Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Liberty & Equality

Free Speech: A Paradox

Ryan Andrews reminds us what free speech is for.

Tom: (tuts over his newspaper) Of course, religious extremists and state censors are not the only enemies of free speech. There are also moral-majority conservatives, left-wing egalitarians, and many more overly-sensitive souls of every stripe. The variables are different, but they all follow the same formula: ‘If the idea expressed is sufficiently antithetical to our values, it should be suppressed’. If that’s free speech, then every society that has ever existed has allowed free speech. But for me, the logic behind real freedom of speech is simple: what constitutes the Good is entirely subjective, and the knowledge on which we base our judgements will always be incomplete anyway, so we have a constant need for new ideas – for new speech.

…