What should we do with speech that is not protected by our favoured justification? The answer depends on balancing the speech act in question against other values. This again suggests that speech is not valuable in and of itself. The thing to keep in mind is that the justifications we use to defend speech will always prioritise some forms of communication over others, and this will be our guide to picking out speech most in need of protection. Mill was a pretty smart guy, but even he struggled to provide a coherent and consistent position on free speech. His justification for speech seems to clash with his reason for limiting speech. This argument faces difficulties, one being harmful speech might lead us towards truth. But he is willing to shut down speech if it leads to unacceptable harm. Mill, for example, tells us that truth is best promoted by allowing a great deal of communication. The autonomy account will offer different protections than the truth/utility account which in turn will differ from the self-government justification. This will depend in large part on why speech is justified in the first place. Having (hopefully) established that speech is not unconditionally good, the next task is to determine what the appropriate limits should be. Which speech deserves special protection? An even more confronting conclusion is that giving reasons for why speech is important makes us reveal underlying values that seem to be even more fundamental than speech itself. These difficulties suggest that any persuasive argument about speech (as opposed to saying “three cheers”) has to embrace the fact that speech can, and indeed should, be limited. Justifying speech because it promotes truth, for example, seems to allow silencing many a politician (oh joy!) and hence interfering with political speech. This doesn’t seem to work because the three accounts often clash. Perhaps combining the three justifications discussed above will allow for lots of unregulated speech. Once we offer a justification we again have an argument for why speech can be limited. To make this claim we need to show why speech is important (enter justification here). This seems to be an argument that we should oppose PC in the name of free speech itself. Why complain at all? The usual answer is that communication is being muted by PC. PC might, for example, limit the speech of white men but enhance that of minorities I would need more data before reaching a conclusion.īut the complaint itself tells us something about the complex nature of speech. This accusation is difficult to quantify. The usual claim is that PC stifles free speech. The heated debate about “political correctness” (a term I dislike), or PC, demonstrates this nicely. And if the autonomy argument is compelling we will not want to protect speech that undermines this goal. Speech that damages democratic processes will find itself unprotected by the self-government thesis. If expression is justified because it promotes truth, we have no grounds for defending it when truth is undermined. The important thing to notice about all of them is that the justification offered in favour of speech also allows for some limitations. These are the three heavyweight contenders in the debate about why speech is important. Edwin Baker argue that free expression is justified because it promotes autonomy. Alexander Meiklejohn suggests speech is important because it allows for democratic self-government. John Stuart Mill thought that freedom of thought and discussion (he doesn’t use the term “free speech”) is valuable because it brings us closer to the truth, which in turn promotes utility. It is not enough to say “three cheers for speech!”, because if we don’t know why speech is important we don’t know if it is worth protecting.
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