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Defending the right to speak freely and disagree

Network Norwich columnist James Knight, responds to points raised about his recent Freedom of Speech articles.

Having seen a few weeks ago the reason why I think that we cannot judge our moral standard with one philosophy and continue to create systems based on philosophies of another kind (namely subjective philosophies) - we can look at something else here. 

Having received over 40 letters of support and approbation and (gladly) just one of indignation - I thought it would be a good idea to address the issues of the sole dissenter (which I will explain shortly). In doing this I also want to bring up right now something which everyone should know and most of us do know. 

Whenever we hear a voice or read an opinion which is vastly different from the common opinion, not only should we give that person the right to express themselves; we deny ourselves the right to hear or read the expression if we choose to seek refuge in the false security of consensus. There are, I would say, three works which stand up as regards this particular subject. John Milton’s Ario Pagatica, Thomas Paine’s Introduction To The Age Of Reason, and John Stuart Mill’s Essay On Liberty. The summarising central point of all the authors (if I may be so bold) is the following. It is not just the right of the person that speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone else to listen; and every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own actions because you deny yourself the right to hear something. 

In other words, your own right to hear is as involved as the other person’s is to have his or her view. The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently. We may not agree with everything we hear, but we do ourselves an injustice if we fail to hear the dissenting voices. Christ says that we will be insulted, persecuted, and offended - and as far as I know there is nowhere in the Bible which calls for statutory abrogation of such things.

Another important point when discussing the rights of others is to enquire as to who says what is acceptable? Who is going to invigilate this - that is, who is going to say what is acceptable and what is not? We are usually quite suspicious of those who scour things looking for impeachable content. We should, and often do, suspect their motives, like those who scrutinised Dr. Johnson’s first lexicon in search of expletives and profanity.

The abolition of, say, the blasphemy law, for example (a law which is totally ineffective anyway) - and other such laws which stifle free expression - do more harm to Christians than anyone else. Religion has carved out for itself a protective niche, whereby it seems reprehensible to contemplate questioning the efficacy of somebody else’s religious beliefs. We know the truth, we have nothing to hide. My own view is that religious expression (without fear of legal repercussions) is much to the benefit of those who really do have the truth on their side. We must be glad that people are free to criticise religion if it means that we can loosen the chains on our own freedom of expressing His glorious word.

I agree that any words which are likely to incite racial or religious hatred are to be seen as a criminal offence, but I think it might appear hypocritical of us to attempt to suppress free expression if it happens to offend us as Christians. The situation reminds me of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons - upon hearing that a man would give up all the laws in England to please the bad one, he suddenly realises that such an anarchic culmination would leave him no laws on which he could fall back for protection.

We might not like all that we hear, but it must be said that to deny the person the right to say it is to be guilty of an infringement of civil liberties. Even the most discordant and discrepant opinions may contain within them at least a grain of truth; therefore we should be impelled to consider them carefully. In doing so we remain alive to the dangers of rumour and superstition and we force ourselves to question how we know what we do and whether the sources from whence our knowledge came were reliable and verifiable. 

Having established the importance of opinions (even ones with which you do not agree), I now turn to the principal objection of my antagonist, to whom I shall refer henceforward as Mr X (for purposes of anonymity). The principal objection of Mr X (the secondary objections can all be corrected by a refutation of the principal objection) is that we humans create morality without any recourse to veracity. In other words, he objects on grounds that morality will change according to how we change culturally. I hope you will not think it discourteous of me to assert that I believe this contention to be wholly insensible. 

In the first place, we do not say that Hitler was evil because of any externally established theory about race or ethnicity; we say that he was evil based upon our observations of wicked and immoral actions and upon our understanding of what constitutes good and bad. At no point can we escape the fact that we must see morality as something outside of the situation in hand. If we take Mr X’s position we might find that we had nothing to fall back on when declaring that eugenics, as a socialist passion was less evil than eugenics as a desire to eradicate those who are seen as ‘inferior’. Mere utility can become an evil thing if we dispose of the standard, for if we are only judging the situation by what we think is useful for society, then we might claim that exterminating those who are ‘less-useful’ in society would be a good thing - a wholly immoral position to take.

