Would suppressing deepfakes violate freedom of expression norms? The question is pressing because the deepfake phenomenon in its more poisonous manifestations appears to call for a response, and automated targeting of some kind looks to be the most practically viable. Two simple answers are rejected: that deepfakes do not deserve protection under freedom of expression legislation because they are fake by definition; and that deepfakes can be targeted if but only if they are misleadingly presented as (...) authentic. To make progress, following a discussion of why freedom of expression deserves protection in a democracy, the question is reframed. At issue is not whether the arrival of deepfakes brings new and potentially serious dangers (it does), nor whether these dangers call for measures that potentially limit freedom of expression (they do), but whether the need for such measures raises any new and unfamiliar freedom-of-expression challenges. The answer to that question, surprisingly, is no. The balancing act needed to cope with the arrival of deepfakes brings plenty of difficulties, certainly, but none of the measures likely to be effective in tackling deepfake harms raises freedom-of-expression concerns that aren’t familiar from consideration of non-deepfake harms. In that respect, at least, the arrival of deepfakes makes no difference. (shrink)

This paper suggests the democratic direction in which the right of freedom of expression should be conceived and applied. In the first two sections it suggests some counter-examples to, and diagnoses of, the libertarian and liberal conceptions of freedom of expression, taking Scanlon (1972) and Scanlon (1979), respectively, to be their chief proponents. The paper suggests that these conceptions cannot take into account clear examples, like fraudulent propaganda, which should not be legal. The democratic conception takes (...) it to heart that the pillars upon which the right of freedom of expression is founded are individual and collective autonomy, the right to know facts of public interest and information necessary for effective democratic control of government. The paper suggests that in a time when private powers seriously threaten these pillars, it is correct for the government to step in to provide the framework in which genuine discussion geared toward fulfilling the objectives of these pillars can take place. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that stifling free expression stifles intellectual life. Others reply that freedom of expression can harm members of marginalized groups by alienating them from social life or worse. Yet we should still favour freedom of expression, especially where marginalized groups are concerned. It's better to know who has repugnant beliefs as it allows marginalized groups to identify threats: free expression qua self-defence.

this paper argues that people are entitled to keep some true facts about themselves to themselves, should they so wish, as a sign of respect for their moral and political status, and in order to protect themselves from being used as a public example in order to educate or to entertain other people. The “outing” - or non-consensual public disclosure - of people’s health records or status, or their sexual behaviour or orientation is usually unjustified, even when its consequences seem (...) to be beneficial. Indeed, the paper claims, the reasons to reject outing, as inconsistent with democratic commitments to freedom and equality, are reasons to insist on the importance of privacy to freedom of expression. While a free press is of the utmost importance to democratic government, it is not identical with the free expression of individuals and, on occasion, the former may have to be constrained in order to protect the latter. [Barendt, 2007, 231]. Hence, the paper concludes, we should distinguish the claims of individuals to publish reports about their lives – even if this necessarily involves revealing the private lives of others – from journalistic claims to publish information about the sex lives of consenting adults. I will start by briefly situating my argument within a democratic approach to privacy, before using the “outing” of Oliver Sipple to examine people’s claims to privacy and their implications for freedom of expression and of the press. I will be assuming that some forms of privacy are legitimate, in order to focus more closely on the question of what information, if any, people may keep to themselves. (shrink)

Must privacy and freedom of expression conflict? To witness recent debates in Britain, you might think so. Anything other than self-regulation by the press is met by howls of anguish from journalists across the political spectrum, to the effect that efforts to protect people’s privacy will threaten press freedom, promote self-censorship and prevent the press from fulfilling its vital function of informing the public and keeping a watchful eye on the activities and antics of the powerful.[Brown, 2009, (...) 13 January]1 Effective protections for privacy, from such a perspective, inevitably pose a threat to democratic government via the constraints that they place on the press. Such concerns with privacy must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about democratic government, and the freedom, equality and wellbeing of individuals. But if it is one thing to say that privacy and freedom of expression cannot always be fully protected, it is another to suppose that protections for the one must always come at the expense of the other. After all, the economics of contemporary politics and journalism would seem to be partly responsible for our difficulties in protecting personal privacy while sustaining robust and informative forms of public discourse. [Moore, 2010, 10 -141]2 Most newspapers are loss-making businesses and the need to reduce those losses and, if possible, to turn a profit, make investigative journalism an increasingly expensive proposition as compared to both “comment” and more or less elevated forms of gossip. At the same time, politics has increasingly become the prerogative of a narrow group of people with access to the large sums of money necessary successfully to compete for high office. In those circumstances, the need for critical scrutiny is as important as it is difficult. Revising our ideas about privacy and its protection cannot alone reduce the tensions between freedom of expression and personal privacy typical of our societies, necessary though such revision may be. Moreover, this paper can only touch on some aspects of the ways in which we need to rethink our interests in privacy, in order adequately to reflect people’s diverse interests in freedom of expression, and the important role of a free press to democratic government. Nonetheless, I hope to suggest ways of thinking about people’s claims to privacy which can be generalised fairly readily, and can help us to think constructively about the nature, causes and solutions to some important social and political problems, even if, in its nature, philosophical analysis rarely tells us what to do. More specifically, this paper argues that people are entitled to keep some true facts about themselves to themselves, should they so wish, as a sign of respect for their moral and political status, and in order to protect themselves from being used as a public example in order to educate or to entertain other people. The “outing” - or non-consensual public disclosure - of people’s health records or status, or their sexual behaviour or orientation is usually unjustified, even when its consequences seem to be beneficial. Indeed, the paper claims, the reasons to reject outing, as inconsistent with democratic commitments to freedom and equality, are reasons to insist on the importance of privacy to freedom of expression. While a free press is of the utmost importance to democratic government, it is not identical with the free expression of individuals and, on occasion, the former may have to be constrained in order to protect the latter. [Barendt, 2007, 231]. Hence, the paper concludes, we should distinguish the claims of individuals to publish reports about their lives – even if this necessarily involves revealing the private lives of others – from journalistic claims to publish information about the sex lives of consenting adults. I will start by briefly situating my argument within a democratic approach to privacy, before using the “outing” of Oliver Sipple to examine people’s claims to privacy and their implications for freedom of expression and of the press. I will be assuming that some forms of privacy are legitimate, in order to focus more closely on the question of what information, if any, people may keep to themselves. (shrink)

