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S10 E4: Justin Tosi: Does censorship undermine its own goals?
27 Plays4 months ago
Justin Tosi is Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He was previously a sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center and is co-author of Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk and Why It's OK to Mind Your Own Business, both in collaboration with Brandon Warmke, who was a previous guest on this show. We discuss an interesting new article of Justin’s, which argues that censorship undermines its own goals.
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Transcript
Introduction: Focus on Truth-Seeking
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics of Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
Guest Introduction: Justin Tosi
00:00:24
Speaker
My guest today is Justin Tozzi.
00:00:27
Speaker
Justin Tozzi is Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He was previously a sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center and is co-author of Grand Standing, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, and Why It's Okay to Mine Your Own Business, both books in collaboration with Ren Mormke, who was a previous guest on this show.
Discussion on Censorship
00:00:54
Speaker
we discuss an interesting new article of Justin's, which argues that censorship undermines its own goals. Justin Tosi, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Hey, thanks for having me on, Matt.
00:01:08
Speaker
So I wanted to talk to you, this season, as I mentioned before we got on air, has a theme of looking to the future for higher ed. And you sent me this really interesting essay draft that you're working on about censorship. And so I wanted to use that as a launching off point, maybe for longer conversation, either about censorship or about higher ed, or about both, depending on where it goes. Yeah, yeah, let's get into it.
Objections to Censorship
00:01:37
Speaker
Most of the time when people object to censorship,
00:01:42
Speaker
The argument is either freedom is good, censorship is the opposite of freedom, therefore censorship is bad, kind of the libertarian argument, or what you would probably call the million argument, that censorship makes us dumber and being dumber is bad, including the people doing the censoring because, as Mel famously said, he who knows only his own side of the argument knows little of that, meaning if, you know,
00:02:11
Speaker
even if hearing bad ideas, even if it doesn't change your mind, equips you better to defend your good ideas. You seem to be in your essay introducing a third objection to censorship, which basically takes censorship's moral goals on their own terms. Basically says, people who censor people
00:02:35
Speaker
you know, certainly these days, certainly on college campuses, right, often do so for reasons that they think are moral. You know, we cannot have these false or morally objectionable ideas polluting our discourse because they might offend people, because they might lead to dangerous policies, because, you know, they might lead to believing things that are false that, you know, undermines good policies or harms people, you know, in vaccines, maybe being an example of the latter.
00:03:06
Speaker
And you basically argue that by making it explicit that you're censoring and therefore that the censor is evaluating ideas and filtering them for their moral content, that any idea that does not get censored, as soon as the censor has announced him or herself, any idea that does not get censored implicitly is endorsed by the censor.
00:03:35
Speaker
and therefore any bad ideas that get through the sensor become endorsed by the sensor, and that undermines the sensor's moral standing. Do I have the basic outline right?
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean structurally, that's about how it works. We can get into the details. But yeah, I mean the idea is like, you know, like you said, you can have these like principled objections to censorship and like defenses of free speech, like, you know, deontic and character, you know, just like,
00:04:07
Speaker
You have a duty to let people speak their mind and so on. And I like those debates. I think my side wins on all of them. So happy that people want to argue that way. But I think, like you say, another way of going is saying like, okay, tell me more about how this is going to work. And then I think once you try to fill out the details, even if you take the most plausible
00:04:39
Speaker
characterization of the aims of censorship, it ends up not working. So that's the strategy of the essay, yeah. So let's pull on that thread a little bit,
Case Study: Williams College Event
00:04:51
Speaker
right? So you give this really good example, I think, from Williams College, where somebody had invited a speaker who was known for defending people's right-to-air racist ideas, if I remember that right,
00:05:06
Speaker
And a university leader was the president, wrote a message to the campus saying, you know, basically we're canceling the event. We strongly believe in free speech. We always thought that, you know, free speech was great right up to a line. We hadn't found the line before, but we found it. Here's the line. You know, he very much literally said that. And so, and so you, you point out that now anything else that ever is uttered on that campus,
00:05:36
Speaker
implicitly has the president's endorsement as not being over the line. Right. And so I guess my first question to you is how plausible is it really that the president is gonna miss something similarly high profile and similarly over the line as he defines it?
00:06:03
Speaker
I want to hear your response and then I have a specific example that motivates it that we'll follow up with.
00:06:10
Speaker
Good, yeah. So, right. I mean, presumably, you know, most people who want to engage in censorship, I mean, I don't doubt many of them mean well. Many of them are very smart. They maybe are often even very morally sensitive. They'll make a lot of good judgments about what sorts of things are really bad or maybe upsetting to people to hear or offensive or whatever you like.
00:06:40
Speaker
But even with all of these points in their favor, I think it's just inevitable that they're not going to catch every bad idea. And in fact, they're going to miss lots of bad ideas. And then as a result, you get this sort of implied ranking of, well, these things are just not as bad as the things that we ban. So some of the sources of these errors
00:07:07
Speaker
could be things like, we just have shifting moral standards.
Challenges of Consistent Censorship
00:07:11
Speaker
So imagine in 2010, say, or 2005, if you're real cool and thought everybody who is in the know knew already, you could have someone come in and talk about what we would now call a trans issue. And no one is likely to think, whoa,
00:07:30
Speaker
cannot have this person talking, you know, like JK Rowling is already made really early to the party in 2005 talking about trans issues. Not likely to stand out at that point as like a really hot button sensitive issue a lot of people, you know, would object to.
