Is Free Speech Overrated?
As I prepared this post, I had no idea MZ was preparing one on a similar topic! But the point I want to make is somewhat different. It is that deliberations on the value of free speech must take place through the prism of the common good. That might sound obvious, but it is anything but. In fact, we too often frame the issue as one of individual autonomy, especially the individual autonomy exalted by American constitutional liberalism. We might set boundaries, but never question the underlying assumption that free speech is a good in itself, rather than as a means to affect the common good.
I want to give three examples of how the common good might call for a less restrictive “right” to free speech.
The first is completely obvious – pornography. An individualist would claim the right to produce and consume pornography as an essential element of human freedom. Those opposed would be simply advised not to partake in pornography. Sure, this approach has room for some modest restrictions, such keeping it away from children etc. But ultimately, it is seen as a free speech right, and this is related to the laissez-faire right to the rewards of market outcomes (porn is big business). I would argue that given the social detriment caused by pervasive pornography, by its effect on sexual behavior and on the stability of marriage, there is a good case to ban it outright on common good grounds. This restricts speech, and it controls the market – both are anathema to individualists. But the common good sometimes involves a rather “big” role for government.
The second is a little less obvious – hate speech. In some countries and contexts, allowing hate speech might hurt the common weal by instilling an atmosphere of violence and endangering public order. Given its particular history, I can support the German prohibition against pro-nazi rhetoric. But in other countries, such as the United States, the case might be not so strong, and might even backfire. Either way, what matters is the common good, not the individual right.
The third issue is topical – donating money to political campaigns to influence policy. In the United States, this is touted as a free speech issue, as discussed by the Supreme Court in its awful Citizens United decision. But a political system greased by private financial interests is poisonous. It means the rich get access and rewards, the poor get left behind. The domination of the political and economic system by monied interests (which usually tends to be big business) has been consistently and vehemently condemned by Catholic social teaching from the time of Leo XIII, and the common good is always the framework of analysis. The United States has a particular problem, with the scale of campaign finance, and the closeness of lobbyists and policymakers. A common good case could be made for banning all private campaign finance, with no loopholes, and moving to public funding.
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On your second point, I would think the South Park/Muhammed controversy would be applicable. I just don’t understand people’s need to defend the creators of South Park. The basic argument is that if we can’t be obscene we aren’t free. As I said, I just don’t get it. Granted, there can be some dispute over what obscenity entails, but I don’t see this epic battle to figure it out that others see.
I tend to advocate freedom of speech to the extreme, not because all speech is moral or because it has no negative consequences for the common good, consequences that we should take very seriously, but because I distrust any authority to determine what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable speech. I would rather see a phenomenon like hate speech addressed at a cultural, communal level than at the level of political power. Those who wield power have a strong incentive to control speech, with or without laws (consider how Bush used language to garner support for the war efforts), but granting them the power to coerce “appropriate speech” through legislation creates, to my mind, a situation worse than that of a society in which people can say pretty much anything without fear of legal punishment. I’ve seen first hand how fear is used to silence people. In my opinion, it’s uglier than what we see on South Park.
(porn is big business). I would argue that given the social detriment caused by pervasive pornography, by its effect on sexual behavior and on the stability of marriage, there is a good case to ban it outright on common good grounds.
Actually, if you do some googling, you’ll find out that the size of the porn industry has been vastly overestimated, and it is in decline.
I have been searching for some solid information about the alleged social costs of porn, and I have yet to find anything of significance. Every time I find something really damning about the effects of porn, it turns out to be from an organization with a name like the Council for the Purity of Christian Family Values.
After reading Caritas In Veritate, i would argue that “charity is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine” more so than the common good. Caritas teaches that “Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity.”
And, “A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world.”
I would argue (leaning heavily on Caritas) that the “common good” is something to desire and strive towards; that it is “a requirement of justice and charity” and not a prism through which the value of free speech is determined.
If charity can only be lived through truth, and if we can get closer to truth as a result of free speech, I would say that free speech is not overrated.
I agree with the previous poster. Advocates of constraints on speech need to specify how such constraints will be enforced without crossing the line into arbitrary censorship of unpopular ideas.
Regarding pornography, I thought the Supreme Court already allowed communities to restrict access to such materials — although I suppose this has little or no practical effect.
In any event, I believe a prerequisite for such a conversation is a robust concept of the common good that is not conflated with the good of untrammeled private enterprise. I suspect a component of such a notion is some way to measure and ascribe value to healthy communities. Right now, such entities and the people nurtured by them are viewed as expendable casualties in the service of what Schumpeter referred to as “creative destruction”.
The problems with 1 & 2 are in the definition. You want to weed out the bad stuff but you want to make sure that good speech does not get excluded as well (what some refer to as the chilling effect). I think as Catholics have witnessed #2 used against priests who preach the Church’s teaching on homosexuality (I believe in Canada), that’s a significant problem.
Kyle does have a point in that societal norms have done a pretty good job of silencing hate speech here (though of course it still exists in an underground/whispers environment where the norms change)
I sympathize a lot with #3, though I don’t know what it would do. Corporations could still spend money on issue ads. There is also a lot of other ways corporations and the wealthy could spend their money outside of direct campaign finance that would have a tremendous influence on the vote (and hence the politicians). However, the drawback would be that it would be harder to see and document that influence whereas with campaign financing laws as they are today you can. So I’m not sure that without more #3 would accomplish what you would like it to.
I like that this post moved to discussing the real conceptual issue: how does speech impact the common good, and (implicitly) to what extent should we rely on a positivistic v.
