As an American citizen, I am a free man! Nobody gets to tell me what I can or can’t do! I can make up my own mind and do as I please! Because, Freedom! Therefore, I should be free to harass or assault whoever I please for whatever reason I fancy without facing any consequences or criticism.
The absurdity of this argument is clear. In the Critical Thinking biz, we’d call this a reductio ad adsurdum, an argument that signals its own flaws through reaching a preposterous conclusion. This instance doesn’t proceed from false premises so much as from a faulty understanding of freedom.
And yet seemingly smart people like Elon Musk endorse exactly this line of argument when it comes to free speech. Never mind that many of the people who endorse this simple-minded free speech absolutism are blatantly hypocritical in their application of it. That inconsistency is a feature not a bug. As we are invited to get our knickers in a knot over censoring talk of DEI or climate change, we are distracted from the sloppy analysis of free speech the absolutist pays lip service to. The general effect is stupefying, which is a key part of how authoritarianism works. Keep people sufficiently confused and they will go along with just about anything.
So, let’s focus, people, focus! Let’s focus on just what freedom of speech might reasonably mean. This is not a question of defining words. Words are notoriously ambiguous, and we can often define them to suit our purposes. The issue here is one of conceptual analysis. We have some grasp on concepts of freedom, such as free speech. But that grasp is tenuous, which is to say that our understanding of freedom is unclear and requires some inquiry if we are to wield such concepts in an intelligent and ethical fashion. We can begin to clarify our conceptual understanding through thought experiments where we test proposed analyses and then weed out the bad analyses when they lead to absurd results.
Thought of in simple and absolute terms, freedom to do this or that tends to be self-defeating. I am free to move my body according to my will, yes, but most of us are much less free to move our bodies around if some of us are moving our bodies like Jake Paul in the octagon. Or to take another example, many people are enchanted with the idea of a free market, though any absolutely free market will soon collapse under the weight of fraud, extortion, insider dealing and such.
Markets need rules and regulations in order to function. And the salutary effect of these rules and regulations can only be realized with the cooperation of good faith participants, meaning businesspeople that adhere to high standards of honesty and integrity. Similarly, laws against assault and battery help to enhance our freedom to move our bodies about the surface of the planet. The effectiveness of these laws also depends on upholding social norms of basic decency and consideration towards others. When edgelords go around testing the boundaries of these liberties, they corrode liberty for the rest of us by undermining the basic norms we all depend on.
Similar reasoning applies in the case of free speech. We do lots of different things with words through speech. Sometimes we express our considered opinions, and this has great value for facilitating understanding and reaching reasonable compromises and accommodations. But we can also use words to demean, confuse, or assault others (yes, threatening speech meets the legal criteria for assault). These uses of words do not enhance liberty. To the contrary these forms of speech poison discourse and thereby undermine liberty.
John Stewart Mill provides a classic statement of the sort of liberty limiting principle that serves to enhance liberty overall in Chpt. 3 of On Liberty when he says, “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Of course, the analysis of liberty is hardly completed by incorporating this liberty limiting principle since we need to look into just what constitutes a nuisance. Mill is firm in denying that offensiveness limits liberty. The problem here is subjectivity. Some are offended by things others find benign. But then the problem here is with mere offensiveness. Sometimes people are offended by speech because it is genuinely harmful; for instance, if it belongs to a well-established tradition of rhetoric aimed at marginalization, as in the case of racist or sexist language. So, banning things like hate speech actually enhances freedom of speech overall.
Many people are struck by a sense of paradox at the idea that rules, regulations and norms might enhance rather than restrict liberty. Hopefully we’ve dispelled some of that here. A little conceptual analysis, testing our ways of understanding liberty through simple hypothetical cases, goes a long way towards a better understanding of freedom and the crucial role of rules and norms in sustaining and enhancing liberty.