I read this to mean "freedom of speech is a good thing if and only if we get our way on all substantive questions," which I don't personally find a compelling argument for the content of justice. I realize she may have trouble distinguishing between obtaining the outcomes endorsed by her view, which she manifestly believe to be identical to justice, and actual justice. Nevertheless, whatever else justice is it entails a manner of addressing controversies and disagreements between human beings in a way that produces outcomes that treat both sides fairly. "Fairly" means something like "treating relevantly similar things similarly," which involves a lot of slipperiness -- what is relevant? what level of 'similarly' sufficies? What it cannot mean is simply resolving everything in favor of the one side.
However, such a view is consistent with her view of what free speech is about (at least for Kant). She writes:
Freedom of speech, when elevated to the status of a moral good, is just another name for thoughtful obedience. Under such a rule, the right of everyone to disagree is protected as long as the state’s authority to limit action is respected. This way, the state may ensure that conflicts of value never turn into contests of value; it blesses us with the freedom to argue about morality on the condition that we never decide who is right. Kant’s foremost goal, after all, was to minimize the possibility of what he called the “worst, most punishable crime in a community” — namely, revolution.
Under her proposed solution, you and I and everyone would have the right to think and say whatever we like, as long as we obeyed the "just" solution that she and hers determined. This really is much more like Kant's view than she admits to herself: it just moves the locus of determining justice from the state, as Kant prefers, to the Left.
Readers know that I disagree with Kant quite deeply on this point of revolution being a bad thing: I endorse revolutions, rebellions, and even treason when pointed at overweening powers that would derail human liberty and natural virtue. The last thing I wanted out of freedom of speech was "thoughtful obedience," neither to the state nor to the elite (nor its outliers and functionaries).
What I did want was respect for human dignity, which Kant also addressed in a view I modify here:
Unlike a rock or a fallen twig, a human being cannot just be broken or otherwise used for your amusement or instrumental purpose. A child might enjoy throwing rocks in a stream, or floating twigs down it; it might be useful to repurpose a rock as part of the foundation of your house, or a set of twigs to start a fire to warm that house. Another human being cannot be seized by force and used without their permission: this is to say that they have a dignity that rocks and twigs and the other merely material stuff of the world does not.
For Kant, dignity arises from your access to the Order of Reason. That is, you are dignified in a way that a twig or a rock is not because you can think for yourself about what you ought to do, what it would be best for you to do, in a way that they cannot. Thus, it is no harm to them to use them for your purposes, because they have no capacity to determine a better purpose for themselves (insfoar as a non-thinking 'thing' can constitute a 'self' or even, in fact, a 'thing').
We can, and that power is the basis of human dignity. But if your thoughts are the basis of your dignity, well, speech is only a way of thinking out loud. To suppress your ability to think is to attack the very basis of your dignity. Freedom of speech is thus properly and fundamentally a moral good. Her view is simply wrong.
4 comments:
Just to play Devil's Advocate, you say:
... whatever else justice is it entails a manner of addressing controversies and disagreements between human beings in a way that produces outcomes that treat both sides fairly. "Fairly" means something like "treating relevantly similar things similarly," which involves a lot of slipperiness -- what is relevant? what level of 'similarly' sufficies? What it cannot mean is simply resolving everything in favor of the one side.
What if two people commit similar crimes, but one is from a disadvantaged minority community and the other from a privileged majority community? One common lefty view of justice would see these as 'not relevantly similar,' so the minority offender might deserve a lighter sentence or no sentence at all, while the majority offender might deserve a heavier sentence and certainly should not be let off lightly in any case.
A lefty might argue that this is just because the cases are not relevantly similar.
That's not a Devil's Advocate position; it's admitted in the argument that the question of what constitutes a relevant similarity is slippery. Both parts of that, actually.
And there really is no agreement about it. It is a commonplace argument that it is unjust that the rich man gets a fine whereas the poor man goes to jail for the same offense, but courts and their judges regularly enact that penalty, and juries often endorse such disparities. It is even more true that men suffer much stiffer penalties on average than women for the same offense; I'm not sure there's an agreement that this is unjust, as women tend to be less dangerous on average as well.
So yes, a lefty might argue that; but we all end up arguing about it all the time. All of that is in the model, which just commits to trying to work out some practical application of the general idea of 'resolving disputes with fairness, defined as treating relevantly similar cases similarly.'
What isn't in the model of justice is, 'Resolving disputes our way every time, because we are right about things and you are wrong.'
I agree, of course. It just seems that some on the left have gone out of their way to define things in such a way that they "just end up" being right every time.
Her view sounds inherently hierarchical, however disguised. The children and teenagers can express their opinions, but in the end even Mama must do what Papa decides. It was a view common even in colonial times in America, and had its most famous expression in Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. John Locke's Two Treatise's of Government goes after it tooth-and-nail, and in the end America is shaped by Locke's understanding far more than Filmer's. Nor did it remain on this side of the Atlantic only, though it has always been stronger here.
She uses fine-sounding words what these limitations on free speech would derive from, but in the end, some power decides on them and enforces them, and there is no appeal that any other view is valid. It is a very Barack Obama attitude to listen to everyone's opinion, and then say to the assembled Senators "I won." Except they also won their elections to get into the room with him.
There is a the frightening undercurrent of "We can make it true if we can only enforce it," which underlies any number of unfair tactics for a Higher Good.
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