Tolerance and freedom of expression
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Okay, good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's event. The Sir Karl Popper Memorial Fund was established in 1994 to commemorate one of the intellectual giants of LSE's history and indeed of 20th century philosophy.

And it does so by supporting student work in areas to which Popper contributed and providing occasional lectures such as the one tonight. I wanted to take the opportunity to just recognize the extraordinary contribution made to the committee's work by David Miller,

who was, I think, on the committee right from the inception of the fund and so served on it for over 30 years and who sadly passed away at the end of last year, but was one of the people who helped make today's event possible. Karl Popper, a very well-known figure, was part of the Austrian generation that emigrated before the Second World War in 1936.

worked his way here to the United Kingdom via New Zealand, joined the LSE in 1946 and was the founding member of the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. He's of course extremely well known himself for his work in philosophy of science and for his doctrine of falsificationism, but he made several, he made important contributions to many areas, many areas of philosophy, including areas like philosophy of mind, metaphysics,

and especially political philosophy, his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, has been extraordinarily influential. Our speaker tonight, Peter Godfrey-Smith, is a philosopher that, if I'm permitted to say so, very much in the mould of Popper. Currently Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney, his own intellectual contributions span many fields, including political philosophy and the philosophy of mind, but which are firmly anchored in science and in the philosophy of science.

He's the author of a number of exceptional books, including the 2010 Lakotos Book Award winner, The Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, and more recently, his other minds, The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, which has been published in over 20 languages. In The Open Society, Popper wrote, "'Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,' giving voice to what has come to be thought of as a paradoxical implication of promoting tolerance."

Understanding that puzzle and the various implications of it is as important today as it was when Popper first wrote about it. We very much look forward to hearing Peter's views on it. Thank you very much. I'll talk tonight about a collection of topics related to tolerance and freedom of expression, both of those things. Quite a bit of the talk will be about toleration of the intolerant, a problem that was highlighted earlier

just on 80 years ago now by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. There's a photo of Popper from his time in New Zealand, just around the time of publication of that book. Popper suggested that tolerance in political contexts can be self-defeating.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance, he said, because it allows intolerance to flourish and take over. And he called this the paradox of tolerance. Now that thought appeared as part of an end note in a two-volume book, but it's become quite famous.

Starting from that idea of an apparent paradox arising from a tolerant society's attitude to intolerance, Ben Kerr and I wrote a paper that was explicitly organised around levels of tolerance.

There are choices we all make about what might be called first order tolerance, tolerance of ordinary behaviours that we might not like. And there are also choices to make about second order tolerance, tolerance or intolerance of first order choices.

Do you tolerate the intolerant? Are you intolerant of the tolerant? Those are examples of second order choices. Now, you can keep going to third order and beyond. We think that questions about tolerance have to be handled this way, not by working with a single notion of tolerance that's just applied flatly to everything, including tolerance itself.

So that's just a first cartoonish representation of the structure. The main example in our paper of an ordinary behaviour that you can be tolerant or intolerant toward was choice of sexual partners in a situation where everyone involved is a consenting adult.

Are you tolerant of other people's choices of that kind? And then, are you tolerant of intolerance or tolerant of tolerance at the first level? Now, this is a relatively simple case because the starting point is a private behaviour. But we had our eye on the harder case of speech, expression of ideas, and today I'm going to look at this harder case.

Part of my goal is just to put the debates about free speech into the framework that Ben and I developed. Now, from there, you might go in several different directions when you make policy choices. The framework itself does not dictate choices. But I will go on and defend some policies using our framework along with other ideas. Now, Ben should not be taken to agree or disagree with the policy choices that I'll defend. When we come to that stage,

I won't be saying free speech does include or does not include such and such, as if there's some hidden fact about free speech or free expression that I'm revealing, a fact about what is included and what is not.

You can ask questions about what's legal in some particular time and place, but I'm not discussing what's legal. I'm looking more at what should be legal. We can make freedom of expression into this thing or that one, but a decision of this kind can be based in reasons, perhaps broad ones that use general principles, perhaps more pragmatic ones.

Now, Tim Scanlon, who I'll talk about later, asks in one of his papers how much justification in this area is natural and how much is artificial. What he means is how much justification for policies here can be based in some general moral or political principle

argument from the ground up as opposed to being based in a pragmatic assessment of what seems to work in societies like ours. And that would be one of my themes, the relationship between general principles and the pragmatic. Okay, I'll start by describing the framework that I think we need. Much of this is based on the earlier paper with Ben, although I won't say what I'm adding or changing things.

Let's look at that relatively simple case where questions of toleration arise. Sex between consenting adults. Gay sex between men was illegal in the UK until 1967, I understand. Now it's legal and sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.

So we start here with what might be called a ground floor or a base level behaviour. The behaviours I also refer to as ordinary. And here this is choice of sexual partner.

This choice is, or at least can be, private in an obvious sense. Now that privacy is not enough to show that all choices are okay. Plenty of religious views and some others would say that only a few choices are acceptable as other options offend against God or violate the natural order. But whatever options one chooses, they don't interfere with someone else's behaviour.

Now you might argue that other people's choices will eventually become affected if same-sex relationships are normalised. That's true. The interference I have in mind when I talk about interference has to be fairly close at hand and personal, not long-term and indefinite. The ground floor or base level is not utopia.

People make bad sexual choices. They can also be manipulated in subtle ways when not being coerced. Now, manipulation takes us into a grey area or outside the realm of what I'm calling base-level behaviour. Bad choices don't do that. They're just part of life.

Then, are you tolerant of other people's choices here? Maybe you don't like gay or straight sex, but would you interfere? The state used to interfere, and in some places it still does. First order tolerance is tolerance of people's choices at the base level. First order intolerance is intolerance of some of those choices.

Okay, this is a figure that Ben did for me. In these figures, blue and yellow at the bottom are base level behavioural options.

At the levels above, green and red correspond to tolerance and intolerance respectively, as in go and stop. And we have here base level options, we assume there's just two, some of the first order options in relation to tolerance and some of the second order options as well. Now tolerance, of course, can be selective. You might be tolerant of this choice, but not that one.

I will simplify today quite a bit of the time and talk as if tolerance at a level is pretty broad. Tolerance of lots of options at the next level down. I want to keep things as simple as I can. As I say, first order tolerance is the familiar kind. Second order tolerance is a matter of tolerance of first order policies. Tolerance of whether some other person is first order tolerant or not. What is intolerance?

For my purposes, it is interference in people's choices. Now, the idea can be understood more broadly, and I'll come back to this later, but interference I take to be the heart of it. Where does interference start? Well, it's coercion in some form, even if only a mild form.

