| Chapter 1: | The Nature of Speech and Freedom of Speech |
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true and false in matters of justice or faith. Government insults its citizens, and denies their moral responsibility, when it decrees that they cannot be trusted to hear opinions that might persuade them to dangerous or offensive convictions. We retain our dignity, as individuals, only by insisting that no one, no official and no majority, has the right to withhold an opinion from us on the ground that we are not fit to hear and consider it.
For many people moral responsibility has another, more active, aspect as well: a responsibility not only to form convictions of one’s own, but to express these to others, out of respect and concern for them, and out of a compelling desire that truth be known, justice served, and the good secured.23
While Dworkin focused on the individual, his arguments are not at odds with the application of sociological theory and are harmonious with concepts espoused by Habermas. Indeed, it is but a short theoretical jump from Dworkin’s explanation of the constitutive justification to the argument that all free speech can be justified instrumentally because freedom of expression is essential to the smooth running of society. That is, to accomplish efficient community functions, where society is typified by an extreme division of labour, broad rights of freedom of expression are essential.
In the next chapter, a sociologically based theory will be presented that provides a reason why the constitutive justification is ultimately instrumental because broad, topically unrestricted speech rights for individuals are essential in societies permeated with social as well as economic division of labour. Furthermore, sociology assists in interpreting philosophical theory from the perspective of communal as opposed to merely individual values. This intervention of sociological theory is necessary, or at least helpful, because while almost all of the traditional free speech theories find reasonable acceptance, none are applied without exception and modification and, the theories themselves usually speak in absolutes and do not, on their face, condone the legitimacy of moderation.