In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge. His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind, is:

Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.

When I talk about wanting to “rigorously define it”, I don’t just mean the kind of definition you would put in a dictionary. I mean something like the debate around the definition of “woman”. For a dictionary, “you know, female person, opposite of male”, is a perfectly good definition of woman. But the debaters want something you can use to adjudicate edge cases.

Lukianoff argues his definition lets you adjudicate some edge cases:

• It makes it clear that cancel culture is about speech. Even though we might colloquially say someone got “cancelled” for sexual harassment, this is a different issue and not part of the pressing problem of viewpoint discrimination.

• It refers to First Amendment standards, which already includes a lot of case laws on specific situations. I’m slightly confused about this, because all Lukianoff’s examples are about government officials; my impression is that the First Amendment mostly doesn’t constrain private businesses. I can’t tell whether or not he’s advocating an implied “we should hold private business to the same standard as the First Amendment holds the government” here.

• It provides an extensional definition as the sort of thing that’s happened since 2014 - 2017.

I agree that this is a good first step, but I’m worried about more detailed edge cases. For example, what do we think of the following situations?

A1: There’s a podcast that promotes pedophilia full time and does nothing else. I choose not to get a paid subscription to it.

A2: I subscribe to a podcast about 12th-century Siberian stamp collecting. Then it switches to promoting pedophilia full-time, so I cancel my subscription.

A3: I subscribe to a podcast that discusses the hosts’ opinions. Then the hosts express a new opinion: they like pedophilia. They discuss this regularly, although not full-time. I dislike this, so I unsubscribe.

A4: I subscribe to a podcast where the hosts interview guests. The hosts start regularly interviewing activists who support pedophilia, and seem interested, and don’t push back as much as they could. I disliked this, so I unsubscribed.

A5: As above, except it’s only two or three such activists, and they do push back a little. But I’m still unsatisfied with the quality of their pushback, so I unsubscribe.

A6: As above, except it’s just once, and they push back a normal amount. But I still don’t think they should be platforming pro-pedophilia activists, so I unsubscribe.

A7: As above, but I also post on social media “Wow, that was a gross and awful episode of my previous favorite podcast. Can’t believe they would platform a pedophile!”

A8: As above, but I also end with “I unsubscribed and you should too!”

A9: As above, but I add “If I catch you continuing to listen to a show that promotes pedophilia, I’m going to block you.”

A10: As above, but I also sent an email to Spotify and say “Did you know you’re hosting a podcast that promotes pedophilia? This is gross and you should take it down.”

A11: As above, but I also start a social media campaign: “Spotify’s hosting a pro-pedophilia podcast, you should stop giving them money until they take it down.”

A12: As above, except that instead of promoting pedophilia, it’s a podcast that once called a woman “bossy” or some equally trivial infraction.

My impression is that everyone wants to allow A1, and anti-cancel-culture people near-universally oppose A12. Everything in the middle, I’m not sure. So where’s the line?

Or if these seem too easy, here are some more complicated ones:

B1. You’re the chair of the psych department at a local university. You hire a new grad student, who’ll mostly help you with your work shocking rats, but also has some leeway to research topics of their own interest. They do a decent job shocking the rats, but all the side papers they write are trying to establish that pedophilia is good for children, and that victims who say they’re unhappy about it are just lying. The papers are neither revolutionary work that makes you personally agree pedophilia is good, nor do they contain any spectacular errors that rise to the level of misconduct. Various pro-pedophile groups on the Internet latch onto these and your grad student becomes a hero in these circles, which he seems to enjoy and actively court. Some journalists are starting to take notice of this and it has the potential to be really embarrassing to the university. You have the power to either ask him to stop with the side papers, or to just quietly fail to renew his contract next year. Should you?

B2: As above, except that he’s writing anti-pedophilia papers which prove that molesting children is even more traumatizing than previously believed, and it has the potential to be really good for the university’s PR. The papers are exactly the same quality.

B3: You’re a journalist (or a blogger). You notice that the pro-pedophilia movement is being energized by a grad student at a local university who keeps publishing papers supporting it. You find this to be pretty gross. You consider writing an article about this. The article will be unbiased, accurate, and not sensationalist. It’s exactly the kind of news you usually cover, and it will get you a lot of clicks/subscriptions. But you know if you write it, thousands of people will get really angry and pressure the university to fire this grad student. Do you write the article?

