 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Gary Chartier, a distinguished professor of law and business ethics and associate dean of the Tom and Visa Para School of Business at La Sierra University. He is the author of many books. The latest is An Ecological Theory of Free Expression. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Gary. Great to be here. Your theory of free expression, as is evidenced by the title, is ecological. So what does that mean? Yeah, so it means that free expression happens in a context, right? It means that on the one hand a whole set of social institutions make free expression possible and realize the benefits that free expression brings about. And on the other hand, free expression itself serves to promote and nourish a whole set of social institutions and networks of relationships. So it's not just you come out from a lot of different angles in the book. It's not just one argument. It's a bunch of different things together that create the argument for free expression. Yeah, a bunch of different considerations all fit together and a bunch of different kind of nodes in a network or set of networks all contribute to making it happen. Is there a main underlying moral theory that you're operating within or drawing from? Yeah, so the book proceeds, as a lot of my work does, from within a particular strand of the natural law tradition. It's rooted in the idea, what I hope is a recognizably Aristotelian idea that what we should be interested in when we choose is choosing wisely in ways that enable us and others to flourish. And I think free expression plays a pretty crucial role in both expressing, if you will, our flourishing and making that flourishing possible. And into that, you create a few principles that are, you said, four of which are important here. And I'm just going to go through what some of these principles are. One of them you call the principle of recognition. What is that? Yeah, so the idea here is that in at least the kind of Aristotelian natural law theory I'm working with, and I don't claim, by the way, that any of this theory is particularly original with me. But in the kind of theory that I'm working with, I want to emphasize that when we're choosing a sensible choice or a rational choice, if you will, a reasonable choice at any rate, is a choice for real goods. So the principle of recognition means ultimately, if a choice is reasonable, it's a choice in pursuit of friendship or aesthetic experience or knowledge or something that actually matters. So I got to ask right now, because you used three different terms. Is there a difference between a sensible choice, a rational choice, and a reasonable choice? If we're talking with economists or rational choice theorists, there absolutely is. The word rational obviously has in that context a pretty specific technical meaning that translates into something like a concern, particularly with instrumental rationality. In other contexts, probably we don't necessarily use rational and reasonable, for instance, in ways that sharply contrast with each other. But probably to be safe here, let's say reasonable. And you have the principle of respect. Yeah, the principle of respect is a natural law principle, but it's one that is very parallel, for instance, I think, to Kant's formula of humanity. And I cash it out as don't purposefully or instrumentally injure other people. In fact, it's unreasonable to purposefully or instrumentally injure yourself, too, as Kant would have said with respect to the formula of humanity. But that's not what I'm focused on here. And the principle of fairness? Again, I think basically a parallel with Kant's formula of universal law, the idea is to act in a way that is consistent with principles you'd be willing to generalize. And then finally, the principle of commitment? It helps to make commitments. We can organize our lives effectively by making commitments. I read a whole book about that called The Logic of Commitment. The idea here is that not only our interpersonal commitments, what we often talk about is say as promises or whatever important, but also just personal commitments where we set priorities for ourselves. This may be an effective way of giving structure and meaning to our lives. So then how do these come together to get us to freedom of expression? So the most crucial role they play, though not the only one I think is in providing a grounding for an account of property rights. So while there certainly are approaches to free expression that take property seriously, they haven't been the most common. And so I deliberately start out by spelling out in very rudimentary terms my theory of property, which suggests that a whole host of considerations having to do with how our lives go well, can in light of these principles yield a set of what I call baseline rules for how we handle the physical objects in our lives and that those then yield in turn kind of robust property rights. Respect for those robust property rights provides I think a really solid foundation for protecting freedom of expression. And that's just sort of to establish who can make the rules in the classic sense of my house, my rules. I can't go into Walmart with a shirt that says F Walmart and then claim the First Amendment is violated if they kick me out. Absolutely. But your theory is it does not only apply to government. I mean you say a few times in the beginning of the book that I mean you as from an anarchist standpoint where you regard the Constitution itself is not terribly binding I guess it also applies to non-government entities to some extent. Yes I want to be really clear about what I am and I'm not saying there. I think that the use of force is really a crucial divide you know is the source of a crucial dividing line here. When we talk about legal constraints and legal protections we're talking I think fundamentally about when force is and isn't appropriately employed and I absolutely don't want to