“We must help people understand how unacceptable the violent suppression of speech is,” Alice Dreger wrote the day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination — stating that for Kirk, the heckler’s veto became the “shooter’s veto.”
In my view, to call murder “unacceptable” still trivializes the taking of a human life. Cultural acceptability is no sure moral guide: honor killings, slavery and caste systems are still acceptable and culturally potent among some groups, but they are morally wrong.
Using acceptability as an evaluative tool is a poor substitute for what J. Budziszewski calls “foundational moral principles” that are both right for everyone, and at some level are known by everyone — even those who violate them. “Our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain,” Budziszewski contends, with an analysis, like the Declaration of Independence, based on natural law principles.
Although organizations like Heterodox Academy do much good, diversity of opinion and free speech alone will not rescue college campuses, nor our larger culture, from a loss of shared foundational values. Gallup Polls can give us the Trends in U.S. Adults’ Acceptance of Moral and Values Behaviors, but can’t tell us the reasons grounding such acceptance.
Christian Smith and others contend that “emerging adults have been poorly educated in how to think about moral issues,” a situation that should concern liberals, moderates and conservatives alike.
Smith argues that in our “culturally, religiously, and morally pluralistic society,” it is vital that young adults “be able to understand different moral positions, to consider how different assumptions shape moral beliefs, to think out some of the more obvious logical implications of taking a certain position ... (and) be able to carry on a basic, constructive discussion about moral differences with other people who disagree.”
Poor moral reasoning impairs our civic order, which Smith notes needs “continual regeneration.”
In The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good and Evil, James Davison Hunter argues that moral education of youth has been subverted by efforts to be inclusive of diverse moral cultures in order to reduce conflict and avoid “indoctrination in any particular religious or political belief.” However, identifying so-called “universal values” requires stripping them from their cultural foundations, such as religion, or natural law theory, yet advancing them as objectively true.
“For the most part,” Hunter posits, “moral educators want to believe that the virtues are self-evident goods that need no justification.”
So, rather than teaching children how to sort through and evaluate competing moral traditions, the “Why be ethical?” questions are too often ignored, moral reasoning is avoided, and argument about the “whys” is viewed as “unproductive and therefore unnecessary.”
So, what happens to any of us in such a milieu? When individuals no longer have the ability to identify or reason about what is moral, Hunter suggests that any talk of “values” becomes “little more than sentiments, moral judgments, expressions of individual preference.” Within such a framework, he says, “the defining moral action is the capacity of the individual to choose as he or she sees fit.”
Robert George asserts that such “moral subjectivism” is the “unspoken premise of the Age of Feeling” in which we live — explaining that “a great many people today have come to suppose that the touchstone of truth is not faith or reason ... but rather feeling and feelings.”
That is why, George states, “we witness the spectacle of many people embracing a fierce moral absolutism based on beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective feelings.” It is such “aggressive absolutism” he says, that fuels people’s willingness to lay aside others’ freedom of speech, and “join ‘cancellation’ mobs determined to ruin the reputations and destroy the careers and lives of people whose ideas they regard, often quite absurdly, as ‘hateful’ and ‘harmful.’”
Moral subjectivism simply cannot function as the grounds for shared values nor cultural solidarity. “If there is little or no common political ground today,” Hunter claims, “it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.”
John Adams’ view that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” acknowledges that our political system assumes some cultural unity — solidarity — that binds us together. But when there are no common standards for measuring morality, freedom, equality, and toleration, persuasion is jettisoned in favor of power. Hunter warns that if “solidarity cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively.”
Hunter also cautions against the growth of a “shared cultural nihilism” hungry for power and which is based on grievances and revenge which dehumanizes the opposition and seeks its symbolic and cultural annihilation, resulting in the cancellation campaigns practiced by both the right and the left.
Both Heterodox Academy and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression share the concern about demands that scholars be professionally sanctioned for constitutionally protected speech. Shiri Spitz Siddiqi’s recent analysis of FIRE’s documented cases of scholars who are nonviolently targeted for professional sanctions appears to show that especially since 2023, politically-motivated campus incidents from the political left of the scholars have decreased, while incidents from the political right of the scholars have trended upward.
She reminds us that “cycles of censorship have characterized human history for centuries. It’s human nature to want to silence ideas we find harmful, but it’s a tendency with dangerous downstream effects.” She admits that “the present conservative backlash is not surprising — but it is concerning, not because we favor one viewpoint over another, but because we recognize that censorship — bad in itself — also breeds resentment, directly undermining the conditions that lead to productive dialogue across difference.”
Certainly, efforts to "disagree better" are more than empty etiquette — and can effectively ratchet down the rhetoric and promote civil discourse. And applying the Dignity Index to our discussions invites us to recognize that “each one of us is born with inherent worth, so we treat everyone with dignity — no matter what.”
But the impact of such initiatives among those who already consider political violence acceptable may be minimal. Currently, according to YouGov polls, older Americans are more worried about political violence than younger Americans, and Republicans and Democrats are more worried about political violence “after attacks on their own party.” Seventy-two percent of Americans say political violence is never justified, “but younger and more liberal Americans are more likely to disagree,” considering political violence to sometimes be justified.
Unless our shared political culture is deeply and genuinely grounded in the self-evident truths that each of us is created equal and are endowed by our creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a primary focus on free speech and civility is unlikely to strengthen solidarity.
William Bennett asserts that “we must make America safe for argument again;” and that our form of government requires us to be able to “argue our way to truth rather than shoot (our) way to silence.”
But unless our shared political ethos genuinely preserves each person’s unalienable right to life, in addition to protecting their rights to think and speak freely, we will remain divided. A primary focus on free speech and civility may only change vocabulary and delivery. We must surely work to change our minds and our hearts. Until we do, after the next political assassination, God forbid, we will witness many people who call it “murder,” a small number who declare it a “public good,” and an increasing number who consider it merely “unacceptable.”