00:07:50
Speaker
hearing it, and so it could be allowed then and maybe not allowed now. You'll also have, we can call it in everyday language, perspectival diversity among censors or those who are influencing censorship decisions. In other words, people are just going to disagree about which topics are the most sensitive, which things are the most over the line, and so you're going to have
00:08:18
Speaker
an institutional judgment that comes down that even the people who are in favor of censorship are going to disagree about. And then they're also more like catch-all categories like sources of mistakes. There's too many things to evaluate unless you're going to have just an absolutely massive office of censorship.
00:08:42
Speaker
You're not going to be able to vet every expression on campus to see whether it is up to standards, and so some things will just get through. Sometimes it's just really difficult to evaluate particular works and say, you know, this one is high quality, this one isn't.
00:09:02
Speaker
And as you introduce censorship, people get sneakier about working in kind of heterodox or forbidden ideas, things that won't be harder to detect ahead of time. But in the moment, it's very clear to everyone, oh, they were talking about that somebody
00:09:25
Speaker
Actually, our former employer, short-term for me, long-term for you, University of Colorado Boulder, Iskra Filiva and the philosophy attorney gave me this nice example. There was this kind of like Soviet era film.
00:09:41
Speaker
where someone snuck through the sensors. This scene in a movie, someone is selling newspapers, one of them is called Culture. And so someone comes up and asks for a copy and the newsstand guy says, oh, sorry, there is no culture. We're all out of culture. And this is supposed to be sort of a dig at how things were going.
00:10:07
Speaker
So, you know, things like that will just get through. So, you know, philosophers like to do ideal theory, not me, but some of these people like to distance myself from now that I'm in a business school, like, oh, you're just saying people make mistakes. Well, sometimes the mistakes are very important and interesting. And they, you know, the ubiquity of them and, you know, just how easy it is to
00:10:36
Speaker
you have people make these mistakes in judgment kind of undercuts the utility of these highly idealized suggestions about public policy. And I think this is one such case. So I want to come back to the point you made about the diversity of views among the people influencing the censors.
University Pressures and Moral Misalignment
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah. Because I think there are examples of that
00:11:04
Speaker
on college campuses recently that at a first glance provide ironclad seeming instances of your argument. And yet I would argue at closer examination, they maybe poke your argument a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk about Gaza. Okay. So, you know, many universities had a long history of
00:11:35
Speaker
both censorship and what you call in your essay, censorship light. So we're not censoring you, but we're gonna put out a statement saying that you're bad, right?
00:11:44
Speaker
So for example, when the former sabbatical fellow Eastman wrote an op-ed before the election saying Kamala Harris wasn't eligible to be vice president because she was born in the US to parents on non-immigrant visas and he has this theory that whether that's a natural born citizen hasn't been settled.
00:12:07
Speaker
I think one of our deans put out a statement basically saying, well, although I disagree with him on the law and I find he should be stronger in condemning people who are misusing his argument for racist ends. People are sitting there thinking like, wait, you're a chemist, like the dean. He has the right to say it. That would be an example of censorship. I'm going to wag my finger at you, but I'm not going to literally shut you down.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, okay. And then you could even, you know, one level down from censorship light might be, you know, affirmative statements of position. So there were, you know, lots of statements, hand-wringing and lamenting the Supreme Court decisions around affirmative action and abortion, right? So universities have these history of
00:12:54
Speaker
Protecting students from ideas they thought was dangerous and then all of a sudden a bunch of people including People on their campus in some places including faculty in their campus started either seemingly or in a few cases explicitly endorsing ethnically motivated Violence against civilians of the most horrific manner, you know against Jewish people in Israel, right and so it seems like okay, this is a
00:13:22
Speaker
the textbook instance of your argument, right? And in fact, universities, many of them have responded in ways that maybe would be consistent with advice that might follow from your argument, right? It's the, oh, wait, maybe we shouldn't be making public statements about anything because then we get into this spiral where we have to make public statements about everything.
00:13:44
Speaker
Okay, so that all sounds good, that all supports your argument, and certainly I would say the people who are literally sending the statements and doing the censorship, the presidents, the chancellors.
00:13:56
Speaker
In my experience, they themselves, almost none of them are sympathetic to the antisemitic views that were expressed on campus. Your argument that they end up implicitly endorsing things that they themselves find morally abhorrent, I think works for the censors themselves. However... Sorry, can you say more about that?
00:14:24
Speaker
So your argument that people who are censoring for moral reasons and then that means they're implicitly endorsing anything else that goes past them, even things they find morally abhorrent and therefore they've undermined the moral purpose of censorship. Wasn't that kind of the argument? Yeah. So I'm saying that if you're just looking at the presidents and chancellors in isolation from the pressures on them,
00:14:54
Speaker
I think that the anti-Semitism on campus perfectly illustrates your argument that basically they, you know, suddenly they were faced with this thing that they found morally abhorrent that was being uttered, you know, on their campus, sometimes by their faculty.
