The Lie of “Freedom of Speech Is Not Freedom from Consequences”

Evasive clichés excuse violence, enable authoritarianism, and degrade liberal values.

(Audio version here)

I am currently infuriated by disingenuous and irresponsible rhetoric about socially-inflicted consequences. They take the form of utterances like “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” “You reap what you sow,” “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences,” or any variation on “What did you expect?” These kinds of statements made in a political context seek to present the ways in which people choose to respond to someone else saying something they object to as entirely the responsibility of the speaker. They frame these responses as though they are some kind of cosmic fate that just automatically hits someone who expresses certain ideas, and the responders have neither agency nor any responsibility to consider the ethics of their own behaviour.

The “Live by the sword, die by the sword” claim has been made frequently in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. This is particularly egregious because it conflates speech with violence and implicitly justifies responding to speech with violence. Mr. Kirk had not, in fact, murdered anybody for expressing views he did not like.

“You reap what you sow” is another empty statement which gives the impression of a direct cause and effect process in which only the speaker of words deemed offensive has any agency. “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” is meaningless unless we are to understand that any kind of consequences for any kind of speech are acceptable and give up entirely on the concept of freedom of speech. Variations on “Well, what did you expect?” appear to simply accept the way people have responded to speech they did not like as natural and requiring of no moral analysis.

It is my perception that people tend to use this kind of phrasing when they feel the penalties meted out to someone for their speech are morally justified but do not want to morally justify them. It is, therefore, a conflict between a tribalistic moral intuition and principled ethical justification. These kind of statements are made by someone who has a strong moralistic feeling that somebody who holds and expresses certain views deserves punishment but is not prepared to fully acknowledge and defend the stance that it is acceptable to punish people for speech. They distance themselves or the people imposing penalties on the speaker from the inherent authoritarianism of that by framing the ‘consequences’ as something that just inevitably happens, seemingly without human agency.

In reality, it is usually easy to distinguish between natural cause-and-effect processes and responses that involve human agency and therefore require ethical justification. Some people will blur this difference, whether deliberately or not, so a few examples make the point clear.

Naturally occurring consequences

• If you jump off a bridge, you will fall downwards.

• If you eat more calories than you need, you will gain fat.

• If you have unprotected sex, you might conceive a baby.

• If you stand in the snow in a bikini, you might get hypothermia.

Culturally imposed consequences

• If you advocate conservative views, you might get murdered

• If you advocate progressive views, you might get murdered.

• If you criticise or mock Islam, you might get murdered.

• If you express gender-critical or conservative views, you might be fired, threatened, or no-platformed.

• If you joke about or celebrate the assassination of a right-wing figure, you might lose your job or be cancelled.

• If you offend political activists of any kind, you might face a social media pile-on involving abuse, misrepresentation and threats.

There are, of course, many variations on these kinds of cultural consequences. People can make good arguments about which ideological group presents the greatest threat to personal safety, freedom of speech and liberal democratic principles more broadly. They do not all present the same kinds of threats in the same ways and it is important to address specific threats without ‘both-sidesing’ everything. It matters that illiberal left-wing ideas have a home in many important institutions including those concerned with knowledge production and that illiberal right-wing ideas have the support of the Trump administration and the owner of the world’s most influential social media platform. It must be acknowledged that Islamism does not fit into either of these, holding views on the rights of women, same sex-attracted people and religious minorities which fit the definition of “far-right” while obstruction to addressing these problems and even support for Islamist organisations comes from the far-left. We need to address specific problems specifically if we are to have any hope of doing so effectively.

Nor should we generally try to lump all these forms of ‘consequences’ together. We must be much more concerned about people being murdered than being fired and more concerned about people being fired than people facing mob pile-ons on social media. At the mildest end of this scale, we find genuine grey areas between targeted harassment and abuse and legitimate criticism. Somebody strongly but civilly criticising an idea may not know that 1000 other people have also responded negatively and some of them with the vilest abuse and even threats. People can also become legitimately concerned about somebody whom they know to have expressed support for violence working with vulnerable people and report this to their employers following sober reflection and based on consistent, non-partisan principles.

However, this is where honest introspection about our own motivations is so important and this is precisely what people using agency-denying expressions like those above are trying to evade.

The thing that all forms of punitive response to the expression of political views considered offensive or harmful to society have in common is that they are culturally driven ones. Culture is created by humans and we all have the responsibility to consider the ways in which we are influencing culture. When people, driven by some ideology or other, engage in decision-making and exercise their own agency to mete out punishment to other people for expressing views they find abhorrent, they have some moral responsibility to consider the ethics of doing that.

