"I’m NOT allowed to suggest that the conference should pick different speakers who think we should hug kittens instead."
Even this step seems very open to nuance, depending on how strong we interpret "suggest" here. Enter Alice and Bob, two conference attendees:
Alice: "I don't think that inviting Kitten Kicker was a wise decision. We have Harry Hugger right here in the audience, who was perfectly ready to give his Hugging for Humanity talk. Couldn't we have him talk instead? If I hold a conference, I'll invite Harry Hugger instead."
Bob: "How dare the conference invite Kitten Kicker! They're a monster! By inviting them, they have revealed themselves as monsters too! And everyone who attended the conference are monsters by association. Let's all review-bomb them and throw rotten eggs at the conference staff, who live at 123 Main St., so that the world knows to shun them forever more!"
Both Alice and Bob are suggesting that the conference should pick different speakers, but I think that Alice really is following the virtue of freedom of expression, while Bob isn't. (Right?)
> I think that Alice really is following the virtue of freedom of expression, while Bob isn't. (Right?)
I think I can see it as "it's okay to disengage (i.e. one doesn't have a right to make others buy one's product/hear one's message) but it's not okay to deplatform (i.e. one still has a right to make one's pitch to an interested/curious audience unmolested)".
Alice would be fine under that interpretation in running her own conference with Hugger, or if she wanted the current conference to have Hugger talk _also_, but with the request to have Hugger talk at this conference _instead_—meaning, to have the conference cancel the agreement with Kicker that they presumably offered in full knowledge of what Kicker was about and how it aligned with their own goals and what the audience interest/reaction would be—she's still trying to deplatform Kicker contra the virtue of freedom of expression, it's just that unlike Bob she's displaying the (separate and unrelated) virtue of being more civil about it, both in her delivery and in what she believes the appropriate punishment to be.
It may help that we don't expect Alice's speech act to be as effective as we worry Bob's will be—unless she is influential enough that her casual utterances will be taken up—but the underlying belief behind "Couldn't we have Hugger talk _instead_" is still directionally against Kicker having that freedom of expression, even if she isn't going to do any further pushing for it.
And on the other hand I think some forms of "telling people they shouldn't go to a conference because one of the speakers is bad", and even of "refusing to go to a conference because one of the speakers is bad", are notably counter to the virtue of freedom of expression, too.
After all - if the conference has like 20 speakers and just *one* of them holds the terrible opinion - what is the *point* of refusing to go to the conference on that basis? If you weren't interested in any of the other 19 speakers your reason for not going wouldn't be "because one of the speakers is pro-kitten-murder", it would be "because this conference isn't my thing". If the pro-kitten-murder speaker is a *crux* for you then - why are you choosing to not go to the conference at ALL rather than just skip that speech?
Nobody owes me a justification for their conference-attending decisions, but my impression is that often the reason is something like "boycotting the conference until they make different speaker decisions", which is at least adjacent to running such a campaign publicly.
I guess sometimes people feel something like a ...miasma of disgust about people who believe terrible things, and want to distance themselves from that? This feels to me like a thing that is Allowed, but an attitude that is somewhat counter to the virtue of freedom of expression, because it is so often a driver of dynamics that harm freedom of expression.
Hmm, if you choose to not attend the conference out of outsized disgust at Kitten Kicker's presence specifically, and you otherwise would have attended... I actually don't think that that goes counter to the virtue of freedom of expression.
It might be bad for *other reasons*, like because it's self-defeating or closed-minded or something, but in the end you really aren't preventing anyone from either expressing themselves or from going to hear the conferencer there, even indirectly - which is what the virtue we're discussing is ultimately about.
Simply not attending some conference just can't really be meaningful in terms of freedom of expression, and honestly we should beware anyone trying to sell us that idea. After all, there are thousands of conferences we're not attending right now! Does that massive non-attendence we're both practicing at the moment have a meaningful impact on all those conferences' freedom of expression? Of course not, non-attendence is the unmarked default, and that's that - we really don't need to dig any deeper there.
This seems so reasonable and well-thought-out!? How are you so good at this
Though I'm uncertain about where that leads to with Blanchardianism. Some particular thoughts:
* One thing that comes to mind is the cancellation of Michael Bailey. Let's say he forwards a claim or seeks to make a presentation or something. It seems semi-common for activists to poison the well by going on about the fuck-saw incident and his association with racists and "he thinks trans women are perverts". Doing so seems like unfair noise, yet also seems highly effective in practice, and it doesn't immediately have to break any of the rules you set up (though I guess does kind of break the virtues?). On the other hand, while these are unfair to cancel on, he's a ridiculous person who does lots of terrible stuff. Most recently he's got a paper out titled "Psychometric evidence that paraphilias are a natural kind", where he claims to make data available to reasonable requests, yet when I requested to know what websites he recruited from, he refused, saying it would be "too much work". This seems invalidating, arguably even retraction-worthy (the reason he refuses is most likely that sharing it would undermine his study - I can write more in detail about that if you are interested). So there's this thing about Bailey where everyone is going after him for stupid reasons but also he really needs people to go after him for less-stupid reasons. It's unclear how hard people need to go after him, and maybe even the form of going after him that needs to occur doesn't have to contradict freedom of expression. (Are retractions a violation of freedom of expression? What if, like with his ROGD paper, the retracted paper stays publicly available after retraction with only a retraction notice?)