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may (...) be thought to be undermining the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state’s expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them. (shrink)

In this article we offer a perspective on the immense number of problems and challenges confronting humanity in our common biosphere. As our human population grows and urbanization increases globally, billions of humans with diverse beliefs and opinions are living in large urban areas without the basic needs of life. The way forward in our biosphere is not violence and disrespect. It is working to maintain and improve our common biosphere and solve our common global problems. Religion and religious believers (...) will need science, so humans can survive and sustain our biosphere. (shrink)

I argue for the recognition of a particular kind of interest that one has in freedom of expression: an interest served by expressive activity in forming and discovering one’s own beliefs, desires, and commitments. In articulating that interest, I aim to contribute to a family of theories of freedom of expression that find its justification in the interests that speakers have in their own speech or thought, to be distinguished from whatever interests they may also have (...) as audiences or third parties for speech. Although there are many differences among such speaker-centered theories, a core commitment that most share is that expressive liberty plays a fundamental role in securing or constituting some form of individual self-realization. My account is a defense and elaboration of what I take to be one specific way in which the nature of such self-realization should be understood. In my proposal, self-realization is sometimes internally related to the very activity of expression, viz, expressing ourselves is one way in which we come to form and know our own minds. (shrink)

According to Corey Brettschneider, we can protect freedom of religion and promote equality, by distinguishing religious groups’ claims to freedom of expression and association from their claims to financial and verbal support from the state. I am very sympathetic to this position, which fits well with my own views of democratic rights and duties, and with the importance of recognizing the scope for political choice which democratic politics offers to governments and to citizens. This room for political (...) choice, I believe, is necessary if people are to have any chance of reconciling the conflicting moral and political obligations they are likely to face, however idealized our conception of democracy or morality. Granted that no amount of personal and political choice will ever guarantee that we do not encounter tragic choices, and painfully conflicting moral demands, it is an important feature of democracy – or so I believe – that its rights reflect the importance of mitigating these conflicts so that people are able, as a rule, to act as they ought, so that they do not experience their moral sentiments, beliefs and capacities simply as grounds for recrimination, alienation and despair. I therefore believe that democracies have good reason not to force the consciences of the undemocratic and the intolerant, where it is possible to accommodate such people without threatening the rights of others. However, the fact that I share many of Brettschneider’s intuitions and beliefs does not mean that I share them all. In particular, I find his conception of democracy unduly narrow, and unduly based on a rather idealized conception of the American constitution which is unlikely to appeal to those whose conceptions of democracy are more republican, more socialist, more pragmatic and more international than his. I have explained these worries elsewhere and drawn out some of their implications for his arguments about privacy and judicial review. There is no need to repeat them here. I will also set to one side my worries about his uninflected, overly abstract and rather reified characterization of the State, in the hope that others will discuss this and that, in the end, a more nuanced conception of the State and a more lively appreciation of the conflicting people, institutions, histories and norms which make up most states, will prove consistent with his arguments. Finally, I do not propose to enter into a detailed discussion of the difficulties of Brettschneider’s overly abstract and reified conception of State ‘speech’ and ‘expression’ which, while motivated by the language of American constitutionalism, appears to cover pretty much anything a government might do, from raising and spending taxes, to accepting judicial interpretations of contested constitutional provisions, or to affirmatively pronouncing on the goals that will animate its legislative agenda and its aspirations for citizen’s lives. Again, while I would have wished for a more nuanced and analytical discussion of so central a concept as ‘expression’ and, in particular, expression by ‘the State’, I am uncertain that anything fundamental in Brettschneider’s account of citizen rights and duties would be altered in the process. Instead, then, I want to focus on points in Brettschneider’s argument that intrigue, and sometimes puzzle, me the most and where issues of nuance and clarification might make a substantial difference to our views of equality and religious freedom. (shrink)