00:15:10
Speaker
that they had by not censoring implicitly approved because they had been censoring other things. So I guess what I'm saying is at the level of the presidents, I think your argument works. But here's where I push back on it a little bit using the same example. Why had the presidents and chancellors been so censorious before? I would argue in many cases, it wasn't that they thought the things they were censoring or soft censoring or making statements about were actually uniquely dangerous. It's that they were getting
00:15:40
Speaker
pressure from other people on campus who found those things morally abhorrent. Often where they found themselves in an awkward position was that the people who were being anti-Semitic were some of the same people who were putting on pressure than before. And so they weren't facing the pressure until they thought, oh, wait,
00:16:03
Speaker
maybe there are other people outside of campus that care about our morals, right? But I guess what I'm saying is I think that there's an important distinction there, or at least I want to ask you if you think there's an important distinction there. So from the perspective of
00:16:22
Speaker
the people who had been pressuring the president to censor, some of whom were supportive of these antisemitic statements, I would argue that they haven't necessarily violated their own morals. We've just discovered that those morals include, in some cases, some antisemitism, right? And the president, the president in my representative scenario, shall we say,
00:16:52
Speaker
I think where he or she has erred is previously misjudging the morals of people that he was listening to before, right? And sort of thinking that they shared his morals.
00:17:06
Speaker
And then when Israel gets attacked, finding out that actually they do not share his morals or her morals.
Signaling Issues in Censorship
00:17:14
Speaker
And arguably the bigger problem is the public is discovering that – put all the pressures together, the university has a set of morals collectively on average in its practice.
00:17:26
Speaker
is the problem that the university has undermined its own morals or that the university has revealed its morals to be sufficiently different from its funders and stakeholders as to threaten its political future, right? And that is certainly a problem, but it's maybe of a different character as the problem you're describing in your essay. What are your thoughts?
00:17:48
Speaker
Okay, so let me take a first pass at this and I mean there are many many points of which we can enter and so maybe you're more interested in other ones here's what I want to say One thing is
00:18:03
Speaker
We can distinguish between the views of any individual or group of individuals in this story, of the people calling for censorship, of what the president privately believes about any one issue or whatever.
00:18:19
Speaker
and then distinguish between those things and then what the message sent by the institutional decision about censorship or expression of viewpoint or whatever, what message does that actually send? So the problem here arises because it becomes meaningful.
00:18:44
Speaker
to say or more importantly, to not say anything about a particular issue once you've started doing that. So the undermining comes, the problem of undermining your own goals comes because we know in principle that when the university wants to censor something or wants to express a view,
00:19:14
Speaker
it does so, and so then it becomes meaningful when it doesn't. This is what we saw in the lack of statements that people were calling out about. By the way, before we go any further, I want to put out the mandatory but also important caveat that when I talk about
00:19:36
Speaker
people being anti-Semitic, I'm talking about, for example, the professor at Cornell saying the attack was exhilarating, right?
00:19:46
Speaker
Israel doesn't have the right to exist, or barring Jews from shared space on campus. I am, of course, not talking about the many people who are saying that the ongoing war in Gaza is horrific, and there are many innocent victims, and nor am I including people who are criticizing the way Israel's conducting the war, or the West Bank settlements, or anything else kind of related to Israeli policy. Okay, just want to make that clear, you were saying.
00:20:18
Speaker
Well, now I don't remember what I was saying because I was so concerned about being lumped into one side or another of what antisemitism means. Right. So I think you were making the point that when universities get into the habit of making statements about everything and now all of a sudden they're not, so let me give you a concrete example. So October 7th happens.
00:20:45
Speaker
Before Israel had even retaliated, there were several scheduled and planned, and possibly one or two that had happened, rallies led, I think, by students for justice in Palestine that were either explicitly or implicitly or both celebrating the attack on college campuses.
00:21:07
Speaker
And, you know, including, I'm not sure, I don't think it was very big, because I don't, I remember hearing about it being planned, but I don't actually remember seeing much about it. But there was one at Boulder, right? And I know that there were people who were asking the leaders, you know,
00:21:23
Speaker
Are you going to say something about this, given that we had four or five statements about affirmative action from various people, right? So that kind of illustrates your point, right? Yeah. Doesn't it? Yes, yeah. So I mean, one thing to say here is this dynamic, I mean, we've framed this and my essay is about censorship. But I mean, the dynamic is present across signaling decisions in general.
00:21:50
Speaker
Right, so as you say, universities, to take the kind of broader context, universities have been issuing all these statements about sometimes things that are, I mean, obviously someone cares about all of these things, but about incidents or court decisions or whatever that are maybe safer to say something about. But then the cost of doing this, which they eventually found out about,
00:22:21
Speaker
is that, well, eventually there's going to be some issue in which it is dangerous to say something about and you will upset people. And now you have no way of backing out of this pattern gracefully, because if you don't issue a statement, then it suggests, well, this isn't as clear to us or it's not as important to us or whatever. So it's a problem with
00:22:46
Speaker
decision about censorship, it's a problem with official statements, all of these things. Sorry, go on. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I basically agree with that and if I was, you know, advising a president whether she or he should make statements, I might even say, you know, something close to that. On the other hand, though, in terms of your argument, right, your argument is not that censorship is bad.
00:23:14
Speaker
I mean it is, but it's for a specific reason. The only reason why censorship is bad, one is that they undermine the morals of the censor. And I wonder in how many of these cases
00:23:29
Speaker
is really the problem that the institution undermines its standing in society by revealing that it had been following a set of morals with its censorship that's very out of step with the rest of society. I think you could frame it that way for the examples we were just talking about around say affirmative action versus the October 7th attacks.
00:23:56
Speaker
I think the two areas where my critique would not apply would be one, as you were alluding to a few minutes ago, the situation where there's just so many things happening in the world all the time, that that omission is inevitable, right? So, you know, why are we condemning, you know,
00:24:20
Speaker
the war in Gaza and not the war in Sudan. Why are we condemning anything happening in the Middle East and not what's happening in China with the Uighur minority and any number of other things that are happening in the world. Then the other one is something slips through.