* Conversely, I've done a lot of yelling at Blanchardians. For example, Phil Illy was worried that my review of his book would've turned off a lot of rationalists if it had made it to the finalists. Blanchardians claim my book review is unfair. I don't *think* that's true, I review lots of major claims he made, but one could just say I'm biased. If I'm biased, am I undermining freedom of expression by putting up a negative review of an already-marginalized position? If my book review is accurate, are Blanchardians being unvirtuous by patting each other on their back and agreeing with each other that I'm biased? Does it matter whether I think they are getting a core point right that most other people are getting wrong? (What if I think the core point is less important than they think and I think them being obnoxiously wrong about endless stuff justifies people disbelieving in their core point?)
* Blanchardians tend to advocate ROGD theory, and conversely trans people find it urgent to start HRT. Especially trans teens want to start HRT ASAP to not get wrecked by puberty, whereas ROGD theorists urgently want to restrict HRT for trans teens. Is it acceptable to try to get ROGD theorists removed from jobs providing trans healthcare? To put "retracted" notices on ROGD papers in prestigious journals? To spy on ROGD support groups and share the findings publicly? (What if the ROGD groups spy on trans healthcare groups?)
* Is it unvirtuous for me to go "well, I tried talking to Blanchardians, but they are extremely unreasonable, so I really don't recommend it"?
Like Blanchardianism really shook my faith in freedom of expression. It's closely associated with many other taboo right-wing opinions, and ultimately it's just this bizarre knot where people feel like they've found The Truth and they sorta kinda have but they are being so terrible about it in every way conceivable that it'd be better for them to just forget.
Conversely, maybe there's a sort of, neuroticism element to it. Like suppose someone sees something that doesn't quite add up and they try to bring it up to the authorities. But the person doesn't really have a clue what it means and so annoys the authorities and they shout them down. Maybe the person becomes sad and anxious because the problem isn't being taken into account. Like is that what happened to Zack? More generally, at times I turn out to be overly forceful in disagreeing with something and then later I go "oh fuck, I was wrong". But also, it just genuinely is annoying when someone is implying that they've found The Big Thing and then they run around in circles without actually answering what that big thing is supposed to be.
To some extent, I'm wondering if the root cause is what I'd call "coercive differential psychology". Like there's the "nice" kind of differential psychology like self-report personality tests, where there's much less controversy because it's all based on how people self-identify. Like, you'd hope there's a connection between self-identity and reality, but the point is that because our best way of observing that connection is self-reports, you don't have to argue to other people that they are ACTUALLY AGP or whatever. Meanwhile, trying to expose what people REALLY are creates an inherently adversarial element which then diffuses out and makes people (including me, IMO) "the worst version of themselves". Like one can try to resolve the conflict by prescribing better social behaviors but maybe it's just inherent to the general topic.
On the other hand, it's not like you can Just Not do coercive differential psychology, right? Psychiatry seems inherently full of it, as does politics, and both of these are closely linked to trans healthcare.
I think a lot of this is something I feel consequentialist about. I would prefer that ROGD believers not provide trans healthcare, because I think the evidence for ROGD theory is scanty. But if I thought that ROGD theory is true, I would want them to provide trans healthcare. That's fine; sometimes it matters what's true and what isn't.
Similarly, it's bad to write a review that misrepresents someone's book, but not for freedom-of-expression reasons; it's bad because you shouldn't strawman others. I have utter contempt for the idea that bad reviews are censorship. It's just information; people can take it into account or not. You're entitled to speak, but you're not entitled to an audience, and you certainly aren't entitled to a lack of responses.
Similarly, I don't think it's censorship for you to say "I don't think you should talk to X because of Y." It's just, like, your opinion, man. I can listen or not listen. It would be bad if you were like "if you talk to X, I'm going to go gossip behind your back about how you're a Y apologist," but if you just shrug and go "well, you're making a bad decision IMO" then who cares.
Your point about coercive differential psychology is very sharp and I'm going to be mulling it over.
A lot of this boils down to "the conflict over Blanchardianism is not a freedom of expression issue", which on some level makes sense.
But one reason to promote freedom of expression (which also comes up in your post) is to promote good discourse and exploration of ideas. It feels to me like the things happening around Blanchardianism are the opposite of that, but it's not clear what to do about that. So far, the main solution I have come up with is "don't get involved", and I suppose that's one solution, but it seems strange for there to not be a better solution.
