October 7, 2007
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Should there ever be limits to the “Freedom of Speech”? Why?
Never. There are no exceptions.
It is important to distinguish between ‘freedom of speech’ as a generic philosophical concept and as a mechanism of the law. Under the law, speech is only protected from government persecution, oppression, and censorship. And how powerful that protection is depends entirely on the government. In the U.S. it has been historically pretty absolute thanks to the first ammendment and a number of court rulings that have come down strongly in favor of freedom of speech.
However, this legally protected speech is not true absolute ‘freedom of speech’ because it does not prevent your speech from being restricted or restrained by some other poweful force that is not the government. The most common example would be when you work for a company they may require you to restrict your speech about the company. They don’t have the power to incarcerate you or execute you legally if you fail to abide by these rules, but they can fire you and they can possibly sue you which together can in many ways be just as bad. Similarly freedom of speech doesn’t make it illegal for me to say to you something like “if you say one more word, I’ll beat the crap out of you.” In fact, legal freedom of speech protects my right to make such threats, or at least the govenrment can’t punish me for saying it. But of course if I were to ever actually beat the crap out of you then I would be liable for charges of assault. My words would have nothing to do with it. Similarly if you were to beat the crap out of me pre-emptively in order to prevent me from making such a threat.
I would say that there should be no limits to even this broader concept of freedom of speech at least as far as a moral principle goes. That is to say when I threaten you with beating the crap out of you in order to shut you up and I mean it, I’ve done something that should not ‘morally’ be allowed to do. Obviously nothing is stopping me. I have free will of course. But society should frown heavily upon that kind of a thing. We should support and encourage absolute freedom to say whatever we want provided we aren’t stepping on the toes of someone else’s ability to say whatever they want.
Likewise we should not be so forgiving of comapanies making employees sign vastly complicated nondisclosure agreements that constraing all of their actions and interactions even outside of their job. Such contracts don’t violate legal freedom of speech but they certainly violate the principle of freedom of speech that underlies the legal framework. The idea is that we should be free choosing agents and we should be able to say and do whatever we please. Why should it be that for the mere sake of survival we must compromise our principles and restrict our behaviors to be in line with what is in the best interests of the company we happen to work for. If we want to go home and bad mouth our employer, we should not feel as if we are risking our very lifestyles by doing it. Obviously going home and badmouthing your employer might not be the most polite or moral thing to do but that isn’t the point. The point is, *restricting* someone’s capacity to badmouth his or her employer by threat or force is just plain wrong under any circumstnaces. That is what I believe when I say that “freedom of speech” should have no limits.
Ok, so that leaves two special cases that often come up in freedom of speech discussions that tend to trip people up. The first is the idea of ‘secrets’. People think that having secrets somehow manifests a restriction to ‘freedom of speech’ that is valid and acceptable. This is an easy one though. It’s just a misunderstanding of the concept of a secret.
Secrets are mutally agreeds upon voluntary restrictions of speech. It is effectively the same as me choosing not to say something and telling my secret keeper that I am not going to say anything. If that person who I tell were to threaten me with death or dismemberment or the loss of my soul or whatever then that would be a case of him censoring me and would be violating my freedom of speech but if all he is doing is being grateful that I am choosing to keep his secret for him then nobody has violated anyone’s freedom of speech. As long as it is all non-coerced, unrestricted choice then there’s no problem. But as in the case of talking bad about your company, if your company, rather than simply asking you to keep their secrets when you become an employee, threatens to force you to hold thier secrets then it is a behavior that your company is engaging in that I believe should be deemed socially unacceptable.
The last case that provides difficult for people like me who want to say that there should ‘never’ be limits to “freedom of speech” is the case of hate speech. Most of us are absolutely appalled by the idea of someone giving out hateful speech that might well incite someone into behaviors that are immoral. This is particularly disgusting to us because it represents a kind of cowardly manipulation. You get other impressionable people to do your dirty work for you while hiding behind the barriers erected to protect free speech that were meant to be used to protect the good and virtuous amongst us. It’s no wonder that we want to condemn the maker of hate speech. We want to make it so that the government can punish people who speak out hateful messages in order to create a powerful disincentive not to make such hateful speech.
And that makes perfect sense of course, I just think it is wrong. Let’s say somebody gives a speech where he says “let’s all go out there a kill a <n-word>”. That seems like a pretty f-ed up speech rigth? But what about context? What if the person is actually making a kind of satirical expression but posing as being in the realistic. Ala, what if he is doing a kind of a Borat thing. Or maybe even simpler, what if he is just a comedian in a comedy club telling a joke.
Now usually in these cases we aren’t worried because nobody listening is going to go out and kill anybody. But what if one person does? What if that person just doesn’t get the joke whereas everybody else did? Should the speaker be held responsible for the stupidity of the audience?
If you say no, then what about the case of the real deliberate hate speaker that incites a mob to go out killing people. Should that person be punished for the actions of the mob? Maybe you say that case is obviously a ‘yes’ but the question then becomes where along the continuum of these two extremes should you draw the line?
Actually, it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this discussion. Since the ambiguity exists about under what context given speech is purposefully intended to incite violence and hate crimes, we should of course I believe pretty much just allow it all. True we won’t be able to create that super powerful disincentive to say hateful things, but I think this can be a good thing since people also won’t have to live in fear of any stray joke they make being taken awry and considered a hate crime. On the other hand we should absolutely punish hate speakers when their speech causes real measurable harm and we can find sufficient evidence that that was the intent of the speaker. But it’s important to note that we are punishing them for the consequences of their action of speaking, we are not punishing them for speaking at all. The speech itself should be legally and morally accepted. It’s just that the act of inspiring morally unjustifiable acts within others should hold some equivalent condemnation to the inspirationalist as to the tool who did what he was convinced to do.
And that’s just the general gist of how freedom of speech should work. Your ability to fearlessly say anything you want should have no limitations whatsoever. It’s jus that when your words cause harm that you could have predicted you have to take responsibility, not for the words themselves but for that harmed caused by them.
All of this applies equally to freedom of expression.
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