
As you start kind of working through (or hashing through) the disagreement with colleagues, you might start to start to think there’s something wrong with this guy a little bit. He’s too defensive about it; he’s not interested in figuring out what’s true here. Or maybe you’ll start to notice about yourself that you’re playing team sports with the view—you’re looking at the reasons as how to defend myself, versus how to figure out what’s true here; how can I show him what’s leading me to think that? You might, in the process, start to form some moral judgements of the person that are negative, or judgements of him that are positive, or that are negative of yourself, or both of us are a little bit awry here.
Now you’re in the realm of moral judgement, but that’s not a judgement like “this person’s a monster, this person is somebody I should never speak to again.” But it might color how you think about his scientific work. You might have a little less or a little more respect for him. As you go on, over the course of a career talking with people, you’re always going to form these subtle judgements of people, and thinking about what their virtues and defects are as thinkers, and as people. You might come to find that actually, you think this person is not a person with integrity intellectually. You don’t have respect for their opinions in science; you think they’re a kind of fraud, or huckster, or something. That’s going to be an unusual case, but there are cases like that.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe a way to put this point would be
something like: don’t valorize disagreement for its own sake. At the
same time, there are cases of disagreement that are a natural
byproduct of a genuine truth-seeking process between multiple
people. Maybe those cases of disagreement should be praised,
precisely because they’re an inevitable part of the truth-seeking
process. And when they’re not, maybe that’s when we start to think
less favorably of the people involved.
Greg Salmieri:
I don’t think of it so much as praising or
dis-praising the disagreement; I think of it as valuing the
disagreement. So if I find that I disagree with someone, particularly
if I think that that person is smart, or knowledgeable in a field, I’m
interested in the disagreement; I want to know what his reasons are;
that’ll help me think about my view. That’s true of people who I
mostly agree with, who I think I’m kind of generally aligned with. “He
thinks this, I would’ve thought that; why would he think it?” But it’s
also true of people who I most fundamentally disagree with, like “how
could anybody think this and get up in the morning and walk around
during the day? It seems like a crazy thing to think. From his
perspective I must seem crazy. I really want to understand that
disagreement.”
So there’s a valuing of disagreements, and wanting to understand them, rather than close down or get fighty over them, that I think is an important part of intellectual honesty. And then part of what you can praise or value in another person is their sharing that attitude, and their sharing other attitudes that you esteem as morally and intellectually good with regard to disagreement. And part of what you can judge someone ill for morally is having opposite attitudes.
Matt Teichman:
So you mentioned earlier that the political
right to freedom of speech involves other people not being able to
force you to speak. We talked about various ways in which a person
could be forced to say XYZ—
Greg Salmieri:
—or refrain from saying certain
things. That’s more common.
Matt Teichman:
Indeed. Is there another kind of right in this
vicinity that we might call a moral right to free speech, as opposed
to the political right, that extends beyond just not having to be
forced out of saying things?
Greg Salmieri:
I mean, plausibly. The way I use the term
right, I just use the term right in the political sphere, as a
principle defining spheres of action, and I think of rights as who
gets to decide something. But there’s a separate question about what
would constitute a good, or wise, or moral decision within the sphere
that you have the right to decide. We could say “you have the right to
decide this, but you decided it wrongly, in a way that’s immoral.” So
if we think about a case of somebody who ends a friendship over a
slight disagreement, one where let’s stipulate it’s a fault of the
person that they ended they friendship over a slight disagreement—
Matt Teichman:
—you think the minimum wage should be $15
and I think it should be $15.01. Oh my goodness; I can’t believe you’d
believe this. I’m never talking to you again.
Greg Salmieri:
“This is the end between us,” yeah. Everybody
would think in the case of a disagreement like that, the person who
ended the friendship was being unreasonable, immoral, unjust—but I
also think we think: well, who they’re friends with is up to them.
They have a right to end a friendship in that sense, politically,
where you can’t arrest them. But also, it’s not just that it’s a state
of the law; it’s like, it’s right that people should decide who
they’re friends with. However, this person decided it poorly, and
there was something wrong and unjust about it.
