E.G.

We do not treat all speech equally. We have classes of privileged speakers who enjoy special tolerances, protections, and advantages.

That's as it should be.

It's good that journalists and only journalists are allowed into the White House briefing room. It's good that the money in your town's Local Arts Fund goes to support artists and only artists. It's good that academics and only academics are allowed to teach philosophy classes at universities. And so on.

There's only so much attention to go around, only so much money to go around, etc. Given such finitudes, there's no feasible way to treat all speech equally. So, we have to have classes of privileged speakers. And if we're going to have classes of privileged speakers, it's good that journalists, artists, and academics are among those classes.

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In a system involving classes of privileged speakers, you need some way to determine who's in and who's out. Who gets to claim to be a journalist? Who gets to claim to be an artist? Who gets to claim to be an academic?

It seems to me that we generally allow institutions to do the sorting. You get to claim to be an academic/journalist/artist, and thus have access to various speech privileges associated with being an academic/journalist/artist, if there is an institution (a university/newspaper/museum) that counts you as an academic/journalist/artist.

This system of institutional sorting has at least one big advantage. It means that we have a way to separate journalists from non-journalists, artists from non-artists, and academics from non-academics without ever having to define journalism, art, or academic research. That's great because it's really hard to satisfactorily define any of those things.

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Suppose people are marching together down the middle of a major road at rush hour, disrupting traffic, making people late for work, etc. Take four cases: (1) the marchers are activists who are involved in a street protest; (2) the marchers are pranksters who are doing some kind of "flash mob" kind of thing; (3) the marchers are engaged in some sort of a religious ritual; (4) the marchers are out there playing some kind of weird sport.

It seems to me that we typically should and typically would want to be especially tolerant of the marchers in the first case. It's probably fine for authorities to make the marchers leave in cases (2), (3), and (4). But in case (1), we should probably let the marchers do their thing.

So I think that activists should be, and probably already are, a privileged class of speaker, alongside journalists, artists, and academics.

But if activists are going to be a privileged class of speaker, then we need some way to separate activists from non-activists. And here I think we can't or shouldn't rely on institutional sorting. This is partly because there aren't any institutions that seem up to the job. Broadly, universities and other academic institutions are pretty good, I think, at plausibly distinguishing academics from non-academics. Similarly, I think we have institutions that do a good job of separating artists from non-artists, and journalists from non-journalists. But it's unclear to me whether there are any institutions that we should entrust with the task of deciding who's an activist and who isn't.

The only reasonable alternative to institutional sorting that I can think of would be definitional sorting. We should come up with a definition of activism, show that this definition is correct, and then we should reserve certain special privileges for all and only those who meet the definition. This is a task for philosophers, I think.