Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill get this point clearly enough that they are worth quoting in full:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. (Mill, On Liberty 7-9)

The Mills are right about all of this. Other people, outside the government, can silence our speech by taking away our livelihoods or raising a mob – or by raising subtler fears of shunning and ostracism. Being permanently exiled from your community can have a more negative impact on your life than being sent to jail for a few months. In the era of social media, mobs take on a new and dangerous decentralized form. The doxxing of outspoken women, perhaps most famously during GamerGate, is its own form of free-speech violation, silencing their expression and their truth-seeking.

When the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organization published a shaming list of left-wing professors that opened them up to death threats, that was a threat to their free speech. When Kirk was assassinated for his political views, that was a violation of his free speech. And when people got fired for celebrating Kirk’s murder, that firing in turn was a violation of their free speech.

But all these points raise a big problem, a major complexity. When someone calls for me to be fired for my speech, that call is absolutely an attack on my free speech – but it is itself speech. We saw how the Mills include in “opinion” the ability to deprive someone of their livelihood – which, they agree, can have dire consequences. But what that means, then, is that what is restricting opinion is opinion. Speech can restrict speech. So the Mills say:

even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. (103-4)

All of this creates a genuine problem, for which there are no easy solutions. Just as electoral democracies allow the election of anti-democratic authoritarians, principles of free speech thereby allow attacks on speech. An electoral democracy must have safeguards to prevent a democratically elected government from ending electoral democracy; otherwise the point of allowing the democratic election will be lost. We need to put some limits on electoral decision-making in order to protect electoral decision-making itself. And so likewise there must be some limits on free speech, at least in order to protect free speech.

When you acknowledge the Mills’ point that some free speech can inhibit other free speech, it becomes impossible to think of free speech as an absolute. Free-speech absolutism only works on the simplistic libertarian view, the one that American leftists somehow fooled themselves into, that only the government can interfere with free speech. While that view is dangerously wrong, it does have the advantage of getting you out of complexity free: you can consistently say that the government should never restrict people’s speech under any circumstances. But once you recognize that restricting free speech is bad whoever does it, then you are required to admit nuance – to see that it’s not always clear how best to protect truth-seeking and self-expression. (Thus the discourse around free speech – like many other kinds of discourse these days – is likely hampered by a focus on rights, which tend to be considered more absolute than they should be.)

So what do you do with free speech when you recognize it’s not an absolute? Above all, you need to remember what free speech is for. Its purpose is not to restrict the scope of government, but to allow for the important human goods of self-expression and the pursuit of truth. Like health and money, free speech is a hugely important instrumental good, necessary for important human ends.

One consequence of this point is that the opinions protected should be those professed to be part of a sincere quest for truth, or connected to the development of one’s own individual nature. (They could even be to deny the existence of truth, if that too is sincere – a sincere quest for something like truth). When the purpose of expressing opinions is not a sincere seeking but just for the hell of it – or, indeed, the purpose is to hurt – then the goods of freedom of speech are less well served.

So too, because of its explicit connection to the seeking of truth, academic freedom is a special kind of freedom of speech that deserves stronger protection than everyday speech – but also comes with responsibility and accountability to that goal of truth-seeking. That’s why it’s not wrong in principle to attempt to get scholarly articles retracted, as an open letter tried to do with Rebecca Tuvel’s transracialism article. It’s just that in that particular case, Tuvel’s article met scholarly standards perfectly well, whether you agree with its claims or not – whereas the open letter itself had only slightly more intellectual merit than racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It is clear to any reasonable observer that the mob was trying to silence Tuvel for the content of her scholarly opinions, not for any lack of scholarly quality in her expression of them, and that is why that letter (and the more general Facebook campaign against it) was indeed an attempt to violate her freedom of speech.

The idea of “safe spaces” is a potentially helpful area to think about the application of free speech. Especially in an academic context, I don’t think it makes sense to say that hurt feelings alone constitute enough of a harm to restrict speech. Part of students’ formation should include learning to handle difficult and widely dissenting opinions and address any hurts within themselves that may be caused. Yet it is also the case that some students may feel intimidated or disrespected enough – psychologically unsafe enough – that they self-censor, silence themselves from speaking. The goods of free speech are not served by that self-censorship either. A skillful professor concerned with the goods free speech will not just allow students to express views freely, but find ways to actively encourage that expression, especially from more timid students who would otherwise keep silent.

Given the tensions and paradoxes involved, protecting free speech is a lot harder than it sounds. That difficult task is nevertheless crucial to human flourishing.