Let’s Talk About Free Speech

Subject: Let’s Talk About Free Speech Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:48 pm

Some advocates of restricting expression insist that censorship debates are merely about boundary-setting—but they’re wrong.

At the height of almost any debate about free speech, censorship, cancel culture, groupthink, the progressive takeover of this or that institution, and so on, someone will likely bring up the “line-drawing” argument. The idea is that nobody is an invariable supporter of free speech or an invariable opponent of censorship. Most of us favor restrictions on plagiarism, copyright infringement, physical threats, false advertising, and maybe even some political speech. So, this argument maintains, the debate isn’t really about free speech or censorship, because everyone agrees that some speech should be restricted. Instead, the debate is about “where to draw the line”—about just how bad speech must be, how much harm it must cause or how easily it must be proven false or destructive, to merit restriction.

Consider some examples. In the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs writes, “A good many people claim to be ‘free speech absolutists,’ but I’m not sure whether they really are. Push an absolutist hard enough with edge cases and you typically discover that they do indeed draw lines beyond which speech may not be permitted to go. . . . The bug-eyed extremists will always be with us, of course, but most people involved in these conversations grasp—even when they don’t want to admit it—the idea that speech should be as free as possible without inflicting unwarranted and unjust harm on others. We may seem to be operating with irreconcilable principles, but we usually aren’t.” In ArcDigital last summer, Nicholas Grossman wrote, “Activists have identified various expressions as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise bigoted and argue that treating those expressions as beyond the pale—like we treat overt racial slurs and Holocaust denial—would improve society by making historically marginalized people closer to equal. One could disagree with this line of argument, of course, but it’s been pretty successful, influencing various institutions and persuading many young people. Defending free speech in the abstract doesn’t really counter it, because free speech isn’t really being attacked. . . . [T]he hard part isn’t telling other people to be more open to ideas they don’t like. It’s drawing the lines of socially acceptable expression and determining appropriate responses to transgressing those norms.” Citing Grossman, Zack Beauchamp concluded in Vox that “[t]he real debate here is not about the principle of free speech, but the much grayer question of how we draw its boundaries. . . . That’s not a conflict over the principles of a free society but the rules that govern its operation in practice.”

.https://www.city-journal.org/the-debate-about-free-speech

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