Matt Teichman:
Yea, it’s almost like they have a right to be
able to be wrong—a right to make moral mistakes.
Greg Salmieri:
We could call the second kind of thing a right
if we wanted to, but I think it’s just confusing. I think rights
entail rights to be wrong, and what I use the word rights for is:
what’s within the scope of, it’s your purview to decide this
thing. Then, for anything that you have a right to do, you might do it
rightly or wrongly; you might do it morally or immorally. If you have
a right to decide what substances go into your body, that doesn’t mean
that every substance you might choose to put into your body that you
have a right to put in is good. Maybe you’re being irrational in
eating this way, or having this drug habit, or whatever. Maybe you’re
being immoral in doing that; you may still have the right to do it.
Matt Teichman:
How should we talk about the unreasonable
friendship ending case, then? “I ended my friendship with you over a
difference of opinion of one cent.” Should we say I was being
unfair to you?
Greg Salmieri:
I think unfair, unjust, unreasonable,
irrational, immoral. We might want to dig into each of these, but
in a case where there are people who unjustly end relationships, maybe
they were acting without integrity. There’s all these years of things
between us. And it could be like this one cent thing is a trivial
thing.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe there’s a subtext; there’s more to it
than just the one cent.
Greg Salmieri:
But you could imagine cases where it was a
bigger disagreement, like you think there should be a minimum wage, and
I don’t think there should be one at all.
Matt Teichman:
Right, that might be a little more
substantial.
Greg Salmieri:
But I still think it would be (for many cases)
wrong to end a friendship over that. You could come up with cases
where it would be right for someone to end a friendship. ‘Our whole
friendship was based on our political alliance and you’ve been lying
to me all these years?’ And I come to see you’re very different from
who you are, or who I thought you were. You can come up with a case
where you see there’s more to it than that.
Matt Teichman:
What would be an example of that? We gave a
clear cut case of something way too petty to end a friendship
over. What would be a just clear case of: this is a totally reasonable
reason to end a relationship?
Greg Salmieri:
Well, I can give you a case from Ayn Rand’s
life, actually, since we were talking about her. She had a kind of
friend—I think it was not exactly a friend of the family, but
someone who she was friends with through her husband, and certain
social circles they traveled in. I don’t know what brought them
together, but it was someone she was associated with, and they were
having a conversation, and the woman said in the course of the
conversation: “you know, Adolf Hitler was wrong about a lot of things,
but you gotta give him that he was right the Jews.” And Rand said:
“I’m sorry to learn that you never knew that I was Jewish.”
Her husband quietly escorted the woman, who he had been friends with for many years, out of the house and said: I’m sorry it has to end this way. Not like “I’m sorry because my wife’s so mad at you,” but, like, “you said something awful, and expressed an opinion that’s just crazy evil, we can’t be friends with someone like that. I don’t think we could be friends if my wife wasn’t Jewish. But she is…” So that’s as clear-cut a case—something that I think almost anybody would agree you’re right to end a friendship over that.
Matt Teichman:
Do you think any two people could conceivably
survive something like that? That their friendship could survive
something like that? Like if they’re, I don’t know what, it does seem
like it would have to be extraordinary circumstances of some kind
but—
Greg Salmieri:
—you could come up with these cases.
There’s that man—I forget what his name is. He’s black, he’s a jazz
pianist, and he goes around—
Matt Teichman:
—Daryl Davis. That is a nice example—
Greg Salmieri:
—befriending klansmen and so forth.
Although he befriends klansmen; he doesn’t find out his existing
friends are clan members.
Matt Teichman:
Right. He goes and finds them. The original
case was one where he bumped into one, but yeah: after that he seeks
them out.
Greg Salmieri:
But, I don’t know; you have to dig a lot into
their relationships.
Matt Teichman:
It always takes a certain kind of emotional
constitution to be interested in that.
Greg Salmieri:
What is the value of this relationship? I
think you’d feel the rug pulled out from under you in a case like
that. Now the Nazis are so—I think rightly—but so stigmatized,
that it’s easy to come up with examples involving Nazism, where
something’s beyond the pale. They’re the paradigm example of
something that is beyond the pale, and I’m very glad that they are.