It's not presenting someone with an argument that they're making a mistake, but impeding them, threatening them, bringing the forces of law or institutional rules to bear on them. It may also involve incentive giving. Interference has vague borders, but its goal is coercion rather than ordinary persuasion. Now, in our case of gay sex, our governments, Australia and the UK, are now first-order tolerant, and they also require you to be that way

There's a sort of summary of the case of sex.

Now, I emphasised just now the role of the state, but the structure I'm describing, the base level, first order, second order distinctions also apply to the policies of other organisations like universities and individual actions. So what matters here is the idea of different levels.

Now, in the sex case, the combination of policies that we see both here and in Australia and other places is what I will call a classic liberal combination of first and second order policies. That is tolerance at the first level, you know, ordinary tolerance, and second order intolerance of first order intolerance. You're not allowed to be too intolerant at first order.

Now intolerance at the higher level is the kind of thing that Popper saw as paradoxical and others have had a similar attitude. An example is John Rawls, perhaps the most important late 20th century political philosopher, in his book A Theory of Justice. When we are intolerant of the intolerant, rightfully

Rawls thought that this is a kind of imperfection in our tolerance, though it can be justified. It's a falling away from an ideal of complete tolerance. Rawls thought that this compromise is okay when there's a danger that intolerant people pose to the tolerant society. So this is very similar in spirit to Popper. We ward off a threat of intolerance by dropping our tolerance of those people.

Now, if you set things up in the way that Ben and I do, this is not a compromise or not yet or a paradox. We have different choices at different levels with different justifications. We have different choices at different levels with different justifications. It's not just that labelling things first or second order takes away the problems.

but there can be a relationship between choices at different levels that makes sense and that results in a liberal, what I call a classical liberal combination. For example, suppose we want to respect individual autonomy in situations where no one's being adversely affected by someone else's choice. As long as there's no hidden coercion, we want to respect freely made choices, so we're first order tolerant.

And in addition, we might want to protect that realm of free choice. So we are intolerant of those who are not tolerant at the first level. They would like to interfere and we want to interfere in their interference. This is second order intolerance, which if we just call it intolerance, does seem to clash with our first order tolerance. But there's no real clash.

We are preventing interference with what we think ought to be a realm of personal choice. Okay, I did first and second order tolerance questions. There's also third order and fourth. Suppose someone tolerates the intolerance of another person in relation to these sexual matters. Do you tolerate that or do you try to interfere with their choice? It gets quite complicated once we get to third order choices and above.

A question that we asked in our earlier paper is how much tightness there is in these combinations of choices. It is possible to have combinations of policies at different levels that are what we call behaviorally contradictory. Here, at a higher level, you interfere with some lower-level policy that you yourself choose at the lower level. So a homophobic person intolerant of homophobes is an example.

Even beyond an extreme case like that, if you include extra assumptions, there does tend to be a lot of constraint between the various higher levels. But that will not be my topic today, and we don't have to climb to the upper stories at all. The first few levels will be all that matters. And so let's now turn to freedom of expression.

Okay, there's a famous pronouncement attributed to the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Now, this is actually a description of Voltaire's views by an English writer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who wrote about Voltaire in the early 20th century. Now, I wanted to have a photo of Hall, but as far as I can tell, online, all the images that come up for her name are not actually her.

So I just have Voltaire. This looks like the classic liberal combination. The Voltaire-Hall figure states a willingness to interfere with those who would be first order intolerant of some other person's verbal behaviour. Now, I think this case shows the necessity of a multi-level treatment. You probably don't want to endorse...

Hall Voltaire, the slogan, in a totally unqualified way because perhaps some of what the controversial person is saying is itself an attempt to interfere with others. You want to defend their right to say things that count as, well, as what?

The problem arises from the fact that speech is mostly not a private behaviour. Far from it. It is often designed to influence people, sometimes to motivate behaviours that might be very consequential. Public speech, unlike sex, is everyone's business. We can tell what Hall Voltaire wants to achieve, what they have in mind. There's a person who's saying controversial things of some political kind.

Person B wants to stop them. And Hall, Voltaire will defend the rights of A. But is this A role and B role just something that we're supposed to pick up on in the context? Is our putting people into the A and B roles mostly arbitrary or guided by what we think is sort of respectable, even if we don't agree with it? Here's another case. In response to a controversial talk scheduled at a conference, a protest was planned.

I heard the protest defended as an exercise of free speech. Now, I don't know what the intention was, to disrupt the talk or just object to it, though I think it was to disrupt and perhaps prevent it, and free speech was brought in as a defence.

Now, sometimes people might say this in a way that's disingenuous, but it can be serious, and I took it that way. They might say, "This is my free speech. I think this situation is a free-for-all, and this is my chosen role in it, and this includes having effects on other people's attempts to say things."

That case was in Australia a couple of years ago. In 2015, the well-known feminist Germaine Greer was invited to give a talk at Cardiff University in Wales. Because of her views on sex and gender, there was a petition asking for cancellation, and in the end, just a small protest took place on the day.

Discussing it afterwards, the journalist and filmmaker Louis Theroux expressed concern to Greer about what he saw as the left's intolerance. And Greer said, but I'm on their side. If they want me to be shut up, then fine. Go for it. I don't think anyone's got a God-given right to speak. Shout away, she said.

Those cases introduce another theme. Communication is a two-sided phenomenon. There's speaking and hearing, production and reception, and each of these can be sites of interference. Free expression is often understood as bearing on the production side, but there are the two sides, and if you interfere in reception enough, you can make production pointless, perhaps even meaningless.

Now in Negria's case, on the face of it, she's saying that others are entitled to interfere with her expression and she doesn't advocate interference with their interference. Now if so, why endorse the protesters' interference but not someone else's?

She might mean that the protesters are going to interfere with the reception of what she says, and she's not advocating interference with that. So perhaps her view might be expressed by saying no one's got a God-given right to be heard, and there's some difference there, I think. Anyway, these are the sorts of cases I want to address. And so let's now go to the multi-level framework and ask how it applies to cases like this.

To apply it, we need to justify the idea of some ground, floor or base level behaviours. With them at the bottom of the hierarchy, other actions are definable in terms of how they relate to the base. Now, the idea of interference and non-interference is usable here. Again, it can define the base level. It's not just that particular behaviours can be non-interfering.

but there's a domain consisting of non-coercive, non-interfering speech.

This is not speech, but this is speech that does not harness power in a way aimed at constraining what someone else says, but whose influence goes through reason giving. Now that's what I'm calling this base level collection of speech acts might be mixed in with other acts that are very different, but there is still this domain, the domain of speech designed to be efficacious, but in a way that leaves receiver choice intact.

