Caveat Censor

Private Censorship, by J.P. Messina, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue, grapples with many of the moral problems stemming from the fact that businesses are largely free – in the US at least – to “censor” their workers' speech or the content they provide in both traditional and new media environments. It's the first book-length treatise I've seen on this important subject, and Messina should be applauded for staking out what had remained until now a largely uncharted field. Furthermore, each chapter offers up a fair number of engaging real-world scenarios that instructors may find fruitful for class discussion and philosophical analysis. A challenge, however, is that many will want to supply their own theoretical toolboxes for framing debates and drawing compelling policy recommendations. This is because, while the text often reads as a self-conscious extension of the great utilitarian John Stuart Mill's public-sector analysis in On Liberty, it is couched in a classical liberalist framing that holds private organizational agents to precious few moral standards beyond the ones legal precedent happens to already have set forth. Through such a lens, should businesses choose to take the high road by granting their employees a measure of free speech or by dispelling dangerous yet revenue-generating misinformation, those prerogatives would seem to remain in an entirely supererogatory realm. While many of the cases under examination will strike readers as eminently urgent disputes opposing cherished rights to freedom – including to democracy itself – those hoping to find formal imperatives by which to hold business accountable or even best practices for curbing managerial overreach will have to make due with sanguine calls for magnanimity. Ultimately, it's more a bird's eye view of moral hazards below than a field guide to overcoming them on the ground. Caveat censor might be an apt subtitle. …