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Chapter 2 In On Liberty ([1859] 1972), J. S. Mill developed a wider justification for the toleration of other people’s speech and actions that highlighted its importance to society as well as the individual. From the individual’s point of view, toleration is primarily a guarantee of personal autonomy and is thus a condition for moral self-development. Nevertheless, toleration is also necessary to ensure the vigour and health of society as a whole. Only within a free market of ideas will ‘truth’ emerge, as good ideas displace bad ones and ignorance is progressively banished. Contest, debate and argument, the fruit of diversity or multiplicity, are therefore the motor of social progress. (For a discussion of liberal thinking regarding the limits of free speech in a plural society.) For Mill, this was particularly threatened by democracy and the spread of ‘dull conformism’, linked to the belief that the majority must always be right. Mill ([1859] 1972) was thus able to argue as follows: 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.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN ACTION . . . FREE SPEECH IN A PLURAL SOCIETY EVENTS: In June 2020, J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter fantasy novels, published a blog post arguing that gender was determined by biology. It came after a tweet in which she took issue with an article referring to ‘people who menstruate’, rather than to women. She was swiftly condemned by transgender activists who claimed that her focus on biological sex was ‘transphobic’, a stance that was backed up by the beginning of a campaign to ‘cancel’, or boycott, her cultural output, with a view to subjecting her to financial pressure. In July 2020, some 152 academics and writers signed a letter on justice and open debate to the USmagazine Harper’s which defended the ‘free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society’. SIGNIFICANCE: A commitment to free speech is one of the core principles of liberal ideology. This does not, however, imply that liberals believe in unchecked free speech but, rather, that free speech should be constrained only when there is a strong likelihood that it will result in physical harm (for example,bythreateningnational securityor,possibly, in the case of ‘hate speech’). The liberal justification for free speech lies in scepticism, the doctrine that certain knowledge is impossible to achieve, in which case all truth-claims must be subject to doubt. In this view, the only way of advancing knowledge and ensuring social progress is by testing ideas and beliefs in open competition against rival ideas and
beliefs, a process that is more rigorous the wider the range of views considered. Even ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ ideas thus have a purpose, and so should not be silenced, either legally or through social pressure. However, the emer gence of plural
societies, shaped by increased diversity in areas ranging from ethnicity and culture to gender and sexuality, has brought with it growing pressure to narrow the parameters of free speech. This trend reflects not so much a retreat from liberalism, as the sharpening of a philosophical divide within liberal culture. At the heart of the call for greater restraint over free speech is the argument that if different people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs (beliefs that relate to their core identity) to criticism. In the case of marginalized or weak groups, this may extend to the creation of ‘safe spaces’, spaces where the discussion of topics which could cause offence is banned. According to such thinking, speech is only free when everyone is capable of enjoying its benefits equally.
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