The same applies to those who share their values and aims. Conservatives are the people who must hold conservatives to high ethical standards. Progressives can best address illiberal elements among themselves. Muslims are the people best placed to address the authoritarian intolerance of Islamism. When people speak in ways that presents attempts to silence speech they find offensive - whether by violence, loss of livelihood, or harassment and abuse - as some kind of inevitable agentless ‘consequence’ rather than something members of their own ideology have chosen to do, they contribute to a culture of polarisation, cancellation and intimidation. The liberal democratic values that protect us all are degraded.

If you are somebody who has been making statements like these, please reflect upon what you mean by it. Have you just become so jaded by the intensity of the culture wars that you now just accept the cancellation status quo uncritically? Are you simply making an observation that, in our current climate, saying certain things that other groups of people find offensive can get one fired, threatened, hurt or murdered? Unless speaking to a small child, a new arrival from a foreign culture or someone who has lived offline for a decade or two, your observation is not adding anything to the conversation. People are not typically complaining that someone has been murdered, hurt, intimidated or fired because they were not aware that this is a thing that can happen. They are complaining because they think it is is morally wrong.

It is much more likely, however, that you are tacitly condoning violent, punitive or censorious responses to speech you find abhorrent while distancing yourself from the authoritarianism of that. You yourself would not do such a thing but think it is quite understandable that others do? If people wish not to be shot, hurt, intimidated or fired, they should just not express those views? You must know this is a partisan bias and not a consistent first principle. There will always be something you believe that other people do or have found abhorrent enough to justify harming you, denying you a livelihood or publicly shaming or abusing you. Perhaps you do not believe Islam is the religion of peace? Maybe you think the UK would be better off inside the European Union and/or have positive views about immigration? Perhaps you have negative views about immigration or think that gender identity is not a real thing? Maybe there is some political figure you regard as so harmful to society that you might not be sorry if they died - or even feel tempted to celebrate it? It could just be that you think it is OK to be gay or not to believe in God.

All of these positions have been regarded as so abhorrent that people have faced punishment for expressing them, up to and including murder. Others have been harmed, arrested, fired, no-platformed, threatened, intimidated, or abused. If you want to express any of them publicly and survive unscathed, you need to live in a society that upholds an expectation that we do not respond punitively to speech. We seldom regard “You reap what you sow,” “Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences,” or “Well, what did you expect?” as an adequate response when our own speech is penalised. We tend to think we should be able to expect better, even if, in our current cultural moment, we cannot.

This is not an argument for moral relativism. We will nearly all believe strongly that some views are morally good and others morally abhorrent. It is important to criticise or outright condemn ideas we think do harm to society. This is precisely how we have defeated the bad ideas we now look back on and wonder how people could ever have thought that way and feel grateful to live when and where we do. This is how we can continue to address bad ideas and replace them with better ones. We cannot do this by encouraging or condoning the development of a culture in which the ideological group most willing and able to penalise others for speech they dislike at any time has the power to intimidate everybody else into silence or preference falsification.

The liberal principle of supporting freedom of belief and speech, tolerating the existence of ideas we strongly dislike, and opposing coercion except in cases of direct material harm is a higher-order value that crosses political and ideological divides. It is in all our interests to protect it actively and to maintain a very high bar for what we count as ‘harm.’ If we fail to do so, and allow ideological groups to force certain ideas underground, we cut ourselves off from the knowledge needed to challenge them, make bad ideas harder to expose and address, empower extremist subcultures to grow, and normalise the punishment of ideas the dominant moral orthodoxy deems abhorrent - ideas that could easily, one day, be our own.

When people obscure the role of human agency in perpetuating a cancel culture, they not only excuse cruelty, injustice and abuse, they erode the liberal values that keep all of us safe to speak, argue, and live according to conscience. A culture that normalises punitive responses to speech empowers whichever faction is most ruthless at any given time, and it is naïve to assume that will always be one’s own. If we value freedom, honesty, and the possibility of progress through open debate, we must reject evasive rhetoric that presents ideologically-driven human responses as inevitable consequences. We must recognise that culture is something we create and take responsibility for our own contributions to that.

Stop pretending punishment is fate.

---

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 5000 readers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.75% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2025 is to increase that to 7%. This will enable me to keep doing this full-time into 2026! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!