| dc.description.abstract | There is a category of speech, call it hate speech, which dehumanizes. In virtue of dehumanizing it undermines its victims’ ability to speak. Traditional, liberal theories of free speech based on a negative conception of liberty do not in themselves give us the tools to acknowledge hate speech’s badness due to their commitment to neutrality between opinions. Instead, they function so as to give us the tools to discuss our differing opinions. But this is a problem because hate speech, in virtue of dehumanizing, implicitly claims the utterer is infallible and that counter-argumentation is superfluous. It thus rejects any debate free speech as negative liberty might facilitate. To attempt to engage with hate speakers in conversation is therefore potentially self-defeating on the part of someone who subscribes to free speech as negative liberty. In order to rectify this problem, we might want to develop a theory of free speech which in itself requires us to hold some opinions better than others. One way to do this is to base one’s understanding of free speech on positive liberty. Positive liberty is concerned with self-realization, typically understood as adhering to one’s authentic moral intuitions. Merging Charles Taylor’s understanding of reasoning and strong evaluation with K. E. Løgstrup’s concept of the ethical demand and fundamental trust allows us to conceive of other people as a kind of inescapable and external moral source, and as such universally demand what I call ‘care-for’. To most authentically adhere to a moral intuition on this understanding of positive liberty is to provide other people with care-for. Because other people are fundamentally unknowable and inexhaustible as moral sources, and because they function so as to provide us with our sense of self, it becomes impossible for us to authentically believe ourselves infallible. Thus, moreover, in conceiving of free speech as positive liberty, understood in terms of care-for, it becomes impossible for us to hate speak whilst maintaining our own freedom of speech. Consequently, unlike what was the case for free speech as negative liberty, subscribing to free speech as positive liberty in itself obligates us to reject hate speech. Accepting the surely uncontroversial idea that it would be bad for our concepts of free speech to be self-defeating, this must be said to render free speech as positive liberty superior with regards to its stance on hate speech. | eng |