Here's maybe one philosophy: A good discourse needs participants. Blanchardians claim that there's a lack of good-faith participants from the trans side, and that's somewhat true. But this is caused by there being a lack of good-faith participants from the Blanchardian side. So until Blanchardians get their act together, it's their fault, and we can't exactly force them to get their act together, so we should just agree to avoid them.
Alternative story: Nobody cares about discourse for discourse's sake. The significance is the political and social implications. Therapists, trans healthcare providers, etc. have an obligation to hear out the valid points that Blanchardians make. Whether I am willing to discuss autogynephilia-related theories in good faith is irrelevant because that's not the point.
"In short, if the law Abigail Shrier proposed passed, it would lead to the publication of approximately three anti-trans books and three million books where the hero fucks a mermaid."
Mermaid-fucking books are a good outcome though. Maybe Shrier doesn't like them, but from a consequentialist perspective, there's clearly nothing wrong with them. Amazon selling them benefits the people who write mermaid-fucking books or want to read them and hurts no one.
I don't have anything to add on freedom of speech, but I stand in awe of the level of self-restraint you must possess to be able to write about Amazon's mermaid sex bans and refrain from commenting on the fact that you found that stock photo on "Unsplash."
I don't think you took the puppykicker analogy far enough:
Suppose that instead of just one speaker being a puppykicker, 80% of the conference speakers were puppykickers. Also, the conference is being organised by the new director of an animal rights organisation dedicated to epistemics in animal rights. You and all your friends have been donating to this organisation and make up a substantial part of the donation base. Are you allowed to point out to your friends that the new director is clearly a puppykicking sympathiser, and that they should obviously stop donating to the organisation? And if, in response to you saying this, the new director is ousted, have you done a bad thing?
My answer to this question is "obviously not". Yes, it meets the definition of "cancelling", but this is just one of the few occasions where "cancelling" is justified. To not "cancel" the director would be to waste your friends money and hurt the cause of animal rights. There are no hard and fast rules: it's always a matter of degrees.
I had no idea you went to New College, but on another level, that totally makes sense. I grew up on the campus - my mom is a humanities professor of several decades there, and part of an ongoing lawsuit, as one of her classes was stricken from the lineup for dealing with gender presentation in dance/theatrical productions in classical and contemporary performance. I think this is a strong framework to think of free speech and morality in broad terms beyond the case-by-cases that dominate a lot of the discourse and seem to lead to people shoehorning themselves based on strongly held local-opinions that they try to generalize to heuristic. Thank you for writing it!
Have you asked Abigail Shrier about her censorship views? I don't know any free speech advocate who would suddenly reverse themselves and reveal themselves to be a hypocrite by wanting to get books banned. The conservatives on the right that want to ban books aren't free speech advocates.
There are things like standards of decency and laws around pornography - you can be a free speech advocate without accepting that businesses have to publish beastiality. This is a lot different from banning a book or choosing not to stock a book based on political beliefs, ie censorship of unpopular views.
Great post. Some thoughts. When people are against free speech, let's take the Mein Kampf as a canonical example, I think they might mean two things
1) reading that book will turn a lot of people into Nazis
2) reading that book might cause emotional harm if you are, for example, a descendant of Holocaust survivors
3) there is the explicitly irrational, but so very human gut feeling that bad things are just going to defile everything they touch
1) is clearly not true. It is shallow, rambling, incoherent book. It will only convince the stupid, and the stupid will be more easily convinced with memes than with books.
2) could be. At least people should be able to opt out from a public reading of the MK, in other words, we need the classic rules of informed consent, content warnings etc. still I wonder whether it is too much to ask that people should leave a conference when this or that person speaks. Perhaps it is necessary, I don't know.
2/B) one rule I would propose is relevance. If a conference is about immigration, I would tolerate someone wandering deep into racist territory, if they have anything constructive to say. We can learn from mistakes, we can learn from debunking them. I would not tolerate that if it is entirely irrelevant to the purpose.
3) is bullshit, but it is the ineridacable irrationalities of humankind. Jon Haidt was wrong, not only conservatives care about loyalty, authority and purity, he was just not inventive enough to look into the liberal kinds of loyalty, authority (science) and purity. For example when I proposed burning my school textbooks, my parents had a classic disgust reaction.
Anyhow I think this is really what drives it, this third. I don't think anyone seriously believes that the far-right have some magic that can turn everybody into their supporters. It is just disgust reactions.
While your typology may cover amateur censorship fans, I think it completely sidesteps the motives of actual censorship proponents and practitioners. The goal of a censorship regime, imo, is that the practitioners identify an alternate arrangement of power in society, and they use censorship to prevent the proponents of this alternate arrangement from recruiting, organizing, mobilizing, and seizing power.
Why does the German state ban Nazi materials? Because it has the belief (with a very loud piece of evidence!) that Nazism is an alternative way of organizing Germany, and it doesn't want that to come to pass. So books that recruit people to be Nazis—not through some sort of mystical contamination but through the ordinary practice of persuasion—are illegal. Flags that you could wave at a Nazi rally are illegal. People who are committed to reading those books and waving those flags spend a lot of time in and out of courtrooms and jails. And so on.
