Balkinization: Milton, Mill, and (Maybe) Aristotle on Why Hearing Horrible Speech Makes You a Better Person

Milton, Mill, and (Maybe) Aristotle on Why Hearing Horrible Speech Makes You a Better Person

Andrew Koppelman

How do you sell the idea of free speech to people who worry that words hurt? In the last few years, there have been increasing demands, most prominently on college campuses, to shut down hateful speech. A defense of free speech needs to explain why we should let people say vile things that no one should ever say to anyone.

The familiar arguments for free speech aren’t responsive to these concerns. Consider a few pronouncements by the Supreme Court. The judges sometimes focus on good consequences: “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail.” “The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.” Sometimes they just invoke rights: “The right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of the broader concept of ‘individual freedom of mind.’”

Suppose that you (like many today) are unmoved by these considerations, that you don’t believe that the good consequences are likely to follow, or that you don’t believe that people have a right to say worthless and harmful things. What reason have you to want to live in a regime that protects such speech?

Fortunately, some classic formulations of free speech do not depend on optimism or the bald claim of rights. John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty is best known as an attack on government censorship. But the state is not the only censor he worries about. He denounces “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.” He fears a population “whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed by the fear of heresy,” and “who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral.” John Milton made a similar argument in 1644: censorship can induce a “gross conforming stupidity,” and officials should understand that “that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”

These formulations focus, not on the collective benefits of free speech, but on the kind of person one wants to be. It is good to be awake rather than asleep, to have contact with the actual minds of other people instead of living one’s life in a solipsistic haze. And it is good to be resilient in the face of stress. A regime of free speech is more likely to produce people of that sort. That produces a distinctive kind of collective social unity: a society of citizens who interact on terms of mutual respect, by genuinely knowing what one another think and discussing their differences like adults.

I elaborate on these claims in a new piece in the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Posted 10:43 AM by Andrew Koppelman [link]