Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes as Trans-Expert.
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an
unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today
is Rebecca Lowe,
Philosophy Senior Research Fellow and Director of Emerging Scholars at
the Mercatus Center, and she’s here to discuss speaking
freely. Rebecca Lowe, welcome to Elucidations.
Rebecca Lowe:
Hey, Matt! Thanks for having me.
Matt Teichman:
So I can’t resist opening by asking the
question: am I speaking freely to you right now? How do I tell? Is
there a test?
Rebecca Lowe:
I’m going to give a really annoying
philosopher’s answer and say that because some of the conditions I
think that need to be met for you to be speaking freely are things I
just don’t really have the epistemic capacity to hold forth
confidently on (like: ‘is there an evil demon controlling the content
of your words’), I can’t really say. But the account that I’ve come
up with is much better at, for instance, being able to identify
instances in which someone is not speaking freely.
Matt Teichman:
Oh yeah, this kind of duality occurs a lot in
philosophy, and especially in logic. There are many cases where it’s
easier to tell if something is not true than whether it is true, so
maybe this is one of those.
Rebecca Lowe:
I think so. I mean, we can talk about this in
more detail. I think one of the problems and also one of the
philosophically interesting things about this idea of speaking freely
is that it can mean different things. And I think that’s part of e.g.
when you say, I’m not speaking freely, that you can be constrained in
different kinds of ways.
The account I’ve come up with tries to distinguish between some important instances of those, and it actually does try to come up with some kind of checklist that somebody could use to try to help to come to some interesting and important conclusions about those kinds of instances. Like: they read about a case in the press, and they’re trying to work out what’s going on. I think that one of the practical bits of value of what I’m thinking about beyond, hopefully, its rigorous philosophical interest, is giving somebody the kind of the tools to think in a little bit of detail of what’s happening in an instance.
I think there are going to be epistemic limits on stuff like: are you speaking freely? I probably don’t have enough context, if I could ever have enough context. That’s an annoying answer, but my deep and rigorous account necessitates me to say something like that, up front.
Matt Teichman:
So maybe I’ll flip it back around and say: can
you remember a time in the recent past when you were sadly not able to
speak freely?
Rebecca Lowe:
So it might be the case we’re recording this in
a building that is owned by your university?
Matt Teichman:
Yes.
Rebecca Lowe:
So it might be the case that you’re not
speaking freely, because perhaps you feel inhibited to say the full
content of the things that you otherwise would want to say, or would
have decided to say, because you think one of your colleagues might
walk past the room and be offended.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah; we’re in the Logan Media Center, so
maybe I don’t want to start screaming about how much I hate the Logan
Media Center.
Rebecca Lowe:
That’s right. I could say something like
that. Perhaps also you have some kind of condition, where if you smell
a particular type of perfume, your throat gets constricted. I’m not
actually wearing any perfume, but say I was. So—
Matt Teichman:
—I am allergic to perfume; that’s an
excellent example.
Rebecca Lowe:
There you go; that would be a very different
kind of constraint. That would be something like: a constraint on
your capacity to utter words entirely. I don’t think that’s happening
now.
Matt Teichman:
If somebody gets me in a headlock in the
middle of the show, similarly, I’m physically prevented from
speaking.
Rebecca Lowe:
The account that I’ve come up with helps us to
distinguish between these different instances. In both of those
instances, I think it’s fair to say that you couldn’t speak freely,
but something very different is happening.
Matt Teichman:
And is the common factor there, all things
being equal, that if the situation was neutral, I would say XYZ, but
there is something preventing me from saying it? Is that the common
factor?
Rebecca Lowe:
One thing I’ve tried to do is think about
different kinds of constraints. If it’s right to say, in some sense,
Matt cannot speak freely, what are the different kind of cannot-s
going on? They’re oftentimes overlapping. I’m not suggesting my
account is entirely exhaustive of all of the instances, but I’ve come
up with what I think are three main types of instance in which it’s
fair to say that someone cannot speak freely.
Matt Teichman:
So we’ve got maybe two so far: one is that
you’re physically restrained from saying it, and the other one is that
the immediate social repercussions would be bad, so you decide you’d
rather not. You don’t want to get fired. You don’t want to get in
trouble. You don’t want to get thrown in jail. Maybe that’s another
kind of category. Is there a third category?
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah. I would say that first one is an instance
of what I think of as a type one constraint. I’ve done this
philosopher thing of having type one, type two, type three. Type one
is something like: I don’t have the personal capacity to speak freely,
in relation to uttering words. So that’s like: the perfume example, or
I’m in a coma, or I don’t have the capacity to determine their
content, or I am uttering words, but the evil demon is determining
everything I say. So that’s some kind of personal capacity.
