"Responsible" Views?

You already, I presume, can give me your views on virtually any free speech issue I present to you. The aim of this course is not to get you to change your mind about any of your views. Instead, it is to help you to change your mind--to change the way you think about these issues. In particular, by the end of the course you will have developed your thinking abilities in three crucial respects.

1. You will know your own mind

Right now, you can state your opinions. But are they really yours? Or are they just a product of your environment? Have you just inherited your views from your parents, for example, or developed them in opposition to your parents--that being much the same thing? Or for another example: right now you may think that it is foolish to try to limit teens' access to sexual images; in fifteeen years or so, when you are a parent facing just this issue, it's likely you'll think the opposite. But if your views change so easily with circumstances, are you really "thinking" at all?

Figuring out what you yourself actually think requires two key intellectual abilities. The first is a sensitivity to the presence of potential free speech issues all around you. For example, consider a standard college situation: the lecture. Does having to sit quietly through a lecture, even one you disagree with, infringe your right of free speech? Or would interrupting infringe the teacher's right to speak, or possibly your fellow students' right to hear? OK, this may not be a difficult issue to decide. But you can't be sure that your own views are anything more than knee jerk prejudices until you have recognized that there are serious questions in front of you that need to be thought about.

This course will help you develop your ability to recognize issues:

by exposing you to many of the "contemporary problems" that are currently being debated, and
by asking you to go and find some new ones of your own.

The second key ability in becoming master of your own mind is to discover and articulate the deeper, more fundamental values on which all your various views rest. Once you begin to recognize the free speech issues all around you, you may begin to notice that your opinions on them are pretty much a mess. Some speech, you think, should be punished, some not; some seems dangerous, some harmless. Why? Can you reach down and discover the underlying princples that are helping guide you through all these different issues? If you can, then it's more likely your various opinions will become coherent with each other--they won't contradict each other. And if you can, it's more likely that your various opinions will remain stable through time--they won't change in different environments, or under stress.

This course will help you articulate your own basic values:

by exposing you to some of the deep values that others have found attractive,
by asking you to try to form coherent views on a variety of complex issues, and
by encouraging you to try to state clearly, simply and repeatedly your fundamental beliefs

2. You will be able to defend your views.

In much of your life up to now, it has probably been enough to simply have opinions; you haven't needed to defend them. In your family, for example, you are loved and respected (I hope) simply for yourself, not because you are able to claim and defend your place. And when you venture out into the world as a consumer, you are again not responsible for defending what you think. When you go to Burger King and order a double cheeseburger, it would be extremely odd if the person at the register challenged you to defend that choice.

As an adult and a full citizen of this country, however, you will face a very different situation. All of us are faced with the task of trying to work out a common life together with the strangers that are our fellow citizens. In this world, views are not simply taken for granted. What you believe will be challenged, and you will need to justify yourself; further, you may want to gain the support of others--to persuade them to join you in your views. This will require you to go beyond just having your own opinions, to the further task of defending them to others.

Again, there are two key intellectual abilities required to allow you to defend your views. The first is simply to realize that they need defending, by recognizing and understanding and empathizing with views very different from your own. Consider the case of "veggie libel"--laws passed by various states which allow lawsuits against those who publish false claims about the harmfulness or dangerousness of agricultural products. The name itself is ridiculous, the laws are conspicuously wrongheaded, and I've had students who simply say "That's stupid!" and want to leave it at that. But these laws (although perhaps unconstitutional) are not "stupid." A series of false claims in the eighties severely hurt industries in several states, starting with the "Alar" scare about Washington apples, and it is not "stupid" to try to do something about this problem. You need to get past the "that's stupid" response to see that your views need a defense at all: that other people, just as rational as you are, have some good reasons to disagree with you.

This course will help you develop your ability to understand others' views:

by exposing you to the differing views that have been put forward by advocates on free speech issues,
by giving you the opportunity to work closely with your fellow Court (group) members,
by asking you to state and occasionally even role-play viewpoints that may be quite foreign to you.

The second key skill is to be able to develop--or in rhetorical terms, invent--something to say to these rational but disagreeable people. The first course goal has helped you find your own reasons for your views. But you also need to find reasons to address to others--that is, the particular form of reason we call arguments. Arguments, as we will be discussing, are answers to the doubts and objections that reasonable people will likely raise against your views. By presenting arguments, you are addressing the strangers that are your fellow citizens on the basis of one of the few things you have in common--human reason.

This course will help you invent strong arguments:

by training you in some basic concepts about arguing (like "premise" and "conclusion"),
by providing you with a toolkit of commonplace arguments ("topoi") on free speech issues,
by asking you to analyze carefully the arguments of others, especially by briefing Supreme Court opinions, and
by asking you to make arguments, and