Free speech and social change: a public reason approach

Abstract Free speech is a fundamental right in liberal democracies. Yet, liberal democracies often face difficult decisions about whether, when and how to curtail various types of speech—including hate speech, pornography, fake news, and offensive speech. In this climate, there is a pressing need to reappraise the case for free speech protection and re-establish shared grounds for its legitimacy. This paper asks whether and to what extent social change has affected the ability of the three main arguments for free speech—truth, autonomy, and democracy—to provide a public justification for (and therefore legitimize) free speech protection. By drawing on John Rawls’s (2005) idea of public reason we evaluate the main arguments for free speech in societies transformed by five processes: greater individualism, international migration, post-truth communication, increasing awareness of cognitive biases, and rapid technological change. We conclude that the truth and autonomy arguments lose their force as a result of these processes and that only the democracy argument can provide a public justification for free speech as a constitutionally protected right in contemporary democratic societies characterized by social change.