FREEDOM

Freedom of Speech and the Question of Censorship: Rajeev Bhargava- The knotty
question of free speech and censorship
While the legitimacy of liberal democracies crucially hinges on the degree of freedom of
expression allowed to citizens, the media and so on, there are also claims of justice that
must be met which demand that citizens be protected from certain kinds of speech.
Censorship is sometimes seen to operate as an expression of power and the refusal to
allow the circulation of certain expressions that question dominant power structures.
Protected speech: Speech which cannot be restricted under clauses like the First
Amendment in the United States Constitution or under Article 19 (2) in the Indian
Constitution, and protect not just ‘good’ speech, but also speech which is untrue, false,
trite, and sometimes downright dangerous (such as racist speech or speech directed at
sexual minorities or religious communities.)
Arguments that have been made in order to construct a ‘free speech
principle’-
-Linking it with the achievement of other values we hold dear such as individual liberty,
democracy, tolerance and so on. The problem with this argument is that if it could be
established that the achievement of these other values would be served better through
the restriction, rather than promotion of speech, speech becomes difficult to defend.
Another set of arguments, therefore, ask for speech to be valued not because it has
favourable consequences in the achievement of other values, but that it be valued for
qualities intrinsic to itself. Such an argument would make the claim that free speech is a
desirable value/good in itself, which does not need to be justified by invoking principles
external to it.
-An adage, ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me’,
or what Fredrick Schauer calls the ‘lesser harm principle’: The argument states that
speech should be free and unregulated not because there are especial benefits to be
had from its circulation; rather, speech, unlike actions, does not have the power to do
any real damage to its recipients .However, neither law nor philosophy can afford to,
and indeed do not, ignore the very real consequences that accrue from speech and
expression especially in case of misogynist or racist speech. Words are important and
powerful and no clear boundaries can be drawn between speech and when speech takes
the form of action.
-Freedom of Expression and The search for Truth: J. S. Mill in his essay, On Liberty
remarks: 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.. 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. Through this, Mill established the fact that it is
only through the free exchange of ideas, open discussion and the constant tussle
between individuals holding divergent opinions, ideas, and beliefs that the truth can be
arrived at. Mill makes his argument in two parts, which relate to the ‘truth’ of an
utterance. The first relates to whether an utterance is true. If it were, to deny it a hearing
would mean that the truth would be lost forever. And if an utterance were false, the
truth would no longer remain a ‘living truth’ but become a moribund ‘dead dogma’
because it would not require constant justification, through arguments in its defence.
The most obvious problem with Mill’s argument is that often truth may not be the only,
or indeed even the primary, desirable outcome in a given situation. Other
considerations, such as justice, or maintaining peace, or individual privacy might far
outweigh the value placed on what is ‘true’. Mill also seems to assume that all
individuals share an equal capacity to speak freely and that they will understood each
other in the same language: shared set of understandings of the values, codes, and
norms through which people make sense of the world and their place in it. Often, the
bitterest contests in society are between individuals and groups whose perception of
the world do not share the same rules, and therefore cannot make sense to each other.
For instance, the conflict between customary law and constitutional law.
-Freedom of Speech and its relation to Self Govt.(Alexander Meiklejohn): Freedom
of speech and expression are important because they are crucial for the functioning of a
democratic system of government and hep in meeting certain social objectives.
Meiklejohn focuses not so much on the speaker’s right to speak, but the listener’s right
to hear. The basis of a democratic government is citizens’ consent. It is only through the
free exchange of ideas and a free press that citizens will be exposed to the ideas,
opinions and views which they require in order to participate effectively in democratic
decision making, and hold government responsible for its actions. The problem, of
course, arises in the event that the goal of democracy is in restricting rather than
promoting free speech (Eric Barendt). For instance, the government in power might
refuse to allow political campaigning during elections on the grounds that the
opposition is spreading false information.