It seems to me that Mr X’s objection is really a confusion regarding the emotional nature of appeals for better practices. A good example is this. Whenever you see stalls set up in the street campaigning for the support of, say, protection for animals, you will find that the appeal for donations is tendered with some pretty gruesome pictures of dogs being mistreated. Similarly if attention needs to be drawn to protection for children the onlookers will always be met with horrific images of injured and mistreated children. Now raising this kind of awareness is, of course, no bad thing - the more that can be done to make folk more mindful of these atrocities the better the chances will be for offering help and support. 

But any appeal to the emotions is based on an understanding that people have an in-built knowledge of what is moral and what is immoral. A man might stop at the stall and contemplate how much money he can afford to donate, but he does not have to think even for a second whether the physical abuse of a child is a bad thing or not. This is the difference between utility and immutability. If I am writing a tricky word, I might have to check to make sure I have spelled it correctly, but I do not have to stop to think if the method by which we spell things is correct, for if I did, I would be thinking about a nonentity. 

To take this point further, we behave unwisely if we take an emotion to be an absolute and consistent arbiter of truth. Emotions very rarely tell us about facts, they tell us how we are likely to react to facts. If a man feels jealous and angry because he thinks his wife is being unfaithful, his emotions do not prove one way or the other if his feelings are justified, only investigation will do that. But if he finds out that she is having an affair and contemplates killing her - he will then be faced with a moral question - one in which he will have various methods of concluding whether murder would be right or wrong. In order to conclude that murder would be the wrong action, he would appeal both to reason (investigation) and intuitive feelings (his in-built morality). He may still end up doing the wrong thing, but there is a difference between doing the wrong thing and not knowing what the wrong thing is, for very often we can suppress our knowledge of right and wrong if our compulsion to act (for revenge or for justice) is stronger than our compulsion to do the right thing. 

An even more difficult problem is faced when we look at vivisection (experimentation on living animals). Man A might insist that vivisection is immoral and make an appeal for it to be abolished; man B might insist that the eradication of human suffering can only be successful with vivisection and, thus, make an appeal for it to be acceptable. The rights and wrongs of both arguments are difficult and largely depend on many other factors, but one thing is certain - the appeals of both A and B tell us that if we can know one way or the other who is right, we will not find out by the appeal alone. If A is right then it is our moral duty to suppress our feelings for human suffering in favour of being more mindful of animal suffering. If B is right then it is our moral duty to suppress our concern for animal suffering in favour of being more mindful of human suffering. But perhaps the ‘right’ in this particular case is (as seems likely) something in between the two - a balance - knowledge of which we must obtain before we can act with the utmost rectitude. But the point remains - that no appeal at an emotional level can tell us about matters of fact regarding morality if we do not admit to an unchanging moral standard. 

This is why I think that Mr X’s solution is problematic. To say that there is no truth regarding morality is to say that there is no truth regarding the eradication of suffering either. If one is flaccid why not the other? If a man causing suffering to a dog or a child is not wrong, there is no reason to intervene. We have to admit that this kind of pain and suffering is wrong, while at the same time admitting that all pain cannot be categorised as wrong or immoral. We do not say that a man getting sunburn is immoral, for we know that sunburn serves as warning not to lie in the sun for too long. In this sense, mindfulness of sunburn is a good thing; that is, it protects us from soreness (and worse). 

But having admitted all this - that some pain is good for us, we have admitted that pain itself is not wrong, it is the cause of pain that is wrong. But to imply that a cause is wrong is to imply a standard by which causes are measured. Heart surgery will cause the patient pain and discomfort but the moral law says that heart surgery is not an immoral action. Beating up a man because he supports a rival football team will cause him pain and discomfort - and the moral law says that this action would be immoral. Mr X cannot have it both ways. If he wants all causes of pain to be neuter - that is, if he wants to treat sunburn and domestic violence as mere outcomes of a purposeless development of humanity then he is free to think this way. But the moment he does, you will find him minutes later claiming an opinion of absolute truth on some issue of ‘right and wrong’. 

