One of the confusing elements in the debate between censorship and freedom of speech is that, while proponents of the former cannot address the obvious and severe drawbacks to such a heavy-handed approach without forfeiting the credibility of their position, the proponents of freedom of speech also tend towards a certain deleterious one-sidedness when they present their position. To wit, they do not, as a rule, address the responsibility that is correlative with any right. In respect to free speech, it is obvious that together with the right for individuals to express themselves free of censorship from government institutions is the responsibility for individuals to do their due diligence in respect to the diverse opinions that are surely to be promulgated. I can illustrate what I mean with the example of drinking turpentine to cure disease, which is a favourite straw-man of those, like YouTube, who are advocating for “the suppression of misinformation,” which is a euphemism for censorship. If freedom of speech is to be preserved—which I think it ought indeed to be—we have to foster the understanding that it is part and parcel with a sort of “Socratic” attitude towards a statement like “turpentine is a global panacea.” We should not, at once, assume it to be true, but rather seek to question it and to juxtapose it to countervailing views and prior knowledge that we possess. In these conditions, YouTube’s turpentine argument is not very convincing because any sensible person will be able to find information that disproves the premise. Clearly, a citizenry that is entitled to the right to free expression must also be capable of dealing with it. On the other hand, freedom of speech has no place in a citizenry that is incapable of bearing the responsibility that comes with it.
These are very elementary principles but at the same time, it seems that contemporary public debate has reached such a frenzy that few people bother to think this through comprehensively. As a result, every argument is reduced to pro and contra and their correlative slogans. Anyway, it is obviously one of the defining issues of our time so I think it’s great that we have the opportunity to understand these questions rather than merely becoming activists for them.
Frederick Douglass was adamant on this point:
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence….
Conscience as a “moral compass” is a very illuminating metaphor. In order to explain the function of a compass, it would be necessary to invoke the context of the entire earth, and any investigation that limited itself to the interior of the device would be as futile as the “experts” in the bottom of Plato’s Cave, who have devised all manner of complicated theories and extrapolative models to predict the motion of shadows. By extension, the conscience, as a “moral compass,” rather than aligning itself out of itself, must be attuning itself towards the objective Good just as the needle of a compass attunes itself to the planet’s magnetic field. To extend the conceit, the “magnetic field” that is responsible to order the needle of conscience toward the “magnetic pole” of the moral universe is love for this objective Good, which remains what it is even if we behold it “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12) and thus appear to turn our backs to it by chasing arbitrary desires, in the same way that, by approaching a reflection in a mirror, I depart from the being who is casting that reflection.
These are very elementary principles but at the same time, it seems that contemporary public debate has reached such a frenzy that few people bother to think this through comprehensively. As a result, every argument is reduced to pro and contra and their correlative slogans. Anyway, it is obviously one of the defining issues of our time so I think it’s great that we have the opportunity to understand these questions rather than merely becoming activists for them.
Frederick Douglass was adamant on this point:
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence….
Conscience as a “moral compass” is a very illuminating metaphor. In order to explain the function of a compass, it would be necessary to invoke the context of the entire earth, and any investigation that limited itself to the interior of the device would be as futile as the “experts” in the bottom of Plato’s Cave, who have devised all manner of complicated theories and extrapolative models to predict the motion of shadows. By extension, the conscience, as a “moral compass,” rather than aligning itself out of itself, must be attuning itself towards the objective Good just as the needle of a compass attunes itself to the planet’s magnetic field. To extend the conceit, the “magnetic field” that is responsible to order the needle of conscience toward the “magnetic pole” of the moral universe is love for this objective Good, which remains what it is even if we behold it “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12) and thus appear to turn our backs to it by chasing arbitrary desires, in the same way that, by approaching a reflection in a mirror, I depart from the being who is casting that reflection.