see actors that aren't using force subjected to force to somehow make them conform with my ideal for free speech but I argue that there are moral reasons why a variety of non-governmental institutions certainly might want to take free speech free expression more generally seriously and so why we ought to be concerned about what happens in the context of those sorts of associations even if we recognize at the same time that they ought to have a legal right to as for instance with your Walmart example you know constrain how their property gets used. It's also important that you define injury and one of the longer chapters the book actually gets into the question of what is the kind of injury that we're concerned with and this goes back to what you just said about force that it's the question of whether or not a fence or other types of linguistic injury expressive injury are such injuries that require law to fix them and you think that that's not true. Yeah I think it's a good idea to have a bright line rule that delineates what can and can't be the subject of legal penalty again I want to really emphasize because I think this is something we can easily skate past that law and morality are hardly co-extensive and there are all kinds of things that people do that might be in various ways deeply wrong that we nonetheless don't want the law to get involved in dealing with and I suggest that at least one simple approach for which I try to offer several overlapping reasons would be an approach that says that what the law ought to be concerned with what legal penalties ought to be concerned with is the use of force against people's bodies and stuff and so I try to spell out in this chapter an injury first of all then a model of what kind of injury the law ought to be concerned with and then apply that to some claims that are sometimes made about injuries that might result from expressive activity. That claim that you just made about there are you know there are plenty of things that we think are deeply wrong that we don't think the law should address or try to rectify you say that like it's you know this is I mean you said that this is something that we all accept but is that true I mean it it seems like at least in the United States both the traditionally conservative view and the progressive left's view would simply reject that claim would say that the you know if something is wrong then the law ought to prohibit it if something is good in the case of say you know like nuclear families or if you're a conservative or whatever else diversity then the law ought to subsidize or encourage it what does I mean is that am I overstating the case there or if I'm not what do what's wrong with that idea that the law is there to enforce moral standards yeah so um you're absolutely right I don't think you're overstating the case that there are indeed people who want to talk in those terms I think I was first and foremost probably responding on a visceral level to people we might encounter sometimes in libertarian circles who seem to think that if one has made the case that something ought to be legally permissible one has at the same time made the case that ought to be morally permissible and therefore no moral criticism of it is appropriate and I get very frustrated with that of you but you're quite right that on the other side there's certainly the view that once we know that something's morally objectionable it must follow that we ought to do something about it legally and so it seems like the the kind of response to that I want to make at least looks something like this that we have the the when the law is involved in sanctioning something or otherwise you know either incentivizing it or disincentivizing it what's involved is the use of force that's what distinguishes the the legal response to you know from from some other sort of response and force I think is special force is different not only because we have good reason to take people's autonomy seriously not only because we have I think good reason to take antecedent rights with respect to people's bodies and property seriously for reasons I try to spell out for a number then of kind of background reasons that are purpose independent that are content independent we I think have reason to respect certain kinds of limits on people's on what can be done to people and if we have reason to be concerned about and thus to to limit the use of force then I think that provides in a pretty solid reason to avoid thinking that the law is a kind of universal fix it now in terms of use of force here it's it's a specific sort because I assume in terms of private actors using force against expression for example say you know to use an example you kind of bring up in the book that if someone came into my house and started playing a movie on on there with a projector on the wall that greatly offended me could I physically throw them out of my house yeah of course you could I mean I hope you wouldn't you wouldn't decapitate them remain them in the course of doing it but sure but but you also at the point that it's that that's not so much about the movie the content of the movie is is not the harm as much as the property right because if he came in and started playing a movie that was just a black square I could also throw them out right absolutely now but you say expression does not constitute a legally cognizable injury but of course that that raises questions of fraud for example what about fraud right so when I say it doesn't constitute an injury I mean that in a in a pretty a pretty narrow way right so it might well be for instance that let's say I lie to you and when I lie to you I'm I am just in virtue of the fact that I'm you know in one way or another messing with your understanding of the world messing with your cognitive faculties whatever that is an injury and I don't want to deny of course that deliberately deceptive expression might in one way or another end up end up directly