00:24:44
Speaker
We uninvite the racist speaker and then we don't see the memo about the sexist speaker the next day. Then people are like, okay, I guess the canvas is not racist, but they're sexist. That hypothetical example.
00:25:06
Speaker
I guess my question, I mean, the first one obviously applies all the time because how can you possibly imagine if you had to start every semester with an exhaustive list of everything that's wrong in the world, right? That would just be exhausting.
00:25:24
Speaker
But what about the other one? A, how often do things really slip through that are just as objectionable as the things that are censored and just as high profile? And could the leader in that case not just apologize and say, sorry, I missed that one, right? And kind of restore the purity of their moral standing with that set of morals. Yeah, good. So I guess,
00:25:54
Speaker
Of course, you can always issue statements after the fact or whatever, but then that sort of makes me think like, well, what are we doing here? I mean, so censorship, typically the idea is supposed to be, well, we don't want to spread hatred. We don't want to amplify bad ideas. We want to protect people, impressionable young people, Matt.
00:26:23
Speaker
uh, from, from hearing these terrible things. Um, so, you know, you can say, well, okay, you know, uh, we will fail sometimes. And then we just, uh, we try to make up for it some other way. Uh, but then I, you know, I just sort of think, well, well, then why do we need censorship at all? Why, why, why not just say, we'll just let people say whatever they want. And then if we don't like it, we can just respond.
00:26:53
Speaker
or say, well, look, the fact that they are allowed to speak, that doesn't mean anything. They're allowed to speak as somebody thought it'd be interesting and they invited them. That doesn't mean we thought they'd reveal the truth to you. So I mean, once you start admitting, like, well, yeah, people just come to universities and say stuff or people publish books and like,
00:27:20
Speaker
Sometimes they say things that are false. And you don't have to like it, yeah. Yeah, why not just admit you've got an unmanaged marketplace of ideas where you just don't have this worry of like, oh, have to constantly issue corrections when things fall through or, oh, that speaker, we didn't think they would use that one example that got you upset. We would never have let, I mean, at some point this is just sort of exhausting. All of it has a cost.
00:27:50
Speaker
But again, I wonder to what extent you now have to assume million morals where maybe the censors don't always have them, right? So if the argument is that censorship is bad for freedom, 100% agree with you. If the argument is censorship is bad for society because it makes us dumber, again, 100% with you.
00:28:17
Speaker
Do people, given those two arguments, which are separate from your argument, do people who still choose to censor, are they being irrational? And I guess the way that I've often intuitively interpreted censorship, I'm really into reading your essay, which I really appreciate, was pushing my own thing on this. But the way I always thought of censorship is,
00:28:48
Speaker
Censorship is perpetrated by people who, for whatever reason, at least in the short term, have the power to censor and know at some level that they wouldn't win the argument if they had to have it, right? And in that light,
00:29:17
Speaker
it seems at least heuristically that you can find instances where censorship is rational, right? Has censorship not, I mean, a comparison that they know that I've used a few times in different forums is like, you know, we have some very prominent disciplines in schools of education in many parts of the country whose canonical texts literally praise
00:29:43
Speaker
the deadliest dictators in human history, you know, the communists, Stalin, the Maoists, right? And their seminal ideas are intimately connected to their sympathy for the deadliest dictators in human history, right? It would be like if we had, you know, Nazi sympathizing education textbooks whose seminal ideas were directly connected to their Nazi sympathizing, right? If it was the Nazi example, society would lose its
00:30:13
Speaker
SHIT, right? And yet in the communist example, people shrug a lot or maybe they don't know. Is that not a tremendous victory from a pragmatic perspective for people who are sympathetic to the communist or neo Marxist or whatever you want to call it worldview? Have they not?
00:30:41
Speaker
Have they not drastically increased their power by their ability to harness and wield selective censorship? Right, right. Okay, good. This happens a lot in interviews. You're signaling for me to talk about something in my own essay. Finally, in other words, I think I see where you're going.
00:31:12
Speaker
we might understand kind of the goals of sensors in different ways. So on the one hand, you might have sensors who have like the really idealistic version of the goal, which is we just don't want to be responsible for promoting any bad ideas. We're in charge of this platform. And so, you know, we've got to be vigilant and we've got to stop the bad people from taking it up. Right now this,
00:31:42
Speaker
If this is your view, then my argument is a really big problem. Actually, that's modest. You're dead, basically. Bad things are going to get through. Your judgment is not going to be perfect. It's impossible to have clean hands here. We might disagree with this. Before you go on to the pragmatist, let me push you a little bit on this one.
00:32:10
Speaker
If your goal is to have clean hands, right? Then I think what you're implying is, as soon as you say you're censoring, whatever's there is on your hands. If you're not censoring, then your hands are clean because you're just not in the arena, right? More or less, yeah. So far, so good. Yeah. Okay, so- Hang on, what if the idealistic
00:32:35
Speaker
view actually is, I want to keep my hands clean by minimizing the amount of bad stuff in my forum. Is it really so bad to not get all of it? Could I take your argument and say, well, we should just stop parenting because we're never going to catch all the bad things our kids do, so why imply that we can catch any of it? I'm sure you wouldn't advocate for that.
00:33:04
Speaker
So explain the difference. So look, I think this is just sort of a silly view to begin with, but I do think it's a pretty common view. I mean, this is the view of people who don't understand that there are trade-offs or that actions have cost, even if it's like clearly the choice where the option is.
