Free speech has become a problem. Provocateurs and trolls routinely appeal to free speech as license to say things they know will be hurtful or outrageous. Of course, there is nothing principled about the rhetorical bully’s appeal to free speech as license to abuse. The same parties are often enough eager to punish universities like this one for allowing speech they don’t like. So, free speech has been abused and weaponized. It’s no surprise that some are losing faith in free speech. Clearly, we aren’t doing free speech very well.
Still, free expression has a critical role to play in inquiry, democracy and human autonomy. Free expression is an engine of inquiry. Open sharing of diverse views expands our base of evidence to reason from. Of course this is true for cutting edge research, but the sort of inquiry I’m primarily concerned with here is that of ordinary people trying to make sense of things and sort out what is true. Free speech is foundational to free and open democratic society. We can hardly participate in self-governance without free and open advocacy. Perhaps most basically, free expression is a critical aspect of human liberty. Respect for persons demands that we allow people to speak for themselves.
So, I’m committed to free speech, but I don’t think this means we have to just live with the problems we’ve identified. Rather, I think it will be worthwhile to look into how we can get the best out of free speech while mitigating the worst.
We might start with itemizing some of the assorted things we do with speech. Sometimes we express ourselves clearly and thoughtfully. The goal here may be simply to share with others so that they might better understand us. But then we also use speech to amuse people, make ourselves look good, manipulate people, deceive people, or to instill fear and dominate people. I do think there is value in making people laugh, but maybe not so much for some of these other things.
I’d submit that using speech to better understand each other, in dialogue especially, is liberating. Aside from its obvious practical value, understanding each other can help to free us from our own fetters, including false views, biases, confusions and other sorts of problematic neural pathways. Here I’m alluding mainly to the epistemic value of understanding through speech, but this often overlaps with the moral value of understanding. People who understand each other have a shared foundation for mutual respect. Mutual respect, as opposed to domination and subordination, enhances human liberty.
So, clear and thoughtful expression through speech can further the cause of human freedom. Some of the other uses of speech aren’t so liberating. Leaving laughter aside, using speech to polish your image, manipulate, deceive, or to instill fear and dominate are all ways of using speech to enhance or exert influence or power. And herein lies the risk of undermining liberty. It is clear enough that speech used to deceive, intimidate or dominate undermines liberty.
Perhaps we’ve already given the lie to the postmodern slogan that every claim to truth is a claim to power. It’s hard to see how speech as sharing constitutes a claim to power. Our assorted assertions can be, in various ways and to varying degrees, assertions of power or ways of enhancing liberty through facilitating understanding.
It won’t do to simply bless speech as sharing and condemn speech as assertion of power. There is no clean distinction to draw between these in our acts of speech. When I advocate for a cause I believe in, I am both sharing and aiming to influence others. When I argue against some bit of misinformation, I am both sharing a perspective and hoping to steer others clear of deception. Further, as both these examples suggest, not every exertion of power through speech is a bad thing. In inquiry, for instance, it is a good thing when criticism of a faulty view nudges people closer to the truth. In democratic government it is a good thing when sharing my legitimate concerns helps guide us towards creative solutions that accommodate these.
Perhaps it is just manipulating, deceiving or dominating through speech that is problematic. The problem here is not one with speech per se. Manipulating, deceiving and dominating are morally problematic ends regardless of the mode of action through with they are pursued.
As with other modes of action, we do regulate speech in some cases where the motives are morally problematic. Threatening speech is assault and can be prosecuted as such. Hate speech is not covered under a right to free speech. Manipulative or deceitful speech can count as fraud. Our right to free speech is not absolute. Yet perhaps we should worry that these modest limitations on free speech error on the side of liberty, at the expense of allowing harms including systematically unjust harms, say in the case of coded racial denigrations commonly designated as microaggressions.
Can further regulation of speech help? The history of racist speech is instructive here. In the wake of the civil rights movement, overt racial epithets became taboo. Informal social regulation of speech was significantly successful. The response by racists to this social regulation of racist speech was to deploy coded language with plausible deniability in denigrating others. This deception is, I think, quite pernicious. It combines domineering aggression with evasion of accountability. So, I worry that the successful social regulation of overt racist speech has backfired to some degree (though I do not mean to suggest we should be more tolerant of overt racism). But I do worry that further attempts at regulating speech would be similarly gamed. Helpful or harmful, free speech is hard to suppress.
So, if regulation of speech is not helpful, how then can we mitigate against the harms we see propagated so routinely under the guise of free speech. Here I would suggest more sharing and less power. We push discourse towards building community and trust and away from harmful speech whenever we steer discourse towards sharing and at least de-emphasize the role of influence and power. As educators we are well positioned to do this as we guide students in inquiry and try to instill intellectual virtues like open mindedness an intellectual humility. Ours is one of the few remaining social contexts where our students participate in speech that is not necessarily about influence and power.
