You ask me why I did it, and I say "free speech."
You would be right to criticise me. While free speech may be a value, it is not the only value. Avoiding physical harms to others is also a value. And in this case it is obvious that avoiding those harms is much more important than my free speech to yell "fire." We have two competing values -- avoiding harms and free speech -- and in this particular case avoiding harms clearly outweighs free speech. Speech of this sort, by me or others, should be banned. I should not have complete free speech.
I take this as the starting place. I would be very puzzled if anyone seriously thought that free speech always outweighed all other values.
(When I teach this topic to my teenage students, I work through this excellent video with them. I highly recommend it as a starter to any general conversation about free speech.)
And this brings us to Stefan Molyneux.
While I was away in China, the big New Zealand news was that Molyneux and Lauren Southern*** planned to visit New Zealand to speak. They were booked to speak at the Bruce Mason Centre, a venue just a few minutes drive from where I live, which is owned by Auckland Council.
Auckland Council decided not to allow Molyneux to use the Council-owed facilities (and so the talk was cancelled), on the grounds that it was likely to significantly harm others through the stirring up of religious and ethnic tensions.
(The Powerstation, a privately-owned venue, has also more recently backed out of hosting them.)
It seems that some people thought that this was a violation of free speech. Simon Bridges, the leader of the National Party, opined that Molyneux should be allowed to speak in New Zealand, even though he disagreed with Molyneux's views.
In other words, what we had was a more complicated version of my "fire in the theatre" story. Most of those defending Molyneux speaking in New Zealand didn't try to say he was right, but just argued for his right to speak (this is a pretty weak form of defence to start with!). The debate was then about two competing values -- free speech and avoiding harms to others -- and the task was to weigh up which outweighed the other in this particular situation.
Figuring out possible future harms is a tricky business. And it is possible that people of good will are going to disagree about the answers. But this is exactly the job of our political leaders, to make these sorts of judgment calls. Did Auckland Council make the right call, or was Bridges correct?
Personally, I am inclined to think that Auckland Council made the right call, though I think it is a complicated one.
Firstly, I think the loss of freedom of speech in this case is minimal. New Zealand is not like China, where certain views are completely blocked from being heard. New Zealanders who are interested in Molyneux's views can freely hear them online on his YouTube channel. And his books are freely available to buy/read. New Zealand Immigration is freely allowing Molyneux to enter New Zealand, and he is free to speak with anyone while he is here. That the Auckland Council is declining to let him use Council-owned facilities is a fairly weak restriction on his speech.
Secondly, I think the possible harms are serious enough.
To start with, quite clearly Molyneux gets a lot of things wrong. He gets many facts wrong, and he is bad at reasoning. I get the impression that most people who have thought about this sort of thing full-time for more than a few years immediately spot the howlers in Molyneux's thinking. Some have been patient enough to step us through his many problems, including:
- David Gordon (a libertarian who one might think shares many of the same political views) sets out many of Molyneux's errors in ethical theory here, and in a follow-up reply here.
- Cian Chartier focuses on Molyneux's confused and wrong understanding of reason and logic here.
- Joshua Stein focuses on Molyneux's errors with respect to political philosophy here.
- Alexander Douglas is amusingly critical in his review here.
- Brian Leiter calls him a charlatan here and here.
But just because Molyneux's views are wrong, is his repeating these wrong ideas in a public setting bad? That is, is his saying these wrong things to crowds of people causing harms that outweigh the value of his freedom of speech?
If Molyneux was merely doing an "Intro to Logic" tour (with his confused and wrong ideas on logic), then we might think that this is not serious enough to warrant cancelling him at The Bruce Mason Theatre.
But the heart of the problem is that Molyneux's real crowd-pleaser is (unsurprisingly) not logic, but the superiority of Western Civilisation over other cultures. This is what draws the crowds, and this is what causes the problems. He also, secondly, has quite a few bad things to say about women. We can assume that this will be a fair chunk of Molyneux's talk, and what the crowds will come away buzzing about. Simon Wilson writes a decently nuanced piece on this. The video I linked to above, at 8 min 20 sec, is also relevant. On this basis, it seems to me that should Molyneux talk, he would likely do what Auckland Council claimed he would do -- that is stir up too much religious and ethnic tension.
All this means that I think the Auckland Council was right to not let Molyneux talk at Council-owned facilities. I am pleased that the owners of the Powerstation cancelled Molyneux, too.
*** I focused this discussion on Molyneux rather than Southern, because Southern is less defensible, and so less interesting, than Molyneux. Southern appears to intentionally try to offend people and was refused entry into the UK for her racist views. I understand that Molyneux is more subtly a Western-supremacist, whereas Southern is more simply a white-supremacist.
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