Robert Mark Simpson

Much of the popular debate that surrounds no platforming centres on its putatively corrosive impact on free speech. This is apt to give a misleading picture of the particular puzzle that no platforming presents. Focusing on the university specifically, I contend that no platforming is distinctively objectionable not because it necessarily runs counter to general free speech values but when and because it is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom. This is because it conflicts with the status of members of the academy as those with the legitimacy to determine the appropriate bounds of free inquiry within the university. No platforming is objectionable insofar as it undercuts the authority of academic faculty in determining which speech, and by whom, is consistent with its purpose as an academic institution. Existing debates over no platforming have been too focused on which views are (or are not) given a platform and insufficiently attentive to the question of who decides who or what to platform. On the view defended here, no platforming by students is objectionable because, under principles of academic freedom, they should not be included in the constituency with the right to constrain the platforming of others.

Epistemic trespassing, science denial, refusal to guard against bias, mishandling higher-order evidence, and the development of vice are troubling intellectual behaviors. In this paper, I advance work done by psychologists on moral self-licensing to show how all of these behaviors can be explained in terms of a parallel phenomenon of epistemic self-licensing. The paper situates this discussion at the intersection of three major epistemological projects: epistemic explanation and intervention (the project of explaining troubling intellectual phenomena in the hopes of deriving ameliorative strategies), hostile epistemology (the study of how intellectual vulnerabilities might be exploited), and the promise of higher- order evidence (the hope that higher-order evidence leads to epistemic improvement). Analyzing epistemic licensing allows us to explain and offer modest interventions aimed at mitigating these behaviors, while illuminating exploitable vulnerabilities and tempering optimism about the promise of higher-order evidence.