Matt Teichman:
Would you count ‘I don’t speak the language
the conversation is in’ as one of those?
Rebecca Lowe:
No, actually, I’d say that that might be coming
more into my second type of category. My second category is: I do
have the capacity to speak freely in the sense that I can utter words,
and I can determine their content, but I don’t have the
opportunity to communicate in some particular chosen way by speaking
freely. An instance of that might be something like: I’m in the
forest. I can utter words and I can determine their content, but
there’s nobody I can speak with, and I don’t want to speak with my
friend in Australia, but I don’t have a phone. I don’t have the
password to the clubhouse where the person is who I really want to
speak with.
In all of those instances, it’s parasitic on the type one thing. I do have the personal capacity to utter words and to determine their content, but I can’t use them to communicate in some particular way. That would be type two; perhaps your language instance, though I haven’t thought about it enough. It feels to me like you’re getting more into that.
And then the third thing, I have the capacity to speak freely, and I also have the opportunity to communicate by doing so, but I face some inhibitive expected consequence. That could be some legal repercussion, like a fine, or being chucked in jail. It could be some personal thing, like you were suggesting. I don’t know. My friend has got a new boyfriend, and I really want to say: look, this guy is awful. Not so much so that he should be in jail, or anything, but I just find him annoying.
Then, you know, people might hear: well, Rebecca’s being unkind. That’s reputationally costly. So, these are pretty broad types. Like I say, I think there’s some overlap. There are these interesting parasitic relations between these things; I think there are two. In fact, if you don’t mind me carrying on, I think there are two main relational distinctions that are interesting and useful.
Matt Teichman:
Can I ask a quick question about type three?
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah, of course.
Matt Teichman:
Anything in the category of: I don’t want to
say such and such because I would hurt the person’s feelings. Maybe
I’m in a romantic relationship, and I want to be careful about my
words. Or, in your friend case, you need to convince your friend to
break up with a bad boyfriend, let’s say because they’re bad for
them. But if you just say that outright, it’s going to be
counterproductive, so you’ve got to figure out the right marketing
pitch. All those would be type three, as well?
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah. And again, some people might just say:
look, Rebecca, you’re being too expansive. These aren’t real instances
of not speaking freely—you’re just going to capture everything in
the world. But I’m not trying to be exhaustive. I’m not trying to be
setting down all of the rules. I then come up with some extra little
things where we can think about whether bad things are happening in
these cases, when bad things are happening, when something wrong is
happening, in the sense of some third party having some kind of causal
responsibility. But just broadly, I think it’s important to be able to
distinguish between e.g. it is the case that someone is fair enough in
saying they’re speaking freely, but pretty different things are
happening in these instances.
So I’m happy to say in any instance where you have this capacity to speak freely, you’re not constrained at that level. You’ve got the opportunity to communicate in the particular way, so you’re not constrained at that level, but nonetheless, you don’t utter the words that you’ve decided you want to. I can talk a little more about what I think it means to speak freely, but that thing isn’t happening because you’re being inhibited by some expected consequence.
Matt Teichman:
And then type two would be: I have the ability
to speak, but something is preventing the act of communication from
fully happening?
Rebecca Lowe:
Something like that. You just don’t have the
opportunity, and it’s to communicate. If we want to say—
Matt Teichman:
‘I’m locked in a recording booth, and I’m
shouting through the glass and on the other side, and they can’t hear
me’ kind of a thing?
Rebecca Lowe:
That kind of a thing. It’s not the personal
capacity thing. It’s not the inhibition of the consequence. There’s
some lack of opportunity, and it’s not lack of opportunity to
communicate. I’m happy to bake into my model at this point that the
central goal of speaking freely is to communicate your thoughts.
Matt Teichman:
It’s okay. Chomsky’s in the room; he’s not
going to get angry with us.
Rebecca Lowe:
Hilarious. Yeah, I think something like that,
and oftentimes it’s going to be some particular chosen way, in a lot
of these instances, like someone being deplatformed. ‘You’ve been
invited to speak in the debate, and then you’re uninvited’ are
instances of this type two thing. I think the beauty of my account is:
it helps people from making category errors about this kind of thing,
by setting out some distinctions. And then, it enables us to get onto
probably the more important (or at least to many people) the more
interesting part of the job, which is: which are the instances in
which something bad is happening, and which are the instances in which
something wrong is happening?
Matt Teichman:
I can see somebody maybe conflating the
examples of type two and type one.
Rebecca Lowe:
A hundred percent.