The first and third issues are basically off the table in the U.S. Porn isn’t likely to be outlawed, although I certainly think (as have many Americans historically) that it can be injurious to the common good, and that ideally, it would be good to restrict it. As to Citizens United, it changes very little in practice; money finds its way to politicians one way or the other, and I think the likelihood of U.S. politicians cutting off their own gravy train is very low. In the abstract, public funding might be desirable, but in practice, I’d have concerns about fairness in implementation.
As to hate speech, I would side with Kyle in the sense that hate speech laws, in implementation, are about as consistent as blog comment policies – one person’s hate is another person’s valid point and there’s perpetual caterwauling about double standards, etc. While in some cases, hate speech laws might be beneficial, I think the risks of abuse in a heterogenous society outweigh the prospective benefits. Moreover, using law to enforce morality in speech seems to be a heavy-handed an ineffectual way to encourage civil discourse.
I’ve watched my share of porn – The problem with porn isn’t so much its existence but its woeful quality. Gaudy, crass, cartoonish, stupid, bad hair, overacting, enormous implants, women being as esteemed as in the average hip hop video. Given the monkey-see-monkey-do nature of humans they frequently adopt the aesthetics and practices. It’s an industry, mass-produced, McPorn. The equivalent of, say, Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears or what have you.
Erotic art is a different matter. What’s the difference ? Quality, lighting, depth of field, lack of idiotic expressions, intelligence of the people involved. I haven’t come across the proverbial gullible farmer’s daughter but rather strong, opinionated women who aren’t anybody’s “object”. I eschew “girls gone wild” types and fail to see the appeal of such footage.
It’s rather patronizing to view women automatically as victims. Mind you, there are many lowlifes among photographers, producers etc (such as Girls Gone Wild), as in any other line of work. There is a chasm between standard fare porn and, say, Helmut Newton. Penthouse and Playboy, in my view, are very quaint, kitschy, unrealistic, absurdly made-up and retouched. Not to mention the interior decoration.
The USA is peculiar, having both the biggest porn industry and rather prudish standards when it comes to nudity (but not with violence). Maybe Puritan heritage makes for bad porn ? More so than elsewhere, terms like filth, dirt, gutter are used in reference to sex. Cussing revolves mainly around sex (defecation in German).
One thing that strikes me as odd is that it’s illegal in most of the US to pay someone to have sex with you but legal to pay two people to have sex infront of you. Catholic rulers (and some saints) tended to be far more pragmatic about prostitution. A valve, if you will – much like porn. Vienna has certain areas where prostitution is legal and prostitutes have to register and get health tests every 2 weeks I think and then are issued a “pass”. I don’t see the attraction of it all, as there is no desire for the customer but only for his money.
Consenting-adult porn or erotic literature should not be illegal, murdering cats, however, should be illegal to commit and depict/market. I don’t understand why it’s ok in the US to show decaying corpses (eg on CSI) on network tv (with the genitalia blown out to white) and all kinds of violence but not breasts. Many a person would be far more offended by that than by war (see also: Super Bowl, Iraq War).
So, in closing, I’d say eroticism is a matter of intelligence and taste more so than morality. There is no difference between painting a nude or photographing one, yet few will protest “Maya”. Only coercive, violent etc. acts should be prosecuted.
On the first two, I think that the position of “liberalism” basically springs, and Kyle points out, from doubt. There’s no reason to hold that pornography and “hate speech” are covered by free speech positions, and throughout much of US history there have been speech limitations on the basis of decency, blasphemy, etc. The break-down, I would argue, springs from the break-down in consensus on what these evils are, or (pace David Nichols above) whether they are even evil.
In that regard, I would argue that the break-down in consensus over what porn was and whether it was a social evil was much more responsible for the application of free speech protections to it in the 60s and 70s than was any respect of “individualism” for the profit motive.
I would like to see a great deal more things banned, so long as I had a good degree of confidence in the people doing the banning. However, I see little reason to believe that, in our pluralistic post-Christian society, that the censors would actually have a good understanding of the natural law. Indeed, I would argue it is precisely this increasing appreciation for skepticism about the understanding of natural law by rulers which has led the Church to take a less authoritarian approach to numerous political issues since the mid 1800s.
Classical liberalism is not remotely a good unto itself, but license is a good way of avoiding silencing the good when those in power have no clear understanding of the difference between “the good” and “the bad”.
The break-down, I would argue, springs from the break-down in consensus on what these evils are, or (pace David Nichols above) whether they are even evil.
DarwinCatholic,
It seems to me that the question of whether pornography is a social evil and the question of whether it is evil are two different questions. I raised the question of whether it is a social evil. If it is, that should be verifiable. It seems to me that according to Catholic teaching, pornography is evil (sinful) even if it is not a social evil. The Church may believe and say that pornography is a social evil, but I don’t really believe that is a matter of Catholic doctrine. So I am not arguing with Catholic doctrine. I am just raising the question of whether pornography causes sex crimes, or makes men dismissive of women, or has other discernible, measurable effects.
Years ago, one of my cousins wanted to go to the nearby state university to study art, and her small-town Catholic parents would not let her, because they heard (correctly, I am sure) that there were art classes in which students were taught to draw using nude models.
“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Matthew 5:28.
I’m not saying all nudity and eroticism in art is immoral. But if it’s primary purpose is to incite adultery in the heart of an onlooker (which I would say is the definition of porn), then it’s immoral.
Whether it should be banned by law is an altogether different question.