Just as there is no such thing as a free market, there is no such thing as free speech. All speech is in context and in a historical and cultural setting. Speech is determined by what we know or think we know as well as where we are and who we are with. FS is a enormous abstraction that is often shown to be un-free by law, culture, and setting. There's no need to give examples of why that is so. Or consider hate speech or even pornography. See these two examples.
'Only Words' Catharine A. MacKinnon
The Harm in Hate Speech (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures, 2009) Jeremy Waldron
Read Stanley Fish's excellent essay or check his intereview here.
"Many discussions of free speech, especially by those whom I would call free speech ideologues, begin by assuming as normative the situation in which speech is offered for its own sake, just for the sake of expression. The idea is that free expression, the ability to open up your mouth and deliver an opinion in a seminar-like atmosphere, is the typical situation and any constraint on free expression is therefore a deviation from that typical or normative situation. I begin by saying that this is empirically false, that the prototypical academic situation in which you utter sentences only to solicit sentences in return with no thought of actions being taken, is in fact anomalous. It is something that occurs only in the academy and for a very small number of people.
Therefore, a theory of free speech which takes such weightless situations as being the centre of the subject seems to me to go wrong from the first. I begin from the opposite direction. I believe the situation of constraint is the normative one and that the distinctions which are to be made are between differing situations of constraint; rather than a distinction between constraint on the one hand and a condition of no constraint on the other. Another way to put this is to say that, except in a seminar-like situation, when one speaks to another person, it is usually for an instrumental purpose: you are trying to get someone to do something, you are trying to urge an idea and, down the road, a course of action.
These are the reasons for which speech exists and it is in that sense that I say that there is no such thing as "free speech", that is, speech that has as its rationale nothing more than its own production." "There is no such thing as free speech": an interview with Stanley Fish <P>
