speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Addressing the Harms of Speech
religion to gender and sexual orientation. Successful community
efforts to redress the harms of speech will broaden and deepen that
consensus, allowing the state to extend the expectation of equality,
as it has been doing since the Enlightenment. The second problem—
harmful speech that escapes communal regulation—seems less
troubling. Each nation will have to decide whether to tolerate it on
the margins—in Hyde Park, for instance, or the streets of Skokie. An
essential virtue of pluralistic regulation by partial overlapping communities
is that it allows everyone to hear many messages and speak
in several fora; those discontent with one community can join
another. As the regulatory jurisdiction expands, the consequences of
silencing dissent become more momentous. The case for suppressing
speech strengthens with its danger: where the harm to subordinated
groups is greatest, the audience receptive and growing, the
message least ambiguous, and the motive clearly evil. I support laws
against such harmful speech, if mainly because their mere enactment
elevates the status of those protected, but I would not expect
the inevitably compromised enforcement to play a major role in
redressing inequality. The real answer to both questions—bad communities
and communal interstices—is that there is no safe place, no
escape from politics to persuade communities of their error and
prudence to guide communities and states in exercising power.
There is no one best solution to the tension between freedom and
authority.
V. The Perils of Pluralistic Regulation
If communal efforts to redress status inequality are limited by
pluralism, their success also generates risks: backlash and trivialisation,
the self-indulgence of identity politics, revolutionary excess,
and damage to civil libertarian bulwarks. Conservatives denigrate
the struggle for respect with the epithet "political correctness"—a
redundant tautology, since politics are omnipresent and all actors
believe theirs are correct. 43 Dominant groups confound challenges
by concocting reverse atrocity stories that ridicule victims or transmute
them into oppressors. California kooks are a favourite target.
After Governor Wilson vetoed a bill outlawing employment discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation, the Santa Cruz Body
Image Task Force proposed to prohibit discrimination based on
height, weight, and appearance. Although respectable jurisdictions
like Michigan and the District of Columbia had similar laws, the
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