Deeper Foundations? (John Speaking)
						MAIN PATH: Event

Let me try to sum this up.

• We had different descriptions or definitions of what happened Saturday. Our different descriptions were linked to other political and social views about how the world works and what is likely or unlikely. Fred viewed Saturday's "incident" as the work of isolated individuals. Ann and Vera rejected that definition and want to link what happened to broader conditions on campus or in society at large. Ann defined Saturday's incident as "harassment." Vera and Malik went further and defined it as "assaultive speech."
  
• We agreed to use a narrow definition of hate speech, but Vera would like to expand it to include the distinction between the historically oppressed and the oppressor. Malik pointed out that hate speech may have different consequences for different people belonging to groups with different histories. He believes that rules dealing with hate speech should take these different consequences into account.
  
• Most of us agree that there are important practical benefits from a liberal policy on freedom of expression. It helps make democracy work. It facilitates the search for truth, and so on. Malik labeled these claims as part of our political mythology and wanted more support for the empirical claims involved, such as the claim that free speech maximizes social progress.
  
• Finally, we looked for some deeper justification for freedom of expression in ethical theory or political philosophy. Several people offered theories, but there was no agreement. Ann is a rule utilitarian. Malik would like a different theory that provides a better basis for protection from utilitarian calculations. He's not sure that the traditional concept of individual rights can provide the protection and wonders whether we also need a theory of group rights. I pointed out that some philosophers have suggested that freedom of speech can be worked into the framework provided by John Rawls. Dee rejected utilitarianism and a Rawlsean contract and based freedom of expression on her view of what rights and powers people would voluntarily hand over to government. Vera thinks the traditional approaches have undermined each other with decades of criticism and wants a new paradigm that gets beyond the wrangling.

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