-Free Speech and Tolerance: In The Tolerant Society (1986), Lee Bollinger attempts
to view ‘free speech in relation to our dealings with social behaviour in general.’ On this
view a defence of free speech may be constructed by invoking its function in inculcating
an ethic of tolerant listening. Bollinger recognizes that speech can be harmful. However,
this recognition does not lead him to demand that speech be regulated; rather that
recognition of the very real harms that speech can effect and to nonetheless, ‘let the
injury pass’ countermands the widespread societal impulse of excessive punishment.
Free speech allows us to develop the ‘virtue of magnanimity’. For Bollinger, free speech
performs the function of a ‘zone of tolerance’ in which individuals are forced to confront
and tolerate views not in keeping with their own. Tolerating free speech makes us more
receptive to the idea that things do not always go our way, and no one has the right to
impose their way of living on anyone else. David Richards notes that given that
tolerance is the ‘central normative term’ in Bollinger’s argument, it is necessary for him
to provide, at the outset, a critical theory of tolerance. In its absence the contention that
the toleration of speech creates the conditions for a general increase of tolerance levels
in society, leaves several questions unanswered. Surely, it can be argued, there are some
things, which no democratic society should tolerate such as racist, misogynist or casteist
speech? And finally, could it not be argued that excessive speech can sometimes lead to
less rather than more tolerance?
-The Autonomy Defence of Free Speech: It asserts that freedom of speech must enjoy
state protection because restrictions on the same would violate the autonomy of
individuals. In ‘A Theory of Freedom of Expression’ (1972), Thomas Scanlon employs
the concept of ‘Millian principle’( though there are certain harms which would not occur
but for certain acts of expression, these harms cannot justify legal restrictions on these
acts of expression) for viewing the notion of autonomy. For Scanlon, freedom of speech
and expression are important because restrictions on them seriously compromise
individual autonomy. To be autonomous a person must be able to view oneself as
sovereign in deciding what to believe and what not to believe. The powers of the state
thus must be restricted to those that citizens will be willing to accept, while still
regarding themselves as equal, autonomous and rational. Restrictions on speech do not
meet this requirement because they undercut the capacity of people to decide matters
for themselves. Thomas Nagel invokes an idea of autonomy similar to Scanlon’s in his
defence of free speech. He notes that recognition of individual sovereignty over reason
and beliefs requires that a person must be permitted to discuss his/her views and elicit
reactions. Susan J. Brison points out that Scanlon’s claim that an autonomous
individual will refuse to allow another to decide on her behalf because she will take
responsibility for her beliefs, may be countered by the reasoning that false information,
by making people believe that a group is inferior or unworthy, might compromise
autonomous decision-making capacities. Second, she argues that not all speech is
processed rationally. Indeed, the socialization of young men and women into occupying
differential power roles in society is the result of processes which are not rationally
mediated.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH HATE SPEECH?
The question of speech becomes even more problematic when we enter the realm of
what has been termed ‘hate speech’, that is, speech directed at certain people or
communities with the intent to cause harm by asserting their natural inferiority
(such as racist speech), or speech that by its nature asserts the domination of one
group of people over another (such as pornography, or misogynist speech) with
assumptions being that hate speech can cause harm that in turn is akin to physical
injury. In terms of demands for the legal regulation of hate speech in India, concerns
have centred on inflammatory speech directed at religious minorities, and this question
has acquired greater urgency after the Gujarat genocide in 2002 in which there was
widespread propaganda against the Muslim community by ideologues of the Hindu
Right.
In Words that Wound (1993), Richard Delgado argues that racist speech leaves deep
psychological wounds on its victims. By perpetuating social stereotypes of inferiority,
racist speech leads to feelings of self-hatred, humiliation and isolation in its victims. For
Delgado, racist speech is inflected with the desire to cause harm. He goes further and
notes that Black Americans are more prone to high blood pressure, hypertension and
stroke as compared to their white counterparts, and this probably has to do with the
physiological manifestations of stress caused by racial abuse. For Delgado, while speech
causes identifiable harm, speech and the harmful actions it leads to are nonetheless
different order of things. Another way of thinking about the relationship between
speech and harm is to complicate the relationship between ‘speech’ and ‘action’ which
have traditionally been seen as separate. Noted philosopher J. L. Austin complicates
this distinction by introducing the idea of the ‘speech act’, i.e. an action that is enacted
through speech. Austin refers to two kinds of speech acts: An illocutionary speech act
is one that both describes and does—that is utterance is equal to the performance of
the act, A perlocutionary speech act, on the other hand, is one where there is a
temporal lag between the utterance and the consequences of the action it encapsulates.
