I am open to the possibility that there may be groundless interpersonal hostility towards “conservatives” (for some value of the term) which should be remedied. But when the claim is put in such broad terms as “self-censorship” and when I am given no real information about the content being “self-censored” or the contexts in which it’s happening, then I have questions. And one of those follow-up questions is whether this is just the normal thing everyone does to get by in society, or something more pernicious. If it turns out most people are doing something similar, then I’m not sure we need to be so worried–or, at least, so worried about “conservatives” in particular.

As I said, I absolutely “self-censor,” for some values of the term. And I wouldn’t describe it using that term, because it’s part of the universal social grease. I once had a conspiracy loon colleague (everything was a plot to destroy Science and elevate PoMo non-white scholarship; one incident involved Indigenous cancer care stealing money from space lasers); I could have taken the time to call them out and correct them repeatedly, and tell them precisely what I thought of them. But… That’s not a very good way to go around the world, let alone to navigate a department. It’s self-censorship, for some values of the term, but also perfectly reasonable. If we’re talking about being afraid to say one was at a church event the other day, for fear of ostracism or worse, then that’s a different story (though unless it’s something like the Westboro Baptists, I doubt that particular case offers a very realistic worry).

Very often, when I encounter this claim from American conservatives in particular, it seems to amount to the fact that they feel they can’t say the nasty things they want to say about racial IQ, or women, or queer and trans people, or the stupid denialist things they want to say about the climate, etc. If those are the kinds of things being “self-censored,” then we shouldn’t be very worried about it.

But I don’t know. What we have is a bunch of self-reporting with no real content or context. And nothing to indicate whether there may be parallel worries elsewhere along the political spectrum. And that seems pretty relevant in a political context where expressing certain views coded “left” (gender stuff, trans stuff, race stuff, Palestine/Israel stuff, etc.) is grounds for termination, deportation, harassment, intimidation, etc.

An important footnote there:

A reviewer notes that, for instance, subjects’ radically right-leaning beliefs may lead them to make utterances about individuals (e.g., women, members of ethnic minorities, etc.) that do not just express the beliefs but also indirectly address the individuals concerned. This interlocutory dimension of the expressions creates harm, and it may be that the envisaging of this harm is what drove the discriminatory responses in some of our participants. We agree that it is important to acknowledge and further analyze this interlocutory dimension of the expression of ideological beliefs in order to arrive at an adequate account of the justificatory basis of the discrimination we tracked.

There’s nothing there to consider. One references a set of beliefs (in the example, beliefs about the existence of God) and the other references attitudes and beliefs that are frequently about people, and often, specifically, about the worth of certain people—including people who are one’s peers, colleagues, teachers, and students. It does not make a difference that those attitudes and beliefs may be, in the view of those who hold them, “considered,” nor that they are, again from the perspective of the person articulating them, “politely expressed.” The beliefs and attitudes that the footnote refers to, which “create harm,” can do so regardless of being “considered” or “politely expressed.” And it does no good to say that concerns about the harm caused are mitigated by mere dint of how politely it is promulgated.

I find it difficult to believe that conservatives self-censor on that front. Indeed, the opposite seems true: Many seem very forthcoming about it. And if it is raised “in apparently appropriate contexts,” I can see it being a good starting point for conversation: For example, one could reply with, “I agree! It shouldn’t be distinguished, and the notion of a distinction is quite contentious in the literature.”

The presumption that a conservative with that specific belief would self-censor seems contingent on them holding the view that others, especially those that they are talking with, disagree with that specific belief. But, on the surface, there are plenty of people, including non-conservatives, who agree with it. For instance, I’m not a conservative, and I also think that such a distinction isn’t warranted, but that’s likely for entirely different reasons. I don’t feel the need to self-censor my skepticism of a distinction between “gender” and “sex,” so why would a conservative?

Unless, of course, there’s more to it than that specific belief. That is, there are other specific beliefs that aren’t just about the “metaphysics of gender,” but about how persons are to be treated, including persons who may be present. Indeed, the fact that they preface it with a statement about “intrinsic worth” and “respect” suggests that there is much more underneath than what the specific belief, as stated, gives. So what is it really then that they are self-censoring here? It’s not at all clear.

It’s not so much the nuances as it is that the specific belief you are referring to doesn’t appear to be all there is to it. The very way it’s articulated, making reference to “intrinsic worth” and “respect,” suggests that it is far more than just a position on whether a distinction between “sex” and “gender” makes sense, and certainly not just a position on the “metaphysics of gender.” What else is contained within that specific belief is not spelled out, leaving those who listen to it, if articulated that way, to fill in the gaps. And yes, listeners might react poorly, depending on what they take the hidden premises to be. But in that case it’s not so much that the specific belief is being self-censored (in your example, the person is articulating it rather than censoring it); it’s that what is being articulated is vague and not fully spelled out.

