It seems to me that there’s a middle ground to be found here in the dispute between David and Carol regarding the situation at Penn.

I think David is right that, in deference to free expression, the student who dressed as a suicide-bomber for Halloween shouldn’t have been punished by the college. In a free society, people have the right to wear offensive costumes. And colleges that promise to honor free expression must live up to their promises. Period.

But with the legal right to free expression comes the corollary moral obligation to speak out in condemnation of that which we find morally repulsive. So not only should Gutmann not have posed for a smiling picture with the toy-dynamite-toting student: She should have berated him in person and let him know just how disgusting his costume was.

So I think the “real blame” doesn’t lie entirely with the student, as David seems to suggest (maybe he doesn’t really mean to suggest this). Guttman and the other party attendees shouldn’t have treated the offensive costume so lightheartedly.

But it also seems that censorship in this case would be both unjust and unnecessary. The mechanism of public ostracism should be more than sufficient to deal with such a tasteless Halloween costume. As FIRE often reminds us: The remedy for offensive speech is not censorship, but more speech to combat the original offense.

I think most libertarians would agree with Carol that ”a good, free, ordered society does not simply proceed on its own.” Society clearly needs the moral stewardship of its citizens. But I don’t think this stewardship needs to take the form of censorship.