injuring you the question is what's legally cognizable so fraud involves the misappropriation of property it's an interference thus with your stuff and or I guess we can imagine a way which could be interference with your body but in any case and so there's a remedy there's a there's a remedy for that which involves obviously returning your stuff and doing whatever else needs to be done to to get you back in the position you were before my illicit action so it's not that in one way or another expressive activity can't be involved with injuries but I'm really interested in that section that you were just referencing in talking specifically about whether just the bare fact of expressing an attitude you know Trevor's a bozo whether that on its own constitutes an injury but how is that so you're very concerned with force but force is I mean the reason that we're concerned with force is because of what it does to us the kind of injuries that the application of force can create yes and so why is this a question this freedom of expression and I guess all of this why is this a question about force and why does force matter versus simply the question of injury degree of harm right so why are we concerned about particular kinds of injuries as opposed to just injuries as a whole so I guess I'm primarily interested in this particular kind of injury because of what providing a legal remedy amounts to right so a legal remedy is going to involve in our current legal system you know might involve imprisoning me at any rate it's going to involve for taking my taking my stuff to compensate someone something like that and so because the law itself is involved in the use of force I'm interested in in injuries that also involve force because of the intuition that I have which I certainly try to defend here and just assert as an underground intuition that it's a good thing to limit the use of force to those cases in which we're responding to the use of force so I'm interested in this narrow subset of injuries because of the kinds of remedies the law can make it now you bring us up this question to which in the book which I was popping into my head and I'm glad you addressed it post traumatic stress the the question of expression triggering someone into a deep mental state or very harmful situation is that is that a different category of expression injury yeah I mean I think that's difficult and I don't and I don't feel like you know my attempt in the book to just sort of you know kind of skate around it and talk about it briefly probably is is adequate fine because I yeah I think we can imagine a case in which there really is say a pre-existing injury that's been done to someone which can be can be triggered verbally can be triggered expressively and I think we want to treat that as trivial I'm nervous of course about the way in which worries about PTSD have then led to a much broader sort of culture of talk about about trigger warnings and so forth when these often don't seem to do really with PTSD but just have to do with things that bother people in various ways and I'd really like to try to cabin the discussion of PTSD as narrowly as possible I I don't frankly feel like I've reached a definitive conclusion about the best way to handle that except that what I don't want is a set of rules that are designed to deal with the you know organic injuries that can certainly be involved in PTSD that then are cast in a sufficiently broad way that they cover all sorts of other things and that they contemplate potential injuries that those engage in expressive activity couldn't reasonably anticipate so I think it's a real concern and I guess I'm still positive well it's interesting too because it affects one of the other concerns you bring up and we see this I think on campuses to some degree whether bringing in the word trauma and using it very for many things when they hear different different phrases but that also brings in the problem of just subjectivity question which is very different than the physical force that that if you have someone be able to claim their level of harm and they're the only one who actually knows it and then you have a system that might incentivize them claiming harm that doesn't seem a very stable system to protect free expression right and it's pretty much unpredictable from the standpoint of those engaging in expressive activity you know there's no way they can sort of coordinate their actions with others try to be respectful of others except by just shutting up and it seems to me that's a that's a pretty undesirable state of affairs so the more objectively predictable something is the easier it's going to be to frame rules around it and I think that concern of objective predictability does really provide a good reason for limiting what we think of as the kind of kind of trauma we're talking about but we address that a bit in I mean in physical injuries too like I'm forgetting with the eggshell eggshell plane if yeah um and and so there's you know we just acknowledge like look it's it's unpredictable you could do this thing that's totally normal for anyone else and then it you know cracks the skull of the eggshell guy um but you're still you know we still hold you liable for that even though you couldn't have known so why is why is that so should we get rid of that principle or if not why is that principle different from the subjectivity of trauma so I think the the eggshell plaintiff case is unavoidable you know I think we're going to have a rule of some kind uh in the eggshell plaintiff case because we're talking about um you know injuries that are going to have to be remedied in one way or another um and I guess I'm you know I'm not interested in tossing that rule out when I think about about the speech case about the the expressive case I suppose my first my first thought uh would be that while you're quite right somebody could indeed think about a trauma case and you know it might well turn out to be the case