Bravo! Yes, this distinction needs to be made, over and over again.
Its concept is far more difficult than you may think; it requires both moral and logical clarity that you possess in such abundance that you believe everyone must have it, too. Not even close. Please keep making the case, in different ways, in different situations.
Thank you Helen for this strong defense of free speech. It is one of the more difficult things in our current time to avoid being dragged into the black hole of controlling or curtailing the rights of others, especially when they say such heinous things. I don't always succeed, but work hard to do so. The threat of tyranny requires the ability to speak out, even if it is offensive. The best antidote is usually, as they say, more speech.
As a professional journalist who’s fought for free speech in every way he could think of for most of his life, I’d like to thank you for one of the better analyses of why free speech matters that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Bravo!
That's a great point you made; we should mostly be arguing what the law *should be*, not what the law actually *is*. If these laws become unpopular enough, perhaps they can be amended.
That said, it can be useful to discuss the law if it's not consistently being applied. For example, if the Human Rights Act had better free speech protections, quoting that piece of legislation could've been useful to challenge other laws as inconsistent with the HRA.
Thank you for being such a clear and consistent thinker. I can only subscribe once in a while but just did so. Remember, when I leave in September I told you so in May.
I wonder about situations where someone like a nurse or a doctor uses social media to say things like “all Zionists should die” and the employer feels that Jewish patients might be ill treated by that medical professional.
I'm somewhat split on the particulars of this case. Like you, I think this is a wrongful firing and an arrest based on a laws that should not be on the books to begin with. Recent legislation in the UK, Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe has taken a wrong turn into even greater censorship, from a prior state of already-inadequate protections. That said, if those laws are on the books, they should apply to everyone - terfs, angry trans activists, Islamists, left, right, and center alike. No special dispensation for being more aligned with popular views. Maybe if enough people start seeing people who they like becoming subject to censorship, they might come to see what's wrong with these laws and put pressure on Parliament to repeal them.
I also notice that you (and not just the individuals you quote) are using the pronoun "him" to describe Heather Herbert. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you swallowed the "gender critical" pill pretty uncritically. I don't see any good reason not to use the pronoun "her" to describe Herbert, considering she clearly identifies as a woman, nor should her violent belief system affect that identification. I think the sex gender/distinction is useful here - Heather Herbert is, to the best of my knowledge, a biological male, but one does not have to accept woo beliefs about "biological sex is a spectrum" to accept the fact that she identifies as a woman (a subjective gender identity, not an objective sexual category) and use the same pronoun one would use with any other women, regardless of the fact that this person is also an asshole.
I have a fairly loose policy here. I commit to using sex-based pronouns when speaking of crimes and medical matters but otherwise I consider it at my own discretion. I generally use preferred pronouns to indicate someone’s self-conception, but I see no reason to respect the wishes of an individual who fantasises about people who disagree with him being tortured to death.
Yeah, that's a very weird attitude I see in "heterodox" circles - Katie Herzog has a similar attitude toward pronoun choices - and I think there's reason to push back against it. I think we can both agree that Herbert is a pretty shit person (or, more generously, is someone a terrible attitude and world view and will hopefully someday grow the hell up and deradicalize) - I have no argument with you there. But here's another example - I think Mao Zedong is one of the worst people in modern history, so is that license to start referring to him as "Chairman Chink"? Or by using that slur, am I also being bigoted toward billions of Chinese people I have no quarrel with? I adhere to the latter, though admittedly, I haven't dropped the word "bitch" from my vocabulary, which I suppose some feminists would say that's no better. (I try to apply "bitch" and "cunt" to both sexes, though. :) Nor do I buy the idea that once a trans woman talks or acts violently, they lose their female identity by default, since the idea that women, cis or otherwise, are inherently non-violent is essentialist nonsense.
If you're going to have a general rule about how you refer to somebody based on gender identity, I don't think that should simply go out the window just because someone's not a good person or you simply don't like them. About the only place I'd make an exception is for someone who's pretty blatantly claiming a cross-sex identity for purely cynical reasons, especially sex offenders who are using it to gain admittance to women's prisons or locker rooms. I suppose I might also make an exception to someone who claims cross-sex identity without even the slightest attempt to present as the other sex. And I have a general rule of never using neopronouns beyond "they" because unlimited numbers of personal pronouns is obviously unworkable. But I try to adhere to general rules about how I use pronouns, and don't change them just because I don't like someone, even if that dislike is very well-founded.
I don’t have a general rule. I don’t care enough about gender. It’s just not important enough to me to have a pronoun policy. It’s equally acceptable ethically to call someone by preferred pronouns or same sex pronouns. It’s not ethically acceptable to be racist.