Matt Teichman:
It feels like it’s a given, but it’s
definitely not a given, in principle.
Greg Salmieri:
Right. But if someone is pro-Stalin, is that
the same thing? I think it’s not too different. I think of Communism
as as bad as Nazism, but I think its badness is not as well
understood. So if someone tells me “I’m a communist”, I don’t—to be
a Nazi you have to make all the mistakes that are involved in Nazism,
and go against the cultural grain so much, that it’s harder to believe
you were just confused and fell into this.
But then, if you’re thinking about the friendship, you want to think about not just: what is it that somebody could say or do that would make them such that nobody could be friends with them. You want to think, rather: what is the basis of my friendship with this person? How does this thing that’s come to light about them reflect on that? That’s going to be different in different cases, and there might even be cases where something really, truly horrible about someone—where a friendship can be sustained, because it’s based on something really good about the person that you’ve seen. Whatever, I don’t know—he saved my life in a certain situation, so I’m going to give him every benefit of the doubt.
Matt Teichman:
The way we’re using the terms moral and
political, a moral free speech question might have to do with
whether someone’s ability to say what they believe is undercut in some
other way than by force—in some broader way. Whereas the political
freedom of speech question has to do with whether they were being
forced, or, coerced into not saying what they believe. Is that the way
we’re understanding that distinction?
Greg Salmieri:
I guess you could put it that way, but I
wouldn’t want to, because I don’t think of the moral thing as freedom
of speech at all. I think of freedom of speech as a political
issue. And the moral issue is—
Matt Teichman:
—it’s, like, the mechanics of friendship, or
whatever.
Greg Salmieri:
Yeah. The reason why is because it’s so
specific to the different relationships. That is, you’re going to be
judging people all the time, on a million different metrics, and their
ideas is one of them, and it’s an important one. The judgments that we
form about them because of what they say, how they live, what they do,
etc., are going to influence the kinds of relationships we have with
them, and they ought to influence the kinds of relationships we have
with them.
You can think of cases where someone is unjust for ending a friendship, or ending an employment relationship, or ending some other kind of relationship, or cases where they’re unjust not to end it. Like arguably, it’d be unjust to have not ended a friendship with someone, in the Nazi case that I mentioned a few minutes ago. But I think the real question isn’t identifying cases of immorality; it’s how do you actually make these decisions, and given that one has to and needs to take considerations of what people think into account in most of these decisions, the idea of a freedom here is misplaced.
What does freedom mean? Freedom means you have a scope in which you can act. Free of what? Free of consequences? I don’t think any of our actions are (or should be) free of consequences. Politically, freedom of speech means: a sphere in which you can act free of political consequences, or more broadly, free of force being brought to bear upon you. And I think should have a tremendous scope of that; you should basically be able to say anything. We could talk about why fraud, and defamation, and false advertising, aren’t actually freedom of speech, if people are interested in that. But in any case, there’s a sphere that you can speak in that way, but then what is the freedom? Freedom from what? (In other spheres.) Freedom from judgement? Freedom from people not wanting to associate with you? Freedom from social harm? I don’t think there’s any legitimate freedom of any of these sorts that someone should have.
Matt Teichman:
You mentioned the employment case. How should
we think about that? I definitely hear this from a lot of people. “I
have view XYZ. I’m an objectivist—I like Ayn Rand—but I don’t
want to mention it to any of my colleagues at work, because I’m going
to get fired if I do.” A lot of people subjectively report that over
time, this is a stifling feeling. It kind of sucks not to be able to
say what you think about anything, for fear of reprisal of this
kind. Should that not be thought of as infringing on somebody’s
freedom?
Greg Salmieri:
No, I don’t think it should. I think we should
think about what sort of work environment we want to have, as
employees and employers. In general, we want people to be able to
speak freely, where here ‘freely’ means within themselves, honestly,
openly, without constraining or monitoring themselves.
Matt Teichman:
They don’t have to sugarcoat everything
they’re going to say, to the nth degree.
Greg Salmieri:
At ease; permission to speak freely, sir, like
they say in the military.
Matt Teichman:
Exactly.
