Justice

Is a society that criminalizes incitement to violence and libel really a free society despite all other forms of speech being legal?

Comments

Is a society that criminalizes murder a free society?

Depends on what you mean. If a free society is one in which nothing is forbidden, then if anything is criminalized, the society isn't free. But if that's what's meant by "free society," then no sane person would want to live in one. This suggests that taking "free society" to mean "society with no rules or restrictions" doesn't really get at what people mean when they use those words. As a first stab, it's probably better to say that a free society is one with no unjustifiable restrictions on people's liberty. That's not meant to say which societies are free, or to what extent. For one thing, there's room to argue about which restrictions are justifiable. For another, even insofar as we agree about that, it will almost certainly turn out that no legal system gets it exactly right.

The better version of your question, I suggest, is whether it's justifiable for a society to criminalize speech that incites violence or libels someone. There's room to argue about the details. (What counts as incitement? How present must the danger of violence be? Should libel be a crime or merely a tort—a civil wrong?...) Or to put it another way, even if we agree that laws forbidding incitement to violence or libel restrict freedom, what we really want to know whether and to what extent such laws are an unreasonable restriction on freedom. Turning the question into an all-or-nothing judgment about whether societies that forbid these things are "free" isn't likely to shed much light.

Read another response by Allen Stairs

Read another response about Justice