The problem with this position, Judith Butler argues, is in assuming the stability of
language where a statement always does what it says; it bestows on individuals a
sovereignty, which in actuality only belongs to the state. It is only the state, which has,
through the language of law, an illocutionary power to always make language mean
precisely what it says. Therefore, Hate speech is a purely legal category. It is the law
that defines certain kinds of speech as hate speech. The category of hate speech thus
cannot exist without the state deeming it to be so, and it produces, through legislation,
speech that does what it says: victimization, de-gradation, and subordination. Butler’s
work provides us with a way to reflect on speech and the ethical questions that
surround speech acts, which moves outside the juridical framework presumed in liberal
theory, where the state is the sole arbiter of what is publicly speakable or otherwise, and
so defines in this way the effects of language itself. In Butler’s formulation, the
subject of hateful speech can render the skeins of language itself vulnerable. In
India, one of the most powerful instances of such appropriation is the use of the word
‘Dalit’ which literally means ‘oppressed’, as a self-descriptive term. Words that are used
with the intent to harm, are appropriated to mean their opposite. Words can and do
wound, but they can also be re-signified and appropriated, their potential to hurt turned
into affirmations of strength.
Conclusion: It can be said that the choice of when to privilege speech, when to
emphasize the virtue of coded forms of speech, and when to pass over things in silence,
are matters that require us to take into account various intersecting ethical and
pragmatic constraints. Sometimes there are no satisfactory answers. By and large, if
something erroneous, mistaken, untrue, dangerous, hateful or injurious is said, then that
utterance can always be responded to by various acts of counter-speech. However, the
silent prejudice, the unspoken hatred, and the inaudible threat can never be challenged.
It is the absence of challenge towards such sentiments that allows them to accumulate
prestige and grow in stature, until they threaten to overcome the very foundations of an
open, tolerant, and democratic polity. For this reason alone, the risks of the freedom
of speech may be seen by many committed to an open society to be preferable to
the safety of regulated expression.
'Should Offensive Speech be regulated?': "In Applying Political Theory" by K.
Smits
Freedom of speech is a widely accepted central principle in liberal democracies, but
debates regularly surface over its limits. The growing pluralist and multi-ethnic nature of
democratic societies from the last century onward, and the increase in claims by ethnic
and cultural groups for collective rights have led to new challenges to freedom of
speech. Should it extend to curtailing the liberty with which people make
statements and claims, or use names and epithets to insult or vilify others on the
basis of their race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation? There is an
emerging debate over the issue of whether freedom of speech is an absolute right, or
whether it should be constrained by the demands of cultural pluralism and sensitive
relations between majorities and minority ethnic and religious groups. Most liberal
democracies have a general commitment to freedom of speech with restrictions upon
statements which are designed to provoke hatred or resentment on the basis of
membership in particular minorities.
Most European countries, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have passed
legislation crminalizing speech that amounts to the vilification of racial and ethnic and in
some cases other groups. This has been in part a response to the rise in xenophobia
and race-related tensions that countries with large immigrant populations have
experienced since the 1980s. States must balance their commitments to human rights,
under the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which specifies the right to
freedom of expression, with the requirements of the International Convention on the
Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), CERD, which entered into
force in 1969. European states follow Article 10 of the European Convention for the
Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which guarantees freedom of
speech as essential to the development of democracy. The European Court has
interpreted this to mean that some restrictions to speech may be necessary in a
democratic society, and that this includes the right to restrict hate speech directed
against religious, racial and ethnic groups.
The balance between guaranteeing free expression and preventing the expression or
incitement of racial hatred inevitably reflects current politics. It also tends to depend
upon the historical place of freedom of speech in their legal systems, and upon the
national history of minority treatment. In countries with relatively recent constitutions,
free expression tends to be interpreted in the light of recent history. The German Basic
Law stipulates that freedom of speech is limited by, among other factors, the
inviolability of personal honour. This has been interpreted to include the honour of
groups, and the expression of hatred against a minority is a criminal offence.
