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This is one my coursework essays for Part IB Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, March 2024.
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The practice of no-platforming has been often objected to on liberal grounds. It is unjustifiable, many say, because it is incompatible with a liberal politics. Alternatively, some would argue that, although incompatible with the principle of liberty, no-platforming is justifiable for other reasons, or that no-platforming is in fact compatible with liberal principles, but is unjustifiable for other reasons. In this essay, I intend only to focus on the question of the practice’s compatibility with liberty and what is required of it. Illustrating that no-platforming in some cases might be justifiable all-things-considered will be a bonus and side-effect. Notwithstanding, I will try to capture an understanding of liberty such that it is an important moral consideration and most things that infringe upon it are unjustifiable all-things-considered.
I take the practice of no-platforming to be that of deliberately preventing a certain speaker from expressing ideas to a certain audience. I take the principle of liberty to be that according to which there is a prima facie duty to allow speech for the sake both of those who might want to speak and those who might want to hear. On its face, practicing no-platforming is incompatible with upholding the principle of liberty, because the former entails the silencing of even sincere forms of speech, and the latter extends a prima facie right for speech to be heard.
However, despite serious worries surrounding the compatibility of no-platforming with liberty, I argue that the two are compatible. I will henceforth be referring to this view as compatibilism. Inspired by Jeremy Fantl, I defend the position that no-platforming is both justifiable and compatible with liberty when it is carried out on the basis of what I will call the victim principle. According to the victim principle, no-platforming is permissible whenever there exists a victim for whom it would be right to feel isolated/betrayed by the community in which the speaker in question would be platformed, were they to be platformed.
In (I), I will outline in more detail the problem(s) facing compatibilism, and the way in which I will try to address it. In (II), I will consider the attempt made by Simpson & Srinivasan to defend a compatibilist position by appeal to academic freedom, and show where they have gone wrong, in my view. In (III) I will outline my victim principle, taken largely from Fantl, in more detail, and respond to some conceptual questions that emerge there. I will then bring the essay to a close in (IV) by responding to some objections that my compatibilist position faces.
A platform is an opportunity for a certain speaker to express ideas to a certain audience. Even with this in mind, however, the practice of no-platforming is difficult to define. It cannot be identified with disinvitation to speak on a certain platform, as there are cases of what we would like to call no-platforming that do not involve the withdrawal of an invitation, but merely the failure to provide one. For example, if a university host were to consider inviting a certain speaker, but was then to find that their platforming would be forbidden by a certain policy of the university, then we would want to say that the speaker’s failure to be invited would be an instance of no-platforming.[1] If this policy was unjust, then we would want to say that it was a case of wrongful no-platforming. Equally, however, we do not want to say that somebody is no-platformed whenever they are not provided with a platform, because this would mean that everyone is no-platformed almost all of the time. With these two things in mind, then, we can understand the practice of no-platforming to be the deliberate prevention of a speaker to access a certain platform. This prevention is decided for specific reasons, the lack of which would mean that the relevant speaker would have been offered access to the relevant platform.
Equally hard to define is the ‘principle of liberty’. Simpson & Srinivasan state that ‘no-platforming generally expresses the view that the targeted person is morally or politically beyond the pale’ and that, therefore, ‘[o]n its face… [it] seems to be at odds with a liberal politics.’[2] This suggests that their conception of the principle of liberty is such that it entails something like a freedom of expression for the sake of potential speakers and potential audiences: to suggest that someone is ‘morally or politically beyond the pale’ is to treat them with an inadequate level of respect required for their liberty, but is also to be paternalistic to the audience who should be exposed to challenging ideas and be offered the freedom to reach their own verdicts. This seems to get at why no-platforming seems, on its face, incompatible with liberty. I will therefore understand ‘the principle of liberty’ to be such that there is a prima facie duty to allow speech for the sake of both potential speakers and potential audiences.
Regardless of which of the three main conceptions of liberty one favours, the reasons for no-platforming’s seeming incompatibility with liberty will be (roughly) the same. According to a negative conception of liberty, an agent is free (liberated) when they are free from external human influence or interference.[3] Alternatively, according to a positive conception of liberty, one is free when they are ‘masters of themselves’.[4] According to a republican conception of freedom, one is free when there is no-one who has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily in their lives.[5] It is plausible to suggest that no-platforming a speaker, on its face, is a case of human interference, impedes self-mastery, and serves as a case of exercising a capacity to influence someone arbitrarily, with regards to both the speaker and the potential audience in question. For this reason, the compatibilist question can be pursued without my dedicating to any one specific conception of liberty.
