Hardly a day goes by without some story of a person facing consequences for what they said. The stories that make the front pages are typically the ones that tap into partisan politics, creating a flurry of controversy that obscures a simple fact: we hold people accountable for their speech all the time. In most settings, from the board room to the classroom to the dining room, not governing speech would be far more remarkable than governing it. In this post, I’ll use moral accounting to explain why and how.
Speech & Stewardship
“the remedy to bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence.”
But the full quote comes with a crucial limitation:
“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
The phrase I’ve italicized is crucial in the busy worlds of business and academia, where so often there be not time. More speech is typically the right remedy if there is plenty of time to respond to it, and even more so if silencing means “no one can say that anywhere at any time”–an extremely broad imposition! But silencing is typically a better choice if time is to precious to let someone say something false (which takes time) and let someone else rebut it (which takes even more time), and even more so if silencing is limited to “you specifically cannot say that right here right now.”
To put this in moral accounting terms, imagine you are in a 30-minute meeting with 10 people, and the goal is to decide which of two candidates to hire. If you raise your hand and are called on, you are being entrusted with a valuable asset–the power to speak. That asset comes with the obligation to use it on behalf of society. In general a society is defined as a group with a shared mission. In this situation, the most relevant mission is probably to make a good hiring decision. So you have an obligation to use that time to make that decision a better one.
That’s why business meetings and classrooms are anything but bastions of untrammeled free speech. We don’t notice “silencing” because most of us learn to censor ourselves. We know that we shouldn’t be using our time to talk about things that are false, or irrelevant, or that will derail the conversation. But let’s not kid ourselves–this is still silencing bad speech, and those who don’t self-censor may face serious consequences. It’s just that we all understand that this type of silencing isn’t just a minor tyranny that we tolerate–it’s a moral obligation to do it well.
GAAP and the Desirable Qualities of Financial Reporting
To spell out a speaker’s obligations in more detail, we can start with principles that have already been developed to help accountants debate Generally Accepted Accounting Principles–the rules that determine what can and can’t be written in financial statements. Underlying those rules is a Conceptual Framework that spells out the common mission of the society of financial statement readers, and principles for achieving it. The common mission is that a firm’s financial statements should be useful to its owners and creditors. The principles spell out the desirable qualities of the speech GAAP should be pursuing. According to standard-setting groups like the Financial Accounting Standards Board, financial statements should be relevant and faithful. They should speak to material matters that will actually change someone’s decision. They should be complete, verifiable, and accurate. They should be understandable.
This might sound trite, but it turns out to be a very useful way to debate GAAP, because firms always want to say things in their financial statements that make them look good. But that’s not one of the desirable qualities. The Conceptual Framework focuses debate on what will further the conversation, not what will help some particular speaker.
From GAAP to LAAP (with the L for Local).
If you say something that violates GAAP, you can expect to be punished for it. I’m going to call everything you can’t say under GAAP “crebit”. I coined the word because crebit is a hopeless confusion of debit and credit, so you can’t talk about it in financial statements—debits and credits only, please! It helps that ‘crebit’ sounds like someone dropped a turd in the punchbowl of conversation. Because just as GAAP governs what you can and can’t say in financial statements, every conversation has a LAAP, with the L for Local, which governs what you can and can’t say right then, right there. And every LAAP treats some speech as crebit. You don’t want people dropping turds in the punch bowl of your conversation, so you call it crebit, and punish them for crebitry.
So what are the desirable qualities of speech in a meeting or a classroom? I divide them into three categories of obligation:
Contribution
To make a contribution–to further the agenda–a speaker must be intelligible, relevant and faithful. Speech is intelligible to the extent that we can understand exactly what someone is saying; this is like knowing when to say ‘revenue’ vs. ‘gain’ or ‘debt’. Relevant speech is how closely the speech hews to the agenda. Speech is faithful when it is honest, accurate, and offered in good faith. The more intelligible, relevant and faithful speech is, the more it contributes to the conversation.
Procedural Impact
Contribution isn’t everything. We also need to think about the procedural impact of what we say–are we moving the conversation forward? Whenever “there be not time”, we want people to be efficient and engaging, even if maybe we have to be a little loose with definitions, so a bit less intelligible. It’s also better to be diplomatic, because offending people derails the conversation. Everyone wants to see themselves as competent, good and valued people. If you say something that threatens that view, they are going to defend themselves, and now we’re pulled away from our agenda. Or maybe they hold their tongue, but they’ll be distracted and find it very hard to engage with the conversation. Either way, this makes it harder to make that good hiring decision in a 30-minute meeting.
Substantive Impact
Finally, we need to consider the substantive impact of our speech. We want speech to be helpful, making people in our society better off, not worse off. We also want speech to be supportive of the venue itself. If this hiring meeting is viewed as unproductive, whoever called it might conclude that they should just make future hiring decisions unilaterally.
Governing Speech
In informal conversations, governance is typically a matter of norms and incentives. Throughout our lives, we learn what we can and can’t say in different settings. Think of the advice children hear all of the time: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Don’t talk back to your parents or teachers. Say that word again and I’ll wash your mouth with soap. As we get older, we learn other norms. Don’t talk about money, sex, politics or religion at the dinner table. Don’t monopolize the conversation. We also have many norms for what we must say. Don’t leave a party without thanking your host. Ask after friends and family. And so on.
But in more formal settings, we have many tools to get govern speech. Here are some powerful ones. Most of them serve as controls as defined in moral accounting– aspect accountability systems that discourage bad behavior not by punishing it, but by making it harder, or that encourage good behavior not by rewarding it, but by making it easier.
Agenda
An agenda is a report that lays out clearly the goals of a meeting, thus defining the overall mission of the group. This makes it easy for people to stick to what is relevant (a control), and also serves as an implicit incentive–the more specific the agenda, the more people will expect to be punished if they deviate from it.
Audience
It’s hard to speak in a meeting if you are not there. Sometimes we don’t have the power to choose our audience, but when we do, it is choosing your audience is one of the most powerful controls to speech.
Venue
Venues can shape speech dramatically. In-person venues often control who speaks through a mix of location-based and technological controls. If one person is on a stage in front of a large group, audience members will often be silent, because it’s hard to raise your hand or pipe up with the architecture of the space so clearly signals that the person on stage is expected to talk most of the time. A round classroom or meeting table encourages more equal participation.
The shift to Zoom venues in both business and education gives meeting hosts a whole suite of controls. You can make it hard for people to speak by disabling chat, screen-sharing and microphones, or enable them only for the people you appoint as co-hosts. If someone steps out of line, you can boot them from the room–a control that most people would also see as a punishment.
Procedure
Meeting hosts often control speech by having strict rules about who can speak when. Sometimes this is pretty informal. For example, when my school’s accounting faculty meet to discuss hiring or PhD admissions, we typically have the most junior people speak first, so they don’t simply parrot the view of someone who will be evaluating their performance. Sometimes procedures are way more formal, like Robert’s Rules of Order, which spell out in great detail how debate surrounding a vote should be ordered.
Conclusion
This post only scratches the surface on the morality of governing speech. In future posts I’ll touch on some more challenging topics, like: How should Facebook govern the speech of its users? If someone says something they shouldn’t, what types of punishments are proportional? How do we hold people accountable for protest speech or whistleblowing? But hopefully this post gives you enough to start thinking about those issues for yourself.