On the limits of free speech

Making a positive case for free speech about group differences

[don’t forget to take the reader survey if you haven’t already]

Are you in favor of free speech?

Most readers and most people in general will say yes, and many even consider themselves free speech absolutists. If asked why, they might resort to John Stuart Mill:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly con- tested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

It sounds good, maybe too good, as Oliver Traldi argues in his new book Political Beliefs A Philosophical Introduction:

A lot of what Mill said sounds pretty reasonable to a lot of people. But in lived political reality, we worry about the consequences of speech, even given the assurance that the truth may eventually come out. False speech might impugn someone’s character, leaving them harmed irreparably, and so we have defamation law. False speech might lead people to make bad purchases, and so we have false advertising law. Even true speech might be a kind of stealing, so we have intellectual property law and, in some contexts, rules against plagiarism. More contentious are recent pushes, especially regarding online speech, to censor so- called disinformation and hate speech. These, too, are sometimes thought to have potential consequences that are too unbearable to justify full freedom of speech.

If you think about all the ways someone could get in trouble for saying something, there's a lot of ways:

1. Telling someone you are going to murder them (threats)

2. Telling someone you are going to kidnap their children unless they pay you (blackmail)

3. A doctor or lawyer telling his clients' secrets to other people (medical or legal confidentiality)

4. An employee telling company secrets to other people (non-disclosure agreements)

5. Lying or making false claims about how great your product is (false advertisement)

6. Claiming you have credentials that you don't have, whether a doctor, lawyer, police man, or even a nurse (fraud, occupational licensing)

7. In some contexts, merely claiming to be someone else (impersonation)

8. In some legal contexts, any kind of lying (perjury)

9. Singing a song someone else wrote in some contexts (copyright infringement)

10. Copying other people's ideas or text in some contexts (plagiarism, not usually illegal in country law, but illegal in university law)

11. Lying or merely saying false things about others' character (defamation, libel, slander)

12. Telling the police or other state agents that you will give them money if they help you (bribing)

13. Telling the public or others how to construct deadly weapons or about a country's military installations (classified information, spying)

14. Telling the public secret information about someone in many contexts (privacy violations, court sealed records)

You can maybe find more examples, but the above is already very broad. Yet almost no one argues that these are limits on free speech in an important or bad way. Why not? Because when people think about free speech, they aren't thinking about these contexts, they are thinking about freedom of speech with regards to political, religious, and other matters of social organization and action. They are thinking of book bans, of political or religious dissidents getting killed, jailed or otherwise harassed, and in general of suppression of information that in some sense should be public knowledge. This broad, latter kind of speech limitation is exactly what the debates are all about. Some such speech may be harmful. People, like Mill above, who argue that we should nevertheless allow it think that there are benefits to such an approach overall, even if some cases are harmful. For instance, a doctor told the world that some vaccines cause autism and this caused 10000s of cases of preventable childhood diseases. Should this be illegal? A supporter of free speech would find it difficult to say yes. They would say, rather, than in general we should leave discussion of scientific matters open because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Sometimes conventional medical wisdom is wrong on a question (in fact, it may be disturbingly quite common). If we punish those who question the current dogma, then the error will perhaps never be corrected, and we will all suffer for it.

Actual free speech debate in the last many decades all concern various protected groups. These are groups that fare less well in society by some metrics, whether these are women (lower incomes, but live longer), Africans, non-citizens, non-heterosexuals, and so on (one exception are Jews who fare better, but are still protected). People who are against free speech think these groups can be harmed by the wrong kind of speech, so it should be prevented. What I think the defenders of free speech generally forego is talking the benefits of free speech in these domains. Instead they argue based on general principles and historical but not so similar examples (chanting the name Galileo 10 times is a common tactic). I can see why. Making the positive case for free speech in the domain of group differences is going to get you into trouble by itself. Thus, ironically, self-imposed censorship on the part of free speech advocates lead them to making poorer intellectual defenses of free speech.

Take the case of African or immigrant crime. What are the benefits to talking about this? Well, from a scientific perspective, if the causes could be found, they might be preventable. Many left-wingers will accept this because they think it's well-established that the causes of these groups' elevated crime rates are things we can do something about if we would just implement more government regulation and social programs (e.g. lead poisoning, income gaps). However, if the causes turn out to be something we cannot easily do something about -- especially genetics, but also deeply entrenched 'culture' -- then it is harder to make a positive case for the free speech concerning group differences. What other benefits might there be? I contend that the answer is simple: public safety. The public needs to know who is relatively dangerous. This is one main reason crime reports are written in the media, namely, to inform the public of who are likely predators, so they can form reasonable stereotypes and act accordingly. Thus, one important goal of publishing true information about the crime rates of e.g. Africans or immigrants (or men) is to let the public know that these people can be dangerous and that a reasonable person should take precautions. In the same fashion, crime rates may also inform immigration policy. Most voters prefer their country to be a safe place to be, so if allowing certain kinds of immigrants in increases crime rates, this is something voters would reasonably want to know, so they can vote for politicians who reduce this problem. We have empirically confirmed this is actually the case in the sense that surveys show that citizens are very concerned with crime rates among immigrants (their top priority in fact), and that the countries of origin they most want to restrict immigrants from are the same ones that they think are sending people who commit crimes at elevated rates, and these are in fact, in reality, also the same countries that truly send crime-prone immigrants (not perfectly correlated, but highly). Voters, then, appear to be acting rationally in their own and their country's best interests. Here's a study by Noah Carl:

 Public beliefs about immigrants and immigration are widely regarded as erroneous. For example, members of the public typically overestimate the immigrant fraction of the population by ~10–15 percentage points. On the other hand, consensual stereotypes about the respective characteristics of different groups (e.g., sexes, races, nationalities) are generally found to be quite accurate. The present study shows that, in the UK, net opposition to immigrants of different nationalities (n = 23) correlates strongly with the log of immigrant arrests rates (r = .69; p = 0.0003; 95% CI = [.39, .86]) and with the log of their arrest rates for violent crime (r = .68; p = 0.0003; 95% CI = [.38, .85]). This is particularly noteworthy given that Britons reportedly think that an immigrant’s criminal history should be one of the most important characteristics when considering whether he or she should be allowed into the country. In bivariate models, the associations are not wholly accounted for by a general opposition to non-Whites, non-Westerners, foreigners who do not speak English, Muslims, or those from countries with low average IQ. While circumstantial in nature, the study’s findings suggest that public beliefs about the relative positions of different immigrant groups may be reasonably accurate.

The debate about free speech on these matters is not only theoretical. Noah Carl was subsequently fired, and his writing of this study contributed to that firing. Making the case against free speech in this domain, thus comes down to whether one trusts that free speech in this area will allow the public to be more well-informed than they would be with censorship. I submit that they would be more informed with free speech.

A second positive case for free speech in this domain is that causes might be misidentified in harmful ways. Take the case of African crime rates. In the last 10 years this has increasingly been blamed on the nefarious behavior of European people, who have set up an evil society to benefit themselves, also something something microaggressions. The government and society at large has accepted this theory of 'systemic racism' and taken preventive actions. Workers are forced to take sensitivity training to reduce their supposedly harmful stereotypes. If this theory is false, this is a tremendous amount of money being spent on worthless programs, and much wasted scientific research. In fact, it is also morally offensive to the Europeans as they are falsely accused. This is what Arthur Jensen had in mind when he wrote about this ethical issue back in the early 1970s. How right he was.