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule; that is, if we are to do the sensible thing and admit that morality is a fixed thing, we have to admit that there will be times when an act which serves the greater good must have precedence over an act which would ordinarily be immoral if it were done with no greater good in mind. The actions of a person condition how we treat them. As a citizen of this country I have the right to walk in my local park if I wish. If however I were sent to prison for a crime I would forgo my right to stroll in the park. Upon being released from prison, I will have paid my debt and thus my right to walk in the park would be reinstated. That is the system on which all of this is based. Desert must sometimes condition our action - our knowledge of morality must condition our perception of desert. It would be far more immoral to hang a man for stealing a loaf of bread than it would to hang a man for mass genocide. 

There are further difficulties when we have to think about the absolute right thing to do. If a terrorist has programmed a nuclear bomb to go off in another country, the consequences of which is certain death for tens of thousands of people, some would argue that it could be morally justifiable to torture him if that were the only method of getting him to disengage the bomb. Others might argue that whatever atrocity is going to occur in this world we have a moral duty not to torture anybody. The same dilemmas are faced with issues of abortion, military intervention in foreign autocracies, and many other issues around the world. 

Faced with certain death for one ordinary decent man or five ordinary decent men one should choose the single tragedy every time. But if there were a situation where we could kill one man and use his organs to save five dying men, I am sure that most of us would consider that to be an immoral action to take. Mr X is right that there are many moral dilemmas in this world. But they are dilemmas because there is a moral standard - because everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. The moral law makes no concessions when it comes to our emotions - it tells us to do the right thing - it insists that the right action must be taken however difficult that action might be.

All this talk of pain and suffering might lead us into thinking that morality is inextricably linked to painful things, but a moment’s thought shows that this is not true. There are, of course, many pleasurable things that are immoral. A married man may be giving his female neighbour physical pleasure in her bedroom every day except Sundays. But the action is immoral not because it is pleasurable but because it is an act of infidelity. 

Many evolutionists have spoken out about human lineage - expressing the view that because all creatures descended from one living thing we should not think of ourselves as superior to the beasts. But the moment after you have heard a naturalist say that he thinks all species should be treated the same, you will see that he cannot escape the very real fact that his own ideas about morality directly contradict this principle. If he is to be consistent he must agree that the swatting of a fly with a newspaper or the killing of a rat with poison is to be seen as no different to killing a handicapped child. But you can be sure that he doesn’t think this way. In other words, if we treat one thing badly because we have the ability to do so, we have no reason for applying that principle to less-fortunate humans because we, as humans, consider human beings to be more precious and more sacred than the fly and the rat. 

On every showing we cannot escape the fact that we do, in fact (rightly), regard humans as more precious than animals. But having admitted this, it does not necessarily follow that everybody will see humans as superior, although most Christians do believe that we are higher than the animals (Matthew 10:31). It is therefore possible that a bifurcation might occur regarding how we should view different species and whether they should have parity or not. But to me this is missing the entire point - God says we are higher than the beasts not because He thinks it our duty to look down on animals but because we should look up to Him. That which makes us special is the very fact that we were created in His image. God did not put Himself into frogs and snails - Christ did not die for whales and hedgehogs - He died for us so that He could become part of us and that we could become part of Him. Therefore the moral question is not about feelings it is about facts. 

The moral law tells no lies. It says categorically that the death of one man is better than the death of a thousand. But it makes no equivocations about all avoidable deaths, or about any issues of right and wrong. Here we see one of the most stupendous paradoxes in creation. The death of Christ teaches us about the sanctity of every other human life. In the sense of the cross, death transcends immorality into something more glorious, because one death defeats death itself.

To read the first part of this article, click here

To read the second part of the article, click here

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