This paper examines how stances and understandings pertaining to whether home education is civically legitimate within liberal democratic contexts can depend on how one conceives normative roles of the secular state and the religious neutrality that is commonly associated with it. For the purposes of this paper, home education is understood as a manifestation of an educational philosophy ideologically based on a given conception of the good. -/- Two polar conceptions of secularism, republican and liberal-pluralist, are explored. Republican secularists declare (...) that religious expressions do not belong in the public sphere and justify this exclusion by promoting religious neutrality as an end in itself. But liberal-pluralists claim that religious neutrality is only the means to ensure protection of freedom of conscience and religion, which are moral principles. Each conception is associated with its own stance on whether exemptions or accommodations on account of religious beliefs have special legal standing and thereby warranted. The indeterminate nature of religion and the allegedly biased exclusion of secular beliefs, cited by some when denying religious exemptions, can be overcome by understanding all religious and conscientious beliefs as having equal standing as conceptions of the good. -/- Analysis of court documents from the Uwe Romeike et al asylum case are guided by these understandings, and relationships among themes are explored. -/- In summary, any stance regarding home education may depend on one’s view of secularism, particularly in relation to whether one views religious neutrality as a means to ensure protection of freedom of conscience or an end in itself. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher argued that the freedom to pursue one's version of the good life is the main aim of Mill's argument for freedom of expression. According to Kitcher, in certain scientific fields, political and epistemological asymmetries bias research toward conclusions that threaten this most important freedom of underprivileged groups. Accordingly, Kitcher claimed that there are Millian grounds for limiting freedom of inquiry in these fields to protect the freedom of the underprivileged. -/- I explore (...) Kitcher's argument in light of the interpretation Helen Longino gave to Mill's argument. She argued that free critical dialogue in the community allows bias to be overcome, through intersubjective criticism of hypotheses and the background assumptions that frame them. I suggest that Longino's approach allows for the identification of the fundamental problems of the research programs Kitcher targeted, and for the rejection of their claims to knowledge. Thus it is possible to address Kitcher's problem without limiting freedom of speech. (shrink)

This chapter offers a plea for the media to reframe its coverage of campus controversies from free expression to academic freedom. These freedoms are entwined, but distinct. Freedom of expression is extended to all persons with no expectation of quality control, apart from legal prohibitions against defamation, threats, etc. By contrast, academic freedom is a cluster of freedoms afforded to scholarly personnel for a particular purpose – namely, the pursuit of universities’ academic mission to seek (...) truth and advance understanding in the service of society. An academic freedom framing better reflects the distinctive social purpose around which universities are organized, as well as universities’ duty of care to employees and students. While universities have a legal and moral duty of care to all employees and students, the unjust, exclusionary past and present of higher education arguably makes that duty particularly acute in the case of equity-deserving (e.g., racialized, Indigenous, disabled or 2SLGBTQ+) people. Finally, academic freedom framing for campus media stories is less monolithic than free expression framing, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of campus controversies while keeping universities accountable to the public they serve. In this chapter, I survey three very different campus controversies at a single Canadian university, and the media response each received. I show how an academic freedom frame for those stories would have produced better reportage while reducing opportunities for bad actors to manipulate both universities and the media. At the end of the day, the real crisis at universities isn’t the cancellation of ill-judged events that were never a part of the academic mission; it is the ongoing erosion of academic freedom. (shrink)

In this review, I outline Lærke's interpretation of Spinoza's freedom of philosophizing as a rich, positive freedom, encompassing but extending far beyond mere legal permission for free expression. Lærke's book takes on the challenge to explain how such freedom is to be brought about. I suggest that Lærke's reconstruction overlooks a central plank of Spinoza's approach: the role of good institutional design in supporting freedom. The longer version is the original author submission; the shorter version (...) was trimmed on the journal's request. (shrink)

_One of the strongest arguments against hate speech legislation is the so-called Argument from Political Speech. This argument problematizes the restrictions that might be placed on political opinions or political critique when these opinions are expressed in a way which can be interpreted as ‘hateful’ towards minority groups. One of the strongest free speech scholars opposing hate speech legislation is Ronald Dworkin, who stresses that having restrictions on hate speech is, in fact, illegitimate in a liberal democracy. The right to (...) express oneself freely concerning any political decision is, according to Dworkin, a core democratic principle; it is what self-governance – and hence liberal democracies – are built upon. Dworkin and many other free speech scholars based in the United States see hate speech legislation as a threat to expressing oneself freely and critically. I argue that Dworkin and other US-based free speech scholars tend to overlook actual hate speech legislation in countries where such laws have been implemented and have functioned for decades. Furthermore, I argue that the real threat against political speech lies not in hate speech legislation but rather outside of the law, namely, in private institutions such as universities and museums. Restrictions on political speech in various societal circumstances have been on the rise over the last decades – first and foremost in the US. I analyse why these restrictions on political speech are more widespread in the only Western country without laws against hate speech than they are in countries with implemented hate speech laws._ _Keywords_: political speech, hate speech, hate speech legislation, private institu-tions, universities, USA. (shrink)