Now, I said about the base level in the sex example that the base level is not utopia, and that's absolutely true here again. All sorts of bad things might be said, but interference is not in the picture. Now, not everything that's base level by this standard is going to be handled in the same way later in this talk, as far as protection goes.

Commercial advertising, for example, does not involve interference, but I will give it a special treatment. I mention this now so my talk doesn't have a bait and switch or advertise and switch feel to it. But let's set aside special cases for the moment and stay with the main idea. So first order tolerance is a matter of whether you interfere with things said at the base level. And second order tolerance is

is directed on, well, second-order tolerance and intolerance are policies directed on those behaviours at the first level, on people's interference or not with base-level speech and so on. So we can re-express the Hall-Voltaire principle like this. We say, I disapprove of what you say in your base-level speech, but I won't interfere with it. I'll also defend your right to say it

when other people try to interfere with your saying it. And we can contrast the whole Voltaire attitude with another. A person might say, "I disapprove of what you say in your base level speech, but I will let you say it. I won't interfere with others who want to stop you saying it. I will be second-order tolerant of their first-order intolerance."

as in the picture. So Germaine Greer, as I interpreted her, was somewhere like this. Her tolerance extended to other people's attempts to interfere in base-level speech like hers. Okay, so we have the multi-level picture in place, and I think as before, some progress is made just by setting up the picture.

As with the sex example, we can say, you know, if we respect autonomy at the base level, it makes sense to protect it by interfering with people who want to interfere with it. So in both cases, the appearance of paradox or compromise, I think, is reduced or gone.

But justifying a policy like this is more difficult. Given the power of speech, no privacy justification can work. You know, if someone says, at the ground level, there's no coercion, so everything is fine, a reply to that is, coercion is not the only kind of harm. Why should we stand back and tolerate other harms that stem from this base-level speech?

Now, a famous line of argument, due especially to John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, holds that we get all sorts of societal benefits from a free exchange of ideas. We can correct and improve our ideas through critical exchange. This is a consequentialist argument.

free speech works and we can see why. Now this, that argument might be applied to the classic liberal, often is applied to the classic liberal combination with first order tolerance, second order intolerance. It might be simplistic to say that that argument has the same force in every case, but I think it takes us quite a long way. Basically, I endorse the Mill argument.

Still, is there more that might be said? Something less pragmatic and less tied to circumstances? To explore this, I'll make use of a famous paper about free expression by the Harvard philosopher Tim Scanlon from 1972. Now, Scanlon abandoned much of this paper within a decade, and I'll discuss the abandonment as well.

The main idea is to focus at this stage not on speech itself, but on making up one's mind, working out what to believe. That's something that happens in the course of base level communication. And Scanlon said in the 1972 paper that we'd not give that right up to a government. The authorities might be able to tell us what to do some of the time, but not what to believe.

And then further, although there might be various reasons the state does have to restrict what people say, one thing that would not be a good reason for restrictions on expression, Scanlon said, is the fact that if people are allowed to say certain things, it might lead to bad beliefs being accepted, beliefs that are false or otherwise harmful. So he said we should not restrict expression based on that reason.

Now, if bad beliefs are adopted and lead to bad actions, the state can certainly go after the actions. This is not a situation where everyone can just do what they like, but the suggestion is the state should respect autonomy in forming beliefs,

And that means that the downstream consequences of that autonomy in action should not be a basis for restriction on what people say to each other. So speech, thoughts and actions are all in the picture. Now I'm expressing all this as simply as possible. I'll put a central passage from Scanlon on the slide, but not read it out. He's working within

a social contract approach to these questions and he's concerned with the powers that we should and should not give up to the state. His view of what these powers are is based on the philosopher Immanuel Kant's views about rationality and choice. According to this view, we see ourselves as autonomous, making our own reasoned choices.

an autonomous person would not give up to the state the power to describe what they should believe. This means that an autonomous person also would not give up to the state the power to restrict what is said when the basis for that restriction is the possibility of other people forming beliefs that the state does not approve of. Even if those beliefs lead to bad actions, which the state can go after,

Those harms are not the basis for restrictions on expression. Scanlon quickly rejected much of this. He decided that his framework fails to give us a justification to prohibit deceptive advertising, for example, and would also be too permissive about libel. The argument given also applies only against laws and state actions. It can't be used to protect speech from coercion by other institutions.

Scanlon's more recent work, since '72, does not include any argument based on autonomy. Instead, what we have to do always is a weighing of interests, the interests of speakers, audiences and bystanders. People in those roles all have legitimate interests in letting discussion take place freely,

and in some cases, he thinks, legitimate interests in restriction. And we just have to always weigh them up. So in the new Scanlan view, a right to free expression is just one possible upshot of a weighing of interests in the circumstances that we're in. I think Scanlan gave up too much, or at least there were good ideas in the old paper.

I won't make use of the heavy-duty philosophical ideas about agency and autonomy, the ones that come from Immanuel Kant, or the idea that we're only concerned with powers being ceded to the state. I want a philosophically lighter view and one that's broader in relation to contexts of evaluation, by which I mean laws, institutional rules, social norms, and so on. The thing I take from Scanlon

is the idea that the protection we should give to many forms of expression comes from the special status of making up one's mind. And the idea that this has consequences for the basis on which expression might be restricted. Roughly, I think, in the way that Scanlan said. So I'll take Scanlan's language up there and put the summary slide back on. Okay, what status...

Can a principle like this have? If you take the sort of Scanlon-like principle and remove it from his background philosophical assumptions, what kind of status can it have? The idea that making up one's mind has a special role and the state shouldn't regulate expression just on the grounds that people might form beliefs they might not approve of. What status does this principle have? Well, I'll briefly sketch a view.

In moral and political choice, a fundamental activity we all engage in is valuation. Valuation of policies and options.

I don't think we can see this valuation as directed usually on some discrete fact of rightness. There's a fact in virtue of which this is the right arrangement or the right thing to do. I don't think there are facts of that kind, but valuation can be factually informed and informed especially by considerations of parity and non-arbitrariness, by treating like cases like.

When our goal is reasoned valuation of this kind, it's not the case that all justification ends up being case-specific and pragmatic. It could include the development and defense of broad principles. And a positive valuation of autonomy in making up one's mind is reasonable, I believe, and applicable to others as well as oneself.

From there, we can say that while interference in speech might be okay in some forms, one form that is not okay is interference with base level non-coercive discourse based on the fact that I or others might, through ordinary reasoning processes, end up with what other people think of as the wrong view.

If I or others end up with the wrong views, we might do bad things and the government and other agencies can go after those actions. But that, again, is distinct. So I think this can be the basis for first order tolerance. Let's now look at second order toleration, second order policies.

