A curious thing came of growing awareness of the ways mistreatment of children was too often tolerated so long as it was passed off as ‘punishment.’ First came a growing discomfort with the very idea of punishing children, and then, in time, to a shift to talk of first natural, and then logical ‘consequences’ as an alternative. The idea, to be very brief, was that children learn to manage their behavior better when they are allowed to suffer their unenjoyable results. Let the world be the heavy here, parents were told, thereby sparing yourself the burden of knowing you are using your authority to impose your will on vulnerable youngsters by punishing disobedience. 

I’ve argued that while well intentioned this move from punishments to consequences involves some conceptual slight of hand—the supposed distinction is hard to maintain because the use of consequences requires quite a bit of deliberate imposition on the part of parents. Pretty it up as much as we like, parents still strive to secure compliance and better behavior from their charges by coupling disobedience with something unpleasant—they just use a different word when talking about it. 

This linguistic shift papers over what’s really going on with the pretense that the unpleasantness children suffer just happens as part of the natural or logical workings of the world, in the way hangovers reliably result from excessive drinking. In fact, ‘consequences’ are entirely the result of decisions made by parents, decisions reflecting as always their own values or convictions or moods. By obscuring this we risk shielding these decisions from legitimate questions about justification and proportionality—the sorts of questions that are rightly asked about punishment. 

In a truly curious twist, this same linguistic move has become a regular part of a familiar drama played out in debates about free speech and academic freedom. It goes like this. Someone is in trouble for something they have said or Tweeted or posted on Facebook or Instagram or wherever. Others rally in defense, decrying cancel culture, or attacks on academic freedom or free speech. And then someone responds with something to the effect that it’s no threat to free speech or academic freedom if someone is merely suffering the ‘consequences of their speech’. 

The suggestion, it would seem, is that having your career ended over an ill considered Tweet is comparable to getting a hangover after drinking too much if the proximal mechanism is popular outrage or one’s employer—say something off and these things just happen apparently. Hangovers may discourage drinking, the thought might be, but not in the way Prohibition did. In the same way, so long as the state is not punishing someone for their speech or research or teaching, so long as the untoward effects bubble up from popular outrage or managerial squeamishness, neither free speech or academic freedom are in jeopardy. 

Here too the language obscures important elements of this drama. The ‘consequences’ a person incurs as the result of a Tweet come from people choosing to act in certain ways—these actions reflect judgments and convictions that ought to be subject to scrutiny when people are being hurt. However organic, it remains imminently possible that the ‘consequences’ are irrational, based on mistaken assumptions, ill motivated, or wildly disproportionate to any actual misdeed. It is also always possible that they reflect convictions at odds with the principles of free speech or academic freedom. 

The burden of defending deliberate harm is no less pressing here than in the case of punishment.