As with terms such as “human rights”, “democracy”, and “equality”, the notion of “freedom” has an emblematic character with highly normative overtones. After the declaration of universal human rights, one might argue that freedom is – at least formally – a universal entitlement belonging to every human being. However, this universalist structure is built upon a conflictual foundation, as the juridico-political meaning of freedom is determined by the boundaries of national citizenship, statehood, and territorial sovereignty. This chapter (...) examines refugeehood as a normal by-product of the post-colonial world order, embodying the counter-history of nation-states whose internal borders, walls, and external fortifications are growingly being militarised and reinforced. Refugeehood represents an anomalous juridico-political condition that cannot be elucidated by colonial-racial binaries such as inclusion versus exclusion or rightlessness versus national citizenship. The central idea of this chapter is that, for refugees, the meaning of freedom and unfreedom are intertwined and should be approached as a dynamic relationship characterising the state of (non)-subjectivity. As political (non)-subjects, refugees call structural determinations of unfreedom into question. Refugees’ freedom is expressed in the act of flight and border crossing, irregular migratory movement, language games of resistance, and other emancipatory signifying practices by which they claim a place of refuge in the world. (shrink)

Li Zehou’s work can be understood as an account of a Chinese modernity, a vision for Chinese society that seeks to integrate three distinct philosophical approaches. These are Chinese history and culture, which Li understands as largely Confucian; Marxism, which has exerted such influence on a modernizing China; and Western learning more generally, as expressed by figures such as Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. Li also frequently expresses the hope that a Chinese modernity will be one in which the importance (...) of the individual is recognized, and rights and freedoms upheld (e.g., Li and Cauvel 2006, p. 182). But this stance raises an important question: how are individuality and freedom understood in Li’s philosophical system? In this paper, I want to examine what resources Li offers to help us conceptualize their place in a modernity with Chinese characteristics. Confucian culture is often regarded as authoritarian and hierarchical, less interested than more liberal traditions in an ideal such as freedom. So how does freedom relate to the Confucian root of Chinese culture, as construed by Li? In this paper I explore how Li Zehou’s study of Confucian aesthetics can deliver a novel conception of freedom, one grounded in Confucian thinking about personal cultivation, and aimed at the free creation of delight (樂). (shrink)

In the face of the increasing substitution of free speech for academic freedom, I argue for the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of the latter. Academic freedom has evolved alongside universities in order to support the important social purpose universities serve. Having limned this evolution, I compare academic freedom and free speech. This comparison reveals freedom of expression to be an individual freedom, and academic freedom to be a group-differentiated freedom with a social purpose. (...) I argue that the social purpose of academic freedom behooves an inclusive approach to group differentiation. (shrink)

It is often held that people have a moral right to believe and say whatever they want. For instance, one might claim that they have a right to believe racist things as long as they keep those thoughts to themselves. Or, one might claim that they have a right to pursue any philosophical question they want as long as they do so with a civil tone. In this paper I object to those claims and argue that no one has such (...) unlimited moral rights. In Part 1 I explore the value of the freedoms of thought and expression. In Part 2 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free expression, focusing in particular on the special obligations and moral constraints that obtain for academics. In Part 3 I argue against the unlimited moral right to free thought. (shrink)

Furthering Western style academic freedom has been challenging, as Arab countries, especially Libya, have known only autocratic regimes throughout their modern existence. Amidst its current political and social upheaval, Libyan society is drifting towards the unknown. The problem addressed in this study is the impact of political change on the state of academia but, more specifically, academic freedom. Since the intervention in Libya by NATO states, many academics have lost their jobs. Some have become refugees outside of Libya (...) as a direct result of the appropriation of most of the governmental posts in the country by religious and political radicals. The research questions reflect ways in which the new inserted de facto leaders of post-transitional Libya have impacted life on Libyan campuses and academic freedom. (shrink)

Religious freedom is often thought to protect, not only religious practices, but also the underlying religious beliefs of citizens. But what should be said about religious beliefs that oppose religious freedom itself or that deny the concept of equal citizenship? The author argues here that such beliefs, while protected against coercive sanction, are rightly subject to attempts at transformation by the state in its expressive capacities. Transformation is entailed by a commitment to publicizing the reasons and principles that (...) justify the basic rights of citizens. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

This special issue of Journal of Poetry Therapy focuses on the use of poetry and other forms of expressive writing to explore the transformative experiences of military veterans, and so in this article I discuss how the use of poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy positively influenced my life while I was serving in the United States Air Force (USAF) from 2000 through 2004. This article briefly reviews my reasons for enlisting and discusses the importance that poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy had for (...) me during four different phases of my military history: (i) Basic Military Training, (ii) Aircraft Qualification, Combat Survival, and Water Survival Training, (iii) serving in the post 9/11 operations Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and (iv) the period after fulfilling my time of service for the USAF. In discussing each phase, I explain the unique challenges that I encountered, how I used poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy to successfully overcome these challenges, point out relevant examples of poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy that were particularly influential, and include pictures of my experiences throughout. (shrink)

