This article in the New York Times‘s philosophy section “The Stone”, is a mixed bag, but on the whole not a bag that’s so great (click on screenshot to read it). The author is a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University, Yale-NUS College and Vassar College, as well as the author of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. 

Click on the screenshot to read it:

Van Norden’s point is that not everyone deserves a platform to espouse their ideas, even if they deserve free speech in the Constitutional sense: freedom from government censorship. And I don’t think many of us would disagree with that. I am not, for instance, going to invite a creationist to speak to my department, though I didn’t try to prevent someone in physics from doing that a few years ago. I wouldn’t invite Alex Jones to speak here, either. But that doesn’t mean that I object to him being given air time. I just don’t bother to listen, for what I heard is deranged bawling into the ether.

Some speech, says Van Norden, is basically not only inferior in quality (and social justice!) to other, but is simply not worth hearing, and his examples are telling:

On June 17, the political commentator Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Fox News, asserted that crying migrant children separated from their parents are “child actors.” Does this groundless claim deserve as much airtime as, for example, a historically informed argument from Ta-Nehisi Coates that structural racism makes the American dream possible?

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?

From this we already know what Van Norden thinks: he’s an authoritarian Leftist who thinks that the best speech, and the speech that deserves a platform, is the kind of speech of which he approves.  In response to John Stuart Mill’s claim, in On Liberty, that all speech deserves a platform to help us winnow good ideas from bad, and to help us examine and hone our position, Van Norden disagrees, for, he argues, the Little People simply can’t do that kind of winnowing:

So, with people irrational and susceptible to the wiles of Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, what are we to do? What we must do is decide what kind of speech is “beneficial” speech:

I suggest that we could take a big step forward by distinguishing free speech from just access. Access to the general public, granted by institutions like television networks, newspapers, magazines, and university lectures, is a finite resource. Justice requires that, like any finite good, institutional access should be apportioned based on merit and on what benefits the community as a whole.

At about this point in the article you begin to realize that Van Norden’s scheme requires that someone be the arbiter of who gets access to public platforms. And of course that’s what happens: newspapers don’t allow every crackpot to write a letter, televisions don’t put every tin-foil-hat-wearing bozo on the air. But Van Norden’s idea that publicized speech should be based on “merit” and on “what benefits the community as a whole” is not a way to resolve this issue. For what is the criterion of “merit”? And what does “beneficial” mean? Some people, like me, would argue that it’s beneficial to give a platform to Holocaust denialists, or anti-vaxers, just to hear what they have to say (and of course this comes with the ability to produce counter-speech).

But Van Norden’s view of beneficial, I think, means “promotes social justice and defends the oppressed”, and excludes people like Jenny McCarthy and Ann Coulter, as well as people like Jordan Peterson. I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson, and what I know makes me think he’s a very strange fellow, but I wouldn’t for a minute claim that his views don’t deserve to be on television. Van Norden:

What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination,” or to give time on a television news show to someone like Coulter who asserts that in an ideal world all Americans would convert to Christianity, or to interview a D-list actor like Jenny McCarthy about her view that actual scientists are wrong about the public health benefits of vaccines is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Not necessarily. I suspect Peterson is worth taking seriously as a thinker in at least some of his claims, but someone doesn’t have to be taken seriously as a thinker—they can be used as vehicles to hone your own arguments, or to see what the “other side” is really thinking. Ann Coulter is a provocateur, and Jenny McCarthy a misguided ignoramus about vaccination, but wouldn’t it be useful to have a debate between Jenny McCarthy and, say, someone like Orac?  If we don’t know what the anti-vaxers are thinking, or what kind of bizarre rationalizations they use to oppose vaccination, then how can we oppose them, and what is our impetus to learn why vaccinations are safe and useful? And if Van Norden thinks that Jordan Peterson isn’t worth giving air time too, then a lot of people on this site, who have listened to his YouTube videos, will surely disagree. For even if they don’t like Peterson, they’ve found merit in his debates with people like Matt Dillahunty and Sam Harris.

No, Van Norden’s article comes down to him saying this: “I, Dr. Van Norden, am capable of deciding which speech is beneficial to society and which is not. I won’t bother to discuss that here, or even define ‘beneficial’, but take my word for it: the people I don’t approve of aren’t worth hearing.”

h/t: Tom