Through the Broyles Bills and McCarthyism, Vietnam protests and the Cold War, University leaders, faculty, students, and staff have defended and upheld the principles of free expression and academic freedom.View the timeline.
The First Amendment guarantees our right to free expression and free association, which means that the government does not have the right to forbid us from saying what we like and writing what we like; we can form clubs and organizations, and take part in demonstrations and rallies.
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Another thing to note before we engage with specific arguments forlimiting speech is that we are in fact free to speak as we like.Hence, freedom of speech differs from some other types of free action.If the government wants to prevent citizens engaging in certainactions, riding motor bikes for example, it can limit their freedom todo so by making sure that such vehicles are no longer available;current bikes could be destroyed and a ban can be placed on futureimports. Freedom of speech is a different case. A government can limitsome forms of free expression by banning books, plays, films etc. butit cannot make it impossible to say certain things. The only thing itcan do is punish people after they have spoken. This meansthat we are free to speak in a way that we are not free to rideoutlawed motorbikes. This is an important point; if we insist thatlegal prohibitions remove freedom then we have to hold theincoherent position that a person was unfree at the very moment sheperformed a speech act. The government would have to remove our vocalcords for us to be unfree in the same way as the motorcyclist isunfree.
We seem to have reached a paradoxical position. I started by claimingthat there can be no such thing as a pure form of free speech: now Iseem to be arguing that we are, in fact, free to say anything we like.The paradox is resolved by thinking of free speech in the followingterms. I am, indeed, free to say (but not necessarily to publish) whatI like, but the state and other individuals can sometimes make thatfreedom more or less costly to exercise. This leads to the conclusionthat we can attempt to regulate speech, but we cannot prevent it if aperson is undeterred by the threat of sanction. The issue, therefore,boils down to assessing how cumbersome we wish to make it for peopleto say certain things. I have already suggested that all societies do(correctly) make some speech more costly than others. If the readerdoubts this, it might be worth considering what life would be likewith no sanctions on libelous statements, child pornography,advertising content, and releasing state secrets. The list could goon.
Given that Mill presented one of the first, and still perhaps the mostfamous liberal defense of free speech, I will focus on his argumentsin this essay and use them as a springboard for a more generaldiscussion of free expression. In the footnote at the beginning ofChapter II of On Liberty, Mill makes a very bold statement:
What of pornography i.e. material that is offensive because of itsextremely violent or degrading content? In this case the offense ismore profound: simply knowing that such material exists is enough todeeply offend many people. The difficulty here is that bare knowledge,i.e., being offended by knowing that something exists or is takingplace, is not as serious as being offended by something that one doesnot like and that one cannot escape. If we allow that filmsshould be banned because some people are offended, even when they donot have to view them, consistency demands that we allow thepossibility of prohibiting many forms of expression. A lot of peoplefind strong attacks on religion, or t.v. shows by religiousfundamentalists deeply offensive. Feinberg argues that even thoughsome forms of pornography are profoundly offensive to many people,they should not be prohibited on these grounds.
To argue the case above, one has to dilute one's support for freedomof expression in favor of other principles, such as equal respect forall citizens. This is a sensible approach according to Stanley Fish.He suggests that the task we face is not to arrive at hard and fastprinciples that prioritise all speech. Instead, we have to find aworkable compromise that gives due weight to a variety of values.Supporters of this view will remind us that when we are discussingfree speech, we are not dealing with it in isolation; what we aredoing is comparing free speech with some other good. We have to decidewhether it is better to place a higher value on speech than on thevalue of privacy, security, equality, or the prevention of harm.
Mill, for example, is an opponent of paternalism generally, but hedoes believe there are certain instances when intervention iswarranted. He suggests that if a public official is certain that abridge will collapse, he can prevent a person crossing. If, however,there is only a danger that it will collapse the public can be warnedbut not coerced from crossing. The decision here seems to depend onthe likelihood of personal injury; the more certain injury becomes,the more legitimate the intervention. Prohibiting freedom of speech onthese grounds is very questionable for liberals in all but extremecases (it was not persuasive in the Skokie case) because it is veryrare that speech would produce such a clear danger to theindividual.
Liberals tend to justify freedom generally, and free speech inparticular, for a variety of reasons. According to Mill, free speechfosters authenticity, genius, creativity, individuality and humanflourishing. He tells us that if we ban speech the silenced opinionmay be true, or contain a portion of the truth, and that unchallengedopinions become mere prejudices and dead dogmas that are inheritedrather than adopted. These are empirical claims that require evidence.Is it likely that we enhance the cause of truth by allowing hatespeech or violent and degrading forms of pornography? It is worthpondering the relationship between speech and truth. If we had a graphwhere one axis is truth and the other is free speech, would we get oneextra unit of truth for every extra unit of free speech? How can sucha thing even be measured? It is certainly questionable whetherarguments degenerate into prejudice if they are not constantlychallenged. Devil's advocates are often tedious rather than usefulinterlocutors. Sometimes supporters of free speech, like itsdetractors, have a tendency to make assertions without providingcompelling evidence to back them up. None of this is meant to suggestthat free speech is not vitally important: this is, in fact, preciselythe reason we need to find arguments in its favour. But regardless ofhow good these arguments are, some limits will have to be placed onspeech.
It has certainly been the practice of most societies, evenliberal-democratic ones, to impose some paternalistic restrictions onbehavior and to limit speech that causes avoidable offense. Hence thefreedom of expression supported by the harm principle as outlined inChapter One of On Liberty and by Feinberg's offense principlehas yet to be realised. It is up to the reader to decide if such asociety is an appealing possibility.
In many ways, the debates confronting courts, legislatures, and publics about how to reconcile the competing values of free expression and nondiscrimination have been around for a century or longer. Democracies have varied in their philosophical approaches to these questions, as rapidly changing communications technologies have raised technical challenges of monitoring and responding to incitement and dangerous disinformation.
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Any Western-centric theory of self-expression will likely propose that a good dose of self-expression is not only healthy but necessary for fulfillment; on the other hand, a theory from an Asian or Middle Eastern country will likely place little importance on individual self-expression and may even see it as a deviant behavior!
To work on improving your capacity for self-expression and encourage your practice of being authentically you, you may find this impressively long list of 75 group activities from the Expressive Therapist website helpful. It includes activities like:
However, as rapidly as social media changes, so too does our understanding of its effects on us; by 2016, social media users were likely to report that Instagram and Snapchat were useful tools for self-expression, but Facebook and Twitter were not (Leighton et al., 2018).
Although Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights1 proclaims that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, many countries have laws that censor or limit certain types of expression, including speech that incites violence and hatred. Some free speech advocates prefer an open marketplace of ideas, where no expression is restricted. They consider that the best response to harmful speech is through debate that lets different ideas freely challenge it. Others argue that restrictions on hate speech are vital to the protection of minority communities from the harm that such speech causes.2
Some countries show a greater acceptance than others for prohibiting certain forms of speech and even the expression of certain opinions. For instance, some European countries have passed laws in accordance with a European Union Council decision to make it a punishable offence not only to incite hatred, but also to publicly deny crimes of genocide (e.g., the Holocaust) or war crimes.6 In other countries, strict limitations on free speech may go as far as to impose the death penalty for such crimes as apostasy, blasphemy or other statements that may be perceived to be opposed to the dominant religion.7 2ff7e9595c
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