In his 1859 essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that free speech and free inquiry are not optional extras of a liberal society — they are its heart. Liberalism is more than a constitutional order or a set of market freedoms; it is an intellectual stance, a commitment to letting arguments be tested in open debate and to letting truth emerge through contestation. This commitment is part of the broader Enlightenment project of freeing humanity from arbitrary authority and debilitating ignorance.

Yet today, a curious thing is happening in the Western intellectual world: many who proudly call themselves liberals are retreating from this core commitment. They defend freedom of speech — up to a point — but then declare an exception for certain topics they deem "too dangerous" or "too harmful" to discuss openly. This is not merely inconsistency. It's a betrayal of the very principles they claim to uphold.

The Great Exception

The philosopher Bo Winegard has called this retreat liberalism's great exception: the tendency for self-identified defenders of free inquiry to insist that some questions are so sensitive that they must be suppressed or ignored, even in academic or scientific settings.

Think about what this means. Liberalism's defenders often recoil at censorship by government or political authority — and rightly so. But when the censorship comes from within the intellectual class itself, justified on the grounds that certain ideas will offend, stigmatise, or lead to social harm, many are strangely silent or even supportive.

Mill's argument was clear: silencing a view is an assumption of infallibility. Even wrong or offensive ideas have value. They force us to refine our own reasoning, to test our foundations, and to distinguish justified belief from prejudice. Mill urged that we should not evaluate each individual speech act on a cost-benefit analysis; we should instead uphold free expression as a general rule because, over time and on balance, it leads to better outcomes for human flourishing.

Where the Retreat Begins

What's striking about many contemporary defences of intellectual restraint is not that they are well-intentioned; it's that they substitute fear of harm for confidence in truth. Rather than addressing controversial questions with evidence and argument, some thinkers simply declare them off-limits, or they urge others to "don't go there."

This is a philosophical reversal with profound implications. If we begin responding to difficult questions by restricting inquiry, we are effectively conceding the field to authority by taboo rather than authority by argument — the very thing liberalism was designed to resist. Mill himself warned against deference to prevailing opinion, arguing that even widely held beliefs should be open to challenge.

Fear as a Substitute for Argument

Part of the motivation behind suppressing certain lines of inquiry is fear: fear of social backlash, fear of reinforcing negative stereotypes, fear of empowering bad actors. But contemptible as those fears may be, they remain practical concerns, not philosophical foundations.

If a belief is false, the remedy should be argument, not silence. If an idea is dangerous, the remedy should be education and counter-argument, not suppression. To treat controversial topics as tabu is to outsource truth-seeking to social enforcement rather than intellectual engagement.

The Vacuum Left by Silence

When the academy or media elite decide that certain questions are inappropriate or indecent, they leave a vacuum. That vacuum doesn't remain empty; it gets filled by narratives that are less rigorous and less grounded in evidence, but more emotionally satisfying. In practice, silence doesn't prevent misunderstanding; it fuels it — and often in far cruder forms than the sober debate could have produced.

A society that fears inquiry is a society that begins to distrust its own principles. Liberalism thrives on the confidence to confront uncomfortable truths; it falters when it prefers shelter to engagement.

Free Inquiry as a Public Good

The lesson from Mill is simple but powerful: free inquiry is not just for agreeable ideas — it is especially for those that challenge us. Denying that inquiry because it might be misused is equivalent to assuming that people are incapable of handling truth responsibly. That is a profoundly illiberal assumption.

Liberalism does not promise safety from dangerous ideas; it promises the freedom to confront them. History is full of ideas that once seemed dangerous, subversive, or indecent — from evolution to civil rights — that only became accepted through open challenge and debate.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Enlightenment Liberalism

If liberalism is to remain more than a slogan, it must resist the urge to carve out exceptions to its core principles. The commitment to free speech and free inquiry must be universal, not selective. When we begin to believe that some questions are too perilous to ask, we are admitting that our society lacks the intellectual resources to answer them.

That admission isn't humility — it's surrender.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/race-and-iq-liberalisms-great-exception