Matt Teichman:
Like in your latest example, I’m invited to
give a talk on campus, something I tweeted circulates, and now
everyone’s afraid about the PR blowback of having me come on
campus. So they cancel my invite. I could see someone who was cranky
about that conflating it with: I was somehow physically blocked from
speaking on campus. So it might be helpful to try to be clear about
these distinctions.
Rebecca Lowe:
I think that’s right. If it is the case that
you have the capacity to utter words and determine the content of the
words, it’s not a type one instance. That said, all type two instances
are contingent on you having the kind of capacity that’s determined in
type one. So, a nice example—
Matt Teichman:
—yeah, there seems to be some sort of
logical relation.
Rebecca Lowe:
There are; I think there are, indeed. A good
example of how my category set can help to deal with this—what I see
as common category errors happening within discussion of these
matters—and I’m going to try to purposely anonymize this, because I
don’t want my friend who said this thing to me to feel hurt, but there
you go. There’s me doing a type three!
A few years back, I was talking to a friend about some of these things. We were talking about one of these classic British instances of legal free speech rights being eroded, and they came out with some comment like: oh, but of course, because I believe in free will, the state can never really constrain my speech. And it’s like, you know: way to like give in to the authoritarian state! A good way of pointing out what’s going on there—because you kind of want to say speaking freely is a central instance of exercising your free will; the state can’t get in the way of that—but you also do want to say, look, something bad is happening when some fine is being imposed on me for saying something perfectly reasonable.
If you just use my type one/type two/type three account, you can say: look, what’s happening in this instance is not a type one instance. It’s a type three instance, and the type three instance is contingent on me having that type one capacity, because if I didn’t have the capacity to speak freely in the sense of type one, uttering words and determining their content, it wouldn’t mean anything if the state constrained my speech by inhibiting me. The state can’t inhibit the speech of a rock. Or, if I’m under the control of the evil demon, the state is still doing something bad, but it’s not constraining my speech. It’s important to be able to make those distinctions. And then, it makes it extra bad that the state is inhibiting me at stage three, in a type three sense, because I’m the kind of thing that has the capacity to be able to determine the content of my words.
It’s a really important power. It gives me this kind of moral status, I’d say, or at least it’s an instantiation of why I have this particular moral status, and why the state should treat me as a free agent. There should be really high bars on the state constraining my speech.
Matt Teichman:
Right. There’s some kind of intuition here
that if you have a superpower, in this case, it’s talking—
Rebecca Lowe:
—and being able to not only just utter words,
but also determine the content of those words. That’s really special.
Matt Teichman:
Yes. Thinking via talking, or however exactly
you want to say that. You have this superpower. Given that you have
it, it’s extra cruel for someone to deprive you of the ability to use
it by force, or the threat of force, or whatever the example is. It’s
like we’re capturing the depth of that cruelty by leaning into the
fact that you have that superpower in the first place.
Rebecca Lowe:
I think that’s right, and I want to say: the
way I think about moral matters, I have this rights-based account. I
don’t think rights are the only important thing in morality, but I
think they are important. For me, a good way of capturing what’s bad
when I can’t speak freely is that I’m being prevented from using this
important capacity, which is morally relevant, as well as
ontologically important, in determining what it is to be a
human. Something like that. It seems to me like it’s a crucial
instance of me exercising my power to free agency. And then, some of
the bad things that are happening, which you’re touching on, one is
just: this power isn’t being able to be exercised. You might also say
it’s having an effect then on my physical mental well-being, in some
instances.
Matt Teichman:
It feels like it’s preventing a butterfly from
flying. Like, what the hell?
Rebecca Lowe:
Yes, very Aristotelian. Right. But also, you
might want to say this is what gives me part of my moral status, which
is equally held among all humans. Me not being able to be morally
responsible for what I speak. For instance, if you are the evil demon
or a mad scientist, and you control the content of my words, then I
don’t have the responsibility for them. Seems like some status wrong
is happening, too.
I can talk a little more about the difference between something being bad and something being wrong, but this is the kind of thing I think we’re getting into. I think it’s very, very serious when somebody is constraining this. It doesn’t mean, however, that there are no permissible instances. But I think that isolating out this level of what exactly is going on is important, and I don’t see people doing this sufficiently.
It’s because I’m a little obsessed with J.L. Austin, and some of that language stuff, and I think thinking about things at that level can actually be quite useful, in terms of having some kind of ontology of speech wrongs.
Matt Teichman:
So we have this three-way distinction between
different ways of not being able to speak freely. Does it follow that
there are three kinds of harms that a person can undergo, by being
blocked from speaking freely in these three ways?