Greg Salmieri:
I think in general, that’s a value. And so,
where it’s compatible with the goal of your organization, or the kind
of relationship you’re in, you want a workplace that promotes that, or
that makes it possible. When you’re taking a job, you should also
think about that being a value. And if you think the people you’re
working for are really opposed to some of your ideas, and you wouldn’t
feel comfortable speaking them in that job, that’s a reason not to
take that job. I think it’s also a reason to try to speak your mind,
in cases where you think you might get some pushback, and see what
happens. Generally it’s a lot less bad than you imagine it will be. So
I don’t mean there’s not a phenomenon there. There’s a phenomenon of
people being censorious, and there’s a phenomenon of people
self-censoring out of fear of that.
Matt Teichman:
Right. I think that in a lot of these cases of
self-censoring, as you suggested, the fear is a bit unrealistic, and
actually there wouldn’t be the reprisals that they imagine there would
be, if they said what they thought.
Greg Salmieri:
I think that’s really true. In general, when
you hold your tongue—when you stop yourself from saying things you
think, not in the heat of the moment where it’s an ill-considered
thought—but you have a position, it’s thought out, and you won’t
articulate it because you feel like it’ll be stigmatized—everyone
I’ve met who’s behaved that way, their views have gotten less and less
thoughtful, less and less clear. Their opinions of what the other
people think have become distorted over time. There’s a phenomenon
where you hide and suppress a view—you nurse a grievance against
other people about it—and the view itself becomes distorted into a
caricature of itself. I think it’s really self-destructive.
But whether you’re your own victim here, or the victim of other people, there can be real issues of immorality (and injustice) with overly censorious environments, including in work environments, but I don’t think it’s an issue of a limit on someone’s freedom or political rights. I think it’s important that these things are differentiated. They’re not in a lot of the intellectual traditions.
Some of the arguments given for free speech today by people are arguments from Mill. Mill is very eloquent on a number of issues to do with free speech, including the importance of being in an environment where you can hear ideas that are different from your own, advocated sincerely. And we talked earlier about the importance to your own thinking of seeking out disagreement, and learning from people you disagree with. Mill is really eloquent on the value of that kind of thing, but he tends to see that as the value of free speech. I think with this one value, that is important to pursue—that you need the right to free speech to pursue—I don’t think it’s centrally what free speech is about. Mill also thinks of constraints on free speech as including social pressure brought to bear on you, so I think he would think of it as a violation of free speech (potentially) if you’re fired for holding certain views, or if you’re ostracized or boycotted for holding certain views. Whereas I think of those things as simply part of the right to intellectual freedom, and freedom of association, which free speech is inseparable from.
Those rights are sometimes exercised in unjust, imprudent, immoral ways, there are all kinds of cases where people are stigmatized and persecuted for beliefs where they shouldn’t be. But I think that’s part of what freedom of speech protects, and one needs the kind of freedom to associate and dissociate from people when one thinks their ideas are true or false, and on other grounds, as part of the foundation of a society that makes possible the pursuing of disagreements, the forging of relationships based on agreements, and the open exchange of ideas. If you’re forced always to tolerate—be in every kind of relationship with—someone who holds ideas, no matter how hurtful to you, how wicked, how immoral you think they are, that’s just not tenable.
Matt Teichman:
So we’ve been in the general vicinity of
firing people, shaming people for views that they take. It seems like
this is the kind of thing that most people who complain about cancel
culture are up in arms about. Maybe we should consider these two
things separately, but what is ‘canceling?’ I guess that would be one
question, and the other question would be: what (if anything) is
‘cancel culture?’ How should we think about ‘canceling’?
Greg Salmieri:
It’s not a term we put in scare quotes in our
title because I’m skeptical of it as a term. The general phenomena
here are ostracism and boycotting. You can ostracize someone, you
can boycott them. Both of those are things you can’t just do on your
own, you could say I’m ‘boycotting’ such and such—Chick-Fil-A, I just
don’t eat there—but unless you think of yourself as part of a large
group of people who doesn’t do it, it’s sort of fanciful to call it a
boycott.
Matt Teichman:
And organized boycotts are a traditional part
of political protests, of that culture, in America.