Now, in the easier case of private behaviours like sex, I said that the liberal combination of first order and second... first order tolerance and second order intolerance is not a compromise or imperfection. We are securing first order tolerance, which we see as valuable. We are protecting a legitimate realm of free choice.

The same sort of thing is applicable again in the case of speech. If we value base level discourse because of its role in reflection and forming beliefs, we can actively protect this discourse from people who would interfere with it. This would justify protecting lectures and talks on controversial topics by interfering with attempts to make the event non-viable.

That in turn includes preventing large-scale interference with the reception side of the communicative context. So if a protest is organised alongside a controversial event, that is fine.

If it includes deliberate attempts to drown out speakers, often these days with tin pans, whistles and so on, and make communication impossible within the targeted event, then authorities should establish enough distance between the groups for expression to be possible by the protesters, but for normal communication to be possible.

within the controversial event. So I think we can reasonably echo, with a bit less drama perhaps, the whole Voltaire maxim. Okay, in relation to actually handling the details of first-order tolerance, it is common to allow...

the time, place and manner of expression to be constrained. So wanting to be able to say something is different from wanting to be able to stop traffic to say it or wanting to spray it on a building or on a work of art.

A pro-free speech person can be fine with lots of restrictions on context and manner of expression. You can't say the thing you want to say while blocking traffic, perhaps, but you can say it if you stand off to the side. The harder part of free speech discussions is usually taken to be whether there are things that you shouldn't say or can't say anywhere.

Now, in a similar vein, there'll be some differences between that familiar way of handling these questions and the way I will handle it. I'll suggest there are special contexts, special communicative contexts, in which expression might be base level as far as the interference criterion goes, but in these contexts, expression would not get protection of the kind that would usually go along with passing that test for being base level. I'll talk about all these...

most of these cases. When Scanlon gave up his old view, he listed some problem cases that motivated him. These included deceptive advertising and some other harmful advertising. Now, I would treat all commercial settings where someone is trying to sell something as special contexts.

This is not just about advertising and labels. Many other special rules already apply when something is being sold. Intellectual property and copyright protection, for example. There are expressive or symbolic products in commercial life, as well as expression in the form of advertising.

I would group all those together and say that commercial life in general is a setting that we should handle with distinctive rules and these could include special rules around expression. Now, pornography is a contested case in free speech debates. It's been defended with an appeal to free expression.

It's also been attacked through appeals to free expression. Catherine MacKinnon argued that in pornography, the free speech of men silences the free speech of women. End of quote. The idea is that porn affects how women are perceived in such profound ways that when a woman does try to speak, she can't get her ideas across, especially in relation to sex and her own preferences. So in my terms...

In my terms, that would be an argument that pornography is not base level, as it is itself a form of interference in women's communicative behaviour on the reception side. Now, that is a possible move within my framework. I have to say I find it unconvincing, but I immediately add that most pornography is a commercial product. It's a symbolic commercial product and hence need not enjoy the protection of first-order tolerance at all.

We can impose whatever rules seem sensible here without justifying them in free speech terms, just as we do in other commercial settings. So I think to some extent the free speech debates around pornography have followed a less fruitful avenue. Now this view will not handle all pornography and some harmful non-commercial pornography is a problem case for me. I won't go further into it, but I acknowledge the point.

Other special contexts: during a trial or an election we might want fixed procedures governing the expression of information. Campaign finance reform, behaviours of witnesses in trials and so on. Things that can't be said inside those contexts can usually be said outside them. Now I acknowledge that when we have this special context idea on the table

Especially at the moment, the distinction between commercial and non-commercial settings is rather vexed because a lot of what people put online is proto-commercial. Influencers might not be selling anything right now, but they hope to attract enough recognition that they can later monetize their projects.

And this is a problem. Here we might say, at least as a start, that to the extent that expression is commercial, it can be subject to special regulations outside of normal first order tolerance protections.

Now, not all the problem cases in this area involve a context, a special context. They might be one-off behaviours, including into normal base level communication. I have in mind things like defamation, hate speech, threats and the pair of problems known now as misinformation and disinformation. Those are the main ones I'll discuss for the rest of this time.

Defamation, libel and slander in the narrow sense where it's directed on individuals and maliciously makes claims that are demonstrably inaccurate is a straightforward reasonable case for an exception to protection I think and due to its directedness on individual reputation an exception for defamation doesn't change the picture very much.

Hate speech also has its paradigmatic narrow sense cases. And here I must say that I admire the US approach to this problem with its reluctance to officially prescribe speech of this kind. Now, I see that as a controversial additional claim I'm making.

controversial especially in a UK or European context and I separate it from the other claims I'm making today. Many people, just as in the case of libel and defamation, would want an exception in this case. A problem is that once installed as an exception there is pressure towards a lot of extension of the hate speech category.

Scanlon in his original paper from the 70s battled with a case where a person wants to publish a recipe for homemade nerve gas.

Scanlon said he would restrict this and the wording of his official principle is set up so that providing technical means for harmful acts as opposed to arguing for their reasonableness will be excluded from protection. Now the fact that he had to engage in quite a bit of footwork to deal with that case I think is notable.

Some other famous cases are ones where we might think that the background conditions for well-functioning base-level discussion are just absent. This would include the very famous case of maliciously shouting fire in a crowded theatre, and perhaps, and this is an example used by Mill, denouncing someone to a worked-up crowd gathered in front of their house. Let's now look at misinformation and disinformation.

The proliferation of wild ideas on the internet has prompted many people to defend special new measures, including interference by governments with the expression of some ideas, especially by leaning on media companies. This is a path I generally don't support. I think it's antithetical to the nature of epistemic life. We're all groping forward, trying to work things out. We, we all, we including the authorities,

The insiders will get many things wrong through honest error, carelessness, paranoia, bias. That's just life. Labelling some ideas in a way that sets them off for special treatment as a kind of discrete pathology I think is very much against the spirit of this view.

honest error I said that brings in the distinction between misinformation and disinformation where the latter is said to be malicious and deliberate and the first misinformation simply erroneous

In commercial areas, detecting dishonesty is often feasible and the bodies that make the call can be fairly impartial. That's not true generally in areas of politics and policy. Scanlon also makes this point. It's hard to detect insincerity and the bodies that would make the call often have vested interests.

Now that's a practical objection. Someone I discussed this ideas with a lot said, "Suppose we could reliably detect insincerity and bad faith. Would I oppose governmental proscription as well as ordinary base level rejection of disinformation in that case?" Well, these thought experiments are so problematic. But perhaps I do have to say yes.

we've looked briefly at four forms of dishonesty. Defamation, misleading advertising, perjury in the special context discussion, and disinformation in the current sense. These all have the capacity to undermine ordinary discourse and deliberation, especially by undermining trust. They can undermine features of base-level discourse that make it worth protecting.