As always laser clear great stuff. Especially followed up with Free Speech Union offering their usually successful offer to help protect even the speech we hate.
On thinking some more, I would qualify this bit: "This is also how defenders of free speech on principle work. When they say that people are being denied freedom of speech, they do not typically mean that the right already exists in law or regulations or policies, but that it should ethically do so and that they will fight for it to do so."
Yes, often when we are making claims around freedom of speech on principle, we are also making an implicit claim that some law/regulation/policy should change. But sometimes we are not.
For example, when we speak out against cancel culture, we are not necessarily saying there should be a law against it.
When a private company fires someone for exercise of speech, I could be outraged on free speech grounds and I could believe they shouldn't have fired the person, while at the same time believe that there should be no law or regulation or policy stopping them from doing so. (In fact that is my position: it wouldn't surprise you that I believe private organisations should be able to dissociate from an individual for any reason whatsoever. But that belief doesn't mean I can't say that the act is against free speech principles)
So free speech can mean:
- free speech in law, regulations, policies, as they are
- free speech in law, regulations, or policies as we think they should be (free speech in principle category I)
- acts that we think are ethically justified or unjustified under a wider understanding of free speech, but without the implication that there should be a law, regulation or policy governing this (free speech in principle, category II)
Depending on context, it should be usually clear what people mean by free speech and which of the above categories it comes under. But as we know from experience, people lack reading comprehension ability and/or good faith assumptions, and so misreadings are common!
To me the reasons that an organisation or individual would take such an action are their business and somewhat opaque to the outer world.
While I'd agree that responding to public pressure may be, in some cases, less than admirable, I'd suggest that any decision based on values will, at least to to some extent, be responsive to social norms and expressed opinion.
It seems odd to suggest that acting in accord with public values with which you disagree is out of bounds.
Helen, are you really saying that an employer, even such a specialised one as a university, should not be able to say "we do not want to expose our employees and/or students to this person's vile affect and opinions"? And act on that judgement? Surely not.
No, of course not. I don’t know why you’d think I was?
I’m saying that we should not enable a society in which any group of activists or mob outrage can create pressure on an employer to fire people so that one year it’s gender critical feminists and the next its trans activists. I said quite clearly that there could be a valid reason for any organisation to need to let someone go for not being able to do their job safely and professionally, but that this needs to come from their policies and be applied consistently on their own volition and is a different thing to being pressured to fire people by activists. I thought I set that out quite clearly. What was it that made you think this piece is an argument against allowing employers to fire people for presenting a genuine risk to students and employees?
Of course, "we do not want to expose our employees and/or students to this person's vile affect and opinions" has most commonly recently been said as a justification for penalising or no-platforming people like gender critical feminists and has been said about me many times. But assuming you mean a legitimate threat to someone’s safety. no.
If the university had made an independent decision to fire someone for threatening behaviour or an inability to work with others who hold views they don’t like, I’d not have written this piece. It’s about activists cancelling people for political reasons.
See the last few paragraphs of this one where I set out the difference between employers acting of their own volition due to reasonable and consistent policies about professionalism and safety and activists pressuring them to cancel people for political reasons.
Oh, for some reason, it won’t let me post the attachment. I’ll paste the bit.
we need to separate out the strands of the issue. One strand is the responsibility of employers to ensure an ethical workplace, protect customer trust, and safeguard the reputation of their business. Another is the growing normalisation of a politically punitive mob mentality, in which people prioritise finding and punishing “wrongthinkers” over engaging seriously with ideas.
In practice, these things often overlap. But in principle, at the level of individual ethical decision-making, they are separate. If you are an employer, your duty is to consider the details of a specific case and make a fair assessment of whether a stated opinion genuinely affects someone’s ability to do their job or whether it is none of your business. If you are a political activist, your duty is to ask whether your time is better spent scouring for people to punish, or engaging seriously with ideas.
Too often, people engaging in Cancel Culture try to distance themselves from the human cost of it and present it as some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon. They say things like “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” as though they are not involved in deciding who should face consequences, for what transgression and what those consequences should be. They speak as they might about somebody who decides to climb a mountain having to accept the possibility that they might fall off. But culture is not a natural force like gravity. It is something we each play a part in cultivating. We should each think carefully about what kind of culture our actions are attempting to build.
If, on serious ethical reflection about a certain incident, you think you have strong evidence that somebody is a danger to vulnerable people and that you have a responsibility to inform their employer of this, you should do so. Make sure that your ethical justifications are well evidenced, soundly reasoned, consistent across political divides and not issued in the service of your own political ideology in a way you would not like to have somebody else’s imposed on you.
