What is Free Speech For?

Our resident philosopher Edward Feser dispels certain mirages that liberalism creates around “free speech” by way of a teleological understanding of the right to speak the truth and uphold the good.

It is easy to assert that one has a right to something.  People do it all the time in contemporary moral and political discourse.  It’s considerably less easy to justify such an assertion – and thus unsurprising that assertions greatly outnumber justifications.  But the denial of a right can be just as glibly asserted, and as hard to justify.  

The topic of free speech affords important examples of both sorts of assertion.  For much of modern American political history, the right to free speech was appealed to in defense of the toppling of taboos and laws, such as those against blasphemy and obscenity.  More recent years have seen a shift in the opposite direction, toward calls for curbing free speech where it threatens to offend egalitarian scruples.  

But why believe in the first place that there is a moral right to free expression that is so expansive that it would, for example, permit pornography to be as easily accessible as the nearest cell phone, even to children?  Or why believe that the right to free speech is not expansive enough to allow for whatever aprogressive would label “hate speech”?  Again, assertions are easier to come by than justifications.

Where moral and political discourse has effectively degenerated into a war of competing intuitions and sentiments, the remedy is to take things back to first principles.  We need to ask exactly why it is that human beings can be said to have any rights at all in the first place.  That will afford a way of determining whether there is such a thing as a right to free speech, specifically, and if so what its scope and limits are.  What follows is an account of how these issues are approached within the natural law tradition that builds on the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

Natural law and natural rights

This traditional natural law theory begins with the thesis that the things that make up the natural world around us have natures or essences, and that by virtue of their natures, they are aimed or directed toward the realization of certain ends.  For example, a tree is by nature directed toward ends like sinking roots into the earth and growing leaves; a bird is by nature directed toward ends like laying eggs and building a nest to shelter them; a squirrel is by nature directed toward ends like gathering nuts and acorns; and so on.  (This view sometimes goes by the fancy name teleological essentialism.  It is essentialist insofar as it takes things to have essences or natures as a matter of objective fact rather than merely by virtue of our classificatory practices.  And it is teleological insofar as it takes directedness toward an end to be a real and irreducible feature of the natural world.)

What is good for a thing, according to natural law theory, is what facilitates the realization of these natural ends, and what is bad for it is what frustrates such realization.  For instance, it is good for a tree if it is able to sink strong and deep roots into the earth, and bad for it if termite damage or disease prevents this from happening.  It is good for a squirrel if it is able to gather many acorns and nuts, and bad for it if circumstances made this impossible, or if some injury or odd genetic defect made it disinclined to even try.  These judgements about what is good and bad are entirely objective, grounded as they are in facts about the natures of these things and their teleological properties.

Now, what is true of other natural phenomena is true of human beings too. We have a nature or essence, and our nature directs us toward the realization of certain distinctive ends.  Specifically, for natural law theory, we are by nature rational social animals.  Ends like securing food and reproducing ourselves follow upon this, given the animal side of our nature.  But the rational side of our nature entails further ends unique to us, and also transforms the ends we share with non-human animals.  Rationality entails the capacity to form abstract concepts, make judgements about the truth or falsity of propositions, and reason logically from one proposition to another.  This makes possible philosophy, science, morality, religion, law, art, music, literature, and culture in general.  It transforms what in animals is mere feeding into the social event of the meal, the development of national cuisines, and so on. It raises what in animals is mere mating into the institutions of marriage and family.

Realizing these ends is as objectively good for us as nest-building is objectively good for birds and sinking roots into the earth is objectively good for trees.  And whatever frustrates the realization of these distinctively human ends is objectively bad for us.  Unlike trees, birds, and squirrels, though, we can know what is good or bad for us and choose either to pursue the former and avoid the latter, or to fail to do so.  And because such pursuit and avoidance are, in us, subject to the will, they take on a moral character.  

This is just a brief sketch, and, naturally, natural law theorists have a great deal more to say by way of defending the theory’s presuppositions and elaborating on its implications.  (I’ve done that myself in many places, such as here and here.)  The point for present purposes is to explain the context within which natural law theory would situate the notion of rights.  Now, to have a right is to possess a moral power to claim some thing or action as one’s own.  For example, to have a right to one’s home is to have the moral power to alter and furnish it as one likes, invite inside whomever one wishes, prevent others from taking or using it, sell it to another if one no longer wants it, and so on.  

Many traditional natural law theorists would argue that the existence of such rights is a corollary of our obligations under natural law.  For example, our nature aims or directs us toward marriage and family.  Naturally, fulfilling this end presupposes finding a spouse with whom we can have children.  Once we have children, our nature directs us toward providing for them materially and spiritually if they and the family of which they are a part is to flourish.  Now, if nature aims us toward forming families and obligates us to provide for them once we form them, then we must have a moral power or right to do so.  For if we did not, we would be frustrated from realizing the ends and fulfilling the obligations in question.  The natural end of building a family is thus, for natural law theory, the foundation of the right to marry and to educate and otherwise provide for one’s children.

In general, for natural law theory, rights function as safeguards on our ability to purse the ends toward which our nature directs us and fulfill the obligations imposed on us by natural law.  But this teleological foundation not only creates rights but also limits them.  For example, because children are ignorant without the example and instruction initially provided by their parents, parents have a right under natural law to educate them — to teach them right from wrong, give them religious instruction, impart basic life skills, and so on.  But they have no right to teach them just any old thing they like.  For example, no parent has a right under natural law to encourage a child to take up a life of crime, or heroin use, or sexual immorality.  For those things would positively frustrate a child’s capacity to fulfill the ends and realize the obligations nature sets for us, and rights exist precisely to facilitate such fulfilment.  

This too would naturally require greater elaboration and defense in a fuller account, but the point for the moment is just to explain how natural law theory approaches the question of the right to free speech.  So let’s turn at last to that.