Note: there are some spoilers for season three of The Good Place in this post. Don’t read if that bothers you!


Warburton writes in the second chapter of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction that, “where Mill draws a line marking the limits of acceptable free speech is at the point where it becomes an incitement to harm to another person; not psychological harm or economic harm but physical harm” (30). This idea brought up many questions for me, such as: what constitutes physical harm? Who all is culpable when someone’s words drive someone else to commit an action of physical violence, especially when the speaker themself does not act violently? Why is physical health valued over economic/psychological health in this viewpoint when these three aspects of life are often intertwined? I don’t have answers to these questions, but they are important questions to ask when evaluating John Stuart Mill’s philosophy.


I think Mill’s philosophy is a decent start at understanding free speech; however, as the author points out, “the world is not a seminar” (31). Separating actions into “caused harm” and “didn’t cause harm” is impossible; all actions, and the media through which actions transpire, have varying intents and consequences. Further, singular actions contribute to larger social movements and cultural norms. One “innocent” joke made in the wrong context could make issues such as sexism just ever so slightly more pressing and pervasive.


Season three of The Good Place, an NBC television show which cleverly explores morality through comedy, discusses this exact concept in the context of the modern age of the internet and globalization. The series’ premise is that humans’ actions all have numerical values attributed to them, and if someone at the time of their death has a high enough point value, they are granted into “the good place.” Those with insufficient points are sent to “the bad place” to be tortured forever. (Season three spoilers ahead.) Towards the close of season three, Michael, a demon from hell turned advisor and friend to the human protagonists, discovers that only one person has gotten into the good place in over 500 years. He wonders what has caused the decline in good people, only to discover that good people do still exist—they just suffer because of the unseen consequences of their actions. For example, someone might buy vegetables from the local supermarket to begin eating healthy—a noble effort according to most people. However, the vegetables were picked by underpaid workers, transported in vehicles contributing to climate change, and once sold, gave money to millionaires who hoard their wealth and allow billions of people globally to suffer from starvation. Thus, the good intention—eating healthy—and the points accompanying it are completely erased by the negative consequences of the system in which the consumer in question operates.


This example may seem trivial; no one is going to be jailed for purchasing a head of lettuce from the store. However, other, more serious actions can fall into this grey area, and we have to ask who is responsible for the negative outcomes. In the above example, surely the consumer is not to blame for the system in which they are forced to participate? My answer is no! What other reasonable choice do they have? However, this example may be too simple to really glean a lesson from.

Here is another example which falls further into the "grey" area: if a professor continually tells a student that their work is unsatisfactory and that their desired career path is not a good fit for them, is that professor to blame if that student drops out of school? What if their lack of care—even if unintentionally—negatively affected the student’s mental health, causing them to fall behind in school? Of course, that professor was acting within their legal rights to tell a student their opinions as long as they did not harass the student or encourage violence. But legality is not synonymous for ethicality and no action exists in a vacuum; so, is the professor to blame for the outcome, which was the student dropping out?


Years ago, as an adolescent, I was asking myself similar questions about life. I wondered how we can assign blame—whether in personal or legal matters. My thought was that in a definable chain of events, the first person to have malicious motivations was to blame for the negative outcome, and if no one had negative intentions anywhere in the line, the entire ordeal was a true accident. So, in the above example, if the professor desired to discourage and hurt the student, then the negative outcome was indeed their fault. However, if the professor was acting from a place of care and a desire to save the student from a later downfall from a failed career, then the result was an accident—albeit one that could’ve been handled much better.


I haven’t really done much thinking about this idea since I first considered it, but I think it could potentially be interesting to discuss, especially as it pertains to hate speech. This idea calls into question intention, in addition to consequence—which is partially missing from Mill’s philosophy. In this way, I think if interacts with Mill’s theory, but also departs from it in notable ways. Since life is not a seminar, we cannot always approach life in a methodical, scientific way—as the people counting the points of the humans’ actions in The Good Place do. We have to look at context, such intent and medium, in addition to results.


Applying this idea to hate speech suggests that people who use their voice to be hateful are always, at least in some way, to blame for the harm that befalls people who suffer at the hands of racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, and other forms of systematic marginalization. In other words, every time Tr*mp uses the word “illegals” to describe Mexican people, he becomes further responsible for racism and the harmful actions which follow it. Similarly, people who use the t-slur knowing the hate behind the word are in part to blame for the violence that is used against trans women.


That being said, this idea becomes complicated when we take into account the phenomenon of “ignorance.” If someone is accidentally ignorant towards a social issue, how can they be totally held accountable for their careless words? Where do we draw the line between ignorance and legitimate hate?


Let me know what you think of this idea on how to assign blame. Do you think it can be in any way applied to interpersonal issues? Possibly even legal issues? How do context and intention impact assigning blame? Where does the idea of blame come into play with the idea of free speech?