Faculty Workshop – Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center)

Title: “Speaking Freely and Speaking Truthfully”

Abstract: I begin by accepting that speaking freely is probably the most valuable activity to the  societal acquisition of truth. But I quickly conclude that — at least on a rights-based, value pluralist account — the permissibility of any particular constraint on someone speaking  freely cannot hinge on this societal value. Therefore, I turn to the relevance of an  utterance’s truthfulness to the moral permissibility of its purposeful third-party constraint.  First, I separate instances of ‘I cannot speak freely’ into three ‘cannot’ categories. Next, I  use conclusions arising from this to identify some bad and wrong things involved in  different instances. Then, I turn to what ‘speaking truthfully’ involves, and move towards  concluding that: 1) the truthfulness of an utterance is neither necessary nor sufficient to  making its purposeful third-party constraint impermissible; and that 2) knowing the  truthfulness of an utterance is neither necessary nor sufficient to morally evaluating the  permissibility of its purposeful third-party constraint. These conclusions are  uncontroversial, but in taking this analytical approach towards them, I aim to expose some  category errors, and to emphasise that thinking hard about free speech at the level of  particular constraint is complicated on many levels.

This event will be held in the Hariri building, room 310.