Li Zehou’s work can be understood as an account of a Chinese modernity, a vision for Chinese society that seeks to integrate three distinct philosophical approaches. These are Chinese history and culture, which Li understands as largely Confucian; Marxism, which has exerted such influence on a modernizing China; and Western learning more generally, as expressed by figures such as Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. Li also frequently expresses the hope that a Chinese modernity will be one in which the importance (...) of the individual is recognized, and rights and freedoms upheld (e.g., 2006, p. 182). But this stance raises an important question: how are individuality and freedom understood in Li’s philosophical system? In this paper, I want to examine what resources Li offers to help us conceptualize their place in a modernity with Chinese characteristics. Confucian culture is often regarded as authoritarian and hierarchical, less interested than more liberal traditions in an ideal such as freedom. So how does freedom relate to the Confucian root of Chinese culture, as construed by Li? In this paper I explore how Li Zehou’s study of Confucian aesthetics can deliver a novel conception of freedom, one grounded in Confucian thinking about personal cultivation, and aimed at the free creation of delight (樂). (shrink)

With insights from philosophy of language and semiotics, this article addresses judicial choices and semantic errors involved in United States v. Stevens, 130 S.Ct. 1577 (2010) (refusing to read “killing” and “wounding” to include cruelty and thus striking down a federal statute outlawing videos of animal cruelty), and Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S.Ct. 1207 (2011) (finding a First Amendment right to picket military funerals and verbally attack parents of dead soldiers as part of purportedly-public expression). -/- This article maintains (...) that a better understanding of semiotics (the theory of signs) exposes the flaws in both decisions and bolsters the arguments of the lone dissenter in both cases, Justice Alito. Such a better understanding of semiotics involves grasping (a) how expression involves signs, (b) how signs work in general, and (c) the differences between three basic kinds of signs (indexes, icons and symbols). This article maintains that the expression involved in Stevens and in Phelps was a type of indexical or quasi-indexical expression that, for reasons similar to those involved in child pornography cases, should have no First Amendment protection. -/- This article also notes shifting interpretive positions in the Court that cry out for reform. Although Chief Justice Roberts uses a textualist approach in his majority opinion striking down the animal cruelty statute in Stevens, his majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 132 S.Ct. 2566 (2012), has no trouble finding a “penalty” a “tax,” upholding the Affordable Care Act, and chastising the dissent for voting to strike down a statute simply because “. . . Congress used the wrong labels.” Id. at 2597. -/- This article attempts to expose such gamesmanship in “textualism” and attempts to lay out a better semiotic path for the Court. It calls for more forthright judicial decision-making in constitutional and statutory interpretation; calls for rejecting mechanical notions of law that conceal judicial choice involved in constitutional and statutory interpretation; and calls for rejecting claims that dictionaries can settle constitutional or statutory interpretation issues without reference to constitutional and statutory goals. -/- Keywords: interpretation, construction, meaning, plain meaning, originalism, original intent, canon, semiotics, signs, signals, symbol, icon, index, signifier, signified, ordinary meaning, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, animal cruelty, first amendment, statutes. (shrink)

In mainstream political discourse, refugeehood is increasingly being associated with victimhood, powerlessness, abnormality, and political crises. On the one hand, refugees are, often, viewed as voiceless victims who should be offered protection and assistance on humanitarian grounds under exceptional circumstances. On the other hand, they are, increasingly, being portrayed as enemy-like strangers who pose a threat to the borders, stability of receiving states, and the well-being of their citizens. This prevailing framework fundamentally disregards refugees’ political subjectivity and ignores emancipatory phenomena (...) and practices of freedom, which are embedded and expressed in refugees’ migratory movements. This philosophical investigation aims to contribute to our understanding of the dynamic relationship of freedom and unfreedom from the perspective of refugees. To examine this dynamic relationship, this study situates itself in the autonomy of migration approach and draws on narratives and lived experiences of refugees, which were collected during in-depth interviews with refugees (Greece). These experiential accounts have been analysed and theoretically discussed in accordance with the guidelines of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Through an interpretative process, this study critically contextualizes refugees’ perceptions and understandings of freedom in ongoing theoretical discussions concerning refugeehood and freedom. Based on these critical discussions, this study develops a theoretical examination of the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in different spatio-temporal phases of refugeehood. In doing so, it explores the multifaceted act of flight, lived experiences of (un)freedom, socio-political structures of abandonment, and autonomous relations and arrangements by which refugees enact freedom in receiving states. Moreover, it challenges the prevalent conceptual distinctions between citizens versus non-citizens, hosts (nationals) versus guests (migrants), genuine refugees versus economic migrants, and the included (right-holders) versus the excluded (the rightless). (shrink)