Despite serious worries surrounding the compatibility of no-platforming with liberty, I will try to show that the two are compatible. I defend the position that no-platforming is both justifiable and compatible with liberty when it is carried out on the basis of what I will call the victim principle. According to the victim principle, no-platforming is permissible whenever there exists a victim for whom it would be right to feel isolated/betrayed by the community in which the speaker in question would be platformed, were they to be platformed.
Now, it is clear that there are at least some cases in which no-platforming is compatible with the principle of liberty. Consider the following kinds of speakers:
(1) individuals whose presence/talks would break the law in a functioning democracy (say, by encouraging an offense, stirring up hatred, causing intentional harassment etc.);
(2) individuals who are known to offer only positions/arguments devoid of meaning, and to intend to bedazzle audience members ignorant of relevant terminologies and discursive norms…;
(3) individuals who are known to try to proliferate harmful/false views among their audiences by way of manipulation rather than coherent arguments (e.g., trying to win a debate via rhetorical means rather than argumentative substance).[6]
We take these cases not to be ones in which the speaker’s freedom of expression is being infringed upon in a way that is incompatible with the principle of liberty. This is because either there are no ideas or opinions being expressed (as in the case of commanding/inciting violence), or, if there are, they are not being expressed in a way that entitles the speaker to express them and the audience to hear them (as in the cases where the speaker is using bedazzlement or rhetoric). As that incompatibilism is true, on its face, is intuitive, so too is that cases (1)-(3) are exemptions from the incompatibilist intuition. I will therefore venture to try to show that compatibilism is true even in cases outside of those granted by (1)-(3). Nevertheless, from that these cases are intuitive outliers, we can derive an important clarificatory note: even according to incompatibilists, it is not the case that speakers have an absolute right to express their views freely. This right is only extended to those who express their views in a way that grants it to them. By attempting to bedazzle or manipulate the audience, a speaker deliberately violates the norms required for reasonable discourse. Rather than being cases of speech whose silencing would constitute a limiting of the freedom of both speaker and audience, such cases become ones whose platforming would constitute a limiting of the freedom of the audience. I will return to this point later.
Firstly, I would like to address the compatibilist strategy, employed by Simpson & Srinivasan, that appeals to academic freedom.
Simpson & Srinivasan provide an argument for compatibilism which invokes the principle of academic freedom. According to them, the university has a responsibility to research and to teach students, and so no-platforming speakers is at least permissible and compatible with liberty when platforming would undermine these epistemic goals. Although our criteria for platforming speech in the public realm are broader, because we cannot trust the government to silence on the basis of epistemic goals, no-platforming is often justified in the academic setting. This is especially the case when the speaker in question undermines disciplinary expertise and consensus, because disciplinary authority is an important means of bringing about the epistemic goals of the university to the greatest extent.[7] Simpson & Srinivasan give the example of a gender studies speaker who denies the moral permissibility of homosexuality. Because what they deny is accepted consensually in the field of gender studies, it is an axiom the undermining of which reduces disciplinary competence, and therefore impedes upon the epistemic goals of the university.[8] Another example that they cite is that of Germaine Greer, who’s invitation to talk at Cardiff University on “Women & Power” in 2015 was protested due to her supposed transphobia.[9] As there is little disciplinary consensus in feminist theory, the authors contend, it is not clear that Greer’s no-platforming would have been justified – until, at least, these disciplinary controversies resolve.[10] Part of what motivates Simpson & Srinivasan to see no-platforming as a question of academic freedom rather than of freedom of speech is a desire to acknowledge the university as a unique setting.
However, in doing so, they provide an argument for compatibilism that only applies to the academic realm. Using it, we cannot discuss or discern cases of justifiable no-platforming from unjustifiable in the public realm – for example, at community events or on twitter. What is more, their justification of no-platforming does not obviously succeed in justifying it in the cases that they would like to. Returning to the gender studies speaker; it is not obvious that no-platforming someone who denies the moral permissibility of homosexuality would be most conducive to the university’s epistemic goals of teaching and research. As Peters & Nottelmann[11] note, exposing students to challenging or controversial ideas can serve as an opportunity to enhance their analytical abilities, and even more so when expressed by someone who genuinely believes them. Appealing to disciplinary authority does not easily do away with this issue; due to cognitive biases, academics are often mistaken as to what it would be most conducive to their epistemic ends to do for their students in the university.
It seems, therefore, that Simpson & Srinivasan need something more to appeal to in order to defend the compatibilist position. This, I believe, can come in the form of what I call the victim principle.