Taking a bigger picture view, another commenter (Michel) noted that this was an issue here: The content of what is supposedly being “self-censored,” as well as the contexts in which it occurs, is often left unclear. Even your example leaves it unclear, at least with respect to content. (The context is relatively clear: a discussion on the “metaphysics of gender.”) This leaves the door open to a motte-and-bailey of sorts. Whereby the conservative can say that they are “self-censoring” some vague claim, one that sounds innocuous to most ears; when what they are actually self-censoring, and what they want to be able to say without facing any criticism or judgment, is something else entirely. Essentially, the “oh, you know the ones” meme.

I’m not sure what to make of the atheist/theist examples. The notion was introduced by On the Market Too earlier, but I still have fundamentally the same reaction to them: There’s nothing there to consider. If someone tells me that I am going to burn in Hell for being an atheist, then, yes, that is a specific belief about me and my place in that person’s religious cosmology. But since it does not bear upon anything significant to me, and since I regard that religious cosmology as false, I don’t see how it could “create harm” merely by that person uttering their belief that I will burn in Hell. If, however, they hold other beliefs, such as beliefs about how non-Christians should be treated, then it is those beliefs and their articulation that would tap into the “interlocutory dimension” that the footnote discusses, potentially in ways that listeners understand as “creating harm.” Or so it seems.

I think this is a bit disingenuous. The reference to intrinsic worth and respect is made precisely because many on the other side of this dialectic charge conservatives with devaluing or denying the existence of the groups in question. Conservatives, in my experience, mention respect precisely to anticipate and reject that charge. 

And that charge is broadly correct. Which is presumably why the conservative in your example gave a vague and sanitised version of the specific belief, withholding the content that was relevant to examining whether they do genuinely hold others to have “intrinsic worth” and so on. In which case, what’s disingenuous here is the conservative claiming that they are self-censoring that specific belief—the vague, sanitised version intended to sound palatable—when what they actually want to say is something else altogether.

Plenty of them will even say things like “I’ll use whatever pronouns you want me to use, I’ll treat you with the same respect I treat anybody else, but if you’re asking what I believe about sex and gender, it’s that the latter is exhausted by the former.”

But that’s fine? The “latter being exhausted by the former” is just another way of saying that a distinction does not exist. Which is a belief also held by non-conservatives, including myself. Again, likely for very different reasons to the conservative, but I clearly have no problem saying that this is a belief I hold. So what’s the conservative’s problem?

Maybe taking the entire statement into account will help. Because you initially said that the context was a discussion on the “metaphysics of gender,” a context where it is appropriate to talk about the nature of a distinction between “sex” and “gender,” whether there is a distinction, what form it takes if there is one, and so on. In that context, articulating a position on the distinction (that it doesn’t exist) while also using hedging language (the mention of pronouns, the allusion to “intrinsic worth” and “respect”) tells listeners that what is being articulated is, again, more than just a position on whether there’s a distinction between “sex” and “gender” as appropriate for a discussion on the “metaphysics of gender.” It tells listeners that there is something else that the conservative has in mind here, something that goes beyond their answer to the question about a distinction but which the conservative nevertheless takes to be bound up with that answer. Of course listeners are going to pick up on something like that. The answer tells listeners more than what they were even asking for.

If so, I have a hard time seeing how this distinction—both here and in general—does not rely mainly on contingent features of the person, what they find offensive, etc., in a way which basically makes them untenable for guiding broader norms of academic discussion.

I genuinely do not see the problem here. If someone says that they are a Christian, there is nothing, in that utterance, that necessarily “creates harm” in the way the footnote is describing. If someone says, in addition to that, that they believe I am going to burn in Hell, again, no harm is created, beyond maybe minor annoyance, if even that. If someone says that they are a Christian nationalist, that they believe women shouldn’t be allowed to work in the university, that queer people should be sent to reeducation camps, and that forced remigration is a good thing, then I don’t see how they can avoid “creating harm” in the “interlocutory dimension” the footnote describes. By its nature, what they are articulating is about others, including very likely people in their immediate presence.

Let’s say that they preface it with broadly the same hedging language used in your other example: So, “I believe that, while every human being has intrinsic worth and should be treated with respect, Christian nationalism is what we need for this country.” Does the hedging language there anticipate and dispel the charge of “devaluing or denying the existence of (certain) groups”? Does it avoid “creating harm”? I don’t think it does. And I think given that these are very clearly beliefs about living people, and the people that they are about are acutely aware that these are beliefs about them, it is rational for them to respond with that in mind.

That is a much clearer, more well spelled-out articulation of a specific belief a conservative might hold. Its expression in “reasonable contexts” seems fine to me, even if it is wrong. But I think there’s a certain naïveté to your characterization of what’s happening in this scenario. Are you claiming that the conservative is expressing this specific belief only in the “reasonable context” of a discussion on the “metaphysics of gender” and nowhere else? That the preamble they gave about “intrinsic worth” and “respect” should assuage concern that this specific belief may have a bearing outside of that context?