Generosity is not best understood as an alliance of forces, necessary for mortal beings with limited time and skills. Sociability as generosity exceeds the realm of need and follows directly from our strength of character [fortitudo] because it expresses a positive power to overcome anti-social passions, such as hatred, envy, and the desire for revenge. Spinoza asserts that generous souls resist and overwhelm hostile forces and debilitating affects with wisdom, foresight, and love. The sociability yielded by generosity, then, is not (...) just a form of cooperation we need to survive and produce leisure for study and contemplation. Generosity is not a mere means but a positive expression of freedom, because it is the activity through which a strong soul (and body) transforms enemies into friends. It is not an expression of lack, but of an acquired power that infuses one’s social milieu with empowering love and joy, creating agreements in nature and power where they did not previously exist. Attention to generosity reveals not only that there are social virtues proper to Spinoza’s understanding of freedom but that freedom itself is, by necessity, social. (shrink)

Contemporary Islam presents Europe in particular with a political and moral challenge: Moderate-progressive Muslims and radical fundamentalist Muslims present differing visions of the relation of politics and religion and, consequently, differing interpretations of freedom of expression. There is evident public concern about Western “political correctness,” when law or policy accommodates censorship of speech allegedly violating religious sensibilities. Referring to the thought of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and accounting for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Universal Islamic Declaration of (...) Human Rights, and various empirical studies on the religious convictions of Muslims, it is argued here that: (1) sovereign European state powers should be especially cautious of legal censorship of speech allegedly violating Muslim religious sensibilities; and (2) instead of legal moves to censorship, European states should defer to the principle of separation of religion and state (political authority). Further, a reasonable interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence allows that matters of religious difference may be engaged and resolved by appeal to private conscience and ethical judgment, rather than by appeal to public law per se. In so far as they are 1 representative of contemporary scholarship, the interpretative positions of Ziad Elmarsafy, Jacques Derrida, and Nasr Abū Zayd are presented in illustration of this latter point. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to design a conception of political poverty that can address the loss of the experience of political freedom. This form of political poverty is described as separate from poverty of resources and opportunities, and poverty of capabilities required for participation. The study aims to make intelligible how a person or a group can suffer from a diminishing and fracturing of social experience, which can lead to the inability to experience oneself as a capable (...) and credible political agent, political engagement as a meaningful field of action, and democratic politics as a meaningful avenue for changing things for the better. This is a phenomenon which has been heretofore neglected by political theorists. -/- The study presents a heuristic diagnosis of political poverty as loss of experiential freedom that involves four aspects of experience that have specifically political relevance: loss of trust, loss of expressivity, loss of a sense of access to the public world, and the loss of future temporality in experience. Diminishing and fracturing of these aspects of social experience can lead to politically impoverished persons and groups to become complicit in their own marginalisation by remaining unmotivated to challenge it. These aspects of social experience are approached through phenomenological portraits, chosen from literature on social exclusion and poverty. The diagnosis remains open to further development through exploration of other aspects of experience. -/- The study draws on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to present an account of political freedom as only experienced in co-existence with others. Through a critical discussion of their work, a more comprehensive account of political agency is developed. The experience of having political agency involves not just the cognitive and communicative capacities of the subject, but also the entire perceptual and motor intentionality of their lived body. The experience of meaningfulness is approached by exploring the intersubjective constitution of the self in a dialectical process with their social environment. This experience is described as a form of faith in oneself as an agent and in the meaningfulness of political engagement. Such faith is a practical, meaning-giving intentional relationship of a lived body to their social environment. -/- This study emphasizes the experience of being a capable and credible political agent, and experiencing politics as a meaningful field for engagement, as important aspects of political freedom that should be considered alongside inclusivity of democratic processes, the equality of opportunity to participate, and the equality of the cognitive and communicative capabilities required for effective participation. In order to discuss political poverty as the loss of experiential freedom, we must go beyond objectivist models of social critique and approach the problem with the tools of existential phenomenology. (shrink)

This essay reframes salient issues in discussions of free will using conceptual apparatus developed in the works of Saul Kripke, with particular attention paid to his little-discussed technical notion of a prejudice. I begin by focusing on how various forms of modality (metaphysical, epistemic, and conceptual) underlie alternate forms of compatibilism and discuss why it is important to avoid conflating these forms of compatibilism. The concept of a prejudice is then introduced. We consider the semantic role of prejudices, in particular (...) conditions in which prejudices turn out to express metaphysically necessary truths. With that as background, I discuss a set of prejudices involving the notion of choice. We consider the role these prejudices might play, should they turn out to be true, in determining the answer to various compatibility questions concerning the nature of moral responsibility and choice. (shrink)