The dominance of freedom of speech is even more marked in the United Kingdom,
where it is a fundamental principle in the light of which others must be interpreted. The
British commitment to freedom of expression dates from the religious conflicts and Civil
War of the mid-seventeenth century, when it was famously defended by the poet John
Milton in his pamphlets. Increased racial diversity in Britain as a result of post-Second
World War immigration has meant the balancing of this fundamental right with the need
to prevent racial and ethnic conflict. The Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Public
Order Act of 1986 made 'incitement to racial hatred' an offence. The limitations of this
legislation, which addressed only racial and not religious groups, became apparent in
the Salman Rushdie case. In 1998 Rushdie, an Indian-British author published the novel
The Satanic Verses, which contained an unflattering depiction of a character modelled
on the Muslim prophet Mohammed. The issue in this case was offence to the
sensibilities of a group, rather than incitement of hatred towards them. Muslims
condemned the book as blasphemous, and protests broke out against Rushdie and his
publishers in the UK and abroad. Here, Muslim immigrants were criticized for failing to
integrate and subscribe to western values such as freedom of expression.
Quite a different approach has been taken in the United States to regulating offensive
speech. The United States has no legislation against racial vilification or incitement to
racial hatred because of the crucial role of the First Amendment to the Constitution,
which states that 'Congress shall make no law.... abridging the freedom of speech or of
the press. The United States signed, but never ratiied, CERD, because of its concerns
about the implications of Article 4. Because the Supreme Court is charged with
interpreting the Constitution in the United States, much of the American debate
concerning freedom of speech centres on its decisions. While some regulation of speech
has been upheld if it applies generally, the courts have rejected both content-based
restrictions of speech (those which target, for example, particular racist content) and
viewpoint-based restrictions which prohibit only the expression of a particular
viewpoint (such as white supremacy, or anti-Semitism). The issue of freedom of speech
resurfaced in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s with the proliferation of
university and college campus speech codes, which prohibited speech offensive to
particular usually racial or ethnic groups. Universities justified the codes on the grounds
that offensive speech encroached upon the equal rights of minority students to their
education, and that regulation was necessary to ensure a civil environment in which all
students were equally able to learn. The most fundamental problem raised by legislation
and court cases dealing with offensive speech is how to balance liberty with other
political values. Offensive or hate speech is often referred to as a hard case because one
of the common defences of freedom of speech - that the exchange of ideas enables us
to discover the truth - might seem to apply less to this kind of expression. This is what
the United States Supreme Court meant when it described offensive speech as having
low social value. However, those who argue against exemptions for offensive speech
often concede its negative social effects but argue that to make exceptions for it might
lead to eroding the central principle of free speech.
The civil libertarian argument against regulating speech
Freedom of speech is good for society because it produces more vigorous debate and
engagement, in which good and true ideas are more likely to emerge and to attract
supporters. But it is also essential to individual freedom and autonomy our capacity to
direct and shape our own lives. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel
Kant argues along these lines that the public use of reason was essential to individual
autonomy and this has become a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism. Kant is
addressing legal prohibitions on freedom of speech. John Stuart Mill, who published
his famous and influential defence of freedom On Liberty, in 1859, is concerned not only
with the dangers of state censorship, but also with the censoring powers of public
opinion, which deters people from developing their own views. Mill defends freedom of
speech because it will strengthen true opinions and weaken false, and because it is
essential to individuality. Freedom of thought and expression are necessary for
individuals to develop their own selves. We might call this 'expressive liberty'. It is this
relationship between freedom of speech and individual autonomy that Rawls has in
mind when he describes freedom of expression as one of the basic liberties guaranteed
equally to all by his first principle of justice.
In addition to guaranteeing individual autonomy, Mill contends that freedom of speech
would lead to the discovery and acceptance of the truth. It is this position which
underlies the common contemporary argument that offensive speech is countered not
by censoring, but by more speech so that debate and discussion can be possible.
