Guest post: Even more pressing today
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Dr Brat.
I’m under no illusion that free speech in any way guarantees that the best evidence and the strongest arguments will rise to the top in the “marketplace of ideas”. Despite what Movement Skeptics™ might like to think, judging evidence and arguments on their merits is not a straightforward matter, but something that requires a great deal of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right.
Also, the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood objectively speaking rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to a lay audience. Playing by the rules of science, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty is nothing if not limiting while the peddlers of nonsense are free to say whatever it takes to impress people. In the absence of the necessary pre-knowledge, critical thinking skills etc. all your average lay person can be expected to get out of the kind of “rational debate” that believers in the “marketplace of ideas” like to imagine, is that one side comes across as far more confident and assertive, more aggressive etc. while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate”), talk about statistical probability and error bars, acknowledge doubt and uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions, and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one, and no need to specify which side your average lay person is going to find most persuasive.
Still, while free speech may not guarantee that the truth prevails, at least it guarantees that it gets a fighting chance. As I’m sure many of us still remember the late great Christopher Hitchens explicitly invoked Holocaust denial as an example of the kind of thing that has to be allowed if free speech is to mean anything at all, precisely because it’s the kind of thing most of us would like to silence. If anything I think old Hitch’s question “Who gets to decide?” is even more pressing today. After seeing how easily institutions like courts, the mainstream media, and even universities can be captured by agenda-pushers of various kinds, it’s unfathomable to me how people can still trust anyone else to decide for us what we’re allowed to read or hear.
I agree. The best reason to allow free speech isn’t that it guarantees (or even especially encourages) that the best ideas will prevail, any more than the best reason to have elections is that the best leaders will win. It’s that the alternatives are rather ugly, in large part because they create a free-for-all power struggle that causes a lot of harm.
That “who decides” is a crucial question. I know there are many things I talk about that would be disallowed under a rule that said we could only talk about things that didn’t offend anyone. Most people who want to limit speech are willing to limit the speech of others, and never realize it might apply to themselves for ideas they already have that are unpopular, or if societal standards change in the future.
I’m seeing a lot of news about the Florida court injunction (link to PDF) against Governor DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act”. The Judge, Mark Walker, quotes Orwell several times, including “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
The way the conversation seems to go, though:
“Free speech!”
“So I can reject gender ideology and refuse to use ‘preferred pronouns’ and explain that there are two sexes?”
“You can say whatever you want, but you’re not free from the consequences of saying such things.”
I think it would be trivially easy to frame the “Stop WOKE Act” as consequences for saying whatever you want.
Sackbut,
Yes, but from a First Amendment point of view, there is a massive difference between “consequences inflicted by the government” and “consequences inflicted by non-state actors.” (The technical name is the “state action doctrine.”)
Screechy, that’s a good point. And I’m not really clear, in words or mind, about what I’m trying to get at here.
A certain set of people will decry things like the Stop Woke Act as a free speech infringement, not because it’s state action, but because they disagree with the goals of the Act. If the Act were to fire people who insisted there were two sexes, they might be fine with it. Some would not be fine with it as written if it were the policy of a private company, and they would not call the results “consequences for saying whatever you want”, although I do know people who excuse the actions of private companies that way.
I’m mostly bothered by the “consequences for saying whatever you want” argument. It seems mostly “consequences for disagreeing with me”.
It would be better, I think, if consequences were more for actions rather than statements. Go ahead and think that same-sex relationships are an abomination and an affront to your god, but if you treat same-sex couples with respect and professionally, I won’t care what you think of them.
iknklast, it’s not limited to “offense” either. It’s tempting to think that the truth will always be an absolute defense, but as we have already seen there is no idea so vacuous, incoherent, or ill-defined that you can’t find a thousand scientists prepared to testify that the idea is more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics, and anyone who says otherwise is the moral and intellectual equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Hence even who is deemed to be telling the truth depends heavily on “who decides”.