Freedom of Speech as Self-Defense
Free speech is often defended on intellectual grounds. However, it is also a form of self-defense too.
Free Speech and Intellectual Life
As a philosopher, I value free speech: everyone should be permitted to express their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction (unless they incite violence, obviously). And a large part of the appeal for me is that I revel in strange and compelling arguments that challenge my beliefs and assumptions. Perhaps that says more about my personality than the value of free speech; not everyone, by example, enjoys intellectual debate like I do—just ask my loved ones. It would be a sloppy intellectual argument though that rested on the peccadillos of one person. We need better reason to support free speech than the temperament of an intellectual who may or may not accurately reflect the social value of free speech.
However, if we stand back, it looks like free speech norms are key to intellectual life: they allow disagreeing parties to express differing opinions without social or political reprisal. If those who disagree keep silent, then intellectual inquiry would stop—how could it not? How can we explore the merits of a moral viewpoint or public policy if those on opposing sides of a debate are reticent to express their perspectives? You may wonder why we would need them to express their perspective to intellectually engage the topic. The answer is straightforward: if we don’t engage with those who hold different perspectives from us, especially where those perspectives diverge a lot, we’ll be in a far poorer position to understand why we disagree, or even if we disagree. The famous philosopher John Stuart Mill made this point defending the intellectual value of free speech:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion […] Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.
Putting his antiquated language aside, Mill is offering an intellectual defense of free speech: in the absence of free speech, we can’t really have an intellectual discussion; there would be beliefs and views we may disagree with that wouldn’t be expressed. How can I know I’m right in my political, moral, or religious views, if I don’t know why other folks disagree with me? This is why it isn’t enough, for intellectual inquiry, to attempt to conjure possible reasons opponents may have to reject our views. We often lack the imagination and incentives to think of good reasons that we’re wrong—if you doubt me, try to imagine a good reason to doubt one of your cherished beliefs.
When the topic of free speech arises—in the United States, anyway—people are often quick to emphasize free speech is a legal protection afforded to Americans by the constitution. But this is too quick: without social norms that protect and tolerate free speech, legal freedoms afforded by the government aren’t worth much. Imagine a nation where abortion is legally permitted, but women who exercise their legal right to an abortion are shamed, ostracized, and even denied employment. The effect would be, despite the legal status, to significantly reduce women’s freedom to have an abortion—exercising a right to abortion would often be too costly. And free speech norms are no different. As George Orwell noted:
The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
Since we need free speech for intellectual reasons, it looks like freedom speech norms are a social good. However, even supposing we need free speech norms and laws for intellectual reasons, we may wonder if there are other compelling reasons, like moral ones, that cut against free speech. We turn to that next.
Moral Reservations about Free Speech
Despite intellectual reasons for free speech norms, critics have offered compelling moral reasons against it: words can hurt badly. Verbal abuse can inflict long-term psychological scars; free speech can, and sometimes is, used to cudgel marginalized groups—the road to practices like oppression, and even genocide, sometimes begins with demeaning speech. Take homophobia by example. Imagine a neighbor regularly expressed their opinion that your sexual orientation or partner choice was seriously immoral; even if you ignored what they said, speech, especially if toxic and relentless, can inflict harm. As a free speech critic recently argued:
This [freedom of speech] logic expects members of marginalized groups to debate their very humanity. As a queer faculty member, it means I am expected to engage in a discussion about the validity of my identity: whether it is real, whether it might be symptomatic of demonic possession or perhaps a mental illness. Students and faculty of color, similarly, are expected to debate the reality of their experiences and their right to equitable systems.
On this argument—call it the self-defense argument—it would be wrong to support free speech norms when speech can be used to undermine the worth of marginalized group members. A debate, say, over whether gay folks are demon possessed or mentally ill would be permitted by free speech, but at what cost? When free speech supporters emphasize the instrumental value of free speech—for, say, facilitating intellectual debate—they sometimes leave off that words may seriously harm. The reply, by friends of free speech, that harmful speech should be defused by further speech may not be convincing to someone who regularly has to hear that they don’t really matter. Speech can influence social norms, and bad social norms can harm.
If one doubts this, we need point to cases of parents who verbally abuse their children, and thus lose custody; if parents rightly lose custody of their kids for psychological trauma produced by verbal abuse, it isn’t unreasonable to think speech can harm folks in society at large. Perhaps free speech is necessary for robust debate, but only when parties to the debate are on comparable social footing. Often though marginalized groups member lack comparable social footing—that’s part of the problem.
Suppose we grant for argument’s sake speech can inflict harm. Should we then curtail speech for moral reasons? We examine that question in the final section.
Curtaining Speech Can Harm Too
However compelling the self-defense argument against free speech is, it is a double-edged argument: an appeal to self-defense offered against free speech can be rejiggered to support it too. First, though, consider a passage from the famous Chinese general, Sun Tzu, who observed:
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
How do deception and war relate to free speech? Restricting speech, and especially speech from individuals and groups who use their power and influence to challenge the dignity of marginalized group members, pressures those folks to conceal what they really think and believe. And even if this mostly silences their oppressive speech, it has a nasty by-product: we thereby have a poorer idea of who holds repugnant and morally objectionable views than we would, had they been permitted to largely speak without reprisal. This isn’t to deny that speech can cause psychological harm, but instead to argue that there are bad consequences to banning speech too that may outweigh whatever good is achieved by curtailing speech. By analogy: in a military campaign, generals want to know things like enemy plans, troop movements, supply chains, and so on. If a general could install tracking devices in the gear of the enemy (undetected) to track their movements, they would. There is value to knowing more, instead of less, about one’s enemies—if speech is curtailed, there’s a sense in which individuals with repugnant viewpoints gain the element of surprise.
While this analogy isn’t perfect, we should consider that if speech can produce psychological harm because it originates from individuals in society who disregard, and even hate people from marginalized groups, one can imagine what these folks would do to members of such groups if they got their chance—perhaps unlikely, but still worth considering. And the worse these folks are, in terms of intent and capacity to carry out evil, the more one would want to know about them; using social pressure and the power of the state to mute them would have a perverse side effect: it would force their bigoted views underground, making it harder to use persuasion to change hearts and minds if possible. We shouldn’t socially quarantine folks with abhorrent view with those who agree with them, or isolate them from those who disagree and may be able to change their minds before they become too radical.
For purposes of self-defense, it is likely good to know whether folks are prejudiced and bigoted, for no other reason than we can keep an eye on them; just as, in the midst of war, we want to know the location of enemy forces. The appeal to self-defense should resonant with everyone, especially folks that are most at risk from abusive speech. Individuals from marginalized groups especially have an interest in knowing who among them has bigoted and close-minded views, instead of being in the dark about what folks actually believe about them. Learning this can be painful, of course, but the consequences of not knowing whether someone holds morally odious beliefs can be even worse. We should prefer, by example, clumsy and obvious Nazis over charming and subtle ones. As the saying goes: ‘forewarned is forearmed.’
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