00:33:29
Speaker
Okay, so I mean, I do want to say I think that this is a very common, like, naive view, is people just hear about something bad. They're like, we got to stop that. Like, we can't let that happen. And, you know, the point of the essay in part is to say, look, there's just no such thing as clean hands here, you know, because of this dynamic of
00:33:52
Speaker
kind of seal of approval or endorsement. The other side of this, the view you can take and the one that you're wisely probably trying to take up is you can be more pragmatic and say, well, all right, fine. We'll wait in, we'll censor some things, we'll take a stance on some issues or whatever. And yeah, we'll make mistakes, but overall, it's still the best course of action. It's worth it.
00:34:19
Speaker
Um, so I mean, I think, you know, I don't agree. Uh, but now we're having an argument about what the actual costs and benefits of censorship are. Right. And, uh, what we need then is from sensors is like an account of like, how do you see these trade-offs? Right. Um, how bad is it if you end up promoting a little bit of white supremacy or a little bit of sexism or, or whatever? Uh, uh, but then on the other hand, you get to like,
00:34:49
Speaker
Tents are a bunch of really bad things you think are even worse. This is where your endorsement effect becomes important too.
00:35:00
Speaker
a college president listening to you might say, well, in the hypothetical Williams College example, yeah, maybe we let some antisemitism through in the fall of 2023, but we stopped the racism before that. And so the world that you're advocating for has racism and antisemitism, and my world just has antisemitism. And I think the endorsement effect response would be, yes, but in your world, you've implicitly endorsed the antisemitism, whereas in my world,
00:35:27
Speaker
you have allowed both to exist in your space, but you have not endorsed either. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So if you have so right, the comparison is like free marketplace of ideas where the fact that someone's allowed to say something doesn't mean anything, right versus one where you've got a manager or a sensor, kind of
00:35:47
Speaker
whether they realize it or not, putting a thumb on the scales and giving a boost to the ideas that are let through. So then what we have to do then is decide how much boosting of bad ideas is enough to tell us, look, even by the sensor's own lights, this isn't worth it. And then we also should consider, look,
00:36:16
Speaker
in a sense, a liberal. It's also a cost in freedom. Most people will recognize to have someone telling people they can't express their views or talk about their thoughts. So that also goes in the equation. And if you haven't heard that argument, not just about the freedom thing, but just the social cost of people being policed,
00:36:42
Speaker
read Justin and Brandon Wormky's book, Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. And go listen to the episode that I did with Brandon on that book.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yes. Sorry. It's the best reason to interrupt me is to tell them to engage with more of my work. Yes. Right. So basically, this is kind of the thought of the essay is like, look, not very sympathetic to censorship, but I want to hear how you people think this is going to work because I think it won't. I bet you you can't give a plausible
00:37:16
Speaker
cost-benefit analysis of censorship being worthwhile once you factor in the cost in bossing people around, interfering with the rights of free expression, or limiting the rights of free expression as you might prefer to say, and importantly by your own lights, in the cost of promoting some bad views. Right, okay.
00:37:46
Speaker
One other thought I want to introduce and that's, you know, I, I keep, when we talk about the, your endorsement effect, I keep being reminded of Jonathan Hyde and others work on purity as an aspect of group psychology. Yeah. Right. And where I think that applies here.
00:38:08
Speaker
So go back to the hypothetical example I gave of you have the one president who censors the racism and not the anti-Semitism, and you say, well, you've endorsed the anti-Semitism, whereas the other person who has allowed both to speak and in your argument has endorsed neither.
00:38:26
Speaker
I think where a lot of calls for censorship in what people call safetyism or safety culture come from is a place of purity where you basically are, your group psychology is wired to think, well, if
00:38:45
Speaker
My group's sacred values are X. If anybody in my group says Y, even if it's not me, even if I don't agree with it, even if it's written on the wall of our group that we do not think Y, nonetheless, somebody uttering Y
00:39:02
Speaker
has made our group impure in a rhetorical, moral way that maybe is seen by such folks as equivalent to the broken glass theory. If you had to rationalize it beyond just, this is just people's irrational tribalism, you could say, well, it's well-documented that if you've got broken windows,
00:39:25
Speaker
broken windows all over a neighborhood, then people are less likely to take care of it, they're more likely to commit crimes because you've signaled that this neighborhood in a sense doesn't have a sanctity. The would-be sensors might say, maybe your endorsement effect argument is a trivial distinction because
00:39:52
Speaker
Because if we allow this stuff to exist, even if we don't implicitly or explicitly endorse it, it's created the equivalent of broken windows in a neighborhood.
00:40:05
Speaker
Again, whereas I share your anti-censorship views generally, and this is what I would argue myself, but maybe to steel man it, I think the closest thing I can think of to that argument working is social media, right?
00:40:24
Speaker
where people just anonymously say the nastiest stuff to each other, and that does kind of pollute the norms and the atmosphere of the place, even if nobody's,
00:40:37
Speaker
Nobody's endorsing him. What's your response to that? Yeah. I'm not sure what to say with social media specifically, but on the thought of... Basically the idea that the endorsement effect exists whether or not you are a censor is the pithiest way I can think of to summarize the argument I'm throwing against the wall. People don't necessarily agree. Uh-huh. Wait.