Rebecca Lowe:
That’s a good question. The conclusion I’ve
come to, thinking about this stuff, is: I think it’s bad, in all
instances where that personal capacity is constrained. So in all
instances in which I can’t utter words, or I can’t determine the
content of my words, it’s bad. Now of course, you’re going to say:
what about when you’re asleep, or under anesthesia? I can come up with
roundabout ways of saying it’s not a time when we can exercise the
capacity. I can put that to one side for a moment (I have clever ways
of getting around those kinds of things)—
Matt Teichman:
—Tourette’s syndrome?
Rebecca Lowe:
I think it is bad for a person to have that,
partly because they don’t have the capacity then to determine the
content of their words, at least some of the time.
Matt Teichman:
Oh, that’s interesting. Whereas talking in
your sleep is not bad, in that way.
Rebecca Lowe:
Although it could be the case, then, that
somebody overhears you. But again, you’ve got to separate out the
levels of what the things are that are happening; whereas I think
exercising this capacity is conditionally good. There are some times
when you exercise this capacity, in ways that are not good for you,
and are not good for other people. That means that your rights around
exercising it—again, there are going to be some kind of
contingencies involved; there’s some conditionality involved there,
where that personal capacity thing seems a little more clear-cut.
So I’ve come up with a list of questions that somebody might ask, trying to determine what’s bad and wrong in particular instances, where it seems someone’s speech is being constrained in the type two or the type three way. I’ve focused on those two types a little more, because those basic personal capacity ones seem a little more clear-cut.
As philosophers, you and I are very interested in thinking about the evil demon case. Most people on the street are going to—in fact, ChatGPT has done this to me before—it’s like, Rebecca, you’re always going on about the evil demon!
I’m writing this book about these things. In the first part, I do this heavy J.L. Austin category type stuff. In the second bit, I talk a bit about where the law might come into this: what it means to be delegating this stuff to the law, rather than thinking about these things as individuals. In the third part, I talk a bit about the relation between speaking freely and speaking truthfully. But, unusually for a philosophy book, I also include this list of questions that the average person—I think the average person is smart, don’t get me wrong, but I mean the non-philosophically trained person—might find useful when, for instance, they’re reading about a case in the newspaper. You know, you have the headline: “Student speech violated at the university,” and already, I think my three categories are helpful.
But then I have this list of questions, including things like: what is being constrained—what is the constraint that they’re being faced with—through to things like what was the type, and, if relevant, intended content of the speech? Was the causing of the constraint a specific goal of the third party? These are third-party instances, and asking these kinds of questions might not give all of the answers, but hopefully get people to be able to, say, distinguish between different kinds of cases—thinking about the kinds of wrongs that are happening.
Oftentimes, when it seems like someone’s speech is being constrained, there might be many different kinds of possible wrongs happening. Imagine you’re thrown in jail by the authoritarian state. And this means, in many ways, your speech is constrained. Maybe you’ve got a bandana tied around your face, or maybe you don’t. But—
Matt Teichman:
—they’re going for the record of ways of—
Rebecca Lowe:
—that’s right. Maybe you don’t, but you can’t
have the possibility to speak to your mom, who you need to speak with
about something important. Maybe you can do that, but you’ll be
inhibited, because your aunt is going to be thrown in jail if you
do. All of these things are happening, but it’s also the case that the
prison has horrible conditions. It’s unsanitary. You’re at risk of
something bad happening to you. It’s important to be able to separate
out what are the free speech issues and what are not the free speech
issues.
Similarly, if someone puts you in a box, then, yes, one of the consequences of that is that you can’t speak freely. But it’s also just bad for you to be put in the box. Having the capacity, as a non-trained philosopher, to be able to make those kinds of fine-grained distinctions—I feel like if people had that kind of toolkit (sorry, very funny hearing a philosopher talk about a toolkit; I’ve been talking with the policy people too much), it could actually be quite useful. Maybe then, you wouldn’t get some of the hysteria, or what I see as some of the categories happening, in public discussion of these really important matters.
Matt Teichman:
I wonder if we could talk about a gray-area
example. One that comes to mind for me is CEOs: CEOs are often obliged
to make public statements about what their company is doing, or about
something that’s happening within the company.
On the one hand, in order for them to be able to fulfill that role, they should probably have to be transparent and honest, and, you know, not tell outright whoppers. On the other hand, they’re also presumably under some kind of obligation, in order for the company to keep functioning, not to leak company secrets. If it’s a public company, maybe there’s some kind of obligation to the shareholders, or the board, or whathaveyou. You often get this sense that they’re being asked to do two self-contradictory things, and that what comes out of their mouth serves neither of those ends. On the one hand, it seems hard in some of these cases to say: oh, no, their obligation is clearly to this, and not to that. It seems like they still kind of have an obligation to both.
