Questioning Free Speech

Jeremy Waldron reviews John Durham Peters'n Courting the Abyss and considers free speech, in the LRB:

[M]any members repeated the saying often attributed to Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by Helvétius might be summed up: ‘How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” was his attitude now.’ It was her readers – and countless civil libertarians afterwards – who made the mistake of attributing the saying to Voltaire himself.

Whoever said it, Peters has written an interesting and provocative book, exploring what might lie behind that smug liberal proclamation. To begin with, the language attributed to Voltaire is bewildering. ‘Defend to the death your right to say it?’ Whose death? How would death be involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.’ Is that what is meant? Defenders of free speech squirm on this point. On the one hand, they want to say that we should be willing to brave death for the sake of this important individual right. On the other hand, they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence, between pamphlets that say ‘Hitler should have finished the job’ and anti-semitic attacks, or between pornography and violence against women. Indeed, they pretend to have no idea of what such a causal mechanism could possibly be: ‘We are defending only the Nazis’ speech. How on earth could there be any connection between what they say and the things that some violent individuals do?’

It’s a strange dichotomy because, in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence.

Comments

[serial catowner]

Well, I'm no scholar, and that makes it easy for me to say- there may be a connection, and that might be a problem, but it's not a problem that can be solved by banning free speech.

[mcd]

To me, Stanley Fish presented the dilemma best:

Free speech either rests on itself, is simply good in itself; or else its goodness rests on producing other social goods.

If free speech rests on itself, it can't be defended, except to stamp one's foot and say. I like it.

If its goodness rests on leading to other goods, then it's likely that sometimes speech won't lead to those goods, or even to their diminution. In which case it would be perfectly sensible to oppose free speech.

[Jack]

"If its goodness rests on leading to other goods, then it's likely that sometimes speech won't lead to those goods, or even to their diminution. In which case it would be perfectly sensible to oppose free speech."

Except, of course, this presumes you can accurately identify what speech leads to what result, and block only speech which leads to a net bad result. And then, further, it assumes you can block it without causing damage to speech which would lead to a net good result.

[Jack Lund]

I agree. It's easy to miss the point that we tolerate nazi's marching and other abhorrent acts not because, as the author seems to say, we want to "look into the abyss", but because we understand that there is noone we truly trust to draw the line between acceptable and non-acceptable speech. Listening to hate-filled speech is a cost of that decision, nothing more.

I, personally, don't feel "better" for having listened to racist rantings. I do, however, feel better that their ability to rant ensures my and other's ability to exchange ideas freely.

[mcd]

To J Lund: How exactly does listening to "racist rantings" ensure your ability to exchange ideas freely?

To Jack: No, it doesn't assume anything about "accurate" identifying. Just making identifications. Politics doesn't wait on mankind achieving perfect information. (despite Bush's pretense that we have to wait for "all the facts to come in" before combatting global warming).

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