If, on reflection, you find that you are searching for people saying things you oppose in order to punish them, fuelled by your own feelings of outrage, disgust and, in the case of the murder of Charlie Kirk, grief, please stop and consider the bigger picture. Think about what such actions contribute to culture and whether this is a culture you wish to build. Consider whether you might do better to make an ethical argument against that person’s stance and persuade others to oppose it for good reasons. Think about whether contributing to a culture of cancellation could backfire on you if your own political views fall out of favour.
Ultimately, the culture we build will not be measured by how harshly we punished our enemies, but by how steadfastly, even in times of rage and grief, we defended the liberal principles that protect us all.
The comments were terrible, no doubt about that. I think it is worth noting, if only for better understanding, that the the bit about being handcuffed to a bed likely references Widdecombe's own comments on female prisoners being handcuffed to hospital beds during labour.
I don’t think she (AW) actually said this, although it was widely reported at the time. I understand that she was justifying female prisoners being handcuffed for routine medical/ midwifery appointments during pregnancy, which is a position one may well disagree with, but is not at all the same thing as being shackled while in labour.
Does not the principal of freedom of speech clash with the principal of freedom of association?
And isn't there also some principal about not feeling threatened?
So if you have - hypothetically - a man who posts in the clear so everybody knows its him which makes him a threatening presence, violent fantasies about women, then don't his colleagues have a right not to associate with him? Aren't his female colleagues reasonably concerned to be around him?
Or, more extreme example, worker in an undertakers who posts necrophiliac fantasies.
I just don't think you can cover the workplace issue with a general autopilot blanket principal. In the end you need a legal consensus on what's OK and what's not.
The issue with cancel culture is not that people are cancelled, but rather they are cancelled for BS reasons.
Well, I think I made that clear. Organisations have the right to fire people if they meet a high and consistent bar for reputational damage based on consistent policies or an inability to do a job safely and professionally. I object to the kind of mob pile-pns that create ‘reputational damage’ by mass campaigns and have organisations sacking people for offending one set of people one month and then the opposing tribe the next.
Bravo! Yes, this distinction needs to be made, over and over again.
Its concept is far more difficult than you may think; it requires both moral and logical clarity that you possess in such abundance that you believe everyone must have it, too. Not even close. Please keep making the case, in different ways, in different situations.
Thank you Helen for this strong defense of free speech. It is one of the more difficult things in our current time to avoid being dragged into the black hole of controlling or curtailing the rights of others, especially when they say such heinous things. I don't always succeed, but work hard to do so. The threat of tyranny requires the ability to speak out, even if it is offensive. The best antidote is usually, as they say, more speech.
As a professional journalist who’s fought for free speech in every way he could think of for most of his life, I’d like to thank you for one of the better analyses of why free speech matters that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Bravo!
That's a great point you made; we should mostly be arguing what the law *should be*, not what the law actually *is*. If these laws become unpopular enough, perhaps they can be amended.
That said, it can be useful to discuss the law if it's not consistently being applied. For example, if the Human Rights Act had better free speech protections, quoting that piece of legislation could've been useful to challenge other laws as inconsistent with the HRA.
Thank you for being such a clear and consistent thinker. I can only subscribe once in a while but just did so. Remember, when I leave in September I told you so in May.
I wonder about situations where someone like a nurse or a doctor uses social media to say things like “all Zionists should die” and the employer feels that Jewish patients might be ill treated by that medical professional.
Yes, that would seem like a clear safety risk, wouldn’t it?
What about somebody, say an IT person, who just has Jewish colleagues?
Case by case. We can whatabout forever.
I'm somewhat split on the particulars of this case. Like you, I think this is a wrongful firing and an arrest based on a laws that should not be on the books to begin with. Recent legislation in the UK, Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe has taken a wrong turn into even greater censorship, from a prior state of already-inadequate protections. That said, if those laws are on the books, they should apply to everyone - terfs, angry trans activists, Islamists, left, right, and center alike. No special dispensation for being more aligned with popular views. Maybe if enough people start seeing people who they like becoming subject to censorship, they might come to see what's wrong with these laws and put pressure on Parliament to repeal them.
I also notice that you (and not just the individuals you quote) are using the pronoun "him" to describe Heather Herbert. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you swallowed the "gender critical" pill pretty uncritically. I don't see any good reason not to use the pronoun "her" to describe Herbert, considering she clearly identifies as a woman, nor should her violent belief system affect that identification. I think the sex gender/distinction is useful here - Heather Herbert is, to the best of my knowledge, a biological male, but one does not have to accept woo beliefs about "biological sex is a spectrum" to accept the fact that she identifies as a woman (a subjective gender identity, not an objective sexual category) and use the same pronoun one would use with any other women, regardless of the fact that this person is also an asshole.