00:41:06
Speaker
Why think that? Basically, it's the broken windows analogy. Basically, the existence of bad ideas in our upstanding moral and intellectual community is inherently polluting to the moral and intellectual value, even if we don't explicitly or endlessly endorse it. Therefore, whether our censorship creates a possibility for implicit endorsement becomes less important.
00:41:32
Speaker
because we have to elicit endorsement and effect anyway. I see. Okay. I guess I would deny that you actually have any kind of endorsement just from the fact that something exists in the community. You're right to say there's a cost to it being around. As much as I love freedom and free expression, I admit there's a cost to having people say lots of
00:42:01
Speaker
like nasty things and so on. Everyone should talk and vote except for the idiots, right? Yeah, that'd be great if we could work that out. However, we happen to define those. Yeah, I guess I'd just say as costly as it might be to have these kind of annoying people around,
00:42:32
Speaker
There's good reason to prefer that set of costs to one in which you have people, whether they think so or not, clumsily trying to manage what's allowed through. And so making it more meaningful to the people who trust their judgment that certain expressions were
00:42:57
Speaker
I mean, I guess, yeah, what I really want to say here is just, sure, you can say we have these purity values, these one or two or three things are our most important values and we just want to, we value them so much that we want to protect them, whatever it costs in liberty.
00:43:25
Speaker
You've got to give an account of how much you value liberty to make your policy prescriptions about this justified. And I think it's assuming something of a moral trait of the censors that they may not share.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I think if I'm arguing with people who value Liberty so little that they think, well, it just doesn't matter if people aren't allowed to talk at all. It's not that important, but it has no value. We don't even have to account for it in an account of trade-offs. Then I think, well, we were never going to get anywhere anyway in having a meeting of the minds here.
00:44:12
Speaker
But what I want to say is just look, you can always go for broke, promote one or two or three values and ignore all of the other costs of that way of going. That's something you can do, but I think it is not plausible that there are only one or two or three values that really matter.
00:44:40
Speaker
Even if you only have a small set of values, they're going to conflict. Again, this is what we saw on university campuses. We had people who think antisemitism is a really big deal. We have people who think the plight of the Palestinians is a really big deal. Even if those are your only two concerns in the world. We have probably a majority of people who think both are a big deal. Yeah, right.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, so just kind of pounding your fist and saying, we got to do something about this, you're going to get in trouble eventually. Well, and your slippery slope argument in your essay is interesting too, right? The idea that, okay, if...
00:45:23
Speaker
The more we sense, if we take your premise that the more we censor, the more we're endorsing things to get through, that creates pressure to not let anything through, which creates pressure to censor more. And if you're a normal person who thinks that freedom is good, then you've created a slippery slope for yourself.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So the idea is, say you've got a free marketplace and then somebody says something really awful. You can't let that happen again. We've got to condemn that instance of speech, allow no more speech along those lines. Well, now you've raised the stakes.
00:46:00
Speaker
Everyone else can say, well, hang on. I mean, I agree that's bad. This other thing, you know, so that sexism was really bad. This racism that you're allowing. Now we've got to do something about that. Or you're saying racism isn't as important to eliminate from our platform as sexism.
00:46:19
Speaker
And now to sort of run this argument across the whole universe of things that people might care about, there's always going to be some pressure to make the filter a little bit tougher to get through.
00:46:37
Speaker
unless you have a bunch of weirdos like you and me and maybe some of our friends around and say, hey, what about, uh, you know, let me, let me throw, okay. I want to throw two more provocations at you and then.
00:46:53
Speaker
And then I wanna end the episode by acknowledging that by saying we're gonna argue against censorship without talking about freedom or about the importance of not being stupid as a society, we are tying at least one of our hands behind our back. And so I wanna untie those hands kind of at the end and talk about that. But first, provocations related to your argument. So the first one I will say is like,
00:47:22
Speaker
is pretty cynical and is maybe, you know, the censors would probably argue that I'm strawmending them. And then the second one is more of an attempt to steel man some of the censors, who obviously are not a monolith and, right? So coming back to the example of, you know, communist sympathizers, right? If you zoom out from that specific example,
00:47:49
Speaker
Another way I can think of that's admittedly cynical, but that I think leads to a conclusion that censorship is rational is if you view it primarily not as a moral strategy or as a truth-seeking strategy, but as a rent-seeking strategy.
00:48:10
Speaker
if my goal is to increase my own status, to cater to my own sensitivities, to promote my own group, or any combination of those things.
00:48:23
Speaker
then being a censor is good. And in fact, maybe creating a slippery slope is even better, right? Like if censorship begets more censorship, then boy, do I want to be the person who's a sensitivity reader, right? And has drastically increased my job prospects, right? So,
00:48:46
Speaker
Now, I would argue that rent seeking is immoral, and so it's not really saying it's rational for an immoral person doesn't really violate your argument that it's irrational for a moral one. But I want to put it out there. And then the second provocation, which
00:49:07
Speaker
maybe is more of a steel man, refers specifically to censorship in the context of a particular policy goal. And this came up in the discussion I had in a recent episode about whether or not academia has a liberal bias, right? And actually in another episode about academic freedom and adversarial collaboration.
00:49:33
Speaker
Some of the most famous instances of censorship in sciences occur in areas where there's a problem that I think most people on both sides of the censorship would like to solve. For example, a certain group is underperforming the national average in some academic pursuit, for example.
