Does it take a government to censor?

Certain types of events, none of which directly involve government action, are what we often think of when contemporary notions of free speech, political correctness, and void culture come up in conversation: a speaker is disinvited from a college campus after what some of their political views are unearthed, a tweet is deleted by X (formerly Twitter) because it is labeled as hateful, a scientific paper is retracted after people express that it upset them, an outspoken actor is fired from a TV series television for controversial opinions, a publisher responds to a petition by canceling the release of an upcoming book, a magazine disavows its own article on a hot topic after pressure from its staff.

Some theories of free speech have little to say that is directly related to these kinds of events. That’s because they see free speech as a right against certain state actions, as codified in laws like America’s First Amendment and related case law. Purdue philosopher JP Messina’s recent book, Private censorshiphowever, it addresses the ethics, politics, law, and culture surrounding these cancellations. It is a powerful and clear contribution to the often silly and confused argumentation in this field.

Taking censorship rather than freedom of expression as the primary reference point, Private censorship adds important insight into these issues. Defenders of cancel culture are fond, for example, of saying that free speech does not entail the freedom to condemn that speech or some of the consequences that might accompany such condemnation. And that is certainly true. But by the same token, the freedom of association enjoyed by individuals and groups, which underlies the greater legal latitude afforded them for actions such as censorship, does not entail the freedom to condemn either. In Messina’s account, if a company or organization engages in a great deal of censorship, they undermine public discourse and make it less likely that we as a society will get to the truth of the matter, and are therefore appropriate targets of the conviction.

Focusing on censorship allows Messina to do an excellent job of distinguishing between legal regimes of free speech, moral evaluations of speech actions, and the desirable features of a healthy culture of public discourse. However, I’m not sure that the notion of censorship is really the right framing device for the kinds of subjects Messina has in mind here. Take his definition of censorship for granted. Messina says that censorship involves “the attempt to suppress expressive content on the grounds that it is dangerous, threatens orthodoxy (moral, political, or religious), or is inimical to the material interests of the agent seeking to suppress it.”

But I think only some material interests are relevant to what we’re talking about in debates about free speech and censorship. Let me explain: Let’s say an editor at a gardening magazine commissioned an editorial about identity politics, but the editor-in-chief decides to cancel it all because customers will cancel their subscriptions if they see that the new issue contains a lots of stuff about politics. rather than a bunch of flower stuff. This doesn’t seem like censorship, or at least it doesn’t seem like the kind of censorship that worries us when we talk about political correctness and canceling culture. Now say an editor at a prestigious and widely circulated politics and current affairs magazine has commissioned an editorial on identity politics, but the editor-in-chief decides to cancel the whole thing because customers will cancel their subscriptions if they have to read that kind of opinion piece. . included in the piece. This, on the other hand, seems to be the kind of censorship we are concerned about. But both are censorship, according to Messina’s definition, in that each involves the suppression of expressive content on the grounds that it is contrary to the publisher’s material interest.

And I’m not sure that Messina’s main argument against censorship is ultimately the right basis for his thinking. Private censorship cites a very popular line of reasoning from John Stuart Mill about how free speech helps us find the truth: the more discourse we allow ourselves and others to engage, the more everyone’s arguments will be tested and refined. Thus, the less censorship there is, the more we can justifiably hope that our current views are true or wise. But this argument seems to go further than Messina is willing to go.

Like many writers on these topics, Messina takes on the threat of online misinformation. However, something that remains unexplained is why misinformation should bother us in the first place if we are working from within the Mill. All aspects of Mill’s argument against censorship apply favorably to accepting and even celebrating the existence of what appears to us to be misinformation. First, we might mistake it for misinformation to begin with; our own beliefs may be false, and the alleged misinformation may in fact be correct. Second, misinformation could prevent us from becoming complacent about our true beliefs and forgetting why we possessed them in the first place; it may ultimately make us more thoughtful and rational. Third, the alleged misinformation might contain an element of truth, even if it is generally misleading.

This is true even of the categories of misinformation that we commonly accept as suitable for censorship. For example, the law of defamation limits free speech, but we accept this restriction because we believe that the interests of ordinary people in avoiding (or even the right to avoid) being defamed outweigh the cost of free speech. Why do so few advocates of free speech argue that defamation might be generally good—that we shouldn’t censor it for all the reasons we shouldn’t censor political dissent? After all, filing a case against someone for defamation meets Messina’s criteria for censorship. This is not a criticism: it is correct to classify a defamation suit in this way, and it reveals tensions in classical liberal orthodoxy.

Maybe what solves a lot of these difficulties for a lot of people, but it’s mostly a sort of background or background concern. Private censorshipis a pointed analysis of our current politicized and polarized culture. Here’s how that might happen: “Diversity of viewpoints is a good idea right now because many institutions have been more or less taken over by one political faction or another, with dissent either not taken seriously or heard not at all Censoring disinformation is a bad idea at this point because the censors are likely to be political partisans who use their right to classify things as disinformation to label whatever they want to avoid being heard under that name. Hate speech legislation is a bad idea right now for the same reason.”

I do not mean to suggest that we gain nothing from the relatively abstract perspective on the nature of rights, the distinction between public and private, the distinction between what is legal and what is moral, and so on. On the contrary: Messina makes a great contribution to our thinking about such things here. But ultimately, much of his concern is how to balance competing claims, such as those of rights such as free speech, free association, and property. In these moments of weighing and balancing, our abstractions are not enough to guide us, and we are driven by our instincts about real-world trends and phenomena in politics and culture. Those with different views on these phenomena, however, will still find much to gain from the intellectual framework developed in Private censorship.

Oliver Taldi is a philosopher at the University of Tulsa Honors College.