Greg Salmieri:
Canceling is just part of boycotting. So is
blacklisting, by the way, because boycotting tends to be thought of as
a thing of the left, and blacklisting as a thing of the right; but I
think they’re essentially the same action. You’re getting a group of
people together and deciding: we don’t want to have to do with certain
kinds of people, because they have beliefs or practices that we regard
as wrong.
This broad category of thing, of getting people together to boycott or ostracize someone based on their ideas, just like based on some of their actions, can sometimes be proper and occasionally be morally mandatory. I don’t think the right response to it, if you think it’s going too far, or is being unjustly applied in a given case, is to say: well, I’m against cancel culture—I’m against firing people for their ideas, or ganging up on people—you want to think about: what is unjust about it in this case? Would it be justified in some cases, or do you not think it would be ever justified? And if it’s unjust in this case, what is it about it?
Boycotting only works in certain kinds of situations, as a real tool for political change. It’s not an accident that the free cotton project didn’t work—that is, some of the abolitionists tried to boycott all slave-produced goods. And you’d think if anything is a cause for boycotting, it’s slavery. But Frederick Douglass, and Llyod Garrison, and the more prominent figures in the abolition movement, realized this didn’t work—I’m paying ten times as much for my suits, and I’m not able to get train fare to the next city to give a speech—it’s just not an effective way to fight this. If you look at some of the sixties writers—even Alinsky and so forth—on topics like boycotting, they all came to realize that there are certain situations in which it strategically works. Where you have a view that’s an outlier view, that’s a kind of low-hanging-fruit for public pressure, and you can push the needle in a certain way.
What I think you have in what’s currently called ‘cancel culture’ is views that are not strongly enough consensus views—nor ought they to be strongly enough consensus views—being thought of and portrayed as such by noisy minorities of people who want to make their view the only socially acceptable view, and are acting as though it is. Part of it is that they’re misreading—and it’s bound to backfire—misreading (whether they’re right or wrong) the political culture—but secondly I think there’s something just very unreasonable about the theory of moral knowledge behind it.
I think J. K Rowling is a good example here. She’s somebody who has been attempted to be canceled—I don’t know how much effect it had on her, it seems like her books are selling just fine—but I think we can appreciate the injustice here, regardless of what we think about the morality or truth of any of the particular claims related to trans issues that prompted the outrage against her, or the particular associations that did. This is a woman whose views were so mainstream as recently as ten years ago or fifteen years ago that they would have been considered very progressive, even on these issues. We’re in a situation where opinions are changing very quickly—a lot of people are shifting their opinions, a lot of new evidence is coming to light as people are coming out of the closet as trans or transitioning. It’s a situation where you have to expect people to update at different speeds.
Whatever view of any particular trans issue turns out to be right, it’s very unlikely to be a view that was held in wide esteem even five years ago—certainly ten years ago; certainly twenty years ago. And these are kinds of issues—moral issues, cultural issues—where it takes time for people to change their minds on them. So even if the views held by the people who think they’re on the cutting edge of this are really, really right now, it’s a kind of situation where you would expect those people to need to be patient for people to come around on them. We’ve seen a lot of change in the culture, most of which I think has been shifts in a good direction, on this issue. The kind of vitriol that has been hurled against her as anti-trans, I think there’s a kind of person for whom it would be appropriate. But it’s not appropriate for someone who simply doubts that trans women are women, or that restroom accommodations should be the way a lot of people think they currently should be. That’s the extent of the things she said that people find objectionable.
More generally, one has to think about: what views are wrong here but acceptable to me? And any view that’s wrong is going to have harmful effects to someone. What views are wrong and potentially harmful about, for example, trans people—or gender identity, or sexual identity—what views are wrong and harmful, but not so bad that somebody should be fired and hounded for saying them? If you don’t have a good answer to that question, I think there has to be something wrong with your thinking on the issue, because it’s an issue where opinions are shifting. It’s an issue that’s difficult, and there has to be room to be wrong without being wicked.
