The freedom of speech rant - “I disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it�
This is for anyone who has ever been on an irc channel with me, and had their head ripped off for what they think was showing consideration for people. This is my attempt at an exact explanation of why they are wrong.
“I disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it�.
The above is a quote from Voltaire, and it summarises my reaction to attempts at censorship. I do not care how much of an arsehole someone is, I do not care who they have just offended, I do not care if it was tasteless, obscene, or just plain disgusting. All of these things are entirely immaterial. Someone’s language usage and opinions are not subject to the approval of the majority. Offensiveness does not make you wrong. It does not make you anything.
The act of taking offence is exactly that. It is something that you take from something that has been said. There is a reason not everyone is offended by the same things, because offensiveness is, as it were, in the eye of the beholder. And since it is not possible to judge how every single person you are addressing will interpret something, even if you wished to avoid causing anyone to be offended, the only way to do so would be for no-one to ever say anything at all.
Does this mean I am happy to listen to any amount of (just as an example) racist drivel? Of course not. But whether to listen or not is my choice. The fact that I disagree with someone else’s opinion does not take away their right to express it. It simply means that I need to exercise my right to leave their company, or my ability to ignore their crap.
Does this mean I don’t think there is such a thing as an inappropriate comment? Not at all. Inappropriate does not equal offensive. I simply believe you should accept the consequences of your actions, including that of self-expression. If you express a racist or sexist opinion and people are disgusted by it, that’s your fault, and you have to live with it. But if it is your opinion, nothing should be able to stop you expressing it. Personally if someone I knew thought like that I’d rather know about it.
I can say whatever the hell I want. So can everyone else. I can swear, I can be explicit, graphic, and disgusting, I can insult people, beliefs, countries, systems of government. It’s up to me. In a society such as we have, when freedom of speech goes, we’ve taken a giant step towards Orwellian territory, and we can say goodbye to any hope we might have of not someday having to prepare ourselves for the thought police.
People take offence at me quite often. Frankly, that’s their own damn business, it’s certainly not going to be my problem. The contempt I feel for the people who take offence at words is nothing compared to the contempt I have for the people who think they have a right to be protected from those words by the very person who is “offending� them so much. So if you ask me to stop swearing, being nasty to people, or expressing an unpopular opinion, you register with me as being somewhere below the amoeba on the evolutionary ladder. The opportunities for re-climbing this ladder are few and far-between, and if you’re that much of a muppet you won’t notice them anyway.
Do I deliberately go out of my way to be particularly nasty, obscene and insulting? Yes, yes I do. I’m making up for the amount of pathetic arse-licking in this world, and I assure you I’m not even making a dent, so you needn’t worry about the overall global impact. I do it because I believe its right, not to mention because its fun. Its fun watching idiots run around in circles trying to justify their censorship requests, its fun watching people try to convince me by their indignant reaction that the first recourse when you think someone is a complete moron is not to express that thought to them.
Are there any exceptions to this load of free speech stuff I have just spouted? No. Not a single one. If there were, it would not be an obvious and universally important phenomenon. There are circumstances in which it becomes difficult, this does not make it inapplicable.
For reference here is a quick rundown on what you can expect from me on irc, or indeed irl:
- I do not lie.
- I swear, deliberately, and often.
- I say whatever I wish to say at any given time.
- I really do not care what people think of me.
- I answer almost any question put to me, regardless of subject matter or origin.
- I do not ignore things just because I do not like them.
January 17th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
interesting enough rant.
I was going to disagree with you on some points, but I don’t think that I will because I believe that any points I would raise would be concerned with freedom of expression rather than freedom of speech. Which itself raises further interesting points - it the written word covered under freedom of “speech” or freedom of “expression”. Is the latter needed or just the former. And then the difficult question of where the boundaries of that expression lie.
Just musings.
January 17th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Oooohhh.. where to start…
(BTW, you here is general - not pointed at the author :-)
Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean you should, at every point possible, excersice your right to do so.
In fact, you could easily argue that being offensive (in a blatant manner) and/or expressing whatever opinion you have whenever you feel like it to whatever group of people happen to be there is an abuse of free speech. Much like there is a very good reason for diplomatic immunity but parking wherever you want despite what problems you may cause is abuse.
The other problem is that when people abuse the law or their rights as written, more laws have to be applied to limit or clarify the point. For instance, you have a right of free speech - but do you have (or should you have) the right of free speech outside my window at 4 in the morning when I have to get up in 2 hours?
As you well know, I am about as blunt as can be at times and am regularily afflicted by foot-in-mouth disease. However, there are some lines even *I* won’t cross. For instance, drink driving is evil and should be condemned. But the funeral of a fella who drove into a wall after 10 pints is not the place to do it - despite the fact you have the right to do so.
So to suggest that your right to criticise the government or say what you actually think about religion is the same as preaching to a teenager leaving an abortion clinic about the evils of what she’s done is abuse and is to be condemned by intelligent, decent people.
Much as all as you might disagree, everyone does have feelings - some just hide or surpress them more than others. We should apply the intelligence and decency given to us by $deity to decide when we invoke our right to free speech. To suggest that someone who doesn’t want to hear some illogical, offensive opinion you have to say should leave or walk around with their fingers in their ears is selfish at best and disgraceful.
Like dynamite, free speech was designed for a good purpose but is reguarily used for evil. Same with e-mail and spam, knives and stabbing etc etc etc. To be decent human being, we need to apply decency and intelligence to everything and not just do it because we can. It’s the difference between ideals and reality. People *shouldn’t* be offended by things we say but realistically, they will we. Should we disregard them? If everyone said everything they wanted, the world would decend into hate very fast and WWIII wouldn’t be far behind.