If we want to interfere with people who would interfere with base level discourse, why would we not interfere with those who would undermine it? Now, a reply to this argument, I take it, might take a libertarian form. A person might say, let people say what they'd like. People can believe it or not.

In reply to that, at least it might be clear in this hypothetical situation that any kind of second-order protection of disinformative speech would not make much sense. And maybe the same is true for first-order tolerance as well. So I accept my interlocutor's argument in this hypothetical context where we assume there's reliable detection of dishonesty, but in practical terms, I think this is not a good path.

Something I'm more opposed to is the idea that misinformation, where there's no claim of insincerity, should be handled in a pathologizing, coercive way.

Our situation again is one where we're groping forward together on difficult topics. Much, probably most of what is actually contested in these areas is very hard to know. We're all subject to biases and blindnesses of various kinds and the claims people end up making have all sorts of different degrees of justification.

Outsiders and defenders of inconvenient views can turn out to be right. There's not even a useful thought experiment in this case, the misinformation case, in which we hypothetically can directly detect falsehood. If we could do that, there wouldn't be much need to discuss factual topics at all.

The fact that misinformation and disinformation tend to be discussed together, I think is problematic, as the clear harm of insincerity accompanies the category of ordinary error or unorthodoxy and makes the two appear as evil twins deserving of special treatment. Okay, we're getting towards the end now. I'm going to start to wrap things up and offer some general, some last general thoughts.

I started with the case of sexual choices and moved to expression. And I've made something of the similarity in structure between these. And at this point, a person might wonder, why do two cases feel so different?

Well, there are several reasons, I think, why the cases feel different. One is that some of the speech I am calling base level in the free expression case is or is perceived as intolerant

in a broader sense than my sense. This is not a sense involving interference, but a sense involving animosity or lack of respect. And in my discussion of policies, I am indeed looking to protect quite a lot of that as part of first order tolerance. Not to protect it from criticism, even ridicule, but from interference. We can criticise it in our own contributions to base level speech.

I'm trying for a treatment that is as principle-driven as I can make it. Now, a lot of people now prefer a more balance-based little bit of this, little bit of that approach. But I think there is value to a unified treatment if we can manage it. Would I imagine relying on a wholly pragmatic balancing without a guiding principle that has teeth,

I ask myself, do I trust the balances as we've seen them operating recently? I don't trust them very much, especially in relation to the need to look past immediate and short-term pressures. The kind of principle treatment I have offered also goes some distance in the direction of protection of unpopular views.

In response to this, you might think, no, I am too concerned right now about harms that can result from a free-for-all. The liberal view in the form that Godfrey Smith has defended is naive in its treatment of those harms, you might say. Now, in reply...

I would note that one of the conspicuous things about recent debates and the place of free speech arguments in those debates has been the dizzying speed with which the political polarities shift. Free expression becomes a right-wing pause, then a left-wing one, and this is not just a matter of right and left. The contentious phrases of our time, adult human female from the river to the sea, remind us of all this.

When the tables turn, there's often an attempt to say that our free speech is the real thing and the other side's was fake. It's better to resist this, I think, and stay with a broad understanding where you accept that liberalism about speech will protect ideas you really don't like in a situation where you might have some capacity to suppress them.

Not only because, but partly because next week you might be on the other side of it. Now that point has been made often, but it's always a good one, especially right now. I've mentioned John Rawls once or twice, probably the leading 20th century philosopher in the liberal political tradition. One of his famous ideas is

is what he calls the original position. This is an imagined context in which you make choices about the overall structure of the society you will live in without knowing what your place will be within that society, privileged or not, talented or not, and so on. Rawls used this device to think about basic liberties and economic inequalities. Now, whether the thought experiment works all over the place, I think it works well here.

I would say choose your policies about free expression as if you are in Rawls's original position, without knowing how your views will relate to the majority, without knowing whether you will have firm institutional voices backing you or if you will find yourself on the outer. Change occurs so fast now

that things are like this. If you're on the powerful side now, you might not be tomorrow. The original position is approximated by our actual ongoing position.

Okay, the text for this talk is on the front page of my website with lots of footnotes and references and quotes to follow up details if you would like. To close, I would like to thank a number of people who've helped me think through these topics, all of them pushing in different directions, and also thank Richard and the LSE for the opportunity to come here and explore this important topic with you.

Okay, wonderful. Thank you very much, Peter. So we have just a little over half an hour for questions. There are microphones all around. So if you would put your hand up if you want to ask a question. I would ask that when you introduce yourself before asking a question, keep the question reasonably concise, if you may. You can start there in the middle there, right in the middle of the...

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.

Thank you, Professor, for such an excellent lecture. My name is Uyoso Amaruge. I am from Canada, alumnus of the University of London. My question is that how would you categorize the situation where I believe that controversial speech should be allowed if there's a countervailing presence? And I notice a lot of institutions do that. So there was a

There was a time a leader from a country that is, um, surprises human rights came to the USA and gave a lecture in a university. And I noticed that everyone was like, a lot of people opposed that. But before the leader spoke, I think the president denounced him, said he's a dictator, he's this, this, this, he's a disgrace and all that, but allowed him to give a speech, right?

which was all contrary to all the values that that university and that country believes. Now how would you categorize that based on your levels of tolerance and intolerance? Because in a way, the mere act of inviting that leader to speak is tolerance, right? But denouncing him in such really strong terms wasn't like a debate. It was kind of like showing intolerance.

Because it was very insulting and all that. So I just wondered where that would fit into your framework. Then the other question, sorry, I just have a very brief one, is because I'm involved with misinformation analysis a lot. There's a difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach, right?

So because we're in the algorithmic age where there's a lot of virality, where platforms kind of, you know, increase the reach of certain speech, shouldn't platforms be a separate category in case of limiting free speech?

you can allow someone to post something, but if that platform will take it to 10 million people within an hour, isn't that a special case? Thank you. I'll start with the first question and maybe spend more time on that. Denunciation of people is base level, as long as it doesn't bring coercion or interference to bear on the situation.

Now, the way you began your question saying that if there's not a, I think the phrase was countervailing presence of other opinions, then we have a problem. I think that's a helpful way of describing a real feature of some base level speech context. If you don't have a to and fro, then...

