The truth-seeking enterprise precludes the university from punishing the expression of a view on the ground that the ideas expressed are false or harmful. That is because such viewpoint restrictions, as I will call them, tend to hamper both the discovery and the appropriation of the truth.
We human beings are fallible: we all believe some things that are false, though we believe them precisely because we (mistakenly) hold them to be true. We have no guarantee that our erroneous beliefs are restricted to minor issues. They may touch on matters of profound importance. Indeed, we have no guarantee that even our deepest, most cherished, identity-forming beliefs are true. Fidelity to the ideal of truth requires acknowledgment of our own fallibility. If we are to pursue the truth honestly, we should never ignore questions or arguments because they make us uncomfortable or threaten to cause us to abandon beliefs that we cherish and even regard as central to our identity. To ignore them on that basis is to be a dogmatist. Nor can we simply take arguments or viewpoints for granted. Fidelity to the ideal of truth requires nothing less than a willingness to have even our deepest convictions and those of which we are most certain questioned, criticized, challenged, denied.
When university administrators, professors, or students forbid the expression of certain points of view precisely because they consider them false, wrongheaded, or even spectacularly offensive, they are undermining the epistemological norms that must be heeded in order for the truth to be pursued authentically and well. Pursuing truth is often a difficult and uncomfortable process. It can even be terrifying—since it could be the case that certain things we desperately want to be true are in fact false, and things that we desperately want to be false are in fact true. And, of course, our wanting things to be true (or false) doesn’t make them so. The temptation is to abandon truth; to favor comfort over it; to allow our emotional investment in our beliefs to cause us to prefer persisting in them to discovering that they are in fact not true (or in some way deficient or defective).
So, one way university administrators, professors, and students can fail in their duties and even undermine the university’s mission is by thwarting the very process of truth-seeking by forbidding the expression of certain ideas and lines of inquiry and argument. I accept my esteemed former student’s accusation that I must therefore support the right of my colleagues and students to ponder, express, and defend deplorable ideas. Indeed, I have spent decades doing just that—consider, for example, my steadfast defense of the free speech rights of my colleague Peter Singer, who defends the moral permissibility not only of elective abortion (which I judge to be deeply unjust) but even the intentional killing of infants for some period of time after they are born. I believe—and am indeed quite confident—that Professor Singer is profoundly wrong on these points and have often stated my reasons for rejecting his beliefs. If, however, I am to be serious about the truth, I must entertain the possibility that I am wrong and Peter Singer is right about abortion and infanticide. I must think through and engage his arguments and present my own. I may not shut down his speech because I passionately disagree with it and am very, very confident that he is very, very wrong—and wrong about a matter of the deepest moral significance, a matter of basic justice and fundamental human rights, literally a matter of life and death.