By this time, you have already worked through the various rights relevant to business and computing. The rights justification framework we have been using is based on the following:
- Arightisa capacity of action essential to autonomy that others are obliged to recognize and respect.
- A duty is a principle that obliges us to recognize and respect the legitimate rights claims of others.
- Rights and duties are correlative. For every right there is a series of correlative duties and duty-holders.
- For a right claim to be legitimate, the right must be essential to autonomy, vulnerable to a standard threat, and imply correlative duties that do not deprive the duty-holders of anything essential (feasible).
- Correlative duties generally fall into three categories. First, are the most fundamental duties not to deprive right holders of their right. Second are the duties to prevent others from depriving right-holders of their rights whenever possible. Finally, in cases where right-holders have been deprived of their right, there are correlative duties to aid those deprived.
The main claim of freedom of speech consists of the right to express our opinions, even if and especially when these are offensive to others. Is this a legitimate or valid claim? If so, it must be essential, vulnerable, and feasible. Why would freedom of speech be essential to autonomy? (Would you agree that expressing one's ideas and receiving feedback from others is a necessary part of developing these thoughts? Then how would developing thoughts contribute to autonomy?) Is the standard threat that our thoughts may be offensive to others who would then try to censor them? Does this constitute vulnerability and the need to protect speech as the capacity to express and develop thought? Finally, does recognizing and respecting free speech in others deprive us of something essential? (Is the legal punishment for defamation a violation of the right of free speech? Does recognizing and respecting the right of free speech of others deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves against defamation?)
John Stuart Mill limits freedom of speech by his "harm principle." If the speech threatens to harm someone (the speaker not included) then society can suppress or censor that speech in its own defense. This is a broad statement of the right. For example, free speech need not be responsible speech. It need not even be true speech for Mill (see below) discusses the bad consequences of censoring false speech. In fact only speech that directly causes harm falls under this principle: yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, inciting an angry mob to riot, and motivating others to inflict harm. So Mill pushes back the limits to free speech but not entirely. Even for its most eloquent advocate, free speech has its limits.
Still free speech is allocated generous territory by Mill. He bases his argument against censorship on the content of opinions. He shows how censorship is founded on the untenable position of infallibility. If one censors opinion contrary to received opinion, then one insulates received opinion from every avenue of criticism and improvement this assumes infallibility. (Received opinion is that which everybody takes for true without question or examination. Slavery was received opinion in the southern states of the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries.) Moreover, this assumes, without proof, the veracity of what society currently accepts as truth. Mills' argument for free speech and against censorship looks at three possibilities:
- The content of the speech to be censored is true. In this case, censorship is wrong because it denies society of the benefit of the truth. This is the most obvious case of the wrongness of censorship.
- The content of the speech turns out to be (only) partially true. In this case, censorship is still wrong because it suppresses part of the truth and, thus, deprives society of its benefits.
- The content of the speech is entirely false. This is the test case. If censorship is wrong even when the view suppressed is entirely false, then this is telling. For Mill, censorship is wrong even if the suppressed speech turns out to be entirely false, because suppressing the false deprives the truth of clarity, which is achieved by contrast with the false, and vigor, which is purchased by defending the true against the challenges brought to it by the false.
There is another argument for censorship based, this time, on the speaker. Corporations are considered legal persons and have been endowed with legal rights including free speech. Until 1978 this included commercial free speech rights but not political free speech rights; corporations could advertise their products (within regulated parameters of truth) but they could not advocate a political candidate. But First National Bank of Boston v Belotti changed all that. To deny corporations, as legal persons, the right to political speech is to target the speaker, not the speech. This opens the way for the suppression of speech based on gender, race, political persuasion, or religion because with each of these we have turned from the speech itself to the characteristics of the speaker. So the Supreme Court of the United States, using this argument, extended corporate free speech rights to include political speech.
The minority opinion issued by the Supreme Court in this case also found a dangerous precedent. Corporate speech backed by the huge financial resources of these commercial entities can easily silence the speech of human individuals by drowning it out. Corporations have the money to buy access to the mass media to disseminate their speech. Human individuals cannot do this so easily.
But consider speech in cyberspace. Outside cyberspace, audiences are best reached through the expensive mass media giving the advantage to the corporation with its huge financial resources. In cyberspace, the networking capacities of the Internet put the speaker in direct contact with the audience and, thus, circumscribes the need for purchasing access to audiences through the expensive mass media. The importance of the speaker diminishes and the spotlight focuses, again, on the content of the speech. Notice how in Biomatrix, three individuals were able to blanket the Internet with defamatory speech against Biomatrix. With this new found equality in cyberspace, how can corporate organizations like Biomatrix protect themselves against cyberslanders? One possibility: hold online service provides or OSPs responsible for the defamatory content published within their portals. This issue is addressed in the next ethics perspective piece.
- 1409 reads