that I'm uh you know I didn't know that I was uh you know I was really going to trigger somebody and it turns out that I do that and and there we are one issue might be the concern that if we think about this again not in terms of just that's why I think the ecological metaphor matters not just the expressive um you know the value to the person engaging in the expression of the expressive activity but the systemic value the ecological value of the expression what we don't want to do for the benefit then of the whole social ecosystem is to just start encouraging incentivizing willy nilly uh deep uh you know self-restraint on the part of anyone inclined to say something so I'd be a little concerned in those cases about a rule that opened that door too widely um you know I think in a particular case if I could really show actual physical you know trauma organic trauma and I think again sometimes that's going to be the case I would be hard pressed uh to make a case about that individual instance being somehow uh completely insulated but what I'm am inclined to think is that we think about this from the perspective of the whole communicative ecosystem it starts to seem as if we might have reason to to want to not release there I guess what's wrong though with a world where all of us are very restrained in our speech where all of us are just really conscious of how what we say might hurt others and so try to be very nice and pleasant I mean we might we might lose out on you know Richard prior Richard prior um we can think of some things we'd lose out on but but in general wouldn't that just be a much more civil world well but the problem of course at least a problem it seems to me there is that so many different things bother so many different people right it's not as if there's a kind of a uniform set of minimal expectations that would uh if acknowledged solve the problem you're talking about instead there's a whole range of diverse responses that people have to different things and it does seem to me that yeah if we spend our time trying to anticipate all of those possible responses and restraining ourselves accordingly then speakers of all kinds would be disadvantaged but more importantly listeners of all kinds would be disadvantaged uh you know if I have to if I have to try to guess in advance what might be a serious problem and I therefore say uh what's as inoffensive as possible the end result is that those who might otherwise benefit from what I have to say won't I mean think about the most obvious example here that are really concerned as I think um you know a whole range of political discussions that we might have and I mean I I really want to stress that I don't think freedom of expression is valuable exclusively or primarily for political purposes but we often think in the first amendment context of the political context is especially crucial um pretty clearly so many things people say uh even in kind gentle tones about opposing political ideas and figures will be deeply offensive to others and deeply unsettled anarchism troubles a lot of people no matter how nicely it's stated I've noticed that I wrote a brief for the spring court a few years ago in a case about a confederate license plate and whether or not the state of texas could prohibit confederate license plates and that brief defended offensive speech uh on this sort of instrumental ground which you get into later in the book but one of the defenses was that if things that were used to be offensive there are things that we should be talking about and like sort of for example female sexuality in 1940 it would just offended many people to even talk about female sexuality and so you need people like comedians and people like kenzie to offend people to begin with so you can actually have a productive conversation eventually about things that we should be able to talk about and that usually begins with offense uh and there's a line a line you have that I really liked which was the state of being offended or insulted is pointless yeah I think that's I think that's right I think that uh there are all kinds of things that our words might might do that that ought to be ought to be troubling if I say uh you know I can't stand what you said on the show today and I'm headed over to your house tonight to you know to beat the stuffing out of you uh you have every reason to be concerned about that uh maybe that's a reason for you to you know hire security guards or call the police or just wait up with a shotgun but the problem with what I said is that I posed a threat to you it's not that I you know was just uh you know said something that might have seemed offensive isn't isn't a fence though just a form of I guess a a broader moral sense like I mean we don't want to jettison the feeling of offense or tell people that you know it's wrong to ever feel offense because offense offense can give us meaningful information about the acceptability of what's been said whether then we in the future should say things like that so I mean are you are you counseling against getting offended because it's pointless are you simply saying this this more of like a wallowing in it is the problem I think there are all kinds of things that ought to again that ought to trouble us so uh you know if uh if you announce uh you know you're you're Donald Trump and you announce that uh you know you're going to execute a drone strike that's going to kill a bunch of people in a wedding I certainly ought to be deeply deeply saddened and angered by that and ought to push back at it but I don't think that it helps on top of those responses to the behavior that you're you're signaling there to get offended so yeah I mean I am actually in the book for good or ill maybe I'm just running up the flagpole to see who's to lose but I do I am indeed in the book advocating just letting go of offense as a separate kind of you know response among the sort of repertoire of moral emotions that we might bring to