What I think of as the function of base-level speech is being compromised even, perhaps just a little bit, but it's being compromised to some extent because the point of it is to have a to and fro. So if there are structural situations where there's no countervailing presence to something that's controversial, difficult, problematic, that is a problem. How is that problem best dealt with? I think probably not by interfering.

with that base level speech. I mean, people, especially around some of the pornography debates, often say, you know, the solution here is more speech. The solution to problematic speech is more speech. And I'm on board with that slogan, and I think I would apply it in the case that you're talking about here. So asymmetric contexts of denunciation have a problematic nature,

probably still lie within base level as I think of it, probably aren't helped much by trying to kind of interfere with it in a top-down way, probably better helped by just a sense of the need to foster countervailing presences. In response to the second thought,

To some extent I think of this as a specific question about the evolving commercial role of the social media platforms. To what extent they should be seen as just places where people can express things, places which have the role of a publisher in having responsibility for what appears there.

Those questions of detail, I don't feel I know enough about as they're evolving in the current legal and commercial debates to offer something helpful, though I think everyone agrees there are questions there. Gentleman at the back there. Yep, yep. There's a...

Thank you very much indeed. I'm a former intelligence analyst in law enforcement so part of my job is to assess probabilities rather than evidence as such. My question is how do you deal with the issue of

what you might call shadow intolerance where you see a big fall off in people discussing certain things. One of the examples is when the United States was still neutral during the Second World War,

the Soviet Union's agents in the United States noticed a sudden falling off, total shutdown of academic papers on nuclear fission and drew certain conclusions. So what isn't said when the dog isn't barking? How do you account for that as signs of intolerance?

They're very interesting phenomena, I agree. I'm not yet seeing a strong connection to these policy choices or to the framework that I want to apply. I will note that one of the cases that Scanlon... I mean, I admire his stuff so much I come back to it over and over. One of the cases he...

emphasises in the more recent papers is military secrets and the like. And that's a kind of descendant of his worrying about the homemade nerve gas case. And it's hard not to say there's a sort of category of important exceptions in the area of military affairs. Now, in the case of academic papers published about fission, that is an interesting case to think about, the topic I didn't tackle here is the relation between

free expression and academic freedom. I'll just say a 30-second word on that and then connect it to the vision case. People sometimes think that free expression and academic freedom are kind of cousins, or academic freedom is one kind of free expression or something like that. I don't think that. I think a better phrase would be something like academic autonomy. I think the thing we talk about as academic freedom is...

a decision to let universities and the like make their own choices on both sides of these questions. When you interfere internally, when you don't, how you police opinion, whether you police opinion, how you reward and punish people within. So I think academic freedom is really the creation of a kind of a little world inside

academic settings in which both expression, reception, interference, reward, all have a kind of self-containedness if academic freedom is real. I think that's the way to ask about academic freedom questions. Now suppose you're in a situation in World War II where the government would quite like people at, say, the University of Chicago not to write papers about nuclear fission.

And some of the people within the faculty, no, I think I've got something interesting to say about this. I would like to publish my breakthrough paper on fishing. That would create an interesting academic freedom problem. The question of to what extent the university, well, let's suppose the university supported this person. That would create an academic freedom problem. To what extent the university should be allowed to sort of go its own way in situations of wartime.

Right, so I think your case does bring up these questions of the relationship between academic freedom and free speech. It doesn't draw strongly on the sort of multi-level framework as I see it, though. Okay, yes?

I'm wondering how your concept of freedom of speech interacts with the freedom to know or the right to know. So I'm thinking of the Snowden case in the U.S. where someone working in intelligence agencies published a bunch of confidential papers on the kind of basis that the public had the right to know. And you could say that this was kind of freedom of speech or freedom to express information

what was held and confident. So I'm wondering how that would interfere with the public's right to know and how freedom of speech or expression would interact with that. Yeah. Snowden and Fishen together is a kind of perfect pairing of difficult cases where my sympathies are, you know, pulled in different directions. I think Assange and Snowden, to some extent, did reasonable things, did more good than harm.

And it's a situation where if you think about base level discourse in this sort of functional way, right, you know, base level discourse as a function of enabling people to make up their own minds in a well-informed and autonomous manner, then...

When governments err on the side of keeping things that are important under wraps, that's at odds with the function of base level discourse. So, you know, that I think is how... That's the initial sort of place it fits in.

Then the guy at Chicago wants to publish a sort of paper on how easy it would be to make a fishing bomb. I think I'll hold your horses at that point. So, yeah, this is difficult territory, but I see... recognise the relation between the Snowden-type case and the Chicago-type case. I'm going to take a question from up at the top there.

Hi. One thing I didn't hear in your lecture was a discussion of the different power of different speakers. There will be situations where somebody's voice, because they're famous or because they're powerful or they have a lot of money or for whatever reason,

can essentially shout down somebody who has a view that's different to theirs. And I'm sure there's many more situations where the balance of power prejudices or favours different actors. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it's clearly very important as a phenomenon. And the question is, how does it...

relate to the policy questions and the proposals I was advocating. I think the main thing I would say is, you know, you look at a situation where there's a great power asymmetry, these people, in virtue of their resources and their standing in society, can have vastly more impact than this other person, that we might think, well, yeah, this might be a situation where a compromise of first-order tolerance, we might be looking to interfere in some way.

But then I think the natural thing to think is, you know, who's likely to have more ability to get into the interference game, you know, once that's on the table? The person with the power. It's not a situation that is readily solved by, you know, some kind of restriction or tamping down of discourse. It's a situation that is, you know, insofar as it's soluble, it's soluble by just...

trying to make the vigorous free-for-all as effective as it can be. So while agreeing it's a problem, I don't see it as pressing against the combination of views that I'm trying to defend. Yeah, thanks a lot. I am Roman Frick. I'm a member of the department here. So a lot in your account depends on drawing boundaries in the right place. So you had...

ordinary speech as it were, and then you had a category of special context and exceptions. And if you look at recent controversial cases like the Greer case that you had up,

I mean different actors would interpret the speech differently so what is just ordinary discourse to some is hate speech to someone else and so I thought I want to get the slide back up tonight took us out of slideshow I don't know if I can get us back in oh there we go I might be able to and I wanted to just get the symmetry between

the speech and the sex case back on the... Yeah, this slide is for special context and exceptions. Oh, that one, okay. So, one of the worries is that what is just ordinary discourse to someone is hate speech to someone else. And then, in one case, it's captured by a framework and in the other case it's not. And I just wonder how you draw these differences and how worried are you that...

the hard cases might be swept under the carpet by just drawing arbitrary lines somewhere. So how would you adjudicate these cases? I think hate speech is the hardest of the hard cases. I agree with that. And, you know, the way I situated myself to it cautiously in the talk is to say that there's the paradigmatic idea

cases of face-to-face vilification. There's no role that they have as a furthering of base level discourse. And the argument that that's a good case for an exception, one can see the force of that argument. And then I think about US

reluctance to let that category get too much purchase, partly because of concern that it would become very expansive. In Australia, it has become, I think, a little too expansive. You certainly can't suppose that just by being offended, someone can make something have the legal status of hate speech. That would be

real problem in the context of enabling vigorous base level discourse. So it's not that I want to deny it's a hard problem case, but I think narrowness and having the hate speech category have as much kinship with the, I think, pretty straightforward exception category of defamation is a reasonable way of handling at least some of that problem case.