Matt Teichman:
One question I’d have about the J.K Rowling
example is that in addition to threats of being fired, and very
flamboyant public criticisms, she also received a lot of straight up
harassment, threats of violence, etc. in extraordinary quantities. Is
there anyone who deserves to get that? Or are we just talking about
the firing, and the strident public criticisms?
Greg Salmieri:
I think we should acknowledge, too, that
public figures on every side of controversial issues receive these
kinds of threats, harassment, etc. and I don’t think that’s within the
bounds of free speech. Certainly, threats are not just
speech—they’re initiations of force; they’re saying “unless you
desist speaking the way you do, I’ll do you bodily harm, or your
family bodily harm.” These things are disturbingly common; I have
friends who have received them. And likewise, harassment—-where
you’re getting in someone’s face, you’re not letting them go about
their day, but imposing your speech on them and denying their freedom
of dissociation from you—I also don’t think that is free
speech. That is certainly wrong, but ought to be illegal, and is
illegal, at least in many places, in many cases of it. I think the
amount of that that public figures have to put up with, whatever their
views are, who hold controversial positions, is really wrong.
Matt Teichman:
There’s been a definite move amongst social
media platforms where they see it as part of their job to moderate
content, censor content, encourage certain kinds of content,
discourage other kinds of content—where that was not at all part of
the job description of a social media platform (in my opinion), as
recently as ten years ago. Are content moderation policies on social
media websites an example of clamping down on someone’s right to free
speech?
Greg Salmieri:
I don’t think so, for the kinds of reasons
we’ve been talking about. And moreover, I think a lot of these sites
set themselves up for this by describing themselves as free speech
platforms. Which I think was also a mistake—I don’t think that
really means anything. I think Jack Dorsey described Twitter as the
free speech wing of the free speech party, and now Elon Musk taking
back over Twitter describes himself as wanting to promote free
speech. You have these other rogue internet platforms, Parler and so
forth—
Matt Teichman:
—the thing they used to say a lot, the
buzzword, was: “we’re just a platform.”
Greg Salmieri:
“Just a platform,” yeah. But a platform is
going to be a platform for something. Any kind of platform is going
to have rules. If you’re creating a platform, you’re creating a place
where people can talk and exchange ideas. What it is to be a platform,
rather than a publisher, or a speaker, is that you’re letting other
people say their ideas, rather than you putting forth your own
ideas. But your own ideas, and your own view of what the point of this
whole enterprise is, what value there is to be gained from doing this,
is going to have an impact on what your policies are and you have to
have some policies.
Twitter isn’t limiting my free speech by letting me only speak in increments of 256 characters, or whatever it is. Even though I may have more to say than that at a given time, I may wish my each tweet can be longer, that’s not a violation of my free speech. It’s not a violation of my free speech if I can only post some things on Twitter and not others. With free speech, there’s this crucial issue of: can I be punished politically? Can I be imprisoned, fined, killed for saying this or not? And I think the principle of free speech is that you can’t be punished, imprisoned, fined, etc. for saying (or refraining from saying) something. These are services for the exchange of ideas, memes, whatever they’re for—
Matt Teichman:
—marketing, in many cases.
Greg Salmieri:
Yeah, for marketing; they’re trying to build
online communities. Essential in that is having some policies about
who can say what, in what ways, and which policies are best is going
to be an issue of: what is that platform trying to maintain? It’s:
what kind of community are they trying to build? There probably
should not be the same policy for Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, every
different format on there; they’re each a competing forum, and they
each have to have their own services.
Now we can, ourselves, have opinions on which policies would be best, which policies we would like as customers, and I have opinions on what kind of policies I’d like some platforms to have on customers, but they’re like the opinions you have on any kind product you buy, about what product you would prefer. I would like it if Apple Carplay worked a little bit differently and interfaced with the heads-up display differently. And I’d like it if Twitter worked a little differently. And so forth. But they’re not issues of something I have a right to demand.
Matt Teichman:
I have a right to wireless Apple Carplay.
[ LAUGHTER ]
Greg Salmieri:
Well I’d like that, if I had it.
Matt Teichman:
It’s a bit of a stretch.