Another quite different argument made for more speech, rather than restrictions upon it
is made by postmodernist theorists; the case here is based not on the best way to
reach the truth, but on the belief that the meaning of words is always shaped by context
and performance. Judith Butler contends that hate speech can be better neutralized
when it is 'mimicked' ironically by its recipients so that its meaning changes, and it loses
the power to damage. A good example of this is the adoption of traditionally
derogatory terms for minority groups by group members themselves, in order to
redefine them and take ownership of them away from racists and bigots.
Critics might argue that while encouraging full and fair public debate is necessary for
true and good ideas to defeat wrong and bad ones, this does not apply in the case of
offensive speech. This speech makes no arguments or reasoned claims, and we might
conclude that it is of little social value. Civil libertarians respond that speech which deals
with political matters, or issues of public concern, including race relations, cannot be
considered low value, even if it is offensive. Civil libertarians also point out that
restrictions on speech might be used to ban public expression by or from the
perspective of minorities targeted by offensive speech. Freedom of speech, particularly
concerning public matters has been an important tool for minority groups to use in
making their political case, a point often made about the Civil Rights movement in the
United States. Banning the speech of oppressed minorities in the past made it more
difficult for them to make and garner support for their political cases.
Freedom of speech and good self-government
Focussing on the defence of freedom of speech from the perspective of both individuals
and minority groups, but also from the wider social perspective of the requirements of a
democratic society is important as Mill argues. Most obviously, democratic government
requires public debate and discussion, and restrictions on freedom of speech might
easily be seen to obstruct that process. Ronald Dworkin suggests that free speech is
necessary because it ensures that everyone has an equal chance to influence the
political process, the laws and mores under which they live. Dworkin addresses the
difficult balance between liberty and equality by arguing that freedom of speech is
justified on egalitarian grounds: everyone has an equal right to be heard and to
participate in and influence politics.
Freedom of speech 'rights' versus the community 'good'
Communitarian theorists take this a step further by arguing that freedom of speech can
only be meaningfully discussed in terms of the moral values of the community rather
than the rights of the individual. This is part of a broader challenge to the liberal
emphasis on individual rights over communal understandings of a common good.
Communitarians argue that rights-based liberalism is mistaken in its ontology (its view
of what the person is) and consequently misunderstands the way individuals act in
politics. Political liberals understand that individuals are members of communities with
shared conceptions of the good, but they believe that people may bracket or set aside
these moral values in public life committing instead only to more minimal political
values, such as individual right. Communitarians do not accept the separation between
what is politically right and what is morally good. Michael Sandel holds the view that
free speech rights should be balanced against the moral values of the community.
Free speech versus the recognition of cultural minorities
The communitarian case that freedom of speech must be in the service of the moral
good of the community also underlies multiculturalist concerns about offensive speech.
From this perspective, pluralist societies committed to recognizing and respecting the
rights of cultural minorities may be justified in banning offensive speech, because it fails
to treat cultural minorities as equal members, Bhikhu Parekh has argued that this was
behind the angry Muslim response to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in Britain in
1989. Muslims felt that their concerns about how their religion was represented were
not taken seriously in British society, and that this reflected broader attitudes of
marginalization. They pointed out that the fact that the offence of blasphemy applied to
Christianity suggested that other religions were not equally legitimate and worthy of
respect.
It's apparent from this that freedom of speech here was not an absolute right but was
meaningful in a material social context, in which some people were able to take
advantage of it, and some were not. The Rushdie affair clearly demonstrated that
demands for freedom of speech must be understood within their political context.
Those who criticized British Muslims for not subscribing to western civil liberties went on
to suggest that Muslim immigration into Britain should be reduced because immigrants
were failing to assimilate. This tapped into a xenophobic anti-Immigrant discourse that
had emerged in the 1970s in Britain, and reflected deep suspicions and tensions
between the majority and minority ethnic groups.