This regime doesn't extirpate Nazi ideas, but it applies a lot of friction on any group attempting to use Nazi ideas as its organizing principle. Similar rationales explain the broad ubiquity of anti-Communist censorship in . . . rather a lot of times and places.
In more totalitarian societies, such as High Catholicism or High Communism, there's a specific official ideology to which any alternative ideology represents an intolerable organizing threat. In the contemporary CCP there is (I am given to understand) a broad sense that the ideological content doesn't really matter as much as the fact of organization at all—and to be fair, given that e.g. the late Qing state was seriously menaced by syncretic Buddhism, syncretic Christianity, and martial arts clubs, they seem to have some evidence on their side.
Is this all laudable? Generally I'm skeptical. Is it effective? Clearly not universally, on account of what happened to these societies. Is it sensible? Often not—plenty of the actual participants in the censorship regimes are as simple and stupid as their vulgar proponents. But there's an actual logic in place.
But… by banning ideas, they are implicitly admitting that those ideas are attractive. And this actually attracts people. Not just the usual forbidden fruit thing, but people think you can’t win a debate.
Well, actually, there is the issue that the truth cannot always win, because competence and honesty does not always correlate. David Irving for example has a huge personal archive of historical data, he is really well prepared for any debate. In his early career, before the controversies, historians were praising him for the massive amount of data collection. So not an easy case.
I’ll tell you something. While the obviously massive human capital problems of the right are well known, the truth is, the liberal-mainstream also has incompetence problems. Lots of mainstream historians just don’t want to work as hard as Irving.
The other thing that makes free speech so hard is the bad arguments we've swallowed about why it's good. For instance, the marketplace of ideas theory is a bad model of how we form ideas and doesn't explain why many kinds of censorship are bad.
I think a better account would focus on the importance of people's ability to self-express, ask questions, blowback effects and the ability of people to route around limitations.
Mostly, the real issue is that being told you can't express that idea makes people pretty angry and undermines the pro-peace role of public discussion. If it's a somewhat popular view then you'll tend to fuel a backlash movement that's extra angry and less interested in compromise. If it's a really unpopular view there isn't much benefit.
And even if marketplace of ideas is wrong, people will adopt bad views because their questions can't be answered in acceptable society. I've known multiple people who have gone down the racist rabbit hold basically because no one but the racists who would talk to them would seriously engage with questions about racial differences in ability (eg take it seriously and then explain the evidence about within and between group differences).
i may be missing some context, but i was a bit confused at the beginning of the 2nd section where you say you're one of the lonely few with principles marching in favor of freedom of expression
"I would like it if people read writing I think is good, and didn’t read writing I think is bad. I take active steps to make this happen."
what active steps towards promoting that are consistent with a firm stance in favor of freedom of expression? do you mean that you amplify good things and call out bad things as bad while also maintaining that those who write bad things shouldn't be fired, deplatformed, or otherwise ostracized?
Good post, especially the third section. I have often felt the need to distinguish between the legal object of "freedom of expression" and something like having a culture of free expression. (Amazon not carrying a book has is completely allowed under the legal rule, but slightly discouraged by the culture). But i have had a hard time making the distinction concise.
It seems to me the arguments in the deontology section are more rule consequentialist than deontological.
Free speech does not have to be binary, there can different levels of visibility.
Victorian Britain had porn theatres. People fucking on stage. Except that one could not just buy a ticket, one had to buy a yearly pass. So it was a sort of an underground thing for people really committed to it, and not part of the mainstream culture anyone can just visit any time.
I find this a good model. Allow a lot of things, but keep a lot of them underground by demanding some kind of a commitment, for example, or some different ways.
If I would be Amazon, I would just move everything adult in to a separate subsite and never mixing recommendations and search results.
"But you can’t try to understand the world if you’ve already written the answer you’re supposed to get at the bottom of the paper. And you can’t express yourself if you’re limited to expressions that other people find acceptable.
By the same token, other people’s freedom of expression benefits you too. Your beliefs are stronger if people you disagree with are holding you to account for sloppy thinking. Other people’s self-expression gives you insight into people very different from you, the rich tapestry of human diversity. Plus, often it’s fun to read."
What makes free speech so hard is that it's not enough to point out the strong consequentialist evidence that trying to suppress expression -- especially in a viewpoint dependent way -- is rarely a net benefit and often quite harmful in expectation. You can't get people to argue for or even not try to ban something they find viscerally horrific without giving them a competing positive value they can feel proud about. I think this is a big part of why we keep getting tangled up trying to formulate deontic principles in the area.
Of course the consequentialist part still requires trying to draw attractive bright line rules (which I'll discuss a bit in a different comment).
"I’m NOT allowed to suggest that the conference should pick different speakers who think we should hug kittens instead."