I have a fairly loose policy here. I commit to using sex-based pronouns when speaking of crimes and medical matters but otherwise I consider it at my own discretion. I generally use preferred pronouns to indicate someone’s self-conception, but I see no reason to respect the wishes of an individual who fantasises about people who disagree with him being tortured to death.
Yeah, that's a very weird attitude I see in "heterodox" circles - Katie Herzog has a similar attitude toward pronoun choices - and I think there's reason to push back against it. I think we can both agree that Herbert is a pretty shit person (or, more generously, is someone a terrible attitude and world view and will hopefully someday grow the hell up and deradicalize) - I have no argument with you there. But here's another example - I think Mao Zedong is one of the worst people in modern history, so is that license to start referring to him as "Chairman Chink"? Or by using that slur, am I also being bigoted toward billions of Chinese people I have no quarrel with? I adhere to the latter, though admittedly, I haven't dropped the word "bitch" from my vocabulary, which I suppose some feminists would say that's no better. (I try to apply "bitch" and "cunt" to both sexes, though. :) Nor do I buy the idea that once a trans woman talks or acts violently, they lose their female identity by default, since the idea that women, cis or otherwise, are inherently non-violent is essentialist nonsense.
If you're going to have a general rule about how you refer to somebody based on gender identity, I don't think that should simply go out the window just because someone's not a good person or you simply don't like them. About the only place I'd make an exception is for someone who's pretty blatantly claiming a cross-sex identity for purely cynical reasons, especially sex offenders who are using it to gain admittance to women's prisons or locker rooms. I suppose I might also make an exception to someone who claims cross-sex identity without even the slightest attempt to present as the other sex. And I have a general rule of never using neopronouns beyond "they" because unlimited numbers of personal pronouns is obviously unworkable. But I try to adhere to general rules about how I use pronouns, and don't change them just because I don't like someone, even if that dislike is very well-founded.
I don’t have a general rule. I don’t care enough about gender. It’s just not important enough to me to have a pronoun policy. It’s equally acceptable ethically to call someone by preferred pronouns or same sex pronouns. It’s not ethically acceptable to be racist.
As always laser clear great stuff. Especially followed up with Free Speech Union offering their usually successful offer to help protect even the speech we hate.
BTW I don't support the arrest.
On thinking some more, I would qualify this bit: "This is also how defenders of free speech on principle work. When they say that people are being denied freedom of speech, they do not typically mean that the right already exists in law or regulations or policies, but that it should ethically do so and that they will fight for it to do so."
Yes, often when we are making claims around freedom of speech on principle, we are also making an implicit claim that some law/regulation/policy should change. But sometimes we are not.
For example, when we speak out against cancel culture, we are not necessarily saying there should be a law against it.
When a private company fires someone for exercise of speech, I could be outraged on free speech grounds and I could believe they shouldn't have fired the person, while at the same time believe that there should be no law or regulation or policy stopping them from doing so. (In fact that is my position: it wouldn't surprise you that I believe private organisations should be able to dissociate from an individual for any reason whatsoever. But that belief doesn't mean I can't say that the act is against free speech principles)
So free speech can mean:
- free speech in law, regulations, policies, as they are
- free speech in law, regulations, or policies as we think they should be (free speech in principle category I)
- acts that we think are ethically justified or unjustified under a wider understanding of free speech, but without the implication that there should be a law, regulation or policy governing this (free speech in principle, category II)
Depending on context, it should be usually clear what people mean by free speech and which of the above categories it comes under. But as we know from experience, people lack reading comprehension ability and/or good faith assumptions, and so misreadings are common!
Yes, I’d agree with all that.
To me the reasons that an organisation or individual would take such an action are their business and somewhat opaque to the outer world.
While I'd agree that responding to public pressure may be, in some cases, less than admirable, I'd suggest that any decision based on values will, at least to to some extent, be responsive to social norms and expressed opinion.
It seems odd to suggest that acting in accord with public values with which you disagree is out of bounds.
Helen, are you really saying that an employer, even such a specialised one as a university, should not be able to say "we do not want to expose our employees and/or students to this person's vile affect and opinions"? And act on that judgement? Surely not.
No, of course not. I don’t know why you’d think I was?
