MOTION #65: THIS HOUSE BELIEVES
THAT IT IS SOMETIMES RIGHT FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO RESTRICT FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Freedom of speech is
often considered to be one of the most basic tenets of democracy. As a
fundamental right it is enshrined in documents such as the Bill of Rights in
the United States, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the
European Convention on Human Rights: Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of
grievances. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of
frontiers.
United Nations General
Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948 Article 19: Everyone has
the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information
and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This is expanded on in
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights
1.
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas
without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This
article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting,
television or cinema enterprises.
2.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and
responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions
or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic
society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public
safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health
or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for
preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for
maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Freedom of speech and
censorship are often phrased as opposite sides of a continuum that balance
personal freedom with societal duty. Famous as a battle-ground between Left and
Right in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, issues of free
speech are often championed by human rights organisations around the world
seeking to support those fighting against repressive regimes (examples include
Aung San Suu Kyi, Vaclav Havel, and Lech Walesa). The Pentagon Papers (1971) in
the United States were the collected criticisms of the United States strategy
during the Vietnam War. Distributed widely to newspapers, they were published
despite attempts by the government to suppress their publication.
Galileo's Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican was
prohibited by the Catholic Church until 1835 containing, as it did, the
heretical doctrine that the earth rotated about the sun. Other books of note
which have been banned include Voltaire’s Candide (US 1930), Thomas Paine’s
Rights of Man (UK 1792), Jack London’s Call of the Wild (Italy 1929), Anna
Sewell’s Black Beauty (South Africa 1955), E for Ecstasy (Australia 1994),
Ernst Zündel’s Did Six Million Really Die? (Canada 1980). In 1925 in the state
of Tennessee USA, John Scopes was convicted for teaching Darwin’s Origin of
Species. John Locke's philosophical
Essay Concerning Human Understanding was expressly forbidden to be taught at
Oxford University in 1701.
The issue is one of much contemporary interest in the developed world,
where new technologies have opened up unprecedented access to materials which
governments could previously keep censored in a relatively efficient way –
pornography, bomb manufacturing instructions etc. have become available on the
world-wide web. In general, however, the issue tends to fall into categories of
book censorship, speech censorship, video censorship, newspaper censorship, and
political expression of one description or another.
Pros
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Cons
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The character of every act depends upon the
circumstances in which it is done. "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a
man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." Shouting
fire in a crowded cinema when there is no fire, and you know it, is wrong
because doing so creates a clear and present danger of harm to others.
Likewise, in the US (and many other countries) there is
no protection for ‘false commercial speech’ (i.e. misrepresentation) and the
contents of adverts can be regulated in order to ensure that they are
truthful and do not deceive consumers. On that basis, restrictions can be
placed on how tobacco products may be advertised, and people may be prevented
from promoting illegal and fraudulent tax advice.
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The argument leads to a slippery slope. It is one thing
to regulate speech on matters that are objectively verifiable, quite another
to restrict the permissible scope of opinion and expression. Even then, the state should be extremely
cautious about declaring a state of objective fact. People taking advice on matters such as tax
always take the risk that that advice may turn out to be bad, the amount of
risk a person is willing to take is entirely a matter of personal
responsibility and not a matter that the government should intervene in.
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Protection of Minors. We need to protect minors (those under the age of
majority) from exposure to obscene, offensive or potentially damaging
materials. While this would be a restriction on the freedom of speech it
should be something that the government is responsible for and we would all
agree needs some kind of restriction or regulation.
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Arguments that invoke censorship of materials for
minors are just that - arguments for the censorship of materials for minors.
They do not concede the general principal that censorship is good because
until the age of majority the state has a duty to respect (and to take
limited measures to ensure others respect) the parental responsibility of
those bringing up children.
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It may be necessary in the interests of national
security. The Government must protect its
citizens from foreign enemies and internal enemies - thus freedom of speech
can be acceptably curtailed during times of war in order to prevent
propaganda and spying which might undermine the national interest. This has
happened in almost all states during times of war, during the second world
war the United States even had a government department dedicated to it; The
Office of Censorship.
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The ends do not
justify the means. The government may well wish to suppress publication of
information that would be prejudicial to its success in the next elections or
its war campaign, but it’s in the public interest to know about their dirty
dealings or illegal activities.
Moreover secrecy in the name of security often leads to
injustice; the rendition of British residents and secret evidence given at
control order hearings are but a couple of examples.
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Holocaust Denial. Speech acts lead to physical acts. Thus pornography, hate speech and
political polemic are causally linked to rape, hate crimes, and insurrection.
Both scientific creationism and Holocaust denial have
serious, and dangerous, hidden agendas. Deniers of the Nanjing Massacre
believe that the Japanese did nothing wrong in the Second World War and
continue to claim that it was a war of liberation against western colonialism
- feeding Japanese militarism today. Holocaust deniers, in claiming that a
Jewish conspiracy is responsible for the widespread belief that six million
Jews were murdered by the Nazis, are closely allied to anti-Semitism and
neo-Nazism. We should not allow such views the legitimacy which being debated
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Society is
self-regulating. The link between speech acts and physical acts is a false
one - people who commit hate crimes are likely to have read hate speech,
people who commit sex crimes are likely to have watched pornography but not
necessarily the other way around. Viewers of pornography and readers of hate
speech are therefore not incited to commit anything they otherwise would not
do.
If the advocates of these views have hidden agendas,
all the more reason to expose them in public. The fact that Holocaust denial
leads to neo-Nazism will, for most people, be one more compelling argument
against it; creationism’s necessarily literalistic approach to scripture can
easily be shown to be ridiculous. Again, the truth has nothing to fear, and
the evil implications of falsehood should not be covered up by refusing to
engage with it.
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Society is entitled to define itself on certain issues
– otherwise what does it stand for? Community is only possible among
like-minded individuals. It is
likewise entitled to tell those who refuse to accept the consensus on those
issues to ‘lump it or leave it’.
It is also absurd to suggest that all challenges to
orthodoxy are legitimate. Denial of
atrocities is usually a mask for racial intolerance. Denial of established scientific truths in
the public world is not usually about progress but rather about ignoring the
evidence to promote theologically based worldviews. Society has a vested interest in
suppressing those movements.
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Free speech allows
challenges to orthodox beliefs. Free speech
is not merely a ‘nice thing to have’, it is a mechanism which brings real,
tangible benefits to society by allowing people to challenge orthodoxy. States that do not allow orthodox beliefs
to be challenged stagnate and decline.
Reducing restrictions on free speech to ‘special
exceptions’ frustrates the whole point because it is precisely those special
exceptions where established truth needs to be challenged. This is not restricted to matters of pure
opinion – the modern scientific process relies upon professionals being able
to vehemently disagree on matters of crucial fact. “Real science depends for
its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect
knowledge.”
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Liberty is an intangible right – restrictions on
liberty can be equally intangible and entirely transitory based on the
circumstances.
What we know though is that real harm is derived from
defaming an individual’s reputation, broadcasting racist abuse and shouting
‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. It is
wrong to ignore real, tangible harm in favour of preventing fanciful and
intangible harms.
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Individual Liberty
outweighs any potential harms. Whatever the
potential harms that may arise from unrestrained free speech; they pale in
comparison to the harm that arises from banning an individual from freely
expressing his own mind.
It is a matter of the upmost individual liberty that
one’s thoughts and feelings are one’s own, and that individuals are free to
express those thoughts and feelings openly.
A prohibition on this liberty is a harm of incalculable value – it
strikes right to the core of what it means to be in individual person.
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