Parekh also argues that the crime of libel, a well-recognized exception to freedom of
speech, should be extended to group defamation. In most countries, libel applies
when the individual reputation of the target has suffered damage rather than the
reputation of the group to which she belongs to as Parekh points out. Libel is a crime
not because it injures the feelings of the victim, but rather because it damages her
public reputation and social standing. It is a social crime. The reputation and social
standing of racial, ethnic and other groups can also suffer as a result of insulting speech,
and this affects individuals because they are, as communitarians argue, socially
embedded: their sense of self-worth and self-respect depends partly on the standing of
their communities. Communal libel is objectionable. Parekh argues, that because it
is a form of social and political exclusion, a declaration of hostility against a social
group.
Offensive speech and personal harm to group members
Offensive speech injures both its targets and others who belong to the same group. As
evident in the anti pornography writings of feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon.
Pornography is defended in the United States on the grounds that it is free- expression
protected under the First Amendment. MacKinnon argues that pornography causes real
harm to women, by legitimizing violence and sexual abuse. Where it is freely available,
men are more likely to abuse women, and women live in fear of male abuse and come
to internalize assumptions about their inequality, and about the legitimacy of sexual
exploitation.
Critique of offensive speech has been developed along these lines in the last couple of
decades by critical race theorists an important new movement that emerged in legal
scholarship, and has been influential upon political theo tists. Critical race theorists are
sceptical about claims to objectivity, neutrality and colour-blindness on the part of the
law. They contend that legal principles and rules, as well as the legal system, reflect
instead racial Inequality. The experiences of racial minorities are crucial because from
them we can gain an 'experiential knowledge which provides a base for analysing law
and society it allows us to see the lived experience of racism. Critical race theorists argue
that the experience of victims shows that an attack upon a racial group in general is
experienced as a direct and personal attack by members of that group. This supports
the communitarian claim that people feel their identities and self-esteem are in part
dependent upon the status of the communities to which they belong. Victims of vicious
hate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotional distress, ranging
from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing nightmares, post-
traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis and suicide.
From the perspective of minorities we see that offensive speech is the one which
silences, intimidates and subjects to psychological and physical trauma. Those who use
such speech are 'racist assailants'.
REGULATING OFFENSIVE SPEECH: COMPETING NORMS AND VALUES
Mich of the debate around regulating offensive speech turns on different interpretations
of rights, freedom and autonomy, and the common good:
Rights: Public argument against regulating offensive speech often cites the
fundamental individual right to freedom of expression. But supporters of regulation
argue that members of minority groups who are the targets of such speech have rights
not to be harmed by offensive speech-particularly speech that incites racial hatred.
Freedom and autonomy: Opponents of regulation argue that freedom of expression is
fundamental to human liberty and autonomy. Moreover, being able to express one's
view in public and participate in public debate and conversation are essential aspects of
being a free citizen. Supporters of regulation argue that freedom of speech is never
absolute, and always subject to some limits (for example, speech that incites violence is
not protected in liberal democracies). Our freedoms must be compatible with the
freedoms of others - and here, the freedom and autonomy of the speaker must be
balanced with the effect that the speech has on the autonomy of its targets.
The common good: Opponents of regulating offensive speech argue that the
circulation of a full range of views and opinions is necessary for a healthy society.
Censorship stifles social change and progress, and while hate speech may not contribute
substantively to this end, allowing the state to prohibit it and ultimately allow it to gag
the expression of views favourable to minorities. Supporters of regulation argue that
offensive speech, particularly hate speech, alienates minorities and exacerbates racial
and religious tensions. It prevents open and democratic deliberation about politics.
Some argue also that unrestricted freedom of speech is damaging to the moral values
that hold a society together.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Online or cyberbullying is a recent and alarming special category of hate speech, which
is targeted particularly at young people using social media. Organizations investigating
this phenomenon estimate that at least one in three young people using social media
have been bullied online. This form of hate speech is particularly difficult to investigate,
as users of social media can hide. Campaigns to end cyberbullying have thus focused on
those who own and run the websites. Steps to be taken:
-A series of changes designed to allow it to detect bullying content earlier, and to
require users to register with their full contact details
-Legislation to prevent cyberbullying. For instance, The US state of California has passed
a law allowing schools to discipline students who engage in the practice.
