But With A “Duty of Care”?

Picture a group of people who believe that they know right from wrong taking books from a library and throwing them onto a bonfire to burn them. There will still be plenty of volumes remaining when they’re done, as the books can be found in libraries and private hands elsewhere, but the ones within their reach are burned. They have not, and cannot, eradicate the offending book from the face of the earth, but they have burned books.

Is this not book burning? Obviously it is, and the fact that this performative act of condemnation didn’t result in the books total destruction doesn’t make the act of burning books any less a book burning. Perhaps they’re right, that the books is bad, evil even, and conveys ideas that are horrible and, at least in their minds, should not exist. Perhaps it’s not so much the ideas in the books, but the author who is so despised that his books should never see daylight. Does this make book burning any better?

Not too long ago, the employees of Netflix took to the street because they hated a comedian, Dave Chappelle, who made observations about people that they found reprehensible. How dare their company show his work? He was a heretic, a danger to their sensibilities, and it was their duty to take action to silence him and his work.

The book publisher Penguin Random House agreed to publish a book by Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It’s employees, and others in the “literay” field, disapproved because of Barrett’s decision in Dobbs and decided to proffer an open letter to express their views.

As members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community of the United States, we care deeply about freedom of speech. We also believe it is imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care.

Is there such a thing as free speech “with a duty of care”?

This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship. Many of us work daily with books we find disagreeable to our personal politics. Rather, this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits. Coney Barrett is free to say as she wishes, but Penguin Random House must decide whether to fund her position at the expense of human rights in order to inflate its bottom line, or to truly stand behind the values it proudly espouses to hold.

Is this censorship? The argument is that someone will publish Justice Barrett’s book, so whatever the outcome of this open letter demanding that the publisher not be the prestigious Random House, it’s not as if her book will never be published, never see the light of day, never be available to be read should someone care to do so. How could this be censorship if the book will eventually come to be? But why does it have to be Random House that publishes it when Random House is a publisher that espouses values of human rights and this author was part of a wing of the Supreme Court that took them away?

We the undersigned have made the decision to stand by our duty of care while upholding freedom of speech. We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.

Every censor, every book burner, believes they are doing so for the greater good. At least their flavor of it. They do not condemn the ideas in the book, as they have no clue what the book will say as yet. But they do condemn the author for having performed her function as a justice in a way that produced an outcome with which they disagreed. Would “their” industry destroy “their” rights by publishing a book?

Perhaps their are lines that can be universally agreed should never be crossed. But this appears to be nothing more than punishing an author for doing something with which a group of employees and others in the “industry” disapprove. They could instead choose not to buy the book. The could tell other people not to buy the book. Just as they could have not watched Dave Chappelle and told others not to watch him either.

Calling it a “duty of care” is much like journalists who eschew facts that conflict with their narrative and omit the offending details or massage them in such a way as to create a false impression that leaves their readers with no choice but to reach what they deem to be the correct conclusion. They call this “moral clarity,” assigning to themselves the lofty position of moral arbiter for the rest of us.

The signatories of the letter, like the Netflix employees, similarly take the position of being the arbiters of “care,” calling it their duty to make sure that others, whether it’s us groundlings or the evil Justice Barrett, aren’t allowed to make the grievous mistake of seeing or hearing from the unworthy or hated.

It’s unlikely that I would be interested in reading love poems by Pol Pot, and I likely wouldn’t lose much sleep if no publisher wanted to make a book of them. But as warm and fuzzy as “duty of care” may sound, like preventing kittens from being inadvertently run over by speeding cars, there can be no free speech if it becomes subject to the populists’ notion of “duty of care.” Not for books in libraries about gay families. Not for a politically incorrect comedian. Not for a Supreme Court justice who sided against abortion in a decision.

No, it’s unlikely that the call for Random House to not publish Barrett’s book will mean that her book will not get published. But it’s no less censorship once the decision to publish has been made than burning books knowing that there will still be copies elsewhere is any less book burning. More importantly, each of us can be our own moral arbiter, and we don’t need the genius of the woke mob to exercise their “duty of care” to save us from whomever they decide is too evil for us to read.