Even this step seems very open to nuance, depending on how strong we interpret "suggest" here. Enter Alice and Bob, two conference attendees:
Alice: "I don't think that inviting Kitten Kicker was a wise decision. We have Harry Hugger right here in the audience, who was perfectly ready to give his Hugging for Humanity talk. Couldn't we have him talk instead? If I hold a conference, I'll invite Harry Hugger instead."
Bob: "How dare the conference invite Kitten Kicker! They're a monster! By inviting them, they have revealed themselves as monsters too! And everyone who attended the conference are monsters by association. Let's all review-bomb them and throw rotten eggs at the conference staff, who live at 123 Main St., so that the world knows to shun them forever more!"
Both Alice and Bob are suggesting that the conference should pick different speakers, but I think that Alice really is following the virtue of freedom of expression, while Bob isn't. (Right?)
> I think that Alice really is following the virtue of freedom of expression, while Bob isn't. (Right?)
I think I can see it as "it's okay to disengage (i.e. one doesn't have a right to make others buy one's product/hear one's message) but it's not okay to deplatform (i.e. one still has a right to make one's pitch to an interested/curious audience unmolested)".
Alice would be fine under that interpretation in running her own conference with Hugger, or if she wanted the current conference to have Hugger talk _also_, but with the request to have Hugger talk at this conference _instead_—meaning, to have the conference cancel the agreement with Kicker that they presumably offered in full knowledge of what Kicker was about and how it aligned with their own goals and what the audience interest/reaction would be—she's still trying to deplatform Kicker contra the virtue of freedom of expression, it's just that unlike Bob she's displaying the (separate and unrelated) virtue of being more civil about it, both in her delivery and in what she believes the appropriate punishment to be.
It may help that we don't expect Alice's speech act to be as effective as we worry Bob's will be—unless she is influential enough that her casual utterances will be taken up—but the underlying belief behind "Couldn't we have Hugger talk _instead_" is still directionally against Kicker having that freedom of expression, even if she isn't going to do any further pushing for it.
And on the other hand I think some forms of "telling people they shouldn't go to a conference because one of the speakers is bad", and even of "refusing to go to a conference because one of the speakers is bad", are notably counter to the virtue of freedom of expression, too.
After all - if the conference has like 20 speakers and just *one* of them holds the terrible opinion - what is the *point* of refusing to go to the conference on that basis? If you weren't interested in any of the other 19 speakers your reason for not going wouldn't be "because one of the speakers is pro-kitten-murder", it would be "because this conference isn't my thing". If the pro-kitten-murder speaker is a *crux* for you then - why are you choosing to not go to the conference at ALL rather than just skip that speech?
Nobody owes me a justification for their conference-attending decisions, but my impression is that often the reason is something like "boycotting the conference until they make different speaker decisions", which is at least adjacent to running such a campaign publicly.
I guess sometimes people feel something like a ...miasma of disgust about people who believe terrible things, and want to distance themselves from that? This feels to me like a thing that is Allowed, but an attitude that is somewhat counter to the virtue of freedom of expression, because it is so often a driver of dynamics that harm freedom of expression.
Hmm, if you choose to not attend the conference out of outsized disgust at Kitten Kicker's presence specifically, and you otherwise would have attended... I actually don't think that that goes counter to the virtue of freedom of expression.
It might be bad for *other reasons*, like because it's self-defeating or closed-minded or something, but in the end you really aren't preventing anyone from either expressing themselves or from going to hear the conferencer there, even indirectly - which is what the virtue we're discussing is ultimately about.
Simply not attending some conference just can't really be meaningful in terms of freedom of expression, and honestly we should beware anyone trying to sell us that idea. After all, there are thousands of conferences we're not attending right now! Does that massive non-attendence we're both practicing at the moment have a meaningful impact on all those conferences' freedom of expression? Of course not, non-attendence is the unmarked default, and that's that - we really don't need to dig any deeper there.
This seems so reasonable and well-thought-out!? How are you so good at this
Though I'm uncertain about where that leads to with Blanchardianism. Some particular thoughts:
* One thing that comes to mind is the cancellation of Michael Bailey. Let's say he forwards a claim or seeks to make a presentation or something. It seems semi-common for activists to poison the well by going on about the fuck-saw incident and his association with racists and "he thinks trans women are perverts". Doing so seems like unfair noise, yet also seems highly effective in practice, and it doesn't immediately have to break any of the rules you set up (though I guess does kind of break the virtues?). On the other hand, while these are unfair to cancel on, he's a ridiculous person who does lots of terrible stuff. Most recently he's got a paper out titled "Psychometric evidence that paraphilias are a natural kind", where he claims to make data available to reasonable requests, yet when I requested to know what websites he recruited from, he refused, saying it would be "too much work". This seems invalidating, arguably even retraction-worthy (the reason he refuses is most likely that sharing it would undermine his study - I can write more in detail about that if you are interested). So there's this thing about Bailey where everyone is going after him for stupid reasons but also he really needs people to go after him for less-stupid reasons. It's unclear how hard people need to go after him, and maybe even the form of going after him that needs to occur doesn't have to contradict freedom of expression. (Are retractions a violation of freedom of expression? What if, like with his ROGD paper, the retracted paper stays publicly available after retraction with only a retraction notice?)