The reason I bring this up is because the following claim, that “some academics have legitimately experienced (ideological) bullying” for articulating that specific belief seems to rest on the premise that their expression of that belief is constrained solely to the academic, the abstract, the “reasonable context” of, in this case, a discussion on “the metaphysics of gender.” But we know that that isn’t true. The purportedly “bullied” academics have written to courts, legislatures, and other public institutions, with the intention of affecting judicial decision-making, policy development, and wider cultural norms. They have had generous column space in newspapers and ample air time on broadcasts. They have joined think tanks, written reports for governments, etc. Together, their actions go well beyond the academic context of a discussion on “the metaphysics of gender,” where one might say that they are simply wrong in the abstract sense, but not in any way malicious. For this reason, it doesn’t seem honest to me to evaluate how they are treated as though their actions are limited to the mere expression of a specific belief within a highly constrained and purely academic context.

Likewise, for the preamble (about “intrinsic worth” and so on), we can’t examine it honestly if we cannot look to the expression of the belief, and the actions that accompany it, made outside the academic context of a discussion on the “metaphysics of gender.” The conservative giving us this preamble is, as you say, trying to forestall a charge that they believe to be unfair. But we have every right to ask whether the charge holds, and how can we do that if not by evaluating the expression of the specific belief, and accompanying actions, in a broader context?

At best, I think you could argue that, in a “reasonable context,” such as a discussion on “the metaphysics of gender,” one should not jump to conclusions. Someone can hold a sincere belief that is wrong, but them holding that belief does not in itself entail anything within the broader context. However, the track record does not favor this level of charity; or, more accurately, it suggests to us that this level of charity is too generous–precisely because we’ve seen how conservatives are not content to narrow the belief’s expression (and actions related to it) to just the academic, especially for this specific belief. And that matters if we’re going to take seriously the claims made in the preamble to their expression of it.

The track record of these things has been that conservatives are not solely “interested in having a discussion in the metaphysics context.” This, for example, is certainly not just a “metaphysics context.” Nor is this. Given that track record, I can’t blame others for responding with the broader context in mind, including how conservatives at large have expressed that specific belief and, crucially, acted with regard to it. That said, I appreciate the point about not jumping to conclusions where and when the context clearly is just “the metaphysics context.” I would say, however, that if that’s the case, a preamble that aims to forestall certain charges that the conservative takes to be unfair has the opposite of the intended effect, precisely because of the aforementioned track record; that is, it draws attention to and invites inquiry about the content of the preamble. I suppose another problem here is that, if Ásta is right, there are huge methodological issues within even “the metaphysics context” itself. This almost certainly also has relevance to the specific belief at hand; although I’m not confident enough in my own ability to give an analysis of that from a broadly Ásta-ian perspective. Happy to allude to it though, if others find it relevant or interesting enough to pursue that line of inquiry as it relates to this subject.

I don’t think I am ignoring that at all; I’ve acknowledged, twice, that one should avoid jumping to conclusions, particularly where the context clearly is just “the metaphysics context.” Pointing out that it frequently isn’t just that context is intended only to contextualize why it would be prudentially rational, given the track record, to be wary when someone offers the very specific statement you’ve given as an example—the one that includes both the specific belief and the preamble about “worth” and “respect”. They would be wary because, all too frequently, those you’ve called “noxious conservatives” have said much the same thing and then retreated to claims of “illiberal bullying” when faced with criticism or pushback for comments they’ve made and actions they’ve taken outside “the metaphysics context”—actions that put into question the claims made in their preamble about “intrinsic worth” and “respect.” Pointing this out does not justify mistreatment of those you’ve termed “politically innocuous;” it establishes why wariness is a rational response given circumstances where less innocuous commentators and actors have made clear that useful, informative discussion, within the metaphysics context, isn’t their only goal.

That would need to be rephrased in light what’s been discussed so far: Do “politically inactive conservatives” self-censor to avoid being thought of as (to use your term) noxious conservatives? Possibly, although that would require that they are aware of the commentary and actions of the latter, and therefore aware that that is considered noxious. But, by virtue of being politically inactive, they may not be aware of that at all. Although, on the other hand, they might be, given that their preamble is clearly intended to create some distance between them and the politically active noxious conservative.

The distinction complicates any analysis of purported self-censorship, because the conservative being proposed in this scenario exists in almost a liminal space, where they are politically inactive but nevertheless apparently aware of what their politically active counterparts are engaged in. Likewise, they are aware of (and apparently in agreement with?) the evaluation that what their counterparts are doing is noxious. Might this cause them to self-censor, even in what you’ve termed “reasonable contexts”? I don’t know. Some have said that they do; although whether they resemble the particular archetype constructed here—that of the politically inactive conservative who nevertheless maintains a keen awareness of the broader context, including of the comments and actions of politically active noxious conservatives and how this reverberates throughout multiple discourses—is unclear.