Would that I could stop on that hopeful note. But we should be clear about how precarious our position is in the age of the “attention economy.” Attention is what we have. I’m not sure there is anything more intimate and personal than our attention. And yet much of is it auctioned off to the highest bidder in our online lives. Functionally, much of what passes for entertainment is just advertising for other advertising. Peddling junk entertainment engineered for addiction that benefits advertisers is the business model for social media. And our speech is often the raw material for this junk entertainment. When speech is commodified, as it routinely is on social media, it becomes manipulative as such. Hence, our orators are now known as influencers. As divisive outrage consumes more and more of our attention for the sake of selling Toyotas and such, less and less attention remains available for the sort of sharing that builds community and trust. It would be wonderful if we could regulate the algorithms. This could help to give speech as sharing a bit more space.
My goal here has just been to seed discussion with a couple of thoughts about how to approach the matter of free speech. At this point, my proposed prescription for getting the best out of free speech while avoiding the worst looks like basic playground guidance: more sharing and less shoving, please. I’ll be eager to hear further suggestions.
I agree with the symptoms described here but propose a different flavor to the concluded take, because I believe the root cause of these issues is 1) unavoidable and 2) fundamental and inescapable to the dynamics of human interaction.
Basic playground guidance assumes the norms will be respected and followed by everybody, and in an increasingly divided community (and society as a whole) that assumption can only be advocated for. But if in lived reality these cries for good faith are ignored, then influence and power inevitably become a factor as a means of upholding these values and will be to our detriment if ignored or avoided. Good faith is a social contract mutually agreed upon, but in event of its breach alternatives to good faith engagement become necessary.
Semantic differences between “influence” and “manipulation” aside, speech that is disagreed upon will always be flavored with moral arguments on either side, whether made in good faith or bad. To my mind, there is no objective means to evaluate the validity of these arguments beyond what is observable and empirical; the material context in which these arguments are made provide this universal standard, as well as illustrate the power dynamics by which one’s speech is made and how that speech may alter the material conditions of everyone around us. It is for precisely this reason why hate speech is outlawed and made distinct from other forms of speech; because it is an incitement to physical, material, lived violence upon a perceived group.
I would agree that further regulation brings diminishing returns; microaggressions and dog-whistles do not carry the same weight of material consequences or historical animus as racial epithets that were so often employed by the bigots and lynch mobs of prior eras. But I would disagree with the assertion is to simply try to enter into good faith discussion with people who are clearly “gaming the system.” If someone speaks dogwhistles rather than open epithets in support of their views (which are fundamentally unchanged in comparison to the speech they employ), then by inference it can already be concluded that good faith is out the window. The ground that is free speech is already contentious. What the law accomplishes with regulations to free speech is to keep that conflict within the bounds of words rather than physical action. I believe this to be a good thing; it suppresses harmful behavior, but it cannot change the heart of the person advocating for those things. Where there is a will, there is always a way.
For this fact alone, speech in pursuit of advocacy takes on a dynamic of engagement, even contention. Even so, it must not be shied away from; and all manner of rhetoric in support of this advocacy is fair game, regardless of how it’s characterized by the opposition. Narratives and framing of ourselves and our detractors will always be an inevitable part of discourse, and as a tool they are used to convince others. I do not think of these things as inherently misleading or harmful. In my humble opinion, biases are inherent to possessing moral values, and therefore cannot be fully suppressed or suspended, and I would rather that these be openly acknowledged rather than claiming that we are free of them (or at least more free than our opposition, which again carries a primarily rhetorical function as a claim towards objective truth) when making arguments for morality and systems of ethics.
The impetus for this engagement, in my view, is all the more important when our own perceptions and means of thinking is influenced not only by individuals of social media, but also by moneyed interests in the mainstream media class, who absolutely weaponize their speech to alter and shape the perceptions of their vast audience. This has been made clear in the ways in which the press has characterized the campus protests of the genocide in Gaza, the lack of any western press on Israel’s intent to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the strip, and the ways in which government twitter accounts blast Neonazi sentiments across the app of a person who bought his way into a shadow vice presidency. Speech has material consequences affecting countless people and cannot be divorced from this reality; these matters must be engaged by every means available to us precisely because of the moral, material crises facing our country and society today. I believe we should defend free speech with an explicit awareness and engagement of this context, as a nonviolent means to advocate our values in a world where speech is inherently intertwined with power, influence, and conflict.
Hi Carson. Thanks for this. I see the playground guidance as aimed at building norms and establishing good faith. I don’t expect this to happen with the committed trolls out there. But the more we forge that good faith social contract with those reasonable enough to find it inviting, the more we marginalize the trolls.
I’d grant that being biased, to varying degrees and in varying ways, is endemic to being a subject, and of course only subjects can have moral values (though this is hardly the only realm in which people can be biased). But it doesn’t follow that all moral argument is inherently biased. An argument is its own thing, and it can be evaluated on its own terms. In a community of critical thinkers that know how to treat arguments as instruments of inquiry, not merely as instruments of persuasion, we can largely correct for the biases of arguers (and argument evaluators) through critical peer review.
On the other hand, the notion that we can’t correct for biases through dialogue with others and can only acknowledge our biases would appear make resulting disagreement unreasonable and unresolvable. That sounds like an invitation to bad faith manipulation on all sides. I’m painfully aware of the effectiveness of propaganda and manipulative rhetoric on social media and facets of the rest of media. Countering messages need to be well argued all the same. In the long run, the only way we reduce the influence of manipulative rhetoric is by inoculating the average person against its pernicious effects through better education in, and better use of, critical thinking.