Salmieri on Free Speech, Rights, and Cancel Culture

Salmieri argues that the right to free speech is specifically a right to be free from forcible interference by government or private actors, not a right to a platform, to be liked, or to avoid social consequences. He distinguishes this narrow political right from broader moral questions about how people should treat each other's speech.

Salmieri contends that treating disagreements over fundamental moral and political questions as trivial, something to laugh off over coffee, actually weakens the case for free speech, because it implies ideas do not matter. He argues that ideas have moral import and that judging people based on them, sometimes severely, is appropriate, while warning that hostility to a view can prematurely shut down one's thinking about it.

Using the example of colleagues disagreeing in a shared field of expertise, Salmieri argues that genuine truth-seeking disagreement should be valued and investigated rather than simply tolerated as harmless difference, and that over time such engagement can properly generate subtle moral judgments about a person's intellectual honesty.

Salmieri's central conceptual move is that a right marks out a sphere in which a person, not anyone else, gets to decide and act, but this does not mean whatever they decide within that sphere is morally right. He illustrates this with the right to end a friendship, which one can exercise wrongly, unfairly, or immorally while still having had the right to do it.

Salmieri argues that firing, shunning, or boycotting someone for their views is an exercise of freedom of association and intellectual freedom, not a violation of free speech, even though such actions can be applied unjustly in particular cases. He contrasts this with Mill's view, which treats social pressure itself as a constraint on free speech, a position Salmieri rejects.

Salmieri treats canceling and blacklisting as instances of the general phenomenon of organized boycotting and ostracism, which can be justified or unjustified depending on the case, rather than a single phenomenon to be uniformly condemned or praised. He uses J.K. Rowling as an example of unjust social punishment, arguing that on fast-shifting moral questions like trans issues there must be room to be wrong without being treated as wicked, while distinguishing this from actual threats and harassment, which he says are not free speech at all.

Salmieri argues that the concept of academic freedom wrongly imagines a scholar and an institution isolated from both economic and political pressures, which is a fiction, since running any university requires choices about hiring, curriculum, and funding that inevitably discriminate among ideas. He argues that public universities are themselves in tension with free speech principles, because government funding of education amounts to the state establishing and supporting certain ideas over others, and that private universities should instead each decide their own approach to fostering disagreement based on their own business model.

Salmieri notes that John Stuart Mill treats social pressure, such as being fired or ostracized for one's views, as itself a constraint on free speech. Salmieri disagrees, holding that such consequences are simply exercises of other people's freedom of association and intellectual freedom, which can be exercised justly or unjustly but are not free speech violations.

Salmieri describes the group FIRE as wanting to hold both public and, through voluntary commitments like the Chicago Statement, private universities to a First Amendment style standard of ideological neutrality. He argues this whole framework is mistaken, because operating any school necessarily requires discriminating among ideas, so neutrality is not achievable and public schooling itself is in tension with free speech.