That was one example that came to my mind of a gray area case, where circumstances compel someone not to be able to speak freely. But I don’t know—what do you think is a good example?
Rebecca Lowe:
Well, I would just say something on that. Kind
of a side comment, because I have actually written some stuff about
the state obligation to be transparent. Something I find useful
thinking about state actors is—
Matt Teichman:
—there’s a lot of overlap with CEO case, in
the style of speech.
Rebecca Lowe:
That’s right. One thing I think is useful,
thinking about those kinds of things, is there’s a difference between
saying that you’re not giving all of the details and just not saying
that there are details.
Matt Teichman:
Or pretending that you are giving details, but
actually saying nothing; those are different.
Rebecca Lowe:
For instance, you could think of a case in
which there’s some ongoing terrorist activity; even if you think the
state has a hardcore obligation to be transparent, you might well
think it’s okay to delay saying that this thing happened, because a
lot of people might die, if you’re being fully hoenest.
Matt Teichman:
Or maybe explaining something they’re doing
would involve outing a spy.
Rebecca Lowe:
That kind of thing. So there are some things
where it seems like there’s a relevance kind of
permissibility. Thinking that a government agency needs to tell the
public about what’s going on isn’t the same as revealing all of the
home details of all of the people who work in the agency; it might
just not be relevant. And it seems like there are some harm-based
caveats, sometimes around those things, like the home details, but
also if the operation is currently happening.
My general take is that you should have really good norms and public discussion, so that people know, in any particular instance, that a kind of temporary non-transparency is possible. Then you also recognize it’s contingent on a time constraint. So—
Matt Teichman:
—yeah, and then maybe not while it’s
happening, you could talk about why it will have to happen, when it
does happen in the future.
Rebecca Lowe:
This kind of thing. Basically, giving as much
information as you can at the time, in line with these priorly
determined and strongly justified caveat-type things. I’ve written a
paper about this. I think you’re right—I hadn’t really fully—
Matt Teichman:
—we can link to it.
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah, thank you. I hadn’t fully thought about
the relation between that and speaking freely. Although in the third
part of my book, and I’ve written a couple of papers on this also, are
about the relation between speaking freely and speaking truthfully. A
lot of people want to say the value of free speech is some kind of
aggregate societal value thing. It’s part of the reason I’m so
interested in these cases where e.g. I cannot speak freely. ‘You
cannot speak freely’: I think people don’t focus sufficiently on that
kind of personal individual instance. Like, you don’t really hear
people saying ‘Matt is doing a bit of his free speech’; it tends to be
more this agglomerated, aggregative thing. And then you get people
saying things like, look, the value of free speech is scientific, like
the acquisition of scientific knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong! I think that’s right. I think we don’t get as much scientific knowledge if we don’t have free speech at the societal level. But groups are just sets of individuals, and in any instance of an unjustifiable speech constraint, there’s an individual whose speech has not been constrained. That comes back to why it’s bad, on a personal level, when you can’t speak freely.
So a lot of what I’m doing is trying to bring it down to this individual point, because otherwise, I think the group stuff doesn’t make sense. But if you think about the ‘truthfully’ thing, it seems like a lot of people have these assumptions about the relationship between speaking freely and speaking truthfully. You sometimes hear people saying things, partly because they believe those true things about scientific inquiry will be set back if people feel constrained from speaking freely.
Matt Teichman:
I feel like people are often thinking about
e.g. Galileo being forced to lie.
Rebecca Lowe:
Exactly. That stuff seems pretty clear. But
then you get people making these jumps, like: it’s never justifiable
to constrain someone from speaking truthfully.
And it just seems like there are pretty obvious counterexamples. Say you are a teacher at school, your students have got an exam tomorrow on the French Revolution, it’s a really important exam. Some of the kids in the class, at least if they don’t pass it, they aren’t going to get into college. You can come up with, you know, the thing. The teacher, instead of teaching them the last few bits about the French Revolution, starts telling them about their friend’s love life. The head teacher comes by and is like: hey, why aren’t you teaching them about the French Revolution? The things the person is saying about the friend’s love life are true, but they should be teaching them about the French Revolution. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that the head teacher says: hey, get on and talk to them about the French Revolution.