OK, good. So we have a little here. Thank you. My name is Sachin Patel.

I wonder if you had any views on the concept we have in this country, certainly, of votes of conscience, where it seems like there's quite a bizarre blurred line where, to use your example of the sort of liberal scenario, we actually appear to allow lawmakers to express views that actually sometimes do appear to be quite intolerant, whether that's on matters like gay marriage or euthanasia.

where conscience votes have a specific

where you think of this as problematic? Yeah, so to use your liberal scenario where we should be, we tend to be intolerant of those who are intolerant, and yet in our Houses of Parliament, we have a number of votes where, from my understanding, you know, lawmakers are permitted to vote with their conscience on certain matters, even if actually that kind of topic or that subject matter we might think of as, you know,

you're harbouring intolerant views. In the area of same-sex relationships, would this be in connection with things like gay marriage? Yeah, gay marriage was that example, yeah. That was an important case in Australia some years ago. And I have to say, I regarded it as a case where the sort of basic protections for gay people were already strong enough that adding marriage as a category didn't seem to be the most pressing thing.

I voted yes in the quasi-referendum we had for that because I thought it was reasonable. But I didn't think people who voted no about same-sex marriage were being... Well, right, it's an attempt to be intolerant in relation to that particular institution of marriage. That is true. Right, that's not really deniable.

the question arises how important that specific institution is in relation to other more basic forms of liberty. Right, I'm not sure what the question you're asking is as opposed to just putting this on the table, but I find myself thinking that, right, some of the

some of the debated issues around recent treatment of same-sex partnerships have been in the vicinity of working out whether first-order tolerance is going to be complete or just partial. That's true. I think I have to say that. In the Euthanasia case, I'm not seeing a strong connection. I see that just as a difficult and important policy question in which parliamentary speech can be a special context

Party discipline is a kind of institutional rule that has a certain status, but it's not an interference-related problem in my sense, I don't think. Unless I'm missing something about it. Thank you so much. So my question relates to your distinction between misinformation and disinformation.

So I agree with you that disinformation, which is someone expressing a view that he actively disbelieves, like perjury, like you said, should be restricted. And in terms of misinformation, it's...

Could there be a bad faith misinformation and good faith misinformation? So what I mean by bad faith misinformation is you genuinely hold a belief, but you know that the way you come to that belief is grossly negligent. For example, the evidence that you use, the news that you're looking for, is grossly misjudged.

And in that case, you can say, oh, I still have those beliefs, but I know I should have taken more care to form those beliefs. And I'm just wondering, in terms of negligent misinformation, bad faith misinformation, do you think it should be restricted, even though it is genuinely held? Honest error. Starting with the second one, misinformation in the setting you're describing. I worry that...

the question is asked with a somewhat idealized view of the role of evidence and reason in belief formation in general i mean is this people want to think there's a sharp contrast between you know we who think sensibly and are not subject to confirmation bias and are not selective about our sources of evidence uh and proportion our degree of belief to the evidence and those other people who are negligent i mean

I think we're all negligent a lot of the time and the way you know and we're all a bit we're all selective a lot of the time we these are the these are the the ubiquitous ills of epistemic life that are found in all sorts of different mixtures in different people there are the cautious and the non-cautious and the inquisitive and the non-inquisitive the credulous and the too skeptical there's this great mix of epistemic vices and virtues

And the idea that there's a category, you know, these people are the irresponsible people. There are cartoonish cases where you can point to, you know, truly crazy ideas and say, look, yeah, there is this category. Those people, these flat earthers or whoever are like that.

But the cases that people point to that are cartoonish in that way are not models for the important cases, the cases that actually arouse serious appeal to or temptation to regulate misinformation. So when I was saying that I think the misinformation concept is at odds with the nature of epistemic life, part of what I have in mind is the fact that all of the sort of ills and negligence and bias and selectivity

are scattered through us all, no exception in my case. This is what it's like to be a person with the kind of mind that we have and we're all groping together trying to improve our situation. Now in the case of disinformation which involves actual insincerity, deceit, what I wanted to say is within the hypothetical scenario which we could actually tell who was doing that,

then, yeah, I can't resist the argument from the sort of function of base level discourse as I see it that we should be trying to do something about that of an interference type.

However, I don't think it is. I don't think that hypothetical scenario is one that is close to real life. I think that detecting insincerity and bad faith outside of some easy cases and some commercial context is really hard. Again, there was a couple. I mean, in the US, when they were able to make a defamation claim,

case stick against Alex Jones, the guy who denied that one of the worst school shootings was genuine, he thought it was staged and so on. There they're able to show insincerity and bad faith and it was done as a defamation case because it would be, you know, that's the mechanism that was available in the US and

And my interlocutor who said, "Look, suppose we could detect all the Alex Joneses in, you know, hypothetically with some sincerity detector. Wouldn't you want to treat them in an interfering way?" I can't say no to that. You know, the arguments seem to be irresistible.

But the premise, the assumption, the supposition that we could actually do that in most of the cases that really matter, I think is just far from reality. So I don't believe in formulating policies aimed at disinformation, really, because I think it's practically a bad road. In the misinformation case, I think it's worse than practically a bad road. I think it's just at odds with, you know, the nature of human epistemic life.

I think we'll take one question online. Question by Christina Easton, LSE alumni, now at the University of Warwick. So the question is, does your argument apply differently when it comes to children, people who we might not have the same obligations to let them make up their own mind?

For example, should we take a less permissive view on what views are allowed to be expressed or indeed directly taught in schools? Yes. Unlike some of the other questions where I have to sort of wrestle and worry and try to balance my reply, in that case I can give a one-word answer, which is yes. Okay. So, Daniel, the middle here.

In the middle of this middle row, yeah.

Thanks, Peter. Daniel Wodak from University of Pennsylvania. I want to make sure I'm understanding how the hierarchy helps with the paradox of tolerance. So my understanding is that we've got the distinction between the baseline behavior and then second order and third order. But also it seems crucial for the view that the justification of tolerance at the baseline doesn't transfer up the hierarchy. And that's why it seems like you're kind of framing things in terms of protected categories of baseline behaviors.

