In the public debate about freedom of speech, which is also going on at schools (Michiel Beute and Saro Lazano Parra, Volkskrant, Opinion & Debate section - in Dutch, ed.), the discussion often takes place within limited legal confines, for example when it is emphasized that incitement to violence is the line where the limits to freedom of speech must be drawn. However, the public debate about freedom of speech has two key stumbling blocks: it is too abstract and the moral dimension of the debate is insufficiently taken into account.
Wanted: concrete cases
Firstly, what we’re missing in the discussion are concrete cases. What exactly are we talking about? Which examples, realities and stories? You can’t be for or against ‘freedom of speech’ simpliciter. And statements like freedom of speech being threatened by ‘the internet’ aren’t worth much either. The conversation about freedom of speech needs to get more concrete.
Secondly, the discussion is always reduced to the question of what should be prohibited by law, while the real challenges of the topic are not legal but primarily moral-social and personal in nature. It is not only a matter ofthe difference between what is (not) allowed legally speaking and what is (not) allowed morally speaking. The main issue is about all of the different ways we can interpret what someone is morally (not) allowed to say, and how many misunderstandings are the result of not distinguishing between them.
Tough cases
Let me put words to action. Here are some tough examples of freedom of speech:
Someone is vehemently going on about how it should be OK to have sex with minors on national television,
A man writes on an online webzine that ‘women generally excel less in a lot of professions and have less ambition’ and ‘often are also more interested in just more family-like things and such’.
A woman, at home on her couch with a good friend, tells her that gay people are sick and that she is afraid that her daughter might be gay in which case she would end their relationship,
A man says on the radio that black people should go ‘back to their own country’ without any significant resistance from the interviewer.
Should these people be allowed to say these things?
These are not questions that are part of some theory examination for a driving test for which ready answers in black and white are possible or desirable. In response to all these examples, we might experience an instant legal reflex and interpret the “are they allowed?”-question as the question of whether their statements should be prohibited by law. In some cases that would be sensible, necessary even. But if we were to do nothing else (which often happens: ‘oh, that’s bad, but anyway it’s allowed by law, so on we go’), then we miss something essential about these issues.
So suppose instead we bracket the legal dimension and ask whether the man on TV is ‘not allowed’ to say that sex with minors should be permissible or whether the woman in her home is ‘not allowed’ discriminate against LGBTI+ people. What might we mean?
It can mean, among other things (multiple answers are possible here):
(1) that you definitely do not share that opinion,
(2) that you think this statement is immoral or harmful,
(3) you wish this person hadn’t said it out loud,
(4) that you now despise that person,
(5) that you will express your indignation by criticizing this person either on paper or in real life, e.g. by ignoring or laughing at them or ridiculing them with quoted tweets,
(6) that you think that they should not been given a platform and that journalists should stop platforming the entire marketplace of ideas, including its rotting corners; that they should not have blind faith in the effects of critical replies to bullshit through op-eds and letters to the editor, since the bullshit is being normalized in the process.
Add context and stir
This list, which is of course not exhaustive, makes clear just how ambiguous ‘not being allowed to say’ something can be. We need to bring that ambiguity to the surface and we can only do that by discussing concrete examples and supplementing them with specific contexts.
Suppose, for example, that the homophobic woman was brought up in a highly conservative religious context and that this conversation with her friend is the vulnerable start to think about homosexuality at all. Does that matter? How? Or suppose the man who wrote a sexist piece on the website is Thierry Baudet, one of the Netherlands’ fascist politicians. Does that matter? Or turn the pedosexual and the religious woman around: the former is now at home on the couch having a vulenrable conversation with a good friend and the homophobic woman is being loud and unreasonable on TV. Do we have the same intuitive reactions? Why?
Let’s enrich the debate on freedom of speech with concrete cases and let’s start to tie loose the legal corset that is so tightly knotted around it.
This article was published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, August 26 2021. English translation via Fleur Jongepier on Medium. Photo: Steve Johnson via Unsplash