bear I really find it unhelpful now many people especially the increasing illiberal left uh who is against free speech argue that that hate speech and letting you know Charles Murray speak on campus and things like this what they actually do is they foster a world that keeps them keeps people of color in a subjugated state that allows people to have ideas that ultimately hurts the people on the bottom of the toting pole in particular and that seems if that's true uh I guess we could debate whether or not that's true but if that is true that seems like an injury we're talking about how does expression injure people maybe the entirety of expression of the kkk in the 1880s of the 1920s created has helped create a system that injured african-americans at that time and that's why it should have been restricted it's certainly somebody could take that view and I don't want to just trivialize it in responding but I think that the injuries that are done by the kkk are injuries that might be reflected in or encouraged by the speech that clansmen might make but those injuries are in fact the injuries that happen when people are beaten up or lynched they're injuries that happen when businesses that might want to you know say you accept you as a customer don't because the kkk is lurking around the corner to to threaten so on my view the while it is certainly the case that speech can contribute in various ways to unhealthy and indeed deeply destructive patterns of social behavior when we're talking about what the law ought to do it seems to me the law to be concerned with the bad behavior that the speech encourages we on my view it's really crucial to recognize there's always a gap between speech or expressive activity more generally and action that is promoted by the speech that the actor who engages in injurious conduct of one kind or another always has a choice about what to do there and ultimately has to be responsible for that so can uh can speech encourage an undesirable social climate absolutely we think about the bad behavior that we want the law to be involved with it seems to me it's the the bad behavior that happens when those in that social climate make particular choices i think we also have to be concerned is one of the reasons i like your book a lot is as you say with the ecology of free expression where sure this might be true to some extent but there's other considerations too and you do that in chapter four one thing that i always bring up when i talk to students in particular about free speech is remember that there will be government officials enforcing these rules and and sometimes i say that my baseline rule for free speech is today today you tomorrow me so if today i restrict your expression tomorrow the next government official will restrict my expression and so talk a little bit about public choice in class and and how that factors in yeah so i mean i think one of the biggest mistakes that i think people who want the government to do things about various ills that they are concerned about one of the biggest mistakes it seems to me that such people make is in treating whatever rules they promote as practically self-enforcing right so the rule will be interpreted in the most rational most appropriate way possible and it will be enforced without friction and and so forth and we and we know that that's just false right in point of fact rules will be enforced by institutional actors whose personal incentives don't go away just because they come to occupy institutional roles maybe they acquire some additional incentives in those roles but they've still got ideological biases they've still got a desire to benefit themselves and their cronies uh they also will have the extra desire now that they are in institutional roles often to beef up the institutions and enable them to continue to thrive in various ways and so when we ask that the government in one way or another get involved in restricting what we take to be insurious speech or insurious expressive activity it's just deeply i think naive to imagine that the government actors who do this won't be pursuing their own their own objectives in one way or another and so if again while i don't believe we should ever treat political speech as the paradigm case or the only case that matters it does matter a lot that speech is available but expressive activity is available to hold political actors accountable and the more you give political actors the freedoms who interfere in expressive activity with expressive activity the more you create for them opportunities to interfere precisely with that activity which would hold that account does prohibiting political actors or agents of the state from getting involved in speech from you know punishing those who say things that we don't like or whatever else i mean so on the one hand yes that that means that they can't over respond or punish the wrong things but does it also potentially create by not having that speech be punished legally does it create almost a vigilante problem where the the non-state actors overreact to the offensive speech so to speak so i'm thinking of like the you know our epidemic of like twitter shaming and the way that people's lives can be outright destroyed by the piling on when they you know making a you know an off-color joke or has justine landed has justine landed yet like that sort of thing and that maybe if we if we simply said it's not okay like this kind of speech is this sort of offensive speech is is legally barred and you're going to get punished then there might be instances of people getting punished you didn't deserve it there might be instances of people checking their speech more than they needed to but the legal penalties that they might suffer could be substantially lighter than the mob justice that that comes down now yeah erin i wish i had a i wish i had a glib response to that uh i i don't i mean i i share your deep discomfort with with that kind of mob justice and the tendency