Free speech for fought and died for - let’s use it right.
January 17th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Interesting.
I’m doing a course on literary censorship this semester, which is looking fairly fun.
On the whole “free speech with no limits” thing, Iknow you said you don’t lie on irc, but how do you feel about other people lying? Should slander/libel be allowed in the name of free speech? Or people who blatantly lie to “incite hatred” (incitement to hatred being the main excuse used to curtail free speech in alot of countries). Just wondering your stance on the whole untruths issue.
January 17th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
In response to previous posts, the right of free speech and the use of such comes down to the are of interplay between different rights - for instance the right to free speech and the right of the listener to privacy, or to be left along. There is also the interaction between rights, such as free speech, and the responsibility to your fellow man to behave in such a way so as not to cause them offense.
This whole interaction is what causes so much difficulty, and strikes me as similar to many of the problems that I face as a computer programmer. Programs or components work fine separately, but put them all together and all sorts of headaches begin as unexpected interactions show up that have to be resolved.
Enough computer similies for now.
January 17th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Seamie:
I believe that free speech should be combined with honesty, all of the time. Then again I also believe people shouldn’t lie, ever. Part of the reason I never feel bad about what I say to people is that its the truth. Maybe they neither wanted or needed to hear it, but it is still true. Incitement to hatred should not be possible, but it is, people shouldn’t lie, but they do, people shouldn’t take offense at truth, but they do. If there is such a thing as an abuse of free speech, then it is lying.
Cian:
*Sigh*, where to even start. Most of what you say is totally besides the point, perhaps because you appear to have entirely missed it. Firstly, I refer you back to the paragraph where I differentiate between wrong and inaproppriate. Commenting on drunk driving at a drunk drivers funeral is inappropriate, but no, you won’t convince me that it is wrong.
Do I believe its the same to complain about the government as it would be to tell a teenager leaving an abortion clinic that I think she did the wrong thing? Yes. Yes I do. It _is_ the same thing, there is no magical line somewhere that defines what opinions should be taboo. And if there is, I disagree with it, and will not use it. The fact that I choose not to stand outside abortion clinics and tell people I think they have made a mistake is my own business. You may not have noticed that I say “I think”, because I am expressing opinions, not stating facts.
No amount of intelligence or decency will tell you what another person is going to feel. Should we then disregard people’s offended reactions to things? Yes. That was the entire point of the rant. You seem to think that by choosing to describe the most extreme uses of free speech for expressions of opinion, that you will make me reconsider or retract my view. This is not the case. If the principle involved is the same, then the level of extremity is totally irrelevant. I have zero intention of pandering to squeamishness. Either something is right, or it is wrong.
I will not change my language or my opinions because other people are wrong.
January 18th, 2006 at 12:37 am
Nicely written piece, very clearly given points. I agree strongly with almost everything you said, the differences lying in how i choose to act based on the beliefs, not necessarily in the beliefs themselves.
January 19th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Beetroot!
January 20th, 2006 at 11:00 am
I break things down into legal, etiquette, moral and ethical (like moral minus religion). Free speech is a legal right (well, in some countries). Interrupting a conversation is legal, but it’s rude. Asking your best friend’s girlfriend out is legal speech, but it’s unethical. And rude.
If you’re discussing the legal right to free speech, don’t confuse it with the effects etiquette and ethics play on legal free speech. You might mention that they are there, but using the law to enforce manners is almost always a bad idea. And usually using the law to enforce morals is a bad idea.
Murder is wrong because people have a right to live. Rape is wrong because people have control of their person. Stealing is wrong because people have a right to their property.
Yes, there are moral (and ethical) issues with the above crimes, but there are also legal issues. Just because the law, morals and ethics frequently overlap, that does not mean they are related.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
I disagree completely with the idea that morals (I do not define these as religious), ethics, and legality are unrelated. Law is a direct result of our concepts of morality. And it _is_ the enforcing of ethics. Why else would it be illegal to kill? The right to life is written into law, but it was burned into our brains first by the the instinct to reproduce, survive, and seek order. The right to life is a moral concept, and it is universal enough to be a basic legal right in most societies.
The problem arises because law is passed by the majority, and too frequently the majority do not think. My fear is that someday a thoughtless, spineless majority will pass a “we should all be nice to each other” law, because the morality behind it has become so diluted with political correctness that thats all we have left.
When I talk about free speech, I mean my right as a human being, as a conscious entity, my moral right. Not my right as an EU citizen, or an Irish person, or whatever. When I talk about the response people have to what I say, I mean their moral take on it. But that morality, and the mentality that holds it today, shapes the law tomorrow. If people really truly believed that everything we say about each other should be nice, that I shouldn’t be honest if my opnions reflect badly on others, then someday we really will have a law that prevents me from having them.
I will not be allowed to dislike people, I will not be able to make a judgement based on value, or worth, lest it be negative. Or I make these judgements, and then lie about them. Pretend that I like people I do not, pretend to laud acheivements that are not real. Yes this is an extreme example, but as far as I can tell thats how moral arguments work.
An enforcing of morals is all that the law has ever been. So I want to be damn sure those morals are corrupted as little as possible by public relations bullshit.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I think I pretty clearly specified why it is illegal to kill.
But if you want to respond to comments without reading them, that’s your prerogative.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
I’d respond to this, but our discussion on channel makes that unnecessary I think :)