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The "guy at Google" 1) didn't have any honors stripped, and 2) said far more than simply "men, in general, have better STEM skills than women". Surely to a degree far more than you posited in your original statement. How is this a free speech issue? Watson continues to have his full free speech rights, yes? How is he being censored? This looks much more like it's a right of free association issue. Cold Spring Harbor Labs has broad rights to associate - or disassociate - with whomever they wish. Since so many people want to place free speech on some sort of pedestal, and claim that it's of overriding importance, I'll quote John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", chapter IV, "Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual", which seems appropriate here: > We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. The people of CSHL are exercising their liberty by choosing the society most acceptable to them. I don't understand the relevancy of your point 2. All research points out that Watson is in the wrong. I also caution that "non-inflammatory speech" is tricky. Who gets to decide? In general, those in power are those who want to maintain status quo and are also those who get to decide what 'inflammatory' means. On topic, we see that 100 years ago CSHL was one of many organizations in the American Eugenics movement, which tended to favor the "Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples". Somehow their calls for sterilization and even eradicatation of large numbers of the poor and powerless wasn't seen as inflammatory, while the speech of black people who called for equal treatment was seen as inflammatory, and could even be grounds for lynching. |