* Conversely, I've done a lot of yelling at Blanchardians. For example, Phil Illy was worried that my review of his book would've turned off a lot of rationalists if it had made it to the finalists. Blanchardians claim my book review is unfair. I don't *think* that's true, I review lots of major claims he made, but one could just say I'm biased. If I'm biased, am I undermining freedom of expression by putting up a negative review of an already-marginalized position? If my book review is accurate, are Blanchardians being unvirtuous by patting each other on their back and agreeing with each other that I'm biased? Does it matter whether I think they are getting a core point right that most other people are getting wrong? (What if I think the core point is less important than they think and I think them being obnoxiously wrong about endless stuff justifies people disbelieving in their core point?)
* Blanchardians tend to advocate ROGD theory, and conversely trans people find it urgent to start HRT. Especially trans teens want to start HRT ASAP to not get wrecked by puberty, whereas ROGD theorists urgently want to restrict HRT for trans teens. Is it acceptable to try to get ROGD theorists removed from jobs providing trans healthcare? To put "retracted" notices on ROGD papers in prestigious journals? To spy on ROGD support groups and share the findings publicly? (What if the ROGD groups spy on trans healthcare groups?)
* Is it unvirtuous for me to go "well, I tried talking to Blanchardians, but they are extremely unreasonable, so I really don't recommend it"?
Like Blanchardianism really shook my faith in freedom of expression. It's closely associated with many other taboo right-wing opinions, and ultimately it's just this bizarre knot where people feel like they've found The Truth and they sorta kinda have but they are being so terrible about it in every way conceivable that it'd be better for them to just forget.
Conversely, maybe there's a sort of, neuroticism element to it. Like suppose someone sees something that doesn't quite add up and they try to bring it up to the authorities. But the person doesn't really have a clue what it means and so annoys the authorities and they shout them down. Maybe the person becomes sad and anxious because the problem isn't being taken into account. Like is that what happened to Zack? More generally, at times I turn out to be overly forceful in disagreeing with something and then later I go "oh fuck, I was wrong". But also, it just genuinely is annoying when someone is implying that they've found The Big Thing and then they run around in circles without actually answering what that big thing is supposed to be.
To some extent, I'm wondering if the root cause is what I'd call "coercive differential psychology". Like there's the "nice" kind of differential psychology like self-report personality tests, where there's much less controversy because it's all based on how people self-identify. Like, you'd hope there's a connection between self-identity and reality, but the point is that because our best way of observing that connection is self-reports, you don't have to argue to other people that they are ACTUALLY AGP or whatever. Meanwhile, trying to expose what people REALLY are creates an inherently adversarial element which then diffuses out and makes people (including me, IMO) "the worst version of themselves". Like one can try to resolve the conflict by prescribing better social behaviors but maybe it's just inherent to the general topic.
On the other hand, it's not like you can Just Not do coercive differential psychology, right? Psychiatry seems inherently full of it, as does politics, and both of these are closely linked to trans healthcare.
I think a lot of this is something I feel consequentialist about. I would prefer that ROGD believers not provide trans healthcare, because I think the evidence for ROGD theory is scanty. But if I thought that ROGD theory is true, I would want them to provide trans healthcare. That's fine; sometimes it matters what's true and what isn't.
Similarly, it's bad to write a review that misrepresents someone's book, but not for freedom-of-expression reasons; it's bad because you shouldn't strawman others. I have utter contempt for the idea that bad reviews are censorship. It's just information; people can take it into account or not. You're entitled to speak, but you're not entitled to an audience, and you certainly aren't entitled to a lack of responses.
Similarly, I don't think it's censorship for you to say "I don't think you should talk to X because of Y." It's just, like, your opinion, man. I can listen or not listen. It would be bad if you were like "if you talk to X, I'm going to go gossip behind your back about how you're a Y apologist," but if you just shrug and go "well, you're making a bad decision IMO" then who cares.
Your point about coercive differential psychology is very sharp and I'm going to be mulling it over.
A lot of this boils down to "the conflict over Blanchardianism is not a freedom of expression issue", which on some level makes sense.
But one reason to promote freedom of expression (which also comes up in your post) is to promote good discourse and exploration of ideas. It feels to me like the things happening around Blanchardianism are the opposite of that, but it's not clear what to do about that. So far, the main solution I have come up with is "don't get involved", and I suppose that's one solution, but it seems strange for there to not be a better solution.
Here's maybe one philosophy: A good discourse needs participants. Blanchardians claim that there's a lack of good-faith participants from the trans side, and that's somewhat true. But this is caused by there being a lack of good-faith participants from the Blanchardian side. So until Blanchardians get their act together, it's their fault, and we can't exactly force them to get their act together, so we should just agree to avoid them.