I’m saying that we should not enable a society in which any group of activists or mob outrage can create pressure on an employer to fire people so that one year it’s gender critical feminists and the next its trans activists. I said quite clearly that there could be a valid reason for any organisation to need to let someone go for not being able to do their job safely and professionally, but that this needs to come from their policies and be applied consistently on their own volition and is a different thing to being pressured to fire people by activists. I thought I set that out quite clearly. What was it that made you think this piece is an argument against allowing employers to fire people for presenting a genuine risk to students and employees?
Of course, "we do not want to expose our employees and/or students to this person's vile affect and opinions" has most commonly recently been said as a justification for penalising or no-platforming people like gender critical feminists and has been said about me many times. But assuming you mean a legitimate threat to someone’s safety. no.
If the university had made an independent decision to fire someone for threatening behaviour or an inability to work with others who hold views they don’t like, I’d not have written this piece. It’s about activists cancelling people for political reasons.
See the last few paragraphs of this one where I set out the difference between employers acting of their own volition due to reasonable and consistent policies about professionalism and safety and activists pressuring them to cancel people for political reasons.
Oh, for some reason, it won’t let me post the attachment. I’ll paste the bit.
we need to separate out the strands of the issue. One strand is the responsibility of employers to ensure an ethical workplace, protect customer trust, and safeguard the reputation of their business. Another is the growing normalisation of a politically punitive mob mentality, in which people prioritise finding and punishing “wrongthinkers” over engaging seriously with ideas.
In practice, these things often overlap. But in principle, at the level of individual ethical decision-making, they are separate. If you are an employer, your duty is to consider the details of a specific case and make a fair assessment of whether a stated opinion genuinely affects someone’s ability to do their job or whether it is none of your business. If you are a political activist, your duty is to ask whether your time is better spent scouring for people to punish, or engaging seriously with ideas.
Too often, people engaging in Cancel Culture try to distance themselves from the human cost of it and present it as some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon. They say things like “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” as though they are not involved in deciding who should face consequences, for what transgression and what those consequences should be. They speak as they might about somebody who decides to climb a mountain having to accept the possibility that they might fall off. But culture is not a natural force like gravity. It is something we each play a part in cultivating. We should each think carefully about what kind of culture our actions are attempting to build.
If, on serious ethical reflection about a certain incident, you think you have strong evidence that somebody is a danger to vulnerable people and that you have a responsibility to inform their employer of this, you should do so. Make sure that your ethical justifications are well evidenced, soundly reasoned, consistent across political divides and not issued in the service of your own political ideology in a way you would not like to have somebody else’s imposed on you.
If, on reflection, you find that you are searching for people saying things you oppose in order to punish them, fuelled by your own feelings of outrage, disgust and, in the case of the murder of Charlie Kirk, grief, please stop and consider the bigger picture. Think about what such actions contribute to culture and whether this is a culture you wish to build. Consider whether you might do better to make an ethical argument against that person’s stance and persuade others to oppose it for good reasons. Think about whether contributing to a culture of cancellation could backfire on you if your own political views fall out of favour.
Ultimately, the culture we build will not be measured by how harshly we punished our enemies, but by how steadfastly, even in times of rage and grief, we defended the liberal principles that protect us all.
The comments were terrible, no doubt about that. I think it is worth noting, if only for better understanding, that the the bit about being handcuffed to a bed likely references Widdecombe's own comments on female prisoners being handcuffed to hospital beds during labour.
I don’t think she (AW) actually said this, although it was widely reported at the time. I understand that she was justifying female prisoners being handcuffed for routine medical/ midwifery appointments during pregnancy, which is a position one may well disagree with, but is not at all the same thing as being shackled while in labour.
Ah OK, thanks for clarifying.
I'm not sure on the employer side.
Does not the principal of freedom of speech clash with the principal of freedom of association?
And isn't there also some principal about not feeling threatened?
So if you have - hypothetically - a man who posts in the clear so everybody knows its him which makes him a threatening presence, violent fantasies about women, then don't his colleagues have a right not to associate with him? Aren't his female colleagues reasonably concerned to be around him?
Or, more extreme example, worker in an undertakers who posts necrophiliac fantasies.
I just don't think you can cover the workplace issue with a general autopilot blanket principal. In the end you need a legal consensus on what's OK and what's not.
The issue with cancel culture is not that people are cancelled, but rather they are cancelled for BS reasons.
Well, I think I made that clear. Organisations have the right to fire people if they meet a high and consistent bar for reputational damage based on consistent policies or an inability to do a job safely and professionally. I object to the kind of mob pile-pns that create ‘reputational damage’ by mass campaigns and have organisations sacking people for offending one set of people one month and then the opposing tribe the next.
OK agreed.