What is the point of free speech? Truth, said J.S. Mill, and he was partly right. Free speech is not a fisticuff free-for-all. What matters is knowledge, especially the knowledge needed to govern ourselves in a democracy. ‘Post-truth’ has been the word of the year, made manifest in speech that manipulates and deceives, in the media, and in social media. The problems of trust identified by Onora O’Neill are more pressing than ever. But the abandonment of truth would be the death, not the vindication, of free speech. A living democracy needs and deserves better.
This lecture was held at the 2017 Holberg Symposium: "Ethics for Communication" in honour of Holberg Laureate Onora O'Neill.
BIOGRAPHY
Rae Langton is Professor of Philosophy at Newnham College, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She has testified to the Leveson Enquiry on media ethics, and is writing up her John Locke Lectures (Oxford 2015), about the ethics of communicative speech acts, entitled ‘Accommodating Injustice’.