-If the material remains public to an independent agency, and if the matter isn't settled,
charges can be brought against the poster of the comments or pictures, and the web
host. Some in the media protested that the Act would have a chilling effect on satirical
and critical comment in the online media.
CONCLUSION
Most countries balance freedom of speech with concerns about promoting equality,
democratic government and multiculturalism, thus reflecting the new political realities of
increased ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism in liberal democratic nations. For some
who support the regulation of offensive speech, it is tempting to try to find the perfect
legislative wording that would prohibit hate without encroaching upon individual
expression or vital public debate. Critics of free speech absolutism remind us, however,
that political principles and values do not operate in an ideal world. They are inextricably
part of and reflect the real-world political context of plurality, difference and the
competition for power.
"Political Concepts", Liberty by Ian Carter:
In his work, Carter gives two contrasting ways of thinking of freedom. On the one hand,
one can think of freedom as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free
if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. On the other
hand, one can think of freedom as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To
be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control
your own destiny in your own interests. One might say that while on the first view
freedom is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it
is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.
#Isaiah Berlin's Two concepts of freedom ‘negative’ and ‘positive’:
NEGATIVE: absence of something (i.e., of ‘obstacles’, ‘barriers’, ‘constraints’ or
‘interference from others’)
‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should
be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’
-The prime interest of theorists of negative freedom is the degree to which individuals
or groups suffer interference from external bodies
-Promoting the existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is sovereign,
and within which she can pursue her own projects subject only to the constraint that she
respect the spheres of others. Humboldt and Mill, both defenders of the negative
concept of freedom, usefully compared the development of an individual to that of a
plant: individuals, like plants, must be allowed to ‘grow’, in the sense of developing their
own faculties to the full and according to their own inner logic. Personal growth is
something that cannot be imposed from without, but must come from within the
individual. Critics, however, have objected that the ideal described by Humboldt and Mill
looks much more like a positive concept of freedom than a negative one. Positive
freedom consists, they say, in exactly this ‘growth’ of the individual: the free individual is
one that develops, determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously
and ‘from within’. This is not freedom as the mere absence of obstacles, but freedom as
self-realisation
POSITIVE: presence of something (i.e., of ‘control’, ‘self-mastery’, ‘self-determination’ or
‘self-realisation’)
‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to
do, or be, this rather than that?’
-Theorists of positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the
degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously.
-Positive Freedom as Debatable Concept in Political Theory: The most hotly debated
issues in political theory is following: is the positive concept of freedom a political
concept? In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as necessarily
achieved through a collectivity. According to Rousseau’s theory of freedom, individual
freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one’s community
exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the general will. Put in
the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is
a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he
or she participates in its democratic process. For liberals, on the other hand, Rousseau’s
idea of freedom carries with it a danger of authoritarianism given the oppressed
majority. Because the members of this minority participate in a democratic process
characterised by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the grounds that they
are members of a society exercising self-control over its own affairs. But they are
oppressed, and so are surely unfree. Several justifications of oppression in the name of
liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical
examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders.

Berlin, himself a liberal, and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in
which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realisation had been
twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century – most
notably those of the Soviet Union – so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West,
were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical
conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a ‘divided self ’: a ‘higher’ self
which is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking
responsibility for what she does. This is the ‘true’ self, since it is what marks us off from
other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of
unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one’s higher,
rational self is in control and one is not a slave to one’s passions or to one’s ‘merely
empirical’ self. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an
additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as
represented by an organic social ‘whole’ – the great society of the living and the dead
and the yet unborn’. The ‘true’ interests of the individual are to be identified with the
interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these
interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their
coercers.
Emphasising upon the fact that the contended self is indeed free, Berlin puts it, if I have
a wounded leg ‘there are two methods of freeing myself from pain. One is to heal the
wound. But if the cure is too difficult or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid
of the wound by cutting off my leg’. This is the strategy of liberation adopted by
ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages. It involves a ‘retreat into an inner citadel’ – a soul or
a purely ‘noumenal’ self – in which the individual is immune to any outside forces.
