In an era of cancel culture, outrage cycles, and the censorship of dissent, philosopher Peter Singer makes his case for freedom of thought and expression.

Singer argues that silencing uncomfortable ideas doesn’t make us safer — it makes us less able to grow, reason, and solve the pressing issues of our time.

PETER SINGER: I believe very strongly that freedom of thought and expression is a very important basic good for any society that hopes to progress, that hopes to improve the world's situation, and hopes also to progress in knowledge and understanding of what is true. And I think progressing in knowledge and truth is an important instrument towards improving the wellbeing of everybody living on this planet. So why is freedom of thought and expression so important for improving that? Well, for two reasons. One is... And this all goes back by the way to John Stewart Mill's famous 19th century essay on liberty. One is, we can never know for sure when we are mistaken. There have been such a lot of beliefs that people have been certain of and persecuted people who oppose them that we now regard as false. Obviously, there were societies that believed that the white race was entitled to rule over the black race. There've been societies that believed that sexual relations between people of the same sex were an abomination. And in fact, there still are some societies that believe that. And people who do practice that should be killed. There are societies... There are times that have believed a whole lot of false factual information, such as the idea that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun revolves around the earth. And the Roman Catholic Church persecuted people for rejecting that belief. So it's quite possible that we all agreed on things that we believe to be true that are false. And if we prevent them being critically examined and scrutinized and prevent people putting arguments against them, then we are not going to get at the truth. We are not going to discover which of our beliefs are false and which of them are true. There's also a second reason why it's really important for us to allow freedom of thought and discussion. Even if there are beliefs that we hold that are true, if we prevent people challenging those beliefs, we will lose our understanding of why they're true and how they would in fact meet objections that might be made to them. Because by preventing people making those objections, we don't understand how the objections are refuted. So it's much better, even if you are convinced that what you know is true and important, and even if, let's say, it really is true, you will understand better why you believe that and how it can resist objections if you allow it to be questioned. I founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas together with my co-editors, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahon, because all three of us were troubled by the narrowing climate of ideas that could be openly and freely discussed. One of the early articles in philosophy that led to a reaction that we felt was unfortunate was when a young philosopher called Rebecca Tuvel published an article in which she accepted the idea that people who wish to be transgender should be able to identify as a gender different from that with which they were born. But she asked the question, if people can do that with gender, why can't they do that with regard to race? And she gave us an instance of an example of somebody who had not been descended from African ancestry, but was working for an organization in the United States that was helping blacks and herself identified as black. And when it was exposed that she was not really black, she lost her position and there was a lot of condemnation. And in fact, a lot of that condemnation came from people with the same politics as those who strongly supported the idea of anybody to identify as a gender different from that they were assigned at birth. So simply for raising that question about transracialism, if you like, there was a petition to the journal. It was a journal called Hypatia that Tuvel published that article in calling for it to be withdrawn and criticizing the editors for publishing it. And this was... As I say, a lot of it was coming from women who were supporting transgender... People who were trans women or trans men, but it was directed against a young woman who was an untenured philosophy professor at that time. So we felt that the article was one that raised a good question and an appropriate response for those who disagreed would've been to show why they thought it was wrong, why they thought transracialism was different from transgenderism. But, you know, to attack the article and say, "It ought to be withdrawn," seemed to us to be completely the wrong reaction. And then there've been a number of other instances since then where many people, some philosophers, but not all philosophers have gone into trouble on a range of different issues and in some cases have been suspended from their teaching and disciplined. And it seems like university administrations have been very weak in standing up to defend academic freedom. And the idea of university administrations following a Twitter storm of protest against one of their professors having said something seemed to us to be completely wrong. And our concern was that people would stop publishing controversial ideas because they wouldn't want to be attacked in this way. So we thought it would be good to have a journal, which was an academic journal, which means that we review the papers sent to us, we get them sent in an anonymous form and have them reviewed anonymously. So people are not biased in favor of, you know, people they who may have reputations they know, and then publish good articles. And if the authors did not want to put their name on it, usually authors do wanna put their names on articles and academic journals. And in fact, we didn't know of any academic journals that would allow people to publish anonymously. But we said if they didn't want to publish under their own name, we would accept anonymous publication. And then if later on the climate changed and they wanted to be acknowledged as the author, we would be happy to do that. So that was the basic idea of the journal. And we have in fact published a number of papers anonymously, but not all the papers we publish are anonymous. Maybe about a third of them are, but we've discovered that there's something else important that we're doing. And that is we're publishing papers where the author is quite happy to have their name attached to it, but the journal editors don't wanna publish them. The journal editors, even sometimes after they've been peer reviewed and have had good reviews, the journal editors discovered that they're too sensitive. In one case, there was an article which was about racial issues, which had been... Was very close to being accepted by a journal. It had good peer reviews and seemed well on the way to being accepted. And then George Floyd was murdered. And with the murder of George Floyd, of course, there was a whole lot more activity protesting against the murder of Floyd and also protesting against other police killings of blacks and in general, making the treatment of blacks much more sensitive. And the editor of this journal decided that even though the article had been well reviewed, they would not publish it because of the more sensitive climate. That incident, it was a paper about when it's legitimate to use blackface, when it's legitimate for people who are not black to put a black face on to act as if they are a person of African descent. And we put it through our review process, it had some interesting things to say. It had a more nuanced view on that issue than other discussions, and we thought it was worth publishing. We did publish it and the author put in a paragraph explaining why he was thankful to us for publishing it. So, and that's now happened with a number of articles in the Journal of Controversial Ideas that they had been rejected by other journals, not because they weren't well argued, but because they were politically