ABSTRACT
There is a tradition which invites us to look at speech as a sales pitch. Some follows of this idea believe that since markets should be free, so should speech. This analogy, and the associated ideology, underwrite many of the moral ideals and legal principles that we currently find in Western democracies. But things are shifting on many college campuses. There, the analogy is taken seriously, but not the notion that speech should be free. Many students, faculty members, and administrators seem to view a free marketplace of ideas with suspicion, favoring regulations of various kinds. We suggest an alternative analogy to respond to arguments for speech regulation. On our view, speech isn’t a sales pitch in a marketplace, but is more akin to an act of war, and so we should approach it from the perspective of just war theory.
If speech is like an act of war, then so is speech regulation. However, not all such acts are justified. For example, we contend that we should take seriously the jus ad bellum conditions for a just war, one of which states that you may not enter or continue a war unless there is a reasonable hope of success. In current political circumstances, it’s implausible that those who favor speech regulations for the sake of diversity and inclusion have a reasonable hope of success. We are too far from the kind of society that students, faculty members, administrators hope to create, and attempting to advance that cause via speech restrictions exacerbates the problem. Limiting speech provokes conservatives to cut our funding and police our programs. And without a reasonable hope of success, we shouldn’t impose restrictions, but instead try to negotiate a truce. In part, that means creating campus cultures where conservative voices are more prominent than they are, even when they clash with our ideals of diversity and inclusiveness.