There comes a group of theorists has claimed that Berlin’s dichotomy leaves out a
third alternative, according to which freedom is not merely the enjoyment of a
sphere of non-interference – as it is on the negative concept – but the enjoyment
of certain conditions in which such non-interference is guaranteed. These
conditions may include the presence of a democratic constitution and a series of
safeguards against a government wielding power arbitrarily and against the interests of
the governed.
#Freedom as a triadic relation
The two sides in Berlin’s debate disagree over which of two different concepts best
deserves the name of ‘freedom’. Does this fact not denote the presence of some more
basic and almost same agreement between the two sides? ? In an influential article, the
American legal philosopher Gerald MacCallum put forward the following answer:
there is in fact only one basic ‘concept of freedom’, on which both sides in the debate
converge. Indeed, in MacCallum’s view, there are a great many different possible
interpretations of ‘freedom’, and it is only Berlin’s artificial dichotomy that has led us to
think in terms of there being two. MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom –
the concept on which everyone agrees – as follows: a subject, or ‘agent’, is free from
certain constraints, or ‘preventing conditions’, to do or be certain things. Freedom is
therefore a ‘triadic relation’ – that is, a relation between three things: an agent, certain
preventing conditions, and certain doings or becomings of the agent. Thus, those whom
Berlin places in the ‘negative’ camp typically conceive of the agent as having the same
extension as that which it is generally given in ordinary discourse: they tend to think of
the agent as an individual human being and as including all of the empirical beliefs and
desires of that individual. Those in the so-called ‘positive’ camp, on the other hand,
often depart from the ordinary notion, in one sense imagining the agent as more
extensive (or ‘larger’) than in the ordinary notion, and in another sense imagining it as
less extensive (or ‘smaller’): they think of the agent as having a greater extension than in
ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the agent’s ‘true’ desires and aims with
those of some collectivity of which she is a member; and they think of the agent as
having a lesser extension than in ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the
‘true’ agent with only a subset of her empirical beliefs and desires Second, those in
Berlin’s ‘positive’ camp tend to take a wider view of what counts as a constraint on
freedom than those in his ‘negative’ camp: the set of relevant obstacles is more
extensive for the former than for the latter, since negative theorists tend to count only
external obstacles as constraints on freedom, whereas positive theorists also allow that
one may be constrained by internal factors, such as irrational desires, fears or ignorance.
Third, those in Berlin’s ‘positive’ camp tend to take a narrower view of what counts as a
purpose one can be free to fulfil. The set of relevant purposes is less extensive for them
than for the negative theorists, for we have seen that they tend to restrict the relevant
set of actions or states to those that are rational, authentic or virtuous, whereas those in
the ‘negative’ camp tend to extend this variable so as to cover any action or state the
agent might desire. On MacCallum’s analysis, then, there is no simple dichotomy
between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom; rather, we should recognise that there is a
whole range of possible interpretations or ‘conceptions’ of the single concept of
freedom. 8 Indeed, says MacCallum, a number of classic authors cannot be placed
unequivocally in one or the other of Berlin’s two camps. Locke, for example, is normally
thought of as a staunch defender of the negative concept of freedom, however at the
same time, he seems to endorse a more ‘positive’ account of the third freedom-variable,
restricting this to actions that are not immoral and to those that are in the agent’s own
interests. This suggests that it is not only conceptually misleading, but also historically
mistaken, to divide theorists into two camps – a ‘negative’ one and a ‘positive’ one.
Might Berlin’s concepts of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom nevertheless still be of
some use? Perhaps, in the sense that the concept of self-mastery or self-direction
implies a presence of control that may not be adequately captured by MacCallum’s
explication of freedom as a triadic relation. If one thinks of freedom as involving self-
direction, one has in mind an ‘exercise concept’ of freedom, as opposed to an
‘opportunity concept’. On an exercise concept, freedom consists not merely in the
possibility of doing certain things (i.e., in the lack of constraints on doing them), but in
actually doing certain things in certain ways – for example, in realising one’s true self or
in acting on the basis of rational and well-informed decisions. MacCallum’s triadic
relation does not really capture this ‘exercise’ element in the concept of freedom
as self-direction. The importance of this concept continues to be dicussed in
contemporary political philosophy.