controversial. The argument is mostly put against the controversial articles that we receive that they're going to harm disadvantaged or marginalized groups. And you know, there are a number of fields of articles that are controversial, but perhaps the one that we've received the most articles submitted to us has been about transgender issues. And the argument here is that if we publish articles which emphasize the significance of biological sex and which say, for example, that somebody is only really a woman if their biological sex changes and not if they identify as a woman, even though they are unchanged in terms of their male biology, that that is harmful to trans women who have chosen not to change their biology, that it attacks their self identity and self identity is very important and that they are very much a vulnerable group, both in terms of being discriminated against and attacked by many people, but also in terms of having a higher rate of depression and suicide than other groups. So people have said that it's therefore wrong of us to publish these articles. Now we take all of those concerns seriously. I think it's absolutely true that trans people are vulnerable, that they're discriminated against, that they have a hard time of it, and that they... Some of them will be upset if they read some of the articles in our journal. Now of course, there was no coercion to read any articles in our journal, but possibly simply knowing that such articles are published may disturb them. But against that, we weigh the importance of having an open debate on issues and the importance of the fact that an issue doesn't disappear if you suppress discussion about it, people will still think these things and some people will say these things and because there is no open discussion, there won't be any good understanding of how best to refute the things that people have said. We stick by the view that John Stewart Mill put forward, that, "If you want to understand a view, even if it's true, you have to allow it to be challenged and you have to know how those challenges should be met." And we do think that, you know, there are factors on other sides in... Particular to continue with the transgender issue. There are the concerns of some women, of... A feminist concern, if you like, that some women want to have spaces where there are only women, and by only women they mean people without a penis and testicles and people without that male biology, which they may have more testosterone circulating in their body, and they believe that such individuals are more likely to sexually assault them. And again, that's a claim that has some empirical basis. So it's not as if there's only one side to this issue, the so-called gender critical feminists who argue against the idea that merely changing your identification, I mean, the choice of identification is enough to make someone who is biologically male count as a woman in every respect, have some kind of case that... We think we're not saying that case is necessarily right, but we think it's better that that case be heard and that people who want to defend the idea of self-identification and the gender issue should then refute the arguments. And the Journal of Controversial Ideas, of course, is open to them to submit reputations of any articles they publish as anyone is to submit a counter argument against any of the articles we publish. We warmly welcome that kind of controversy. That's exactly what we're trying to do with the Journal of Controversial Ideas. One area in which I've worked for a very long time as a professor of bioethics and previously as a... just a professor of philosophy is the question of choice in ending life. And I've argued for voluntary euthanasia for people who are terminally ill and wanna die or incurably ill and wanna die. And similarly, physician assisted dying or voluntary assisted dying, which is similar. Now those arguments themselves were not protested against, I never lacked freedom of expression to argue for voluntary euthanasia or physician assisted dying. But when I extended that to the possibility of parents choosing to end the life of a severely disabled newborn infant where the prognosis was very poor for the future of the child and the parents thought it was in the best interests of the child and of their family that the child not live, I was protested against on that issue in a number of countries. I was protested against in that issue initially in Germany, which understandably has a Nazi past and was very concerned about anything that looked like what the Nazis did. And the Nazis had a so-called euthanasia program for dealing with people who were mentally ill. But it wasn't really euthanasia. It wasn't for the benefit of people who were suffering or so severely disabled that they could not enjoy life at all. It was rather to remove people who were seen as a blot on the Aryan folk. So obviously what I was saying was not really about that, but I did get protests in Germany. And when I came to Princeton in 1999, there were protests against my appointment at Princeton because of my views on that issue. Now I think that discussion is a little more open now in that in some countries it is being discussed. And in fact, in the Netherlands there are protocols that medical organizations have accepted, which allow doctors in a very carefully circumscribed number of cases, and there've been only really a handful of cases, to do that, to actively end the life of a very severely disabled newborn, especially one who was in pain with the consent on the... With the wishes of the parents. In other countries, it's not exactly that that's happening. But on the other hand, doctors who are treating a baby who needs life support and who also has a very poor prognosis, will go to the parents and ask the parents if they wish to have life support continued. And they will describe the prognosis for the child and say, "You might think it's better for your child that we withdraw treatment, the child will then die and we can make the child comfortable while the child dies." And many parents given that choice, exercise it. So that's not very different from what I've been advocating. And I think perhaps my views have had some influence in making doctors more willing to do that, more open to discussing it with the parents and then to removing life support and ensuring a humane death for a child whose future was going to be very bleak. We should try to make ourselves more comfortable with controversial ideas because it's important that those ideas be discussed. It's important to be on the side of finding out the truth and not of protecting what we think is the truth behind some kind of shield so that it can't be challenged. Because again, looking at past history, we know that many people have very firmly believed ideas that have turned out to be false and they have put up shields against anybody criticizing those ideas. And those ideas hung on a lot longer because they were not able to be criticized. Let's go back to the example of same-sex relationships In the early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the Utilitarian School, wrote essays strongly attacking the idea that it should be a crime for anyone to have sex with someone of their own sex. He argued as a utilitarian would that this experience is enjoyable for the consenting adult parties involved and does no harm to anyone else. But Bentham never published those papers because he felt that to publish them at that time would've brought discredit on all of the other things that he and the early English utilitarians wanted to do. For example, prison reform, for example, ending the slave trade, for example, bringing about a universal suffrage so that instead of just wealthy property owners voting, everybody could vote. So those essays remain unpublished until this century. And you know, that's an example of something that people firmly believed in and did not allow a real debate. Maybe if they had been more open to controversial ideas and they'd had debates about that, then many decades of repression and discrimination against gays could have been avoided.