Tara Smith and Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute explore Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, its emphasis on reason and individual rights, and how it applies to contemporary free speech issues.
Smith and Onkar are contributors to a new book, “The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom.” Listeners may be particularly interested in their argument that John Stuart Mill, widely regarded as a free speech hero, actually opposed individual rights.
Tara Smith is a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin and holds the Anthem Foundation Fellowship in the study of Objectivism. Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Objectivism.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:51 What is Objectivism?
06:19 Where do Objectivism and free speech intersect?
09:07 Did Rand censor her rivals?
13:54 Government investigations of communists and Nazis
18:12 Brazilian Supreme Court banning X
20:50 Rand’s USSR upbringing
24:39 Who was in Rand’s “Collective” group?
35:12 What is jawboning?
40:01 The freedom to criticize on social media
46:02 Critiques of John Stuart Mill
59:49 Addressing a critique of FIRE
01:09:01 Outro
Abridged Transcript
Editor's note: This abridged transcript highlights key discussions from the podcast. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please reference the full unedited transcript for direct quotes.
Explanation of Objectivism
NICO PERRINO, HOST: Onkar, since you teach undergraduate and graduate courses on Objectivism, I guess I'll start with you. What is Objectivism?
ONKAR GHATE, GUEST: It's a philosophy that is pro-reason and champions the individual's mind's ability to know reality. Your basic guide in life should be what you know, what you can figure out, and what you think. As a result, you come to value reason. It's pro-reason and pro-this world. It rejects any concept of the supernatural. So, it's secular and atheistic. Most controversially, it is pro-selfishness, or pro-egoism. To put it in a less controversial way, it's pro-the pursuit of happiness.
The way the Declaration of Independence puts it, it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which means your own personal individual happiness. In terms of morality or the good, it says that what is moral is to pursue your own happiness, your own life. Consequently, in politics, it's pro-free market, pro-capitalism, and pro-individual rights. This stems from the philosophy, which is a philosophy of individualism, and its consequences in politics. You need to look at politics from the lens of the individual and the concept of individual rights.
Ayn Rand’s view of censorship
PERRINO: Ayn Rand wrote in her 1962 essay "The Fascist New Frontier," that “freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression, or punitive action by the government and nothing else. It does not mean the right to demand financial support or the material means to express your views at the expense of other men who may not wish to support you.” Professor Smith, can you talk about that belief? She only saw it as pertaining to the government. Would "censorial" be a word in her lexicon?
TARA SMITH, GUEST: No, "censorial" would not be a word. But it's an adverb meaning something akin to censorship in certain respects. But we need to be so careful with language, especially in debates about intellectual freedom and freedom of speech. We use metaphors and parallels a lot that are not literally true. Yes, censorship is government restriction of your rightful speech. Why isn't this just a linguistic issue? Because there's a fundamental difference in kind between forcing you to do something or to be silent about something and simply saying, "I don't want to deal with you." Government coercion can shut you down.
If I propose some deal to Nico or to you, Onkar, and you don't like it, you don't like the terms of employment that I'm offering or participation in my social media platform or whatever it might be, you can take them or leave them. But if I'm a private company, no matter how large and influential I might be, if I'm just a private individual, I can't shut you down. I leave you free to go and find somebody else to deal with. But I don't want to deal with you. If we think of what the private individual, a private group, or a private company is doing as censorship, and that's not supposed to be allowed, what happened to my right to choose who I associate with, who I trade with, who I speak to, and whose speech I do or do not support, right?
The right to free speech and intellectual freedom also includes the right not to engage with certain people and not to support certain ideas. If you say, "Oh no, Facebook is censoring me; they must be made to allow what I said," you're disregarding the rights of platforms like Facebook.
Ayn Rand vs. John Stuart Mill
PERRINO: John Stuart Mill is also concerned with what you might call the tyranny of the majority. Now, that's not his phrase; I think that's Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase from his journeys through America. But Mill was very much a transgressor in Victorian England, and he was concerned about the ability to play with different ideas and ways of living. He also argued that we need to have freedom of speech because there are three possible options with any argument: that it's right, that it's partially right, or that it's untrue. And in all three cases, we benefit from hearing arguments on the other side.
GHATE: There's something true about what he's arguing, and something false. There are many issues that I think are settled and can be settled in an individual's mind. It's not that you have to keep checking them. Take something like hate speech or Holocaust denial— it's not like you have to spend a day every two years looking at what Holocaust deniers are saying and think about that. It's said that what they say is a fantasy, it has no relationship to the truth, and you can dismiss that and not revisit it, not think you need a continuous check on your thinking. Yet, I still think you cannot censor those people.
But from a collectivist perspective and with hate speech laws — I'm from Canada, we have hate speech laws — they're given many justifications. The harm they create is considered more than the harm of silencing these few individuals, tossing them out of schools so they can't teach, even putting them in jail. It's a balancing of harms and is very much how Mill thinks of it. And it's explicit in Canadian law that this is what they're doing. It's about considering the public good. If we believe that prohibiting certain expressions is beneficial for the public good, we can prohibit it. Conversely, in Canadian law, if we think something is beneficial for the public good, we can permit it. So, the same content of speech can be penalized, criminalized, or not, depending on how it is perceived to affect the public good, which essentially considers the harm it does to society at large, regardless of any harm to an individual.
Distinguishing free speech from unlawful criminal conspiracy or incitement
PERRINO: Free speech advocates accept that there are a lot of uninformed people saying a lot of uninformed things all the time. The distinction lies in whether there’s an actual criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government as opposed to an amorphous call for its overthrow.
SMITH: So, do general, amorphous calls to overthrow the government or seize the means of production, for example, deserve protection, or is it the coordination that matters? Yes, I think so. I agree with what was just said. That's not to say there won't be cases where it's hard to figure out what some organizations do; some of these cases have come before the courts. But, yeah, no, the broad advocacy of certain sorts of ideas which would, you know, change our system radically is okay. But not the use of force, the initiation of real force against people or restricting their rights.
GHATE: The idea that [Ayn Rand] would think you can jail communists, Marxists, and various fascists: No, you can't do that when it's just an issue of ideas. But you can cross the line to actual action. And when that happens, the government should be very strict. There's a tendency to think that because we don't want to intrude on the realm of ideas, we are reluctant to intercede. And I think part of having a distinction between expression and advocacy of ideas and taking actual actions is having a clear line that is very different. We'll make it that, no, we're not intruding on the realm of ideas if we're stopping some kind of criminal plot. It doesn't matter what their ideas are; we're agnostic about that because the issue is now they're plotting to do something illegal.
Show notes:
“Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings: Free Speech on Campus” (2016)
Letters of Ayn Rand (1995)
“Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” (2009)
“Brandenburg v. Ohio” (1969)
“NRA v. Vullo” (2023)
“Murthy v. Missouri” (2024)
“Moody v. NetChoice” and “NetChoice v. Paxton” (2024)
Ep. 224: Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and free speech