of folks to pile on um and i'm not sure i see ultimately a response to that that doesn't involve you know a deep-seated cultural shift in what people people regard as appropriate so you might think the availability of legal penalties could in one way or another help to affect that kind of cultural shift i suppose one might imagine alternatively that the legal penalties would just reinforce people's thought that their their pilot mob was entirely appropriate and uh that see you know the law is the law is intervening here and putting this this nasty person in his or her place and weren't weren't weren't we right to make a we're going to make an issue of it um um i i despise that kind of that kind of reaction um i still tend to think that uh physical force against bodies and stuff is in a separate and especially troubling category and i'd really like to minimize that even if over the short term the furies come out uh in uh in other in other contexts but i i certainly didn't have anything dramatic to say about that well i think it's important to to realize when it comes to the social media world always and i'm telling people this all the time that in the history of the the future history of social media we are in infancy right now so we're actually creating social norms uh in the technological world right now and it's all very new and i think that the justine story for example has resonated with more and more people that that was particularly horrible and so we learn maybe that will in 20 years it'll be just considered very gauche to to do that kind of stuff to people hopefully let's hope um now you also discuss uh freedom of expression is having instrument instrumental value which which has you have many many bullet points of what sort of things they are we always talk about the marketplace of ideas but you expand beyond that what sort of instrumental value does freedom of expression have yeah so you know that's really uh in i think modern free speech doctrine and you know if you think about the work of people like uh like milton and mill who helped to kind of lay the groundwork for that is the instrumental approach that's really gotten probably the most attention right so i've tried to talk about other factors before getting to that because i think it's been it's been discussed so much so talk about you know about the importance of property rights about the way in which expressive activity is an expression of autonomy and should be respected for that reason and so forth um but i do end up focusing quite a bit on the instrumental value of expressive activity which i think fits really nicely with the ecological metaphor because it really has to do with benefits that are often dispersed very widely throughout society um and so sometimes they're individual but sometimes they really are very widespread so we start out it seems to be the classic example is talking about knowledge and truth and the way in which the debate that can happen uh as different positions are expressed and then confronted you know by alternatives can really help for the rest of us and also the participants sometimes to figure out more clearly what it makes sense to think but i also suggest yeah there are some other instrumental uh consequences that we ought to be very happy about those include i think just giving people new opportunities to learn how to make good choices to engage in practical reasoning they include uh holding uh not only politicians but other you know kind of actors out of the public space but government or private holding them accountable uh and then finally um a particular favorite of mine i guess i talk about the way in which we ought to see this is mill's phrase but experiments and living can be seen as instances of expressive activity right that it's not just that i go and you know i try a new way of a new way of being whether it's living in a commune whether it's uh you know engaging in polyamory you know all the different things that people experiment with in one way or another um those are things that are interesting and sources of learning for the participants but i think we can also see these as expressive and as conveying ideas to to the wider public and helping people to make sense of what they what they think of these things so i talk for instance about an interracial community in mid 20th century georgia and the way in which uh you know surrounding observers in a highly segregated society could be deeply unsettled not by the thought that for instance those involved in this community were pressuring them to uh change the law or uh you know demanding integration now but just by showing that in the context of this uh you know this environment uh people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds could get along just fine and in so doing call into question the perceived necessity of uh existing segregation and so i think uh yeah experiments and living should be seen as as expressive and as yielding instrumental benefits too so i think there's a whole whole range of ways in which expressive activity yields uh moves these instrumented actions that that seems like an awfully broad definition of expression like is there under i mean along those lines then is there any behavior that human beings could engage in that does not count as expressive so i think in most of the cases i haven't mind the expression is intentional right so if we're talking about uh um you know conveying information uh and people understand themselves to be conveying information let's say for instance to hold uh you know a politician or a CEO accountable um that's pretty deliberately and self-consciously expressive i just want to note that uh there are other kinds of uh context in which we definitely can see behavior as conveying expressive content i think you're quite right that it's not always going to be intentional and that the most natural label to apply isn't going to be expressive so the people you know let's say in the commune