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WillowOne's Positions

Free Speech

My Positions

  1. Free speech is a foundational principle of a rational and progressive society.
  2. Free speech includes the right to offend. Speech that offends no one needs no protection.
  3. The only legitimate limits on speech are those required to prevent direct, specific harm to others: incitement to imminent violence, credible threats, fraud, defamation, and the disclosure of information that endangers a specific person. "Harm" here means harm, not offence, discomfort, or disagreement.
  4. Free speech is a principle, not merely a law. A society in which the state permits speech but in which people are afraid to speak for fear of losing their jobs or their social standing does not have free speech in any meaningful sense. The principle binds employers, universities, platforms, and individuals, as well as governments, though it binds them differently.
  5. The remedy for bad speech is more speech. The remedy for a false claim is a refutation, not a prohibition.

Notes

  1. I hold that all ideas must be open to challenge, satire, and scrutiny. This includes religious ideas (see Atheism on the demands for blasphemy laws after the Danish cartoons), political ideas, scientific ideas, and my own.
  2. Free speech is essential for the discovery of truth, the correction of error, and the intellectual development of individuals and society. Suppressing speech is not only a wrong to the speaker but a loss to all, since it denies others the opportunity to refute or reconsider ideas. See Knowledge: models are changed by surprise, and surprise requires that the surprising thing be sayable.
  3. The principle is most tested by speech one finds repugnant, and that is where it must be held. I would not criminalise Holocaust denial, though I regard it as both false and vile, because the state that can ban a false historical claim can ban a true one, and because prohibition lends the claim a glamour it does not deserve.
  4. The right to speak is not a right to be heard, platformed, published, or employed. A newspaper that declines to print a letter, a university that declines to invite a speaker, or a private platform that removes a post has not violated anyone's free speech, though it may have acted against the spirit of free speech, and may deserve criticism for it. The distinction matters: the state has a monopoly on force, and private actors do not.
  5. The European Court of Human Rights put the point well in Handyside v United Kingdom (1976): freedom of expression "is applicable not only to 'information' or 'ideas' that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no 'democratic society'."
  6. The UK does not have free speech in the American sense, and its laws on "grossly offensive" communications (Communications Act 2003, s.127), public order offences, and non-crime hate incidents have been criticised for policing opinion rather than preventing harm. On the principles above, they are hard to justify.

Quotations

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapter II

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapter II

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapter I (the "harm principle")

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire (1906), summarising Voltaire's attitude; frequently misattributed to Voltaire himself

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1755

Also see