This post follows on from here. Applying this to the question of freedom of expression is a complicated task.…
Month May 2013
This post follows on from here. Consider a society in which adultery is legal (most liberal democracies, in fact),…
Right now there’s a bit of drama going on related to a recent conference. I don’t really want to…
Consider two possible societies; one in which members of a minority frequently see themselves as the target of hateful messages1 and one in which they have a much greater sense of dignity. I agree with Waldron (as I suppose virtually everybody of sound morals would) that we should desire the latter society, and that is the society that is ‘well-ordered’ (in the sense Waldron uses it). We want to live in a society that is well-ordered, in which all people may live their lives without fear or encountering hateful propaganda. It may seem that we should stop there – if that is what we want, then we should actively try to create that society and discourage all efforts to the contrary. But should we use regulation by the state as a means of bringing about that sort of society? Suppose we want to bring about a society that we consider well-ordered as a result of the fact that nobody interrupts each other. It seems to me that this society is ‘well-ordered’ in the sense that Waldron is talking about. Of course, someone interrupting another person is not as undesirable as someone handing out racist propaganda on the street. Waldron’s argument is not a question of degree or ‘drawing the line’; it is a question of bringing about well-ordered societies. While we want to discourage people from interrupting each other, it is clear that this is not the kind of act that should be regulated. So, even though we rely on the state to shape our society into one that is well-ordered, there are some things which are inappropriate to regulate. Again, this is not a question simply of whether the act in question is a grossly immoral act or not. We can be fined for parking our vehicle for too long in the same place. This is a relatively minor misdemeanour, and yet it does not seem inappropriate to prohibit it with a reasonable and proportionate punishment. The question therefore raised is this: what sort of acts should be prohibited by the state?
…would I believe He existed?
The question of what it would take for me to believe that God exists comes up from time to time, and I think it’s good to have an idea of what sort of evidence would be acceptable to me. Now, if I knew that God wrote my name in the stars, then I would believe, simply because such knowledge entails the existence of God. The question then really ought to be whether or not I’d believe that it was God who wrote my name in the stars, if indeed my name is written in the stars.
After the happy news that three women missing for about a decade were found alive in Ohio, many noted that ‘psychic’ Sylvia Browne had told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead. Tragically, Amanda’s mother died falsely believing this to be so.
There isn’t a lot to say about this. We know how effective psychics are – they simply can’t do it. We haven’t only just discovered that Sylvia Browne was wrong – she was wrong to say that Amanda was dead, regardless of whether Amanda was in fact dead, because she didn’t know. She had no way of knowing.
Browne’s attempt to describe Amanda’s condition is no more disgraceful given what we know now than it was at the time. If Amanda had turned up dead, then Browne would still be guilty of talking about incredibly sensitive issues she had no knowledge about – she would simply have got lucky with the facts. She might have imparted true beliefs, but not justified true beliefs.
The fact that she didn’t accidentally strike truth is, in my view, of no consequence to how we view her treatment of anguished families.
Jeremy Waldron in his recent book The Harm in Hate Speech suggests that there are kinds of hate speech that are justifiably regulated. He concentrates his arguments on a particular kind of harm; harm to the ‘dignity’ of individuals. ‘Dignity’ in this context has a special meaning; it reflects the social standing of an individual, and “entitle[s] them to be treated as equals in the ordinary operations of society.”2. Unless otherwise stated, I will use the term ‘dignity’ in the same way. What sort of ‘hate speech’ are we talking about? Waldron is primarily concerned with the visible environment that any individual must live their lives in. By ‘visible environment’ Waldron means the sort of society in which there are cross burnings by members of the Ku Klux Klan, leaflets handed out containing racist propaganda (which we might call ‘defamatory’), neo-Nazi parades through Jewish neighbourhoods, and so on3. It is this kind of outward expression of hateful views that has the most significant impact on the dignity of a member of a (say) racial minority. A member of a minority ends up going about their lives in such an environment, is put into a position of having to explain the hate speech to their children, and so on. This, according to Waldron, justifies the existence of hate speech regulation; we ought to protect these minorities from having their dignity impacted in this way.