00:50:01
Speaker
And so most people, again, on both sides of the censorship debate, wish that weren't the case and would like to do anything they can to improve that situation. And where censorship, that again, I think more often than not has bad unintended consequences, but comes from a place of good faith, I would grant in the sciences is where people basically, the gist of the argument for censorship is,
00:50:30
Speaker
If we allow this idea to be aired, influential people are going to be convinced that this problem can't be solved and are going to stop trying to solve it. If that idea is aired and it's true, right, or sorry, if that idea is true and it's not aired, then
00:50:53
Speaker
we may not be able to solve the problem as well as we thought, but we'll at least try. And so the outcome will be better from the perspective of solving that problem than it would be in the case where we didn't censor. Now, I'm still a million. Is the steel manning of this argument? No, go on. Well, no, it is. I mean, I think that the right like, like if you say, you know,
00:51:24
Speaker
Like if you say, you know, if you put out a claim, true or not, that implies that we will never close an achievement gap in a particular area between two groups, I think people will rationally worry that we'll stop trying, right? Whereas,
00:51:48
Speaker
I would argue the worry that you often hear that's even consequentialist worry as opposed to kind of million philosophic worry that you often hear on the other side is, well, if we don't air this view, this argument, then people are going to do quotas and divide each other up. And my response to that is there are lots of
00:52:13
Speaker
there are lots of better arguments against quotas than saying this problem can't be solved, right? And so if the argument is just like, basically the argument comes down to like type one or type two error, right? Like we have a beyond a reasonable doubt standard for convicting people.
00:52:32
Speaker
of crimes, not because we think that's the best way to get to the truth of who committed the crime. It's because we think that we would much rather let a guilty person walk free than throw an innocent person in jail, right? So I guess what I'm saying as a steel man is some arguments that I hear for censorship sound to me like they're coming from a place of, here's some taboo question.
00:52:58
Speaker
And if we think the answer is this and we're wrong, it's going to be bad. And if we think the answer is this and we're wrong, it's not going to be bad. And so I'm not going to let people say the answer is this, right? So does that make sense? I think a million cents in the broader society that breaks down and it creates slippery slopes. And so I'm not saying that I'm suddenly a censor, but I think that that type of argument
00:53:26
Speaker
is good faith and at least is rational in the context of the problem that it's being applied to. Well, it is and it's not good faith. I mean, I guess, I mean, I know you cannot think. Or can be good faith. Yeah. I mean, we're not, I mean, this isn't part of my paper, so I'm now releasing myself to- Yeah, sure, sure. Give me a whole million kind of, I mean- Yeah.
00:53:55
Speaker
Here's an analogy. In software, there used to be this debate, is it better for the security of software and preventing exploits and so on
00:54:11
Speaker
to have the code be open-sourced so that anyone can see it, anyone can see how the algorithms work, see any weaknesses, potential backdoors, exploits, or is it better to have a closed system
00:54:27
Speaker
And so, you know, people just have to guess at where the vulnerabilities might be. And I say there used to be a debate because as I understand it, the debate is now over and people realize that it's a better approach to have, in principle, unlimited eyes on the code to spot errors or, you know, spot potential back doors. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah.
00:54:51
Speaker
versus only your coders versus every badly intentioned hacker in the world trying to break through. I mean, look, what I want to say is you should have more faith in people if this is what you think. People are smart.
00:55:07
Speaker
Not everyone and lots of people will hear evidence and be convinced when they shouldn't be. But there are people on the other side who will probably, if we're in a democratic situation, cancel those people out who also seize on weak evidence for their own
00:55:25
Speaker
predispositions. I guess I would like to say be more optimistic, be more trusting. Let yourself benefit from the smart people trying to make the world better rather than trying to close the blinds and keep it to yourself among you and your small group of experts or whatever. To apply your argument to the example I gave,
00:55:51
Speaker
would it go something like this? Well, if you let people make arguments that say this problem can't be solved, have faith that you're going to have way more people come and say, let's still try to solve the damn problem. Yeah, or you're mistaken, actually. It can be solved. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No good examples of this, or people think they have an impossibility proof, and what you get in response is,
00:56:12
Speaker
Actually, it is possible to do this. Good, good, yeah. The truth is all connected, and if you hide some of it away, you lose out on lots of chances to discover things you otherwise wouldn't. Well, and this comes back to, this actually is a perfect segue to the last thing I want to talk about, which is, you know, let's untie our hands from behind our back and defend, you know, liberty, right? And, you know, the quote that I keep thinking of,
00:56:40
Speaker
is from Roland Fryer, I think, where he says that the truth has to be enough in the context of his work, you know, where he's...
00:56:53
Speaker
He's done, I think, as much as anybody I can think of in the academic context in uncovering how you solve achievement gaps that some people argue can't be solved. And much of his research shows that actually if you do common sense stuff that doesn't always neatly line up with any ideology, you can make a ton of progress on solving these gaps. So kind of the
00:57:19
Speaker
you know, many eyes make us smarter, you know, basically wisdom of crowds, right? The free speech is good because crowds have wisdom. And because wisdom is good. There's a guy in a basement somewhere who's got the answer for you, you just gotta get the information to him. Well, and, and this kind of goes back to, you know, whereas I could see how censorious
00:57:50
Speaker
groups can be effective at rent seeking. If you go back to the idea that societies are more likely to be prosperous if they're smart and free exchange of ideas are more likely to make society smart, you certainly see the folly right in the censorious regime. So, you know, there are many a dictator that has enriched themselves through censorship.
00:58:16
Speaker
but nary one that has made their society prosperous in a lasting way. I think that we, and this is, our permit me to implicitly infer your age, our lifetime, yours and mine, illustrates this. When we were kids, I'll infer people were talking about the end of history.
