Faculty Workshop – Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center)
December 6 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
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.