In this article I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a method for presenting a disclosing critique of aphonia as the loss of a political voice of one’s own. I claim that aphonia is a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from a lack of opportunities for democratic participation and a lack of the communicative capabilities required for effective political participation. I give examples from sociological literature on social exclusion and political apathy, and then diagnose them using Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of operative (...) intentionality and the lived body. A picture emerges of aphonia as the diminishing of the expressive modality of the lived body. This can lead to the inability to perceive oneself as a capable public speaker and the public realm as a welcoming field of possibilities for political engagement. I propose that democratic theory should consider the way that the negative social experiences of social marginalization can diminish, or even completely take away, the capability to authentically give a voice to one’s experiences in public on one’s own terms. I conclude with a call for grass-roots alternatives towards engendering political participation among marginalized groups through a “therapeutic” approach to political inclusion. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it (...) not be fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent (...) part of everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a framework to understand the transition in Foucault’s work from the disciplinary model to the governmentality model. Foucault’s work on power emerges within the general context of an expression of capitalist rationality and the nature of freedom and power within it. I argue that, thus understood, Foucault’s transition to the governmentality model can be seen simultaneously as a deepening recognition of what capitalism is and how it works, but also as a recognition of (...) the changing historical nature of the actually existing capitalisms and their specifically situated historical needs. I then argue that the disciplinary model should be understood as a contingent response to the demands of early capitalism, and argue that with the maturation of the capitalist enterprise many of those responses are no longer necessary. New realities require new responses; although this does not necessarily result in the abandonment of the earlier disciplinary model, it does require their reconfiguration according to the changed situation and the new imperatives following from it. (shrink)

After being largely unknown to non-siniphone philosophers, Li Zehou's ideas are gradually being translated into English, but very little has been done on his aesthetics, which he says is the key to his oeuvre. In the first of three sections of this paper, I briefly introduce the reader to Kant's aesthetics through Li's eyes, in which he develops an implicit notion of aesthetic freedom as political vehicle through the notions of subjectivity, universalization, and the unity of the cognitive faculties. (...) In the second section, I introduce Marx's notions of 'human nature as practice' and 'freedom as practice', as outlined in his early manuscripts. I conclude that Marx's politics take free practice as the highest expression of humanity, which is finally, ideally, self-legislating. In the final section, I present Li's interpretation of Marx as a remedy for Kant, introducing some of Li's specialized vocabulary and demonstrating his final synthesis of Kant and Marx in a notion of aesthetic freedom that presupposes political freedom. (shrink)

If I take a free decision, how does this express itself physically? If God acts in this world, how does he do so? The answers to those two questions may be different or the same. Here we sketch a typology of possible answers, including Transcendent Compatibility. It turns out that in an open universe, freedom is the timewise mirror image of causality.

In this article, I link Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion1 to decolonial perspectives that also challenge this universality of affect in cross-cultural facial expressions. After first outlining some of the present-day political stakes of these questions, I turn to Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" in Western modernity, where she asks: how were concepts of not only being, truth, power, and freedom but also affect—the intelligibility of one's feelings toward others—framed by histories of colonial violence and (...) refusals of imaginative identification?2 Wynter argues that the overrepresentation of the Western ethnoclass results in the naturalization of a limited and contingent mode of being as... (shrink)

Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfreedom such as those ideologically expressed in (...) possessive individualist and libertarian conceptions of freedom. (shrink)

Academic freedom is under attack, both in authoritarian democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey, and in liberal Western democracies, such as the United States, the UK, France and Germany. For example, Gender Studies are being targeted by right-wing governments in Eastern Europe, and in France President Emmanuel Macron has attacked post-colonial and critical theories as “Islamo-gauchisme“, portraying them as a danger to the Republic. However, dominant discourses about academic freedom and free speech in the global north, lately especially (...) in France and Germany, focus on an alleged threat to academic freedom through “political correctness” and “cancel culture”, that, under scrutiny, often turn out to be exactly the opposite, namely defences of plurality and critical voices. (shrink)

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...) which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

I highlight three features of P.F. Strawson’s later, neglected work on freedom and responsibility. First, in response to a criticism by Rajendra Prasad, Strawson explicitly rejects an argument put forward in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ against the relevance of determinism to moral responsibility. Second, his remarkable acceptance of Prasad’s criticism motivates him to take the ‘straight path’, that is, to be straightforward about the relation between determinism, freedom, the ability to do otherwise and the conditions of responsibility. He (...) claims that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of responsibility and provides a list of additional conditions, including a knowledge condition. Third, he clarifies the relation between responsibility, quality of will and the reactive attitudes. The latter do not figure essentially in his answer to the question, ‘What are the conditions of responsibility?’, but they do play an essential role in his answer to the question, ‘Why do we have the concept of responsibility?’ We have it, Strawson suggests, because of our natural concern about the quality of will with which people act, a concern expressed in our reactive attitudes. I argue that, although Strawson’s later work definitely involves a shift of emphasis when compared to ‘Freedom and Resentment’, his overall account of freedom and responsibility is coherent. The later work helps to better understand the nature and significance of Strawson’s contribution, and to identify problems with common interpretations of and objections to ‘Freedom and Resentment’. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that (...) Brandom can provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

