The Prisoner and the Letters from His Wife (2)

A week or so later, the Prisoner received another letter from his wife, and while opening the letter, he said, 'So, because Freedom of Speech or Expression is a moral right, it also contains moral responsibility. People who have high moral awareness, will prefer to say good speech, rather than hate speech. All civilized society, will agree with this.

There are three principal types of harm that result from offensive utterances made about a particular group in a society: (1) those which are produced by a violent reaction by the victims of group vilification, (2) those which result from violence committed by other persons incited by "vilifiers" to assault the victims of racial vilification, and (3) those which consist of the very utterance of offensive words, regardless of any further violence committed.

This is not to say that there do not occur other, collateral, types of harm which may be identified as ensuing from, for example, racial vilification. For one thing, one may argue that there is harm to the society generally, regardless of any more specific harm inflicted upon the direct targets of racial vilification. The broadcasting or publication of material which is offensive to particular racial or ethnic groups is damaging, not only to those directly offended, but also to the community: it degrades the standards of everyday life, of civility, of the quality of public discourse. Further, it undermines social peace and harmony, and the entire society suffers as a result.

The idea of free speech for all became widespread comparatively late. On the whole, it was treated as a prerogative of elites, although an early exception of a kind was the ancient Buddhist emperor Ashoka in India, who encouraged people of all religious groups, to live and talk with each other and learn from each other.

The idea of freedom of speech for all religious affiliations is found in Rock Edict VII of the emperor Ashoka, inscribed on rock in the third century BCE. Long before any such universal concept existed in Europe, the emperor Ashoka, having converted to Buddhism, desired freedom of speech for everyone. His inscriptions do not say for all individuals, but for all the pasandas, or religious affiliations. He encouraged all affiliations to be admitted to live everywhere. He did not want rival affiliations shut out. He moved from free speech to beneficial speech. Referring to all religions in his vast Indian kingdom, he desired them through harmony [samovaya] to learn, respect, and know the doctrines of other affiliations, and to acquire sound doctrines. If he meant that that is how to learn sound doctrines, he would be anticipating John Stuart Mill’s extrapolation from the Roman lawyer Cicero, who said from the different context of legal dispute, that he studied his opponent’s case with as great or greater intensity than his own. Mill’s conclusion is that, you don’t know your own case until you know that of your opponent. On another translation, Ashoka required more than knowledge of the doctrines of others, and said instead that affiliations should learn, respect, and listen to the doctrines of others. Ashoka also set a boundary. He desired restraint on speech [vacaguti] such as has not yet even now been widely accepted in the West for relations between communities. He desires them all to avoid disparagement of other religious affiliations, or over-glorification of their own. Others can be criticized, but not without reason and not immoderately. Moreover, the inscriptions prudently present these not as law, but as the powerful emperor’s desires. The medium for learning the beliefs of others will have been not only speech, but discussion, to which Mill, in another age, would also attach so much importance, and the emperor’s appeal to his desires, rather than his commands, shows that he valued the tone in which his message was expressed.

But even Ashoka was talking about all religious groups, not about all individuals. Free speech was not for all individuals, and it still has other kinds of legal constraint: people cannot say whatever they like. Moreover, from antiquity, people treated the need for beneficial speech as a reason for, and constraint on, free speech.

Freedom of expression for everyone was an enormous gift, won by great bravery at the cost of personal danger, and for purposes of political, religious, and social freedom. It is important to recognize how damaging it can be when this freedom is denied.

Aside from its connection with democracy, some degree of freedom of expression will undoubtedly contribute to the realization of other things that we value positively. Thus, some degree of freedom of expression promotes knowledge that is useful to us in our roles as consumers or producers in the marketplace. Some degree of freedom of expression contributes to a flourishing artistic life (again, as either a producer or a consumer). Some degree of freedom of expression is necessary for scientific and technological progress. Most importantly, some degree of freedom of expression contributes to the knowledge we require to function as responsible moral agents. And there are numerous other goods–and also, of course, “bads”–that some degree of freedom of expression promotes instrumentally or constitutively.

In the absence of a human right of freedom of expression, we have no choice but to engage in quite speculative and hunch-driven predictions about whether some degree of freedom of expression will produce good results that, in terms of whatever normative theory we hold, will outweigh the bad results it produces. I should emphasize that by asking whether some degree of freedom of expression will produce good results on balance, I am not asking whether any particular token of expression will produce such results. A jurisprudence of asking whether any particular token of expression will be on balance beneficial in terms of some background normative theory is not a jurisprudence of freedom of expression, because it cannot distinguish its approach to tokens of expression from its approach to act-tokens generally. If an act-token produces good results on balance—and contravenes no moral side-constraints, it should be permissible—or mandated—regardless of whether it is an act of expression or a token of some other act type. Only if some set of tokens of expression is assessed in terms of its consequences as a set and not token by token do we have a form of freedom of expression. Case by case balancing of the costs and benefits of particular expressive acts is inconsistent with freedom of expression rightly so-called.' 

A moment later, he read the letter. His wife told him,

'Dear husband, you wouldn’t believe what happened. Some men came with shovels to the house and dug up the back garden. They found nothing but tossed the soil, until it became loose and, apparently, good for cultivation.'

The prisoner writes back,

'Dear wife, now is the best time to plant the lettuce.'

Putting his letter in the envelope, and this time, not in a sad tone, but with a smile, the Prisoner sang,

I'm not crying 'cause you left me on my own

I'm not crying 'cause you left me with no warning

I'm just crying 'cause I can't escape what could've been

Are you aware when you set me free?

All I can do is let my heart bleed *)

Before she took her leave, Laluna closed the story by saying, "Better to educate than to punish. Freedom of expression and speech is not only the responsibility of individual, but the moral responsibility from all of us. How unhealthy, if there is, within a country, everyone, are afraid to talk. And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- Larry Alexander, Is There a Right of Freedom of Expression?, Cambridge University Press
- Wojciech Sadurski, Freedom of Speech and Its Limits, Kluwer Academic Publisher
- Richard Sorabji, Freedom of Speech and Expression, Oxford University Press

- George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classics
*) "Don't Watch Me Cry" written by Jorja Alice Smith

[Part 1]

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