Quain 2025-26: Sharing What We Have in Common | Lecture 1 of 3

Quain Lectures 2025-26: Sharing What We Have in Common

Lecture 1 of 3

Speaker: Prof. Seana Valentine Shiffrin (UCLA)

Convenors: Prof. Prince Saprai and Dr Martin Fischer (UCL)

Three lectures explore loosely connected topics about the use of public property in communicative endeavors and the achievement of democratic values, followed by a Commentators' Seminar.

Lecture One: The Priority of Public Property

The moral justification of social practices depends, in part, upon meaningful opportunities to evaluate them and to receive commentary, criticism, and reactions to them by participating, affected, and excluded parties. For non-intimate social practices, including the conventions of private property, those opportunities, in turn, depend on regular access to public (real) property, in the sense associated with the commons, operating under conditions of freedom of speech. Further, they depend upon a plentitude of such public fora where strangers and associates may encounter each other in real life and may be exposed to their conditions and their perspectives, as they put voice to them. Reflection on these basic conditions of the moral justification of social practices yields the conclusion that an important right of access to public (real) property for free speech purposes is normatively prior to private (real) property and that this right of access to physical public property is non-conventional.

Lecture Two: Jumping to Conclusions -- Free Speech and Imputed Speech

Our practices of moral justification depend upon a robust free speech environment that protects a vast dialogic space in which people may voice, hear, and exchange ideas, hypotheses, criticisms, arguments, reactions, feelings, and other mental contents without vulnerability to sanctions. Maintaining that open dialogic space requires the legal and social application of a variety of free speech principles. One such principle, what I call ‘the anti-imputation principle,’ is both crucial to preserving the ‘breathing space’ of a free speech culture, but under-recognized. The anti-imputation principle imposes a strong (though rebuttable) presumption against levying legal or social sanctions against speakers for objectionable content they do not explicitly utter, even when explicit utterances of that objectionable content could permissibly be subject to sanctions and when that objectionable content may be reasonably or is commonly inferred from what the speakers have explicitly said. The breathing space created by this sanction-resistant zone is essential for thinkers to articulate and refine their thoughts and to make, identify, and correct their mistakes, often through interchange with others.

Lecture Three: Our Common Intellectual Heritage and the Mission of the University

The third lecture turns to our common intangible property and the role of the university in protecting and distributing access to this domain of the public’s common property. It argues that the accumulated knowledge of humanity, a substantial portion of which universities house and maintain, is a good of inestimable value that belongs to the public and that its widespread, public use enhances its value to the public. The university should be understood as a trustee of our intellectual heritage. As such, it must be the mission of the university to facilitate the public’s access to it. This perspective yields a non-instrumental conception of the university’s mission and in turn, a distinctive argument against competitive meritocratic admission and for affirmative action, understood as demographically sensitive admissions practices.

Professor Shiffrin's three lectures will be followed by a Commentators' Seminar, on Friday, 24 October, featuring: Prof. Fabienne Peter (Warwick), Prof. Thomas Simpson (Oxford), and Dr Robert Simpson (UCL).

Lecture main image by Declan Sun on Unsplash.

Programme of Events

• Lecture I: The Priority of Public Property - Monday 20 Oct 6.30pm (pre-lecture reception at 5.45pm) | Reserve your ticket here
• Lecture II: Jumping to Conclusions - Wednesday 22 Oct, 4.30pm (pre-lecture reception at 3.45pm) | Reserve your ticket here
• Lecture III: Our Common Intellectual Heritage - Thursday 23 Oct, 6.30pm (pre-lecture reception at 5.45pm) | Reserve your ticket here
• Commentators' Seminar - Friday 24 Oct, 4.30pm (pre-lecture reception at 3.45pm) | Reserve your ticket here

About the Speaker:

Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA, where she has taught since 1992. She is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Law and Philosophy Program. Shiffrin received her B.A. degree from UC Berkeley where she was the University Medallist. She attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received the B.Phil. with Distinction and the D.Phil. in Philosophy. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Shiffrin teaches courses on moral and political philosophy as well as contracts, freedom of speech, and legal theory. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, she received the UCLA School of Law's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Her research has addressed doctrinal and theoretical issues about freedom of speech, sincerity and truthfulness, contracts, torts, feminism, intellectual property, anti-discrimination, economic equality, reproductive rights and family law, with a thematic focus on the social conditions for the joint realization of equality and autonomy. She has written extensively on he role of law in facilitating and fostering deliberation and moral character, with a special emphasis on freedom of speech and the connection between contracts and promises. Her book Speech Matters, explored the ethics of communication and the connection between the moral prohibition on lying, a thinker-based approach to freedom of speech, and the conditions for moral progress. Her recent book, Democratic Law, addressed the intimate connection between law and democracy and traced the implications of a democratic legal approach for the common law, the doctrine of good faith, and constitutional balancing.

About the Commentators:

Prof. Fabienne Peter: Fabienne is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in the UK, specialising in moral and political philosophy and in social epistemology, including political epistemology. She has served as Head of Department from 2017 to 2020, and is currently an Academic Director in the University's Research Executive, responsible for interdisciplinary research and research communications. Before coming to Warwick, Fabienne was a postdoc at Harvard University and then an assistant professor at the University of Basel. She held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University and at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans. Fabienne is an associate editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a past editor of Economics and Philosophy, and was the President of the Aristotelian Society in 2024-25.

Prof. Thomas Simpson: Tom is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College. At the Blavatnik School he is also the Co-Chair of Executive Programmes and directs the Military Leadership and Judgment Programme. He was educated at Cambridge (BA, MPhil, PhD), where he was also previously a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. Between degrees he served as an officer with the Royal Marines Commandos (2002-07), with tours in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. His research focuses on a variety of issues in moral and political philosophy, both foundational—especially on trust; and on the nature of freedom—and applied—including issues around the ethics of war, technology, and security, such as the ethics of autonomous weapons, cyber-attacks, and the use of unconventional force. He co-edited a collection of essays, The Philosophy of Trust (OUP, 2017), and his first monograph, Trust: A Philosophical Study, was recently published (OUP, 2023). He has given evidence to UK Parliamentary committees on the UK’s drone policy, the balance between privacy and security in surveillance, the ethics of autonomous weapon systems, and on legislation in support of academic freedom, having co-authored an influential report on the topic, Academic freedom in the UK: Protecting viewpoint diversity (Policy Exchange 2020). This was described by the Times Higher Education as “the source for the key proposals” now established by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.

Dr Robert Simpson: Robert is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at University College London. He writes about free speech, social epistemology, liberalism, applied ethics, and religion. His work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, MIND, Legal Theory, Political Philosophy, Daedalus, Law and Philosophy, Politics Philosophy and Economics, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He teaches courses at UCL on free speech and autonomy, epistemology in contemporary society, and legal philosophy. Before arriving at UCL he held positions at Monash University and the University of Chicago. His forthcoming book, Experimentality, is on the topic of free speech and popular music.