Flying around social media yesterdaywere cheersthat Oxford University had issued a Statement on the Importance of Free Speech in response to a motion from the Oxford Student Union allegedly to ban ableist, classist and misogynist reading lists.

Heres Richard Dawkins on Twitter, for example:

I checked out the widely circulatedOxford Blue article linked to in Dawkins and others tweets, as well as theOxford Studentarticle first reporting on the Student Union motion. Though there were a few snippets here and there, neither article included or linked to the whole text of the motion, or even a substantial block of it.

And what of the Statement on the Importance of Free Speech that Oxford University released, according to the May 3rdOxford Blue article? Fortunately, the authors ofthe article included the entire text of that statement. However, it appears to be the exact same text already posted last year on at least a couple of Oxford sitesand released at least as early as May, 2017. Its not clear what actually happened here. Perhaps the university simply referred the journalists atOxford Blue to this pre-existing statement. [Update: according to the reporter, yes, this is what happened.]

Oxford Blue also reports that the university (they dont specify who) said, I can confirm that the University has no plans to censor reading materials assigned by our academics.

Censor reading materials? Is that what the students were calling for? Not exactly.

Jenny Saville, Stare III (detail)

A fellow twitterer answered my request for the actual motion, and from the looks of it, the students were basically aiming forfour things:

What to make of these demands? The first thing to note is that none of this is censorship. So, for the university to say that it has no plans to censor reading materials is not, strictly speaking, to reject the student union motion. The closest we get to censorship in the motion is in the condemnation called for in #4, above. That isnt technically censorship, but it may have similar effects (I dont know, as I dont know anything about those particular offices or whether Oxford faculty care aboutwhether they condemn their reading selections). [Note: in light of the correction of #4, above, I think it is safe to say that #4 does not come close to constituting censorship.] #2 might strike some as censorship but it seems pro-freedom to me, for if its effect would be to give students more choicehere, not to take a course they otherwise would have been required to.

(In one line in the original document, the students complain about the lack of criminalization of certain forms of biased speech, but what they end up calling for from Oxford isnt the criminalization of speech.)

The extent to which these demands are anti-free speech turns in part on what material is actually covered by it. I dont know enough about the legal context to know exactly what kinds of texts would be picked out by intended or likely to stir up hatred. Are historical documents and older writings ever included here? Has the assignment of a hateful text for the purposes of study ever been the target of the Public Order of 1986 or university policies based on it? Readers, help us out.

Heres the actual text of the motion (courtesy of Eric Sheng):

As you can see, the studentsnamed one example of a text they think would fall under their expanded hate speech proposal: Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children by Julian Savulescu, which appeared inBioethicsin 2001. In this article, Savulescu argues that prospective parents should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information, which they took to be objectionably ableist.

I dont think the students did themselves any favors with this choice of example, in which Savulescu distinguishes betweenidentifying conditions, such as poor memory, that tend to make peoples lives worse(a claim he endorses) and saying that people with those conditions are less deserving of respect or are less valuable (a claim he rejects). Regardless of whether one thinks Savulescus argument is any good, this article is certainly neither intended to, nor likely to stir up, hatred against disabled persons.The students are just mistakenthat it is an example of hate speech.

Suppose, though, that they werent mistaken. Even if it were hate speech, note thatthe students are not calling for Oxford to ban Savulescus essay. Rather, they are arguing that students be given the option to take a course in which it is assigned, and that students be warned about its content. One way to put this is that theyre arguing for informed consent for encountering hate speech.

Unfortunately, they are also asking for administrators* [students actually; see the correction to #4, above] to condemn the assigning of the reading. Though I tend to favor more speech approaches to allegedly objectionable speech, withoutmeasures toseparatethe authoritys expressive actions from its coercive ones (a la Brettschneider), this is an overreach. [Note: in light of the correction of #4, above, which makes clear that it is students, not administrators, being asked to condemn the readings, I retract this criticism.]

So what to think about all of this? Here are three takeaways (feel free to add your own):

(a) The students care about the welfare of the vulnerable among them and are pointing out what they take to be a problem of arbitrariness in law and policy (that thereare protections on the basis of, say, race and religion but not gender and class).

(b) The students are arguing for a more-freedom, more-information, and more-speech approach to solving this problem, rather than censorship.

(c) The students seem to have an overly inclusive conception of what counts as hate speech.

I think (a) is good, (b) is a mixed bag owing to the vague call forofficial condemnations and [see the correction to #4, above] the confused language of criminalization, and (c) is not terrible but not good, either.

The problem with (c) is not really the legal point, but rather an apparent tendency towards a kind of affirming the consequent. Heres an example. We might expect an atheist to criticize the ontological argument for the existence of God, but someone who criticizes the ontological argument for the existence of God is not necessarily an atheist.That is, it doesnt follow from ones making an argument an atheist would make that one is an atheistit depends on the argument (among other things). Similarly, it doesnt follow from ones making an argument a racist or sexist or classist would make that one is a racist or sexist or classistit depends on the argument (among other things). For example, we might expect a racist to argue against affirmative action, but it doesnt follow that one is a racist in virtue of arguing against affirmative action.

It isnt surprising that students are susceptible to thismistaken reasoning. For one thing, theyre still learning how to think carefully. For another, its not always a mistake to reason this way, and in some contexts (or for people with certain backgrounds) it could be a reasonable heuristic to employ.

Ironically, thiskind of reasoning might have been in play in the widely shared descriptions and attitudes expressed about this story, which framed the students as censors. We might think that someone who favors censorship might express the same kinds of concerns the Oxford Student Union did in their motion. But it would be a mistake to conclude, as many seemed to do, that because they expressed such concerns, the studentswere calling for censorship. They werent.

I suppose an additional takeaway would be that, as with some other disputes over speech, the combatants may have more in common than they realize.

Read the rest here:

Free Speech at Oxford (updated with an important correction) - Daily Nous