Cancelling and freedom of speech

I dislike the term “cancel culture”. Specifically, I detest the “culture” part of it, with the barely-concealed accusation that the use of “cancelling” is a specific cultural phenomenon arising from a specific culture, whose values and attitude to freedom of speech is deeply problematic.

From conversations with recent undergrads, however, I must acknowledge the existence of a phenomenon known as “cancelling”. Some of them have described it as used by their friend groups against specific individuals within that same friendship group. From what I have understood of their description, the process of “cancelling” in that case involves repeated denunciations of the person, in a public or at least semi-public setting (i.e., at the very least, everyone in the friend group can see it).

I am assuming that this localised type of cancelling someone is the same, functionally, as more public attempts to “cancel” a celebrity or other public figure. The defence of such public attempts to cancel are unambiguously rooted in Enlightenment concepts of rights: freedom of speech offers no protection against public judgement; public denunciation is merely the exercise of freedom of speech in response to speech; and any firing or other disassociations are simply people exercising their own right of free association, which of course includes the right not to associate for any reason.

At the localised level, the sense of discomfort expressed by my students at the thought of being “cancelled” by their friend group has nothing to do with either freedom of speech or freedom of association, however. If I take the understandings of my informants (the students) seriously, then their objection to the process of cancelling needs to be considered seriously. I think I can do that.

The defence of freedom of speech tends to rest on a perception of communication as governed entirely by the provision of utterances that can be judged only by the standard of truth and falsity. John Stuart Mill’s famous case for it, for instance, presents the only alternative to one in which all viewpoints can be expressed as one in which some viewpoints are suppressed because of their presumed error. Against this, The speech act theory of JL Austin frames communication first and foremost as a pragmatic act that changes reality in some way. Communication is “locutionary”: the fact that an utterance occurs is a brute reality that has effects, independently of what the utterance consists of. Some utterances are “illocutionary”: they are speech acts that define what reality is. For example, the utterance of a judge “court is now in session” does exactly that: it makes the court in session. Some utterances are also “perlocutionary”, and this is a type of utterance that Austin did not pursue overmuch. Perlocutionary communication is communication that has an intended effect. The “intended effect” can be very broad: it can mean persuasion, via rational or perhaps irrational means; but there is no clear limit in Austin’s writing on what “effect” might include.

It seems to me that many existing limitations on freedom of speech are limits based on the intended effect of the speech. Death threats are illegitimate exercises of speech because they have the intended effect of putting someone in fear of their life. Defamation, likewise, because it has the intended effect of damaging somebody’s reputation. Defamation is an interesting case precisely because sometimes – and this is recognised in law – somebody’s reputation deserves to be impugned, or brought down to the level it truly ought to be. Hence proof of the truth of an allegedly defamatory statement is, in most countries, a defence against libel. Defamation law is an attempt to navigate the Enlightenment concept of communication as a matter of testing truth and falsehood while also acknowledging that some speech has effects that go beyond the mere propagation of falsehood.

Where does cancelling fit in all of this? Cancelling generally isn’t about whether something is true or false. It is about whether or not someone ought to be shunned. But it is also, simultaneously, an exhortation to shun. Is this exhortation based on rational persuasion? Demonstration of why a person should be shunned? The problems that my students seemed to have with their interpersonal experiences of being cancelled was precisely that it was not. It was instead based on repetition of condemnation and on peer pressure to conform. It is perlocution – communication with an intended effect – but the effect is not one achieved via rational persuasion. I am no expert on morality, but the intuition I have is that the pressure here is very morally dubious at best

However, it would be too easy to jump from this to the assumption that cancelling in the public sphere is always based on a morally dubious and irrational perlocution. It would be premature to assume that what happens at the interpersonal level is exactly duplicated in the political sphere. Further, in the political sphere it is quite common and usually encouraged for individuals to band together and seek an outcome of some kind via any legal action they see fit; this is called “activism”. The question, then, becomes somewhat similar to the example of defamation.

Cancelling, like defamation, needs to navigate the legitimate exercise of freedom of speech with the potentially illegitimate intended effects of a communication – but with the added caveat that the intended effects, even if not directed towards rational persuasion, may still be a legitimate exercise of political power. My belief is that different example of cancelling will see a different mix of these effects and intentions of communication, much like any potentially defamatory statement will have to be assessed for such a mix before determining whether or not it is defamatory.

This, by the way, is another reason the “culture” part of “cancel culture” is so pernicious. I see an implication there that cancelling must only arise because “the culture says it should”, which prematurely rules that there could be no rational persuasion present in cancelling.

Rather, the extent to which rational persuasion enters an attempt to cancel is, in my view, the key determining factor in whether cancelling can be considered a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech. Unfortunately, I as yet have no idea how anybody might approach the task of making that assessment of any given attempt to cancel.