Abstract
Much of the most influential free speech scholarship emphasises that ‘political speech’ warrants the very highest standards of protection because of its centrality to self-governance. This central idea mitigates against efforts to justify the regulation of political speech and renders some egregiously offensive or harmful speech worthy of protection from a theoretical perspective. Yet paradoxically, in practice, in many liberal democracies such speech is routinely restricted. In this paper, I develop an argument that is compatible with both the argument from democracy and the notion of political speech, and that can justify the regulation of hate speech, by joining an understanding of the constitutive role of speech in individuals’ lives derived from Nussbaum's capabilities theory with ideas of democratic deliberation and legitimation drawn from a Habermasian framework. This approach attends to the conditions required at an individual level for democratic legitimation to occur at a social level. It permits the development of a robust theoretical justification for the protection of a broad range of speech. It simultaneously provides a guiding framework for regulatory policy designed to ameliorate the effects of, and inhibit the expression of, that speech, which could imperil the conditions required for individuals to develop their own capabilities and which instantiates anti-democratic practice, and thus discourse, preventing the very communications required to perform democracy from being uttered. Thus, my argument also strengthens and transforms the argument from democracy as a justification for free speech protection more generally.
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Notes
I make no claim here as to the form of such regulation, noting only that the possibilities ought not to be limited to punitive criminal sanctions.
Weinstein (1999) draws on the foundations of both the argument from democracy and the marketplace of ideas/argument from truth to provide general justification for the protection of such speech in the US Supreme Court (pp. 229, n65).
Sunstein (1995) suggested that an Aristotelian approach may be an alternative to this way of differentiating speech deserving protection from speech less deserving of protection (pp. 145 and n29), but made no move to develop such a conception as I have done here.
It is a feature of free speech literature that its most eminent scholars operate within the constraints of the First Amendment jurisprudence. A critic could charge that in criticising these arguments for paying insufficient attention to the viability of regulating a type of speech that in the United States is not regulable, I am misplacing their scholarship. In response, I note that although the First Amendment jurisprudence is unique, it is widely influential internationally and this breadth and depth of influence have contributed to the problem that I am attempting to redress.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Reece Plunkett for research assistance and Michael Pusey, Conal Condren, Martin Krygier and this journal's two anonymous referees for very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Much of the work on this paper was undertaken while I was a Visiting Fellow, Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law, University of New South Wales. This project was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP0663077).
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Gelber, K. Freedom of political speech, hate speech and the argument from democracy: The transformative contribution of capabilities theory. Contemp Polit Theory 9, 304–324 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.8