I guess I was curious about that because it looks to me like a lot of justifications for tolerance of the baseline behaviors in the classical liberal tradition actually look like they would transfer up the hierarchy. So thinking about common appeals to...

reasonable pluralism. That, you know, we have a lot of disagreement about what behaviors are justified and unjustified. Abortion is a very classic example of this where, you know, at least in the States, people think there are reasonable arguments on both sides. So as a result of that, we should be tolerant of this baseline behavior. But that kind of justification looks like it's going to apply up the levels as well. The exact same reason for thinking that we should be tolerant of

decision to have an abortion would also suggest we should be tolerant someone's intolerant at the second level because this same degree of reasonable disagreement so the pluralism kicks in there as well so I guess I'm curious do you think the hierarchy always helps us resolve the paradox or do we really need to then use the

our desire to avoid the paradox, to filter out the kinds of arguments we use for justifications of tolerance within the classical liberal tradition, such that we perhaps exclude some, like appeals to pluralism. I'm just going to do the same-sex relationship case rather than abortion, because abortion is a new, hard case with extra elements to think about. And I think the question you're asking can be posed within the easy case just as well. And if I understood...

the question, then yes, there are ways of justifying first-order tolerance, which would also lead to a justification of second-order tolerance, including tolerance of intolerance by others at the first order. And I'm thinking of this as a kind of pure libertarian or pure autonomy-driven conception of, you know,

social and moral life. A person might say, here you are looking at these base level behaviours and why are you going to let people make their own choices? Well, you respect the free choices that these people are making. Autonomy has a certain amount of pure weight. Now if you say it like that, then you might say it again at the next level. You might say, actually I'll go back to

one of the other slides to make this point because it's clearer there. Yeah, here, here.

That's the one I had in mind. So you have someone there at the first order who is intolerant. Homophobic is a simple way to think about that red dot there. And then you have someone who's green at the second level who's saying, look, that's their call. Being homophobic is an exercise of choice in the way that being in a same-sex relationship is an exercise of choice. Same thing both times. And...

It's not that I think there's a fallacy there or something like that. If you think that autonomy is everything, it's possible to say it sails up and down the hierarchy. In the paper I wrote with Ben, we were quite cautious about justificatory arguments. We said, look, we're going to make a certain assumption, which we call teleological assumptions.

which is the idea that what you're doing at the higher levels is securing something you think is valuable at the lower level and then

The paradox is not a pa- there's no paradox, there's no compromise. You know what you're doing. You think base level behaviour is a special domain, sex, speech, whatever it might be, and you are securing it with a collection of policies at the higher levels that will prevent interference, basically. We call that teleological. Now you might not make a teleological assumption in the way you did. You might say,

If autonomy is worth anything anywhere, it has the same status everywhere in the hierarchy. And then, yeah, I mean, in a way, the sort of quasi-Greer view could be seen as reflecting that kind of attitude as well. So, yes, and I was trying to, without using the language...

in my discussion of the speech case here, apply the kind of teleological assumption that I had in mind in the earlier paper where I say, you know, what is it about the base level that might make it worth protecting? Well, it's where we make up our minds, we communicate in the service of that, it has a special status. And the things that are special at that level

not the same when you're looking at the other levels. The other levels are not making up your mind levels. They're interfering in people making up their minds levels, basically. So that's a long answer, but it took us quite deep into the heart of these issues. So I'll just summarize it very quickly again.

So if you make a teleological assumption about base level activity, then lots of constraint tends to pop up at the higher levels very naturally. If you don't and you have a kind of autonomy is everything attitude that's general, very different picture. This gentleman here. Bradley Baker. It seems to me that we do discriminate in how we interfere or choose not to interfere with

as concerns the freedom of expression between adults, adults in adolescence and adults and children. I was wondering if you could say a few words on how we justify that form of discrimination.

When you say, so this relates a bit to the earlier, the online question, there are information flows that I think are appropriate in the case of children that would not be appropriate in the case of adults. And adolescents are kind of just poised there in their own special status. So that's, you know, my answer to the earlier question was, you know, yes, age matters and

there's no need to apply these ideas to every human at every age. Is there a particular kind of context you have in mind that's pressing this forward? Perhaps I've just been reflecting on it in the context of the recent gender ideology debates or discourse, rather.

So there is, you know, there are certainly some things that are... About medical treatment for trans kids and things like that. For instance, all those kinds of things caught up in that debate and, yeah. Which is typically, right, adolescence in that... It's easy for me to say about young kids, look, this is just doesn't... This is an adult thing we're talking about here. I mean, I have lots of views on those questions about the medicalisation of, you know, fairly young teenagers and so on, um...

have gender dysphoria and the like. Is there some connection, I'm not quite sure how it attaches to this framework and if you could make the question more concrete that might help me.

How does it relate to free expression? Well, it seems to me that this discrimination is maybe based on our cognition and as the communications between adults that we're speaking about and when we talk about communications with adolescents or with children, these sorts of models perhaps don't apply in the same way. I think maybe the best thing for me to say is

Right, the framework here is sort of for adults, basically. It's an adult level treatment of belief, discourse, expression and so on. And, you know, it would be crazy to treat six-year-olds as fully-fledged agents in the context of this talk. At what age are you sort of in? I mean, that's a hard question.

I think would differ across contexts, across what sorts of policies are on the table and things like that. I'm going to take a last question from the back there because you've been waiting patiently and then we can... Yes. How do you think that moderation of hate speech online should be approached correctly and where is the line between that and the infringement on free speech?

And how does that also work with, like, radicalisation of young kids online and, like, the Australian phone ban? Do you think that's a conducive way to tackle that? Thanks. There's about four gigantic policy questions in there. LAUGHTER

and I don't think I'm going to be able to tackle them effectively in a short space. I'll just say a couple of things that might be informative, though. What counts as hate speech online I think matters a whole lot there, because part of what has worried me about the Australian case in particular is that the category is under continual pressure toward extension into things, cases I would regard as base-level speech get treated as hate speech.

at least by some agencies, and I think that is as unfortunate. Now, if I push back against that, it makes it sound like I'm against any kind of...

of hate speech in the narrow, pragmatic, face-to-face vilification type way. And I think that's a very distinct matter. And certainly I think having an exception from ordinary first-order tolerance protection there is far from crazy in the same way that it functions in cases of defamation. So the sort of size of the category of hate speech is part of the problem here.

I think that maybe it would be informative for me to say, perhaps to you, not to everybody listening who's not familiar with the Australian case, that I think the Australian government has been too proactive in trying to control the flow of information on the internet and it's led to some pathological cases here and there. So I can position myself in relation to those debates, but I do think it requires a sort of fine-grained grappling with some examples if we were to go further.

And sadly, we're out of time, so we won't be able to do the fine graining right now. Thank you all for your participation tonight. And thank you in particular, Peter, for a wonderful lecture. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.