don't think of themselves as first and foremost uh you know living their communal life as a matter of expression i still think though as a as a third party observer when i think about house you know society-wide learning takes place it certainly does take place through uh the observation of what people are doing there and we can see the the activity therefore as secondarily expressive obviously i don't think that uh you know a case for freedom of expression ought to rest primarily on those kinds of cases where expression isn't the primary purpose and isn't the natural way to characterize what's going on i just wanted to note that i think there are benefits of a kind that we can recognize as associated with expression that come along with those kinds of experiments in living for instance now you bring up some instances at the end case studies that you think are some of our problematic for free expression one of them is intellectual property and you have quotes around property so i guess we see where you're where you're coming from in that debate yeah so i mean i'm i i think i i side here with uh with those libertarians who tend to think that intellectual property rules in fact are counter to uh rights in physical property and also tend to inhibit the exchange of information obviously there are going to be counters to that that uh you know will emphasize the way in which intellectual property rules might in one way or another encourage the expression of information and that's a long and detailed argument that i try to engage in and a little more detail elsewhere and other people of course even more but i do at least attempt to cite uh studies that provide reason to believe that uh those intellectual property rules don't yield the informational benefits that they're often taken to and uh it's clear on the other hand they can be used to restrict access to information that restricts lower information in a way that i think we we might well find troubling to you get into private action here and just sort of talk about it more in a virtue ethics sense so i gotta ask you about calling cavernac and the the kneeling in all those things is it how should we view those in the context of your theory of free expression yeah so that was very much of course in the news when i was finishing the book and uh you know my view certainly is that uh trump only made matters worse as he usually does by by getting involved and trying to urge that the uh you know the owners in one way or another stop the players from uh their their behavior that he saw as disrespectful to the flag to the troops to him whoever and uh you know i think that if you're if you're an owner if you're operating uh a a football team you certainly need to be aware uh at least to some degree of the extent to which uh behavior players on the field may uh you know impact uh adverb into a ticket sales and i don't want to uh be insensitive to the pressures that those kinds of things may may place on others but i think that it's also really important uh that uh both of the president of the united states i think not get involved in talking about what private actors want to do uh in this context and that owners at least take us you know take a second before assuming that they're really going to to take an irremediable hit here uh to really allow players the opportunity to express themselves i uh i respect the the courage of the players who do want to call attention to police violence and other kinds of abuses um if they can do that uh in a way that's uh that's not disruptive and that you know doesn't bankrupt the teams um i certainly think it it matters for the teams to to respect the contribution that those players are making to to public understanding of the debate our current culture of free speech is fairly troubling uh both both on the left and the right seem to be increasingly upset about people expressing themselves freely and increasingly claiming offense at everything often in a highly inconsistent and unprincipled fashion do you do you see any glimmers of hope do you think that this is going to get worse before it gets better is it going to get better or is it just going to get worse before it gets worse um my ability to predict the future is really limited uh right now however uh i don't feel very optimistic frankly i uh i feel as if uh so on the one hand uh as you say say for instance uh campus folks on the on the status left who who seem to be quite unhappy with speech that uh you know they they regard as inappropriate certainly don't immediately show signs of back and down i know there have been arguments about how widespread uh campus suppression of speech really is that the back and forth discussions of the the numbers there but at any rate uh certainly the examples we see are troubling but then it's very clear that the same folks on the right who uh dismiss their counterparts on the left at snowflakes are themselves really unhappy when you know say someone uh you know posts an image of a decapitated trump or something like that and you know they're very willing to jump on the bandwagon of you know calls for uh you know stigmatization of those who who express what they regard as views that are outside the pale i do think it's an across-the-board phenomenon i think you're absolutely right erin and it bothers me um if there's any glimmer of hope it's just that you know maybe technology provides ways for people to communicate uh that are relatively difficult to suppress and that are relatively anonymous and you know unfortunately that's going to mean uh often people engage in anonymous conduct that's itself pretty nasty uh so i i don't know i'm if there's a tiny glimmer of hope technology might provide it but i think the culture as a whole is anything but hospitable to free expression at this point free thoughts is produced by test terrible if you enjoyed today's show please rate and review us on itunes and if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org