Greg Salmieri:
It’s not an issue of rights, and I think the
billing of these things in politically loaded terms like free
speech—Parler’s going to offer you free speech, which Twitter
doesn’t, or Twitter now will offer you free speech, where it
didn’t—is a mistake. It’s false advertising—I don’t think legally
prosecutable false advertising—but false advertising. It’s a
category error to describe that as free speech or not. It’s laxer or
less lax content moderation policies, and different content moderation
policies are good for different purposes.
Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever have to decide what kind of platforms they want to be. What is it that they want to happen on them, what kinds of interactions do they want to encourage? And they have to do it in a way that’s connected with a business model, importantly: what do advertisers want, what do users want. There are going to be a lot of different niches in the information ecosystem for different kinds of platforms; none of them are politically better than the other; none of them are more freer than the other; they’re just different kinds of marketplaces.
There’s the metaphor of the marketplace for ideas: well, think of a marketplace. Not the abstraction—the free market, or the marketplace. There’s no such place; there’s just the fact that economic transactions are free, if they’re free. But then, there are different marketplaces: there’s the free market, there’s Macy’s, there’s the mall; they function differently, and they should. What a free economy looks like is that there are lots of different places that work in different ways, with different terms, and likewise, what a free information economy looks like is that way. There are going to be niche things—niche items that you have to go to someplace a little off the beaten track to get, and you get all kinds of signals that this is a weird thing you’re shopping for, because you can’t get it in the mall; you gotta go down to the docks, or whatever. Likewise, in the marketplace for ideas, there are going to be weird, out-there opinions that you have to go to some subreddit for, and you’re not going to find it on Facebook. That’s just part of what freedom looks like.
Matt Teichman:
Another arena in which these questions have
frequently come up recently is the university, where we happen to be
sitting right now. We’re in a university. The big buzzword at the
university, of course, is academic freedom. So a professor in a
university has a right to academic freedom, and they have the freedom
to pursue the study of whatever they’re studying, wherever it leads
them, and not get in trouble if their research leads them in
politically unfashionable directions. What box do we want to file
academic freedom under? Is it like cancel culture? Is it like one of
these things we’ve been talking about, where a values question gets
political rights talk inappropriately projected onto it?
Greg Salmieri:
Yeah, I think that’s right; it’s a misformed
concept. But it’s complicated, because universities and politics are
interconnected. In a real free speech regime, where political freedom
is properly respected, that means that the government shouldn’t be
establishing bodies of ideas, or institutions to teach those bodies of
ideas, which means that there should be a total separation of
government from education. I think the government operating schools of
any kind, is a violation of the principle of free speech. So in a kind
of country—in a kind of economy—where we have government-operated
schools, there’s the question of: how should it do it?
Now, I work at a public university. Given that you’re in a world where so much of the university system is done with public money—even private universities are largely publicly funded—you need to think about how you want to interact with these entities, and how should these entities comport themselves in the situation they’re in. But to think about those kinds of issues, in principle, you have to think about what it would be like in an ideally and properly free system, and then relate what we’re doing back to that. The principle of free speech, or freedom of ideas, means no public universities, in part. It means all universities should be private. Whereas I think too much of the thinking about academic freedom comes from a public university mindset.
Think about the group FIRE, the Foundation for Freedom and Individual Rights. It used to mean education; now it’s Freedom of Individual Rights and Expression, because they’ve expanded their mandate a bit. But FIRE are a group that often fights for what I think is real free speech on campus, and I think overall has been a good force in the world. They often think about: “we want to hold schools to a first amendment standard.” So they think that public schools, by being public entities, are forced to be, or required by the law—by the first amendment—to be ideologically neutral, and therefore, to allow certain kinds of speech, and not penalize people for certain kinds of speech, and so forth, on campus. Private schools may not be held to that standard, but we want to encourage them all by adopting things like the Chicago Statement of Principles, to adopt that kind of standard, and indeed, make themselves legally accountable for living up to that standard.
But all of this, I think, is just a mistaken way to think about freedom of expression on campuses. Having a school, a public school, is itself a violation of the first amendment, properly understood—certainly the principles that give rise to it. It’s a violation of free speech; it’s government establishment of ideas. And you cannot operate a school without discriminating between ideas. Someone has to hire or fire the faculty. The faculty, even if they have tenure—someone has to grant the tenure decision, someone has to decide what gets taught, what departments are there, is there a department of astrology or creation science, or a department that’s tracking QAnon posts and determining who Q really is, or is there a department of astrophysics. All of these decisions have to be made.
