T.M. Scanlon on Freedom of Expression

There is an excellent 54-minute webcast interview here (requires RealPlayer) with Harvard Professor T.M. Scanlon based on his collection of essays The Difficulty of Tolerance. This site also provides a complete transcript divided into six sections. Persevere beyond the initial biographical questions as it gets much better, particularly when he begins to talk about the nature of Philosophy and why he thinks it can be difficult (roughly, he believes that Philosophical questions usually arise from tensions within a subject area but that Philosophy steps outside that subject area to try and answer them, and that this requires a certain kind of analysis, as well as creativity and perseverance).

The interview has at its core, (from about 20 minutes into the webcast) a discussion of Freedom of Expression. Scanlon first got engaged with Philosophy when he realised a tension between the undesirability of people expressing misleading views and the value of freedom of speech. Scanlon believes in the value of an open society, that is one in which the legitimacy of political institutions in part depends on the possibility of citizens objecting to or protesting about the activities of the state.

In his earlier writing on freedom of expression he emphasized autonomy and how freedom of expression acknowledged autonomy. He mentions several legitimate restrictions on freedom of speech that he has come to accept such as not being permitted to describe how to make nerve gas at home in your sink, and the possible legitimacy of intervening to stop free communication between conspirators. He does, nevertheless defend the idea that a price of having an open society (which is what we want and need) is that we should tolerate advocacy of views to which many of us object.

In passing he makes the interesting point that we are far more likely to accept as appropriate a government that curtails free expression relating to false advertising, than one that censors political views, on the grounds that governments are likely to be more neutral and objective about the former than the latter.