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For example, imagine a disgruntled TSA employee pens an article excoriating Muslims and suggesting that they be forbidden to travel. They should be allowed to

• anigbrowl 13y ago
  I don't agree with your position. Look at the balance of harms in this example. On the one side, a TSA employee whose expression of sincere opinion is restrained by his employer, the government. On the other side, millions of innocent people who feel dissuaded from air travel on the grounds of national origin (see below) because they don't believe they'll be properly treated at airports and because they fear assaults , even if only verbal, from passengers emboldened by the slight imprimateur of official support for their prejudice. (I say national origin rather than religion because most people seem to be in the habit of making judgments based on the former. Post 9/11 people like Sikhs were attacked because they were foreign-seeming and from a part of the world that has a lot of Muslims, even though Sikhism is a wholly different religion. a woman named Fatima Mubarak might be a Christian but most people are going to assume Islamic affiliation based on her name. Likewise, it's easy to imagine or identify people who are Islamic but statistically unlikely to be identified as such. In the aggregate, we're pretty superficial). You have a balance of harms here, and I think ultimately courts would choose the harm that affects the fewest number of people, especially given the existence of numerous avenues for dissatisfied TSA employees to raise grievances through administrative channels rather than by trying to whip up public sentiment in favor of their political view. Please note that it's not the speech excoriating someone else that I'm saying should be regulated - it's the publicity by the angry person of their official position with a government agency in connection with that speech, which shI say should be restrainable by the agency. If the TSA agent in this example thinks the agency so wrong-headed, s/he could resign from the TSA and then write things like 'I quit the TSA because they don't recognize the threat posed by Muslims' - to which the TSA could reply 'We are required by law to treat everyone equally and it is our policy to do so, which is why we parted ways with this employee.' Now I totally agree that it's convenient when 'assholes out themselves as such.' The thing is that when they're in uniform (so to speak) what's convenient to you or me may be intimidating to someone else; things look quite different when you're a spectator rather than the target of someone's bias, and the appearance of official sanction for that bias amplifies the intimidatory effect. I'm saying that the interests of the agency in being seen to serve the public fairly and in accordance with law outweigh the interests of the individual agency employee who feels constrained by the agency's code of conduct.
  • elohesra 13y ago
    I disagree with your position. When we regulate free speech -- in any way whatsoever -- we open ourselves up to greater regulation of free speech. Free speech is a special privilege in that only unrestricted free speech can argue against restrictions on free speech. Once you grant restrictions against free speech, you open yourself up to a position where your speech becomes so restricted that you become unable to even argue why it should be less restricted. Furthermore I strongly disagree that restrictions on speech should be relative to either the social position of the speaker, or the harms posed by the speaker. If our justification for preventing speech is that the speaker's speech could be mistaken as the official position of some group (in this case the TSA), then this gives us a legitimation to shut down all speech, as we can simply twist the speaker's position as being representative of some group to which they're tenuously related. A woman wants to speak out unpopularly against x? Well, we can claim she represents all women, and her speaking out would sour the position of the public towards women. A black man wants to speak out against unpopular y? Same argument. Jewish? Same argument. And so on. This is why speech is an individual right, regardless of circumstance. As for the (in my opinion, unpersuasive) argument that the harm caused by speech should be legitimation to close down certain speech, no speech in-and-of itself is harmful. Speech is just speech, and cannot itself be harmful. It is people's reactions to speech which causes harm. Even if we claim certain classes of speech (say, yelling fire) have predictable outcomes that can cause harm, we also have to accept that harmful speech can sometimes be necessary. When the founding fathers spoke out against the tyranny of the British (or so I hear; I'm British!), this lead to a civil war which cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. Same again when Lincoln spoke out against the separatist south. Same again when Churchill spoke out against the Nazi threat. Yet few would argue the harms caused by these pieces of speech should cause them to be banned, even though these pieces of speech resulted in the deaths of millions. This means that we cannot be logically consistent when we claim to ban speech based upon harm, so we either have to change our justification (i.e. admit that it's not really harm we're avoiding, but specific types of harm), or admit that we're being illogical in selecting lesser harms (discomfort felt by non-Americans, in your example) as justification to shut down speech, and greater harms (the deaths of millions, as above) as protected speech. Honestly, free speech is simply too fundamental to both democracy and philosophical/scientific progress to tamper with. No matter what lesser right you put up against it, you'd have a hard time convincing me that it should trump free speech, the right which underlies our very society.