Matt Teichman:
Where does force come in there, exactly?
Greg Salmieri:
Well, we’re talking about money that’s taken
from the taxpayers to support this publicly. It’s exactly the same as
establishment of a doctrine in religion, or something else: we’re
establishing doctrines in the sciences. We’re establishing doctrines
as supported by government funds, taught with governmental support,
and disadvantaging other competing ones. So it’s not a private,
voluntary exchange of ideas; it’s a governmental function. What
happens on the quad, or what you’re allowed to say, or who’s allowed
to protest, or what people’s opinions are of the ROTC (to take
something that was a big deal in Berkeley, back in the sixties) are
all small potatoes, relative to this central thing within the
university, which is that certain ideas are being supported and
propounded. Certain opinions on topics in science, and morality, and
literature—what’s great literature, for example—people in the
English department are going to have opinions on that, and they’re
agents of the state, insofar as they’re employed by the state.
So I think the whole setup is anti-free speech. And we shouldn’t think about making private universities function more like public ones are bound to. I think public ones are bound to not take people’s opinions into account in hiring, firing, or accepting or rejecting their students, any more than they have to be by the mere fact of being a school. But that itself is too much. We shouldn’t think of “private universities should try to act like public ones.” Rather, we should think of: what should a university be like under conditions of freedom, under conditions where there isn’t force, including the force of other people’s expropriated money, involved in the supporting of ideas, or the exchange of ideas.
There are a lot of really good reasons, if you’re running a university, to value there being a lot of scope for disagreement among your faculty and among your students: the kinds of reasons we spoke about earlier of wanting to lean into disagreement. Now, it’s not going to be infinite, and different universities are clearly going to have different decisions. There’ll be Catholic universities, and Protestant universities, and universities founded by a different political view. But I think any of them, to be good universities—that really teach people, rather than just indoctrinating them, and leaving them incapable of thinking through their ideas—are going to have to want to have a place for critical engagement, want to value some degree of diversity of opinion. They’re going to want to—even if they’re themselves teaching from one perspective—create ways to expose students to different perspectives, encourage them to look into them, and so forth. Something like the kind of views adopted in the Chicago Statement on academic freedom, strike me as like really good policies that a university that has a business model, and financing, and other things to be able to support itself doing it that way, would be very well advised to take on.
But a lot of it is going to depend on the specific university: what’s its business model—where is its money coming from? Is it getting its money from an endowment, and then what did the person endowing it want, is it largely from enrollment, from tuition from students, or how is it functioning? The concept of academic freedom, as it’s generally understood, I think, presupposes that there are going to be universities, and that they’re somehow going to be free from market forces. They’re not going to have to worry about where they’re getting their money from, and can they be profitable, or maintain their endowments, or whatever they have to do to, functioning this way. And then, how an ideal scholar, insulated both from the market and from politics, would function.
That kind of ideal scholar is a fiction. There’s no such thing as being isolated from everything—isolated from every source of influence, and you can’t create an institution that really isolates someone that way. So we have to think about universities in terms of where do they get their money, what is their business model, and then how can they make that consistent with the fact that good education and good research often require tolerance for a lot of disagreement? Allowing for a lot of error, so that we can figure out which things are errors, and which things are true, so that ideas can be tested against one another in the conflict of ideas, so that few ideas are forbidden to be spoken, if any, and none forbidden to be thought, or considered—that people feel like they can follow the evidence wherever it lies. But I think each university is going to have to figure out how to create a model to do that, in its own case. And the idea of academic freedom,as it’s too often used, is based on this kind of fiction: that it can somehow be isolated from both politics and economics, where it can’t be.
Matt Teichman:
Greg Salmieri, thanks so much for coming back
on Elucidations. I look forward to having you on again a fifth time
after we’ve both been canceled for this episode.
Greg Salmieri:
I look forward to coming back from our seclusion.