My initial work, with collaborators Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner (2005, 2006), on surveying folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility was designed primarily to test a common claim in the philosophical debates: that ordinary people see an obvious conflict between determinism and both free will and moral responsibility, and hence, the burden is on compatibilists to motivate their theory in a way that explains away or overcomes this intuitive support for incompatibilism. The evidence, if any, offered (...) by philosophers to support the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive has consisted of reports of their own intuitions or informal polls of their students. We were skeptical about the reliability of such evidence, so we used the methodology--”now associated with the label 'experimental philosophy'--”of conducting formal surveys on non-philosophers. Our participants read a scenario that describes a deterministic universe and were then asked to judge whether agents in those scenarios act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. Using three different scenarios with hundreds of participants, we consistently found that the majority (2/3 to 4/5) responded that agents in deterministic universes do act of their own free will and are morally responsible. That is, we found that most ordinary folk do not seem to find incompatibilism intuitive or obviously correct. Our results have been challenged in various ways, philosophical and methodological. For instance, Shaun Nichols (2004, this volume) and Nichols and Joshua Knobe (unpublished) offer some experimental evidence suggesting that, in certain conditions, most people express incompatibilist and libertarian intuitions. I will respond to this work in the following section. I agree that people express conflicting intuitions about free will (after all, we consistently found a minority of participants expressing incompatibilist. (shrink)

The idea that citizens have a right to receive information that is relevant for their suitable exercise of political rights and liberties is well established in democratic societies. However, this right has never been systematically analyzed, thus remaining a blurry concept. This article tackles this conceptual gap by conceptualizing citizens’ right to information. After reviewing previous approaches to this idea, I locate citizens’ right to information on the map of communication rights, and put forward a systematic framework for both justifying (...) and analyzing it. This framework focuses on this right’s grounds, its function, its holders, its content, and its correlative duties. Although the conceptualization offered here will be incomplete, it will be enough to distinguish the general concept of citizens’ right to information from both its specific conceptions and from the other two best-known rights of the public: freedom of information and the public’s right to know. (shrink)

Kant’s early critics maintained that his theory of freedom faces a dilemma: either it reduces the will’s activity to strict necessity by making it subject to the causality of the moral law, or it reduces the will’s activity to blind chance by liberating it from rules of any kind. This Element offers a new interpretation of Kant’s theory against the backdrop of this controversy. It argues that Kant was a consistent proponent of the claim that the moral law is (...) the causal law of a free will, and that the supposed ability of free will to choose indifferently between options is an empty concept. Freedom, for Kant, is a power to initiate action from oneself, and the only way to exercise this power is through the law of one’s own will, the moral law. Immoral action is not thereby rendered impossible, but it also does not express a genuine ability. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

While most of the literature has attempted to justify harsh and soft containment given some fundamental commitments of political liberalism, I focus on how justified forms of containment can in themselves be deemed effective. This article shows that a reading of Rawls allows for a comparison of different containment practices based on their capacity to protect the stability of liberal democracies under serious threat. And, in making it possible to compare harsh and soft containment, I evaluate immediate stability gains against (...) citizens’ judgements about their liberal democratic institutions. (shrink)

The debate on whether and how the Internet can protect and foster human rights has become a defining issue of our time. This debate often focuses on Internet governance from a regulatory perspective, underestimating the influence and power of the governance of the Internet’s architecture. The technical decisions made by Internet Standard Developing Organisations that build and maintain the technical infrastructure of the Internet influences how information flows. They rearrange the shape of the technically mediated public sphere, including which rights (...) it protects and which practices it enables. In this article, we contribute to the debate on SDOs’ ethical responsibility to bring their work in line with human rights. We defend three theses. First, SDOs’ work is inherently political. Second, the Internet Engineering Task Force, one of the most influential SDOs, has a moral obligation to ensure its work is coherent with, and fosters, human rights. Third, the IETF should enable the actualisation of human rights through the protocols and standards it designs by implementing a responsibility-by-design approach to engineering. We conclude by presenting some initial recommendations on how to ensure that work carried out by the IETF may enable human rights. (shrink)

The new frontiers in the philosophy of intellectual property lie squarely in territories belonging to moral and political philosophy, as well as legal philosophy and philosophy of economics – or so this collection suggests. Those who wish to understand the nature and justification of intellectual property may now find themselves immersed in philosophical debates on the structure and relative merits of consequentialist and deontological moral theories, or disputes about the nature and value of privacy, or the relationship between national and (...) global justice. Conversely, the theoretical and practical problems posed by intellectual property are increasingly relevant to bioethics and philosophy and public policy, as well as to more established areas of moral and political philosophy. Perhaps this is just to say that the philosophy of intellectual property is coming into its own as a distinct field of intellectual endeavour, providing a place where legal theorists and philosophers can have the sorts of discussions - neither reducible to questions about what the law is, nor wholly divorced from contemporary legal problems - which typify debates about freedom of expression, discrimination and human rights. These are all areas in which legal and philosophical ideas influence each other at the level of method as well as of substance. My hope is that this collection of essays will appeal to those who, whatever their professional specialty or training, share an interest in the philosophy of intellectual property, and that it will build upon and advance existing interdisciplinary dialogue and research in this complex, fascinating, and important area. Authors include John Christman, Stephen Munzer, Alex Rosenberg, Geert Demunijck, Laura Biron, James Wilson . (shrink)