Freedom of expression is often considered one of our most important liberties. But why is freedom of expression so important. In this article I intend to give some of the reasons for why many believe freedom of speech is essential to a healthy society.
To begin with the freedom to speak and write what you want is commonly said to be one of the key pillars of a functioning democracy. Without the ability to protest, without the ability to write petitions or pamphlets or campaign for political causes or a specific political party the demos, the people, would have very little power to voice their opinions on how their country should be run. Politicians would be able to pass legislation and make certain decisions without fear of being criticised or held to account before the next general election.
Another reason people often put forward on the matter is that freedom of speech is essential to the world of ideas in any society. If authorities of one kind or another decide that a particular idea is so controversial that it needs to be banned from even being uttered, then it cannot be tested in the realm of debate to see whether it has any truth to it or not.
And even with ideas which many people already accept are abominable and untrue, such as that one race is superior to another (racism) or that men are superior to women (sexism), these ideas must be openly debated in order to be fully defeated. Banning such ideas, free speech advocates say, allow them to fester in the private sphere unchallenged where they can gain strength and perhaps resurface in public with renewed force. Furthermore, they say, it allows those who oppose such ideas to become lazy and simply hold the idea of men and women being equal as a dogma, rather than continually having to rehearse and perfect the reasons why they believe the idea to be true. You strengthen your own arguments by inviting opposition and criticism of them, not by shutting contrasting voices down.
As the nineteenth century philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill wrote:
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; [robbing] those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they [the dissenters] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, [that is] the clear perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”
In other words, by censoring a particular person for an opinion they hold, you don’t simply deprive them of the right to speak, you also deprive their audience of the right to hear what they have to say and learn from it – either by realising they are wrong on the matter or by strengthening their impression that the opinion they hold on the matter is in fact the right one, having re-evaluated the reasons for why they hold that opinion in light of what the speaker has said.
Image: By Daniel Rothamel [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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