00:58:46
Speaker
and how liberalism had won because the censorious communist regimes had made themselves crumble from within, even though they were kind of powerful for a while. And then along came China, right?
00:59:02
Speaker
and also some of the divisions in countries like ours. And so we were like, well, hang on, maybe history isn't over. Maybe we haven't found the most successful system of organizing society. But then what happened since then? I would argue in China's case, they adopted
00:59:26
Speaker
liberalizing reforms. Yeah, liberalizing reforms in some areas and receive dividends for them and didn't in other areas and are now paying a profound cost for that. That's kind of undermining what was assumed 10 years ago to be their inevitable ascent to Gemini, right? In contrast, who is emerging as a, you know,
00:59:51
Speaker
success story define the expectations in the BRICS world, you might argue India, right, which is, you know, made incredible strides, for example, against rural poverty and against lack of access to basic things like electricity in their country as a democracy, right? So, bringing it back, you know, yeah, I don't know, is there,
01:00:20
Speaker
Would it be fair to say that free speech and small liberal societies still are unchallenged as history's most prosperous ones for reasons that are actually more well understood than we think?
01:00:43
Speaker
and does censorship not at an institutional scale sow the seeds of institutional destruction, even if it enriches a few censors along the way? Yeah.
01:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, food for thought. All right, that was too easy as a way to end, right? Just kind of self-congratulatory million things. So let me add on a spicier, more provocative note. What is the strongest argument that you can think of for censorship? Ooh, what is the strongest argument? Wow. Well,
01:01:27
Speaker
I guess I worry about arguments like my friend Rishi Joshi gives about liberalism kind of being committed to its own demise and it can't
01:01:42
Speaker
preserve the conditions under which liberalism flourishes. So if it were to turn out that you could run something like my kind of self-defeat argument against free speech itself, I would be very worried about that. I guess the idea in very quick outline would be something like, well, if you just leave people free to discuss any doctrine, any opinion,
01:02:12
Speaker
that they like, that inevitably, eventually, they'll abandon liberalism thinking that, and more importantly, they would abandon free expression, thinking that they have figured it all out and there's no longer any need to let people say whatever they want, then I would be very worried. So then it's very difficult, you know, you then have the, well, then what instead problem because you'd then be abandoning
01:02:41
Speaker
liberalism to save it or something like that. So I guess I would say I would be tempted if someone could say, I've got a way of dialing it back just a little bit and then you'll enjoy.
01:02:57
Speaker
for an extra millennia, the joy of living in a society with somewhat free expression versus 100 years of truly free expression, then I don't know. I'd have to think about that. So let me try to answer that question. And the way I'm going to answer it maybe isn't a great
01:03:17
Speaker
arguments or censorship, but I also think it's sort of the closest argument I can think of that I genuinely agree with. So one is, lots of people have thought about where the limit should be. You can't shout fire in a theater, you can't harass a specific person severely and pervasively, you can't call for imminent violence, even in the US with the First Amendment. The second argument that I would offer, which I actually think is,
01:03:45
Speaker
easiest to see where this is important. And it's not oppositional really to free expression, but I would say it's additional, right? And I think you can see this best in countries that don't have explicit laws for many things, including free, including free expression. And that is that to reap the benefits of a free and open society, you also need
01:04:16
Speaker
You also need strong social norms and strong social capital, right? You can't have Adam Smith's wealth of nations without his theory of moral sentiments, right? If you wanna put it in terms of the classics. And so the idealized version of, I think it is genuinely important to acknowledge that the idealized version of the free society is one where people have
01:04:43
Speaker
a specific set of shared moral commitments, not necessarily religious, specific religion, but have a specific shared moral commitments to, you know,
01:04:54
Speaker
order to non-violence, to trust, to following the rules, things like that. And maybe social media is an example of what happens when you don't have that and you still have free speech. Is that worse than not having trust or free speech? I don't know that I would go that far, but it's certainly
01:05:20
Speaker
It's certainly bad, right, compared to case of trust. And I think that you see the importance of norms in societies that don't have laws, like so they're, you know, Canada, Britain, you know, there's lots of societies that we have historically thought of as free societies that, you know, never wrote down the First Amendment. But didn't need to, because we had these norms, these liberal norms. And then all of a sudden, you know, people in Britain are being arrested for retweeting things. You're like, yeah,
01:06:00
Speaker
And so in some ways, that example illustrates the importance of having laws around things like free speech, but it also illustrates how far you can get with norms of a good society. And X being an example of how far the other way you can get if you have explicit rules of free speech, but otherwise not great norms. Right. Yeah.
01:06:15
Speaker
Oh crap, we should have written that down, right?
01:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know what else to say other than I'm glad I'm alive now in a society that has real free speech protections. I hope we get to live here a lot longer. Yeah. Well, and to keep the positive note going, I think that there are lots of reasons to be optimistic about this country. I'll plug my essay called How Polarization Will Destroy Itself, which you can read in my sub-stack. Good one. Yes.
01:06:52
Speaker
makes us strong of an optimistic case as I can. And even if I'm wrong about polarization, you know, we certainly live in one of the freest, safest, all around good societies ever, and we're lucky to be here. Yeah. Great. Well, on that sunny note, Justin Tozzi, thanks so much for being on the Free Mind podcast. Best of luck in your new position, and we'll see you soon. Thanks a lot, Matt.
01:07:19
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center.
01:07:45
Speaker
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