Similarly, there are instances in which somebody might be obligated to say something that’s false. Take the instance of, like, you go to the doctor, and it turns out that the doctor believes, on all reliable testing, that you’ve got some horrible cancer. All the tests are coming back saying these things. The doctor is clearly obligated to tell you that, which seems to me pretty clear. But actually, the doctor didn’t know there’s this other disease, schmancer, which is actually perfectly fine. And it’s a disease, but they’ve got an easy cure for it, and the doctor is going to realize that in two weeks’ time. But the doctor doesn’t realize that.
It seems to me the doctor is doing something clearly bad (and wrong) by not informing you of the false thing, because we’re epistemically fallible. There are all of these cases which say: this relation between speaking freely and speaking truthfully just isn’t that clear-cut. So I’ve come to this conclusion that an utterance being truthful is neither necessary nor sufficient for making a constraint impermissible. And then this other related epistemic claim: knowing an utterance is truthful is neither necessary nor sufficient for morally evaluating the permissibility of a constraint.
Sorry, that was kind of technical, but I think this also comes into your CEO point on both of these levels. I want to say: look, this stuff is actually really hard. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible or anything, although, like I say, the evil demon stuff might be. But these big claims around free speech that we often see, I completely understand them, and I understand why people are exercised about this stuff, and we should be. But having some of these philosophical and conceptual tools to be able to really parse what’s going on, and make fine-grained distinctions between instances, is really important.
Matt Teichman:
One thing that strikes me about these examples
is that they seem to be connected to promising, in some way. You
promise something, and you’re promising something specific, but there
could be all these logical and causal downstream consequences: further
commitments you take on just from the initial promise. And some of
those downstream commitments could be not to say something that you
believe to be true. It’s hard to have all those commitments in your
mind when you make the initial promise. And especially, once you’ve
got more than one promise, now you’re really in trouble; you’ve got to
make those cohere with each other.
Rebecca Lowe:
That’s right. Depending on who the person
is—if you are a state actor, there are probably going to be extra
obligations. You’re responsible to the people. You have these extra
levels of obligations of transparency that don’t affect you, in your
private life.
I actually think that doing moral stuff—thinking about moral evaluation—is really, really hard. This is one reason why I’m a little allergic to the cookie-cutter idea that we have these simple moral theories can tell us all of the answers. One reason is that oftentimes, there’s more than one permissible option. Sometimes I think certain moral theories are not good at making distinctions between better and good, or better and right. You get these weird conflations between right and wrong, or good and bad, and I think it’s really important that we do this work ourselves.
But it’s really hard. We shouldn’t be trying to fool anybody into thinking that as moral philosophers—I’m a political philosopher. I see that as a branch of moral philosophy. One thing that we should be doing is doing the hard work. It’s not easy, and it shouldn’t be easy, because when you’re intervening in someone else’s speech, that’s a serious thing. I should say, for somebody who’s very much on the ‘I care about free speech a lot’ side of things, I do think there are some instances where it’s not only permissible, but it’s required to intervene in someone’s speech. The qeasy example is e.g. the head teacher example I just gave.
Matt Teichman:
You and your family are hiding Anne Frank, and
your family member wants to leak Anne Frank’s location, so you cover
their mouth.
Rebecca Lowe:
That seems to me to be justifiable. It doesn’t
mean, however, that I can chop off your tongue. Although, again, there
are questions about what counts as the actual intention, and where is
the free speech violation. However, say you’re in the pub, and you get
in the way of a fight, and somebody accidentally punches you in the
mouth, and it breaks your jaw. A consequence of that might well be
that you’ve lost your capacity to speak freely, in that really
important sense of just being able to utter words at all. But if you
just got in the way of the punch, that person has done wrong things to
you, but saying that they wronged you by constraining your free
speech, it’s true on some level—
Matt Teichman:
—it feels like more of a byproduct.
Rebecca Lowe:
That’s right. And I think it’s, again,
important to be able to distinguish exactly the wrong that’s happening
there. You can say something like, look, you should be really careful
not to punch around, knowing that if you accidentally punch someone in
the mouth, you might constrain their free speech. That’s a really
important constraint on their personal capacity to express their free
will. So you should behave responsibly generally. That’s very
different from somebody, like you say, constraining somebody so that
they don’t blurt something out. So the intention is clearly important
here. Goals are important here. These are some of the questions I
bring out in my work, to be able to make distinctions between
instances.
Matt Teichman:
One type of example that you’ve discussed
involves coercion. I’m particularly interested in non-violent
coercion examples, because I think they can be gray areas as well. Not
gray areas as to whether it was justified or not, but gray areas as
to whether or not it’s speaking freely: maybe it was speaking
freely, and maybe it wasn’t. Suppose that I’m blackmailed into firing
one of my employees, who I think totally doesn’t deserve to get fired.
