Certain sorts of events, none of which directly involve government action, are what we often think of when contemporary notions of freedom of speech, political correctness, and cancel culture come up in conversation: A speaker is disinvited from a college campus after 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 has upset them, an outspoken actor is fired from a television series for controversial opinions, a publisher responds to a petition by canceling the release of a forthcoming book, a magazine disavows its own article about a hot-button topic after pressure from its staff.
Some theories of free speech have little to say that directly bears on these sorts of events. That’s because they consider freedom of speech to be a right against certain state actions, as codified in laws such as America’s First Amendment and related jurisprudence. Purdue philosopher J.P. Messina’s recent book, Private Censorship, however, addresses the ethics, politics, law, and culture surrounding such cancellations. It is a strong and clear-headed contribution to the often silly and confused argumentation in this sphere.
By taking censorship rather than free speech as its primary reference point, Private Censorship adds an important perspective on these issues. Defenders of cancel culture are fond, for example, of saying that freedom of speech does not entail the freedom from condemnation of that speech or from some of the consequences that might attend such condemnation. And that’s certainly true. But by the same token, the freedom of association enjoyed by individuals and groups, which underlies the greater legal latitude they’re afforded for actions like censorship, does not entail freedom from condemnation 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 thus are appropriate targets of condemnation themselves.
Focusing on censorship allows Messina to do an excellent job of distinguishing between legal regimes of free speech, moral evaluations of actions relating to speech, and desirable features of a healthy culture of public discourse. Nonetheless, I’m not sure the notion of censorship really is the right framing device for the sorts of topics Messina has in mind here. Take his definition of censorship itself. Messina says censorship involves “the attempted suppression of expressive content on the grounds that it is dangerous, threatening to (moral, political, or religious) orthodoxy, or inimical to the material interests of the agent aiming to suppress it.”
But I think only some material interests are relevant to what we are talking about in the debates over free speech and censorship. Let me explain: Say an editor at a gardening magazine has commissioned an editorial relating to identity politics but the editor in chief decides to nix the whole thing because customers will cancel their subscriptions if they see that the new issue contains a bunch of stuff about politics rather than a bunch of stuff about flowers. This doesn’t seem like censorship, or at least it doesn’t seem like the sort of censorship that worries us when we talk about political correctness and cancel culture. Now say an editor at a prestigious, widely circulated magazine of politics and current events has commissioned an editorial relating to identity politics but the editor in chief decides to nix the whole thing because customers will cancel their subscriptions if they have to read the sorts of opinions contained in the piece. This, on the other hand, does seem like the sort of censorship we’re worried about. But both are censorship according to Messina’s definition in that they each involve suppression of expressive content on the grounds that it is inimical to the material interest of the editor.
And I’m not sure Messina’s primary argument against censorship is ultimately the right ground for his thinking either. 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 in, the more everyone’s arguments will get tested and refined. Thus, the less censorship there is the more we each can justifiably hope our current viewpoints are true or wise. But this argument seems to go further than Messina is willing to.
Like many writers on these topics, Messina takes on the menace of online misinformation. However, something that remains unexplained is why misinformation should even trouble us to begin with if we’re working from the framework of Mill. All the aspects of Mill’s argument against censorship apply favorably to accepting and even celebrating the existence of what seems to us like misinformation. First, we might be wrong that it’s misinformation to begin with; our own beliefs might be the false ones, and the purported misinformation might in fact be correct. Second, the misinformation might keep us from becoming complacent in our true beliefs and forgetting why we possessed them to begin with; it might ultimately make us more thoughtful and rational. Third, the purported misinformation might contain an element of truth, even if it’s misleading overall.
This even goes for categories of misinformation that we commonly accept as appropriate for censorship. For instance, defamation law limits freedom of speech, but we accept this restriction because we think ordinary people’s interests in avoiding (or even rights to avoid) being defamed outweigh the cost to free speech. Why do few free speech advocates argue that defamation might be overall good — that we ought not to censor it for all the reasons we ought not to censor political disagreement? After all, bringing a case against someone for defamation meets Messina’s criteria for censorship. This isn’t a criticism: It’s right to classify a defamation suit this way, and it brings out tensions in the classical liberal orthodoxy.
Maybe what resolves many of these difficulties for many people, but is mostly a kind of undercurrent or background concern in Private Censorship, is a concrete analysis of our current politicized and polarized culture. Here’s how this might go: “Viewpoint diversity is a good idea right now because many institutions have been more or less taken over by some political faction or another, with disagreement either not taken seriously or not heard at all. Censorship of misinformation is a bad idea right now because censors are likely to be political partisans who use their right to categorize things as misinformation to label anything they wish not to be heard under that name. Hate speech legislation is a bad idea right now for the same reason.”
I don’t 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’s legal and what’s moral, and so on. Quite the opposite: Messina makes a great contribution to our thinking about such things here. But ultimately, much of his concern is about how to balance competing claims, like those of rights such as free expression, free association, and property. In these moments of weighing and balancing, our abstractions don’t suffice to guide us, and we are driven by our instincts about real-world trends and phenomena in politics and culture. Those with different views of these phenomena, however, will still find much to gain from the intellectual framework developed in Private Censorship.
Oliver Traldi is a philosopher at the University of Tulsa Honors College.