Alternative story: Nobody cares about discourse for discourse's sake. The significance is the political and social implications. Therapists, trans healthcare providers, etc. have an obligation to hear out the valid points that Blanchardians make. Whether I am willing to discuss autogynephilia-related theories in good faith is irrelevant because that's not the point.
"In short, if the law Abigail Shrier proposed passed, it would lead to the publication of approximately three anti-trans books and three million books where the hero fucks a mermaid."
Mermaid-fucking books are a good outcome though. Maybe Shrier doesn't like them, but from a consequentialist perspective, there's clearly nothing wrong with them. Amazon selling them benefits the people who write mermaid-fucking books or want to read them and hurts no one.
I don't have anything to add on freedom of speech, but I stand in awe of the level of self-restraint you must possess to be able to write about Amazon's mermaid sex bans and refrain from commenting on the fact that you found that stock photo on "Unsplash."
Would you believe me that I didn't notice?
I don't think you took the puppykicker analogy far enough:
Suppose that instead of just one speaker being a puppykicker, 80% of the conference speakers were puppykickers. Also, the conference is being organised by the new director of an animal rights organisation dedicated to epistemics in animal rights. You and all your friends have been donating to this organisation and make up a substantial part of the donation base. Are you allowed to point out to your friends that the new director is clearly a puppykicking sympathiser, and that they should obviously stop donating to the organisation? And if, in response to you saying this, the new director is ousted, have you done a bad thing?
My answer to this question is "obviously not". Yes, it meets the definition of "cancelling", but this is just one of the few occasions where "cancelling" is justified. To not "cancel" the director would be to waste your friends money and hurt the cause of animal rights. There are no hard and fast rules: it's always a matter of degrees.
I had no idea you went to New College, but on another level, that totally makes sense. I grew up on the campus - my mom is a humanities professor of several decades there, and part of an ongoing lawsuit, as one of her classes was stricken from the lineup for dealing with gender presentation in dance/theatrical productions in classical and contemporary performance. I think this is a strong framework to think of free speech and morality in broad terms beyond the case-by-cases that dominate a lot of the discourse and seem to lead to people shoehorning themselves based on strongly held local-opinions that they try to generalize to heuristic. Thank you for writing it!
Have you asked Abigail Shrier about her censorship views? I don't know any free speech advocate who would suddenly reverse themselves and reveal themselves to be a hypocrite by wanting to get books banned. The conservatives on the right that want to ban books aren't free speech advocates.
There are things like standards of decency and laws around pornography - you can be a free speech advocate without accepting that businesses have to publish beastiality. This is a lot different from banning a book or choosing not to stock a book based on political beliefs, ie censorship of unpopular views.
Your failure to distinguish them is glaring.
Great post. Some thoughts. When people are against free speech, let's take the Mein Kampf as a canonical example, I think they might mean two things
1) reading that book will turn a lot of people into Nazis
2) reading that book might cause emotional harm if you are, for example, a descendant of Holocaust survivors
3) there is the explicitly irrational, but so very human gut feeling that bad things are just going to defile everything they touch
1) is clearly not true. It is shallow, rambling, incoherent book. It will only convince the stupid, and the stupid will be more easily convinced with memes than with books.
2) could be. At least people should be able to opt out from a public reading of the MK, in other words, we need the classic rules of informed consent, content warnings etc. still I wonder whether it is too much to ask that people should leave a conference when this or that person speaks. Perhaps it is necessary, I don't know.
2/B) one rule I would propose is relevance. If a conference is about immigration, I would tolerate someone wandering deep into racist territory, if they have anything constructive to say. We can learn from mistakes, we can learn from debunking them. I would not tolerate that if it is entirely irrelevant to the purpose.
3) is bullshit, but it is the ineridacable irrationalities of humankind. Jon Haidt was wrong, not only conservatives care about loyalty, authority and purity, he was just not inventive enough to look into the liberal kinds of loyalty, authority (science) and purity. For example when I proposed burning my school textbooks, my parents had a classic disgust reaction.
Anyhow I think this is really what drives it, this third. I don't think anyone seriously believes that the far-right have some magic that can turn everybody into their supporters. It is just disgust reactions.
While your typology may cover amateur censorship fans, I think it completely sidesteps the motives of actual censorship proponents and practitioners. The goal of a censorship regime, imo, is that the practitioners identify an alternate arrangement of power in society, and they use censorship to prevent the proponents of this alternate arrangement from recruiting, organizing, mobilizing, and seizing power.
Why does the German state ban Nazi materials? Because it has the belief (with a very loud piece of evidence!) that Nazism is an alternative way of organizing Germany, and it doesn't want that to come to pass. So books that recruit people to be Nazis—not through some sort of mystical contamination but through the ordinary practice of persuasion—are illegal. Flags that you could wave at a Nazi rally are illegal. People who are committed to reading those books and waving those flags spend a lot of time in and out of courtrooms and jails. And so on.