But the threat of something horrible to me forced me to fire them, so
to speak. In examples like that, you’re pulled in two directions. You
want to say I was speaking freely (let’s imagine that there is speech
here; ‘you’re fired’—that’s the speech), in the sense that
ultimately, the only arbiter of whether that happens was me. I decided
to utter the words ‘You’re fired.’ And then you also kind of want to
say: no, I wasn’t speaking freely, because I was tricked somehow into
doing it, and I really didn’t want to do it, but I saw no other way.
Do you think that your taxonomy of different kinds of speaking freely can help us understand what’s happening in these coercion cases?
Rebecca Lowe:
I totally do, actually. I like the work of
G.A. Cohen, this great
socialist political philosopher. One of the things he says in one of
his articles, this great article, is something like: if you’re forced
to do something, you must be free to do it, and you can only be forced
to do things you’re free to do. So if you put the gun to my head, and
say, Rebecca, you’ve got to say X, I can only be forced to do that
if I can actually say X. That comes into my categories distinction.
But I think what you’re talking about, at some level, is the fact of the matter that sometimes, I might want to say the thing that I’m being forced to say. In the instance of the blackmail, I don’t want my family member to be harmed, or whatever. I do actually want to say the thing that I’m being forced to say. Similarly, imagine, I have this very convoluted case of like—it’s actually another gun to the head thing, but you could you could imagine it being—
Matt Teichman:
—I guess we watch too many action movies.
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah, it’s the classic philosophers’ thing. You
can imagine a blackmail thing instead. The person comes to me and
says: I’ll blackmail you, if you don’t say ‘I’m going to leave you my
fortune.’ Now it might be the case that I’ll say I’ll leave you my
fortune. Most people are going to think that the bad thing happening
there is that Rebecca doesn’t want to say ‘I’ll leave you my fortune.’
Rebecca wants to say: ‘How dare you say that I should leave you my
fortune.’ I will leave my fortune actually to—not that I have a
fortune—but to the World Wildlife Fund. And actually, you saying it
to me under coercion probably isn’t going to meet legal standards.
But actually, no! It turns out that this person who’s blackmailing me is my long-lost son, who I just recognized, and actually I do want to leave him my fortune. This seems to me clearly the case, just because what I happen to want to say matches what he’s trying to force me to say. Isn’t there something bad happening?
Matt Teichman:
It’s a blackmail Gettier
case.
Rebecca Lowe:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a Gettier case. This comes
back to my original point about the difference between uttering words
and determining the content of the things. There’s some very
simplistic sense in which somebody might say speaking freely is saying
what you want to say. But it’s not what you want to say in that easy,
base-order thing of, like: you know what my desires are. Rather, it’s
what I’ve determined to say, or what I’ve decided to say. If
there’s some sense in which there’s this inhibition that is playing
some work in determining what the content of my words are—even
though they’re the content of my words, as I have decided to do,
because I don’t want the bad thing to happen—there’s something bad
happening there. I do think it’s an interference.
On that, it’s not just what you want. You can also think of the instance of: imagine that somebody offers me a donut, and they say, ‘Do you want a donut?’ And I do want a donut, because who doesn’t like donuts? But I also am being controlled by the evil demon, such that the only thing I can ever say is: I want a donut. Saying I want a donut matches what my first order want is, in the sense that I really want the donut. But I haven’t freely determined that that’s what I want to say. So, I think—
Matt Teichman:
—or you can imagine a chat app: you have
malware installed, such that you type what you want to type, but what
comes out the other end is “I want a donut,” even if you do actually
want a donut.
Rebecca Lowe:
Exactly. I want to say that speaking freely is
uttering the words you’ve decided to say, and then there’s this whole
point around your reasoning process, and other people putting
inhibitive consequences on it.
These are great examples you’re coming up with, and, like I say, I think my account is an attempt at some kind of descriptive sense of: here are some distinctions between different instances, then taking those types as useful. We can, then, think hard about some of these points around what are the bad things that are happening, what are the wrong things that are happening, to enable us to morally evaluate. But part of my point is that this stuff is hard.
And if I could just say one final thing, I think another thing I’m trying to show in this book, in the second part, is the risk of over-delegating this stuff to other people, or to the law. I think it’s bad, because then we’re not doing the hard work, and I think we should be doing that hard work. But also, because it is so complicated. The law is famously blunt. The law is not good at making these fine-grained distinctions. So if we over-delegate this stuff to the law, it’s not just that we crowd out our own personal capacity of doing this stuff (very Aristotelian, again). We should be doing this stuff ourselves. As communities, we should be engaging with each other about these matters. It’s also the case that the law is just bad at doing this stuff.