B4: As above, but the grad student is studying how the word “bossy” does not actually negatively affect women that much. People are still really angry and it’s still a PR problem.

B5: As above, except the grad student is studying whatever is the most unpopular/offensive theory that you personally believe is correct.

Or if these seem too forced, here are some examples I’ve encountered in my own life:

C1: The New York Times said they were going to write an article doxxing my real name. Some of my friends made an open letter/petition asking them not to do this. Philosopher Agnes Callard said that she supported me, but she wasn’t going to sign the petition, because petitions are a form of pressure and a near occasion of sin to cancellation. Is she right? Would the answer be any different if thousands of people signed an open letter/petition demanding that the NYT not publish an article criticizing transgender people? What if it was something really horrible, like publishing the names and addresses of right-wingers during a murderous left-wing riot? What if it was something more related to corporate practices, like their newspaper being published on paper which was made by slave labor in North Korea?

C2: A little while ago, the Atlantic published an article saying that people who like quiet are racist and need to shut up, because noise is objectively vibrant and good. I have strong noise sensitivities that already make it hard for me to go out in public places, this felt like denying my right to exist in public, and I got angrier than I’ve ever gotten at anything in the media. I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation. Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually. But am I morally obligated to get over it for reasons of cancel culture in particular? Should I force myself to buy an Atlantic subscription if I think that I would have bought one if not for my anger here? Would the answer be any different if it were an article criticizing transgender people?

In fact, let’s expand on these last two. Suppose (getting back to hypotheticals), that the Atlantic publishes something unbelievably offensive. Maybe “Stay-at-home fathers are pathetic failures, and CPS should take away their children and put them in more traditional families”. Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions. Millions sign an open letter demanding they apologize, and the Atlantic is hemorrhaging credibility among other journalists and potential sources. The CEO meets with the writer, and with the editor who chose to let the story through, tells them they’re idiots, and fires them.

I think you have to accept one of these three propositions:

P1: The stay-at-home fathers were wrong to be angry that the Atlantic called them pathetic failures and urged the state to abduct their children. They are morally required to react like perfectly equanimous Buddhist monks. Certainly they are forbidden to cancel their subscriptions.

P2: The CEO was wrong to care that he’s losing thousands of subscribers and potential employees/connections because his employees published an insane thing. He should have told them “You have every right to say this, carry on” and told stockholders that the company’s bottom line is less important than journalistic freedom. (Does this mandate that the current real-world CEO of the Atlantic hire a writer who wants to pen an article about how stay-at-home dads are pathetic failures who should lose their children? Why not? How come it’s okay to chill this opinion ab initio, but not post facto?)

P3: Everyone acted in a morally acceptable way here, and you have no objection to this line of events. (Would you still feel this way if it were an article criticizing transgender people? What about an indisputably correct article, criticizing some bad pro-transgender science? Isn’t this option basically saying that cancel culture is fine, and that it’s okay to get a journalist fired if they express an opinion you don’t like?)

I’m not demanding that anyone solve these questions before opposing cancel culture. I’m certainly not challenging the proposition that cancel culture is real and bad. There are lots of things that are bad and that we should oppose, but which we can’t easily define or circumscribe (the most famous example is pornography, but also the distinction between normal policing and police brutality, or between normal punishment and cruel and unusual punishment).

But the more work we put into solving these questions, the more robust an anti-cancel-culture coalition will be. A coalition works best when people believe that if they support other members’ pet causes, those other members will support theirs. Right now nobody’s sure about this. If I support a Republican’s right to criticize transgender people, will he support my right to say I wish the Trump assassin hadn’t missed? Should he support it? Is there a natural coalition between people who want to do those two things? I think there is some natural coalition here, but until its members hammer out what promises they’re making their co-coalitioners, it risks collapsing when people feel betrayed by not getting support that they expected (or when they’re told they unknowingly signed up for supporting things that they hate).

I think of myself as, at the very least, in a strong coalition with everyone who believes that people shouldn’t be fired from their job for speech that they made outside of their job. But this is too limited! It doesn’t cover lots of things which I want it to cover, like an agreement not to cancel scientists for getting the “wrong” results. I’m in an informal shaky coalition about that issue also; I just feel like it could be stronger if we could bound exactly what we meant and what we were fighting against.