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I think the entire view isn't focusing enough on minority, plurality, and majority viewpoints. To wit, my own theory: Cancel Culture is when too many people all exercise their Freedom of Association in the same way at the same time. You can't know if any example of what you are doing is good or bad without considering the way the rest of the world will act. This applies regardless of the topic.
An extended analogy to dating to demonstrate what I mean. Romance, we can agree for the sake of the discussion, is an area where FoA is, and of right ought to be, absolutely sacrosanct. No one can force you to date or be attracted to someone you aren't attracted to or don't want to date. And no problems arise from this, provided that everyone's preferences are kaleidoscopically unique and match up with the diversity of options available. This is the utopian vision of FoA: a lid for every pot.
Imagine a Midwestern high school, with a student body that is more or less entirely varieties of mixed up European white mutt, with no particular dominant strain. Within this student body, some boys prefer sunny blondes, others sultry brunettes, and a few happen to really have a thing for redheads. On the flip side those same groups of boys find the other girls outside their preference less attractive, the blondes too dumb, the brunettes too boring, the redheads too pasty, respectively. This is fine, terrific even, certainly not a problem, provided that the rate of boys with those preferences lines up close enough to the rate of girls with those hair colors that everyone has a reasonable chance to get a date. If 40% of guys prefer blondes, 40% love brunettes, and 20% worship redheads; and 40% of girls are blonde, 40% are brunette, and 20% are readheads, then we win. FoA is great, we all get to date a girl we find really pretty, or be courted by a boy who finds us really pretty, respectively. On the flip side, if 90% of the boys are crazy about blondes, the remaining 10% prefer brunettes, and no one will touch a redhead, but we keep the percentages from above; then we get a distorted market. FoA is good, is sacrosanct in dating, but it has lead to negative outcomes: the blondes are besieged with fetishizing fawning attention, the brunettes are left competing desperately for the attention of just a few men, and the redheads are out in the cold.
Without violating strict FoA and forcing anyone to do anything, in the first scenario where everyone's preferences match up with availability, there's nothing wrong with allowing or even encouraging hair-color fetishism. Men, refuse to date any girl that doesn't have your preferred hair! But in the latter case, it would make sense to push the opposite message, hair color doesn't really matter that much, as such a message will make everyone happier.
We can play with this pet example in a million ways, with ranked rather than strict preferences, with touchy subjects like skin color or height instead of low stakes examples like hair color. But in all cases, I root for the less common preferences, and decry the more common. I love to see a girl cheat on her tall husband with a short king! Because I know girls who are 5'2" who won't date a guy under 6', that market is deeply distorted, so I love to see the opposite preference in action!
The problems don't occur from any one individual having preferences and exercising their freedom of association to enact them, they come from too many people having the same preferences and enacting their freedom of association together.
Back to Cancel Culture. FoA, and Freedom of Speech, require that no one is forced to hang out with anyone else, listen to anyone else, publish speech they don't agree with. And that is fine inasmuch as everyone else doesn't happen to have the same opinions, such that people get unpersoned. This is the basic American values of freedom we were taught growing up. If we all choose to freely associate in the same way at the same time, it becomes freedom-limiting rather than freedom exercising. This is the Christian virtue of reaching out to the oppressed and the outcast, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. There is virtue in eating lunch at school with the kid sitting by himself, even when you don't really want to.
McCarthyism was bad, according to this teaching, not because there weren't any Communists, and not because the Communists were right or weren't bad. It was bad because it lead to people being driven out of society, forced out of their professions. It ultimately failed because there were enough people who didn't really care all that much, and were willing to hire blacklisted workers, but for the brief moments when everyone did care, the results were tragic, with people totally shunned and unable to earn a living. Communists were wrong, but a man has a right to earn a living. I don't particularly object to any individual employer saying something like, my favorite uncle died in Budapest in '56, I'll never hire anyone who breathes a positive word about Lenin. But if everyone decides that no one who has ever breathed a positive word about Lenin can work for them, then we've got a problem.
Boycotts are the same. The Bud Light boycott is a good thing, regardless of your level of agreement with the motivation and rhetoric, because it represented a group that wasn't being heard in the discourse, and it inflicted pain for ignoring their demands. Companies hewed closer to mainstream views, and avoided strong stances. Bud Light was good because you can still be a libtard beer company, but you know what you will lose if you do. But you can also be a conservative beer company. Let a thousand flowers bloom! Cancel culture is bad when you can't be something, not when being something causes you to lose 30% of your sales. A moderate range of consequences isn't Cancel Culture, a total loss of ability to associate is.
If you want to avoid engaging in cancel culture, avoid being in the majority. Always be skeptical of the crowd, the mob, the herd. Refuse to be bullied into what is popular. Since anything worth doing is worth doing with fake numbers, the moment more than 20% of people agree with you, reassess your views and see if they will be harmful if everyone holds them. If you see something, don't just complain, reach out. Support places, like our very own Motte, where any voice can be heard. I started using Twitter after the Musk takeover for that reason, I wanted to support a free speech positive platform, even if it has had its problems since.
That's a terrible definition. Cancel Culture has nothing to do with Freedom of Association, and if you want to argue otherwise you should at least go through some high-profile cancellation attempts and show how they are in any way connected to it. When Scott got doxxed and a horde of people tried to get him fired from his clinic and bullied him to the point where he locked himself in a room and had nervous breakdown, was that Freedom of Association? When Meghan Murphy tried to make an event and booked a venue she already worked with before, planned on keeping it secret until the last day as per her own anti-cancellation protocol, but ended up publishing at the insistence of the venue itself, which double pinky-promised they will not cancel her and will not cave to pressure, but did in fact cave to pressure and canceled her, when activists started vandalizing it and harassing the staff - is that like a brunette being passed over for a blonde?
Let's not descend to this level of pathos based arguments, people have nervous breakdowns or kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't grant one moral power that one has gotten upset, one's interior emotional state as a result of actions doesn't make those actions right or wrong. They stand or fall on their own merits.
That said, the clinic choosing to fire Scott is clearly the clinic exercising their FoA. They decide they don't want to be associated with Scott, based on the things that people are calling the clinic to tell them about him. Or merely because they would choose not to be associated with someone so controversial. The alternative, to say that the clinic is obligated to retain Scott regardless of what anyone says about him or the amount of controversy he engenders, is obviously to abrogate the clinic's FoA. That's the debate we're having here. The Clinic is free to choose who it wants associated with it; and people at large are free to decide that they will or will not associate with the Clinic based on their choices of who they associate themselves with. It is absurd to say that the Clinic is required to associate with people, and absurd to say that people are forced to associate themselves with the Clinic. But at some point in that process of everyone exercising that FoA, we get a Problem. Maybe we draw the line at people telling the Clinic they won't associate with it, but secrecy and confusion seems like a poor strategy for achieving rational ends, more like to end in superstition than in good outcomes. So I'm trying to draw a different line: we need to limit the freedom for majorities to associate.
I know nothing about Meghan Murphy, so I'm not going to get into a nebulous debate about it.
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