Censorship

"Censorship" is the suppression of speech or symbolic expression for reason of its message. Liberal Western constitutionalism has traditionally condemned censorship on both instrumental and intrinsic grounds, classically articulated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. In this traditional liberal view, freedom of speech instrumentally serves the ends of truth and self-government. Censorship, by entrenching orthodoxy and suppressing dissent, impedes the advancement of truth and the processes of democratic change. Freedom of speech is also intrinsically valuable, in this view, as an aspect of human autonomy. Censorship illegitimately interferes with that autonomy, because speech, unlike action, typically causes others no harm. The proper response to bad speech is more speech, not government regulation.

Late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century critics have challenged both the instrumental and the intrinsic justifications for freeing speech from censorship. First, some suggest that the power to speak is so unequally distributed that free competition in the marketplace of ideas is unlikely to produce either truth or democracy. For example, advocates of regulating campaign advertisements argue that wealthy voices dominate and thus distort political debate, and advocates of hate-speech regulation argue that racial epithets and invective perpetuate a form of cultural white supremacy in which minority voices are effectively silenced. These critics would turn the traditional free-speech principle on its head. In their view freedom of speech helps to entrench the existing status quo while government regulation of the speech of powerful groups can level the playing field. Redistribution of speaking power would advance truth and political equality better than a regime of laissez-faire.

Second, some critics argue that the defense of free speech on autonomy grounds undervalues the harms that speech causes. On this view speech regulation ought to be more widely allowed to protect the countervailing autonomy interests of listeners or bystanders. Liberal constitutional democracies generally permit censorship only to avert a narrow range of material harms. For example, incitement to riot may be forbidden, as may publication of the movements of troops at war. But censorship is rarely permitted on the ground that speech will cause disapproval, anger, alarm, resentment, or offense on the part of the audience. American constitutional law categorically forbids such justifications. Legal systems that permit them do so only in exceptional contexts: For example, British law forbids expressions of racial hatred, and some international human rights laws forbid advocacy of genocide.

Free-speech critics argue that such exceptions should be more the rule. First, some argue, government should be free to prevent injury, not only to bodies, but also to hearts and minds, including the injury caused by expressions of caustic opinion. Second, others argue, speech should be regulable for its social impact, even in the absence of immediate physical harm. On this view speech is not self-regarding but rather helps to structure social life. Thus, for example, pornography, hate speech, and graphic television violence inculcate attitudes that make society more immoral, sexist, racist, lawless, or violent than it would be if a different rhetoric prevailed. Speech helps construct society by socializing behavior, and reconstructing society, in this view, requires regulating speech.

At stake in these debates is whether speech will continue to be understood, like religious and reproductive practices, as presumptively a matter for private resolution, or instead will be subject to greater government regulation in the pursuit of social ends, including that of maximizing the quantity or diversity of speech itself.

Democracy; Liberty; Mill, John Stuart.

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