Abstract
Respecting expressive activity enables the expressive ecosystem to generate a range of benefits related to knowledge, practical reasoning, æsthetic experience, and other aspects of flourishing, as well as to institutional accountability, the discovery of valuable forms of life, and the effective functioning of markets.
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Notes
- 1.
Broadly instrumental arguments have provided the most familiar justifications for freedom of expression . The two most familiar and influential are John Milton , Areopagitica (1644) and John Stuart Mill , On Liberty (1859). I gratefully acknowledge their ongoing significance. Cf. Robert P. George , Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality 192–208 (1993) (exploring links between freedom of expression and flourishing ).
- 2.
Cf. Alan Haworth , Free Speech 3–32 (1998) (suggesting that Mill ’s understanding of free speech focuses on the kind of freedom needed in “the seminar room,” in which ideas are sifted in the course of intellectual exchange).
- 3.
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes , J., dissenting). For an extended discussion of the background to and aftermath of Holmes’s opinion, see Thomas Healy , The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—And Changed the History of Free Speech in America (2013). Thanks to Alexander Lian for focusing my attention on this book.
- 4.
Cf. Peter Railton , Scientific Objectivity and the Aims of Belief, in Believing and Accepting 179, 191–202 (Pascal Engel ed., 2000).
- 5.
This claim is similar to, but arguably different from, the notion that Mill ’s defense of the freedom of expression is an accurate “tendency claim” which might be summarized as: “An increase in the rate of participation in seminar group type activities causes an increase in the supply of truth.” Haworth , supra note 2, at 67, 66.
- 6.
Thanks to Seana Shiffrin for highlighting the need to address this point; see Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law 84 (2014).
- 7.
See Chapter 4, supra.
- 8.
See John Stuart Mill , On Liberty 103–39 (1859).
- 9.
Thanks to Charles Teel , Jr., for alerting me to key details regarding Koinonia Farm. On Jordan ’s life and impact, see, e.g., Tracy E. K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (1997); Frederick L. Downing, Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrim in Scorn of the Consequences (2017).
- 10.
For an evocative depiction of one representative life in the Jazz Age that captures the liberating and liberated experimental temper of the times, see Nancy Milford , Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001). Millay outlived the Jazz Age, of course, but her work captured the spirit of that era and her own life reflected the tumultuous energies in play in an American culture breaking free of older strictures. The experimentation in which the flappers engaged bore fruit in a variety of ways, doubtless playing some role in birthing an increased willingness to push the limits of acceptable speech in the immediately subsequent decades; see, e.g., H owl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (Bill Morgan & Nancy J. Peters eds., 2006).
- 11.
Rick Moody ’s The Ice Storm and the Ang Lee film based on the book nicely depict the migration, not without cost, of ideals of sexual freedom from the counterculture in the 1960s to the urban upper-middle class in the 1970s; see Rick Moody, The Ice Storm (1994); The Ice Storm (Good Machine, 1997).
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Chartier, G. (2018). The Instrumental Value of Expression. In: An Ecological Theory of Free Expression. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75271-6_6
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