This regime doesn't extirpate Nazi ideas, but it applies a lot of friction on any group attempting to use Nazi ideas as its organizing principle. Similar rationales explain the broad ubiquity of anti-Communist censorship in . . . rather a lot of times and places.
In more totalitarian societies, such as High Catholicism or High Communism, there's a specific official ideology to which any alternative ideology represents an intolerable organizing threat. In the contemporary CCP there is (I am given to understand) a broad sense that the ideological content doesn't really matter as much as the fact of organization at all—and to be fair, given that e.g. the late Qing state was seriously menaced by syncretic Buddhism, syncretic Christianity, and martial arts clubs, they seem to have some evidence on their side.
Is this all laudable? Generally I'm skeptical. Is it effective? Clearly not universally, on account of what happened to these societies. Is it sensible? Often not—plenty of the actual participants in the censorship regimes are as simple and stupid as their vulgar proponents. But there's an actual logic in place.
But… by banning ideas, they are implicitly admitting that those ideas are attractive. And this actually attracts people. Not just the usual forbidden fruit thing, but people think you can’t win a debate.
Well, actually, there is the issue that the truth cannot always win, because competence and honesty does not always correlate. David Irving for example has a huge personal archive of historical data, he is really well prepared for any debate. In his early career, before the controversies, historians were praising him for the massive amount of data collection. So not an easy case.
I’ll tell you something. While the obviously massive human capital problems of the right are well known, the truth is, the liberal-mainstream also has incompetence problems. Lots of mainstream historians just don’t want to work as hard as Irving.
The other thing that makes free speech so hard is the bad arguments we've swallowed about why it's good. For instance, the marketplace of ideas theory is a bad model of how we form ideas and doesn't explain why many kinds of censorship are bad.
I think a better account would focus on the importance of people's ability to self-express, ask questions, blowback effects and the ability of people to route around limitations.
Mostly, the real issue is that being told you can't express that idea makes people pretty angry and undermines the pro-peace role of public discussion. If it's a somewhat popular view then you'll tend to fuel a backlash movement that's extra angry and less interested in compromise. If it's a really unpopular view there isn't much benefit.
And even if marketplace of ideas is wrong, people will adopt bad views because their questions can't be answered in acceptable society. I've known multiple people who have gone down the racist rabbit hold basically because no one but the racists who would talk to them would seriously engage with questions about racial differences in ability (eg take it seriously and then explain the evidence about within and between group differences).
i may be missing some context, but i was a bit confused at the beginning of the 2nd section where you say you're one of the lonely few with principles marching in favor of freedom of expression
"I would like it if people read writing I think is good, and didn’t read writing I think is bad. I take active steps to make this happen."
what active steps towards promoting that are consistent with a firm stance in favor of freedom of expression? do you mean that you amplify good things and call out bad things as bad while also maintaining that those who write bad things shouldn't be fired, deplatformed, or otherwise ostracized?
Good post, especially the third section. I have often felt the need to distinguish between the legal object of "freedom of expression" and something like having a culture of free expression. (Amazon not carrying a book has is completely allowed under the legal rule, but slightly discouraged by the culture). But i have had a hard time making the distinction concise.
It seems to me the arguments in the deontology section are more rule consequentialist than deontological.
Dear Ozy,
Free speech does not have to be binary, there can different levels of visibility.
Victorian Britain had porn theatres. People fucking on stage. Except that one could not just buy a ticket, one had to buy a yearly pass. So it was a sort of an underground thing for people really committed to it, and not part of the mainstream culture anyone can just visit any time.
I find this a good model. Allow a lot of things, but keep a lot of them underground by demanding some kind of a commitment, for example, or some different ways.
If I would be Amazon, I would just move everything adult in to a separate subsite and never mixing recommendations and search results.
I really like what you're saying here:
"But you can’t try to understand the world if you’ve already written the answer you’re supposed to get at the bottom of the paper. And you can’t express yourself if you’re limited to expressions that other people find acceptable.
By the same token, other people’s freedom of expression benefits you too. Your beliefs are stronger if people you disagree with are holding you to account for sloppy thinking. Other people’s self-expression gives you insight into people very different from you, the rich tapestry of human diversity. Plus, often it’s fun to read."
I'm happy for Amazon to be forced to carry books I don't like, so long as it means they're also forced to carry books I do like.
What makes free speech so hard is that it's not enough to point out the strong consequentialist evidence that trying to suppress expression -- especially in a viewpoint dependent way -- is rarely a net benefit and often quite harmful in expectation. You can't get people to argue for or even not try to ban something they find viscerally horrific without giving them a competing positive value they can feel proud about. I think this is a big part of why we keep getting tangled up trying to formulate deontic principles in the area.
Of course the consequentialist part still requires trying to draw attractive bright line rules (which I'll discuss a bit in a different comment).
What specifically do you disagree with Lukianoff about? I've met him, and at the time he identified as a liberal Democrat.