So you get some instances like—I don’t know—some students complaining about something, and the university calls in the police. The chance that you’re going to get this kind of nuanced—
Matt Teichman:
—yeah, the police weren’t there. What do
they know about what happened? They know how to stop bank robberies,
but—
Rebecca Lowe:
—but also, the police aren’t really equipped
to do that stuff for you. So if you’re the philosophy professor, and
there’s the science professor down the hallway, and you’re giving this
talk, and you’re just saying really wrong stuff about gravity, if the
science professor’s like: “this is going to wreck the minds of the
students. I need to complain to the police,” no! The science professor
should come along and say, hey mate, you’re getting this wrong. Here’s
a little lesson on gravity. And if he doesn’t do that, he’s failing in
his obligations. He’s very privileged as a professor of science, and
he should be sharing that stuff.
Similarly, you get these instances of e.g. in Britain somebody makes some sexist joke in the pub, and rather than just saying, “Hey mate, that’s dickish,” or indeed thinking in this instance, it is not my business, but it’s the business of the person they’re speaking to, to do that, they go and call the police. I’m actually probably not exaggerating here.
These things are bad and wrong on many levels, A, because the law is bad at dealing with this stuff, and B, because it’s our obligation to be engaging with these things, to be making these fine-grained moral distinctions. A society in which that doesn’t happen is degraded. It’s degraded at the individual level, because you’re not doing your stuff that you should be doing, as hard as it is, but it’s also a society in which we’re going to give away our humanity. It’s hard! It’s hard. Part of the point I’m trying to make with this work is to say, look, this stuff is really difficult, but it’s worth the hard work. It’s really important we do the hard work.
Matt Teichman:
The delegation thing is interesting, too,
because it seems like there’s some element of that in every example I
can think of, of type-three not speaking freely. So if you go to the
relationship example, say I didn’t say XYZ to spare my partner’s
feelings. Is it my job to determine what would hurt my partner’s
feelings, or is it my partner’s job to determine what would hurt their
own feelings?
Rebecca Lowe:
One of the questions that I come to, in this
list of questions about distinguishing if wrongs are happening, is
authority. Do I have the authority to say this? Does somebody else
have the authority to do it? It might be the case that I’m not very
good friends with this person, and they have the bad boyfriend, but we
have a mutual friend who’s closer to them. Maybe they’re in a better
position to do that.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, that’s a good way to think of it. Who
is best suited to whatever the task is?
Rebecca Lowe:
One way I like to talk about this—I think I
get this originally from Josh Ober, who writes great stuff about
democracy, and I wonder if I got this phrase from him—it’s whose
business is it? I quite like this. Is it your business? Oftentimes,
I think it’s not the law’s business, and it’s then a question of whose
business this is. Let’s say there’s an instance where some kind of
intervention is required—not just permissible, but required—that
doesn’t mean that everyone in the world has the authority to do that.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah.
Rebecca Lowe:
I think there are all of these fine-grained
distinctions about things, in any of these instances that you can
think about, stuff like the permissibility of the kind of
constraint. Again, if you say you do have the authority, and it’s
permissible, it doesn’t mean you can chop the person’s mouth off,
right? Is the kind of intervention in itself an action that is
permissible, and is it permissible in this instance? What is the
intention? Are you the right person to be doing it?
Matt Teichman:
Maybe I’m not good at covering people’s mouths
with my hand, and it won’t work because I’m bad at that.
Rebecca Lowe:
Right, these kinds of things. Or maybe you have
poison on your hands and therefore—I know we’re getting into edge
case philosophical stuff, but I’ve tried as best I can to come up with
some general and particular kinds of things that will be useful for,
minimally, making some distinctions. My goal is such that you’re
ruling out some stuff, so you can say along the way: look, this isn’t
an instance of this. Or it is an instance, but it’s not for that
reason.
Coming back to your point around logic, and yes and no, sometimes it’s easier just to say the no things along the way than to say yes, it’s definitely this, and then you just get something more manageable. You’re still not fully aware of all of the moral stuff that’s going on, but at least you know it’s not a case of that, and it’s not a case of that, and it’s not a case of that, or it meets this requirement, and that requirement. You’re getting closer, so you don’t just have this kind of morass in which everything is the same.
Matt Teichman:
Rebecca Lowe, I freely state to everyone
listening to this show that this is a wonderful interview. Thank you
very much.
Rebecca Lowe:
I’ll say thanks to you and the evil demon!
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