![]() It says that those people are not a part of “us†and that their opinions and arguments have no place as we decide where our country should go. People can have their voices amplified or silenced by their wealth, connections or prestige but also by other speech which aims to deny them the right to participate on equal terms with others.Īs Jeremy Waldron has argued in his book The Harm in Hate Speech, racist speech aims not just at hurting the feelings of its victims or expressing a view but at reconstituting the public arena of democratic debate and argument so that some people are not seen as forming a proper part of it. The barriers to speech are not just about the threat from the state but also about the social atmosphere in which speech is conducted and about who has the standing to speak and what kinds of speech are acceptable to others. But the cancel culture furore tells us that such a model is inadequate. It is easy to think about free speech and open debate as just being about whether people are censored or punished by the law. Now that he has come out with such language, he’s been cancelled, and rightly so. A society that refuses to tolerate speech like David Starkey’s recent racist remarks about “damn blacks” and the slave trade is better for it, and it is a pity that Starkey didn’t think twice before uttering them. But the problem with this critique is that some speech should be chilled and sometimes people ought to self-censor. One objection to “cancellation” is that it chills open debate and makes people self-censor. ![]() But is “cancelling” people always wrong? Is the practice always an attack on the norms of free speech and open debate? Might cancelling some people be necessary to ensure others get the voice and platform to which they are entitled? In the democratic space of social media this can sometimes tip over into unpleasant mobbing and sometimes bullying. Cancelling is essentially a kind of crowdsourced attempt to boycott and ostracise individuals for their words or actions, sometimes including calls for them they be fired from their jobs or denied contracts and opportunities by media organisations. €œCancel culture†has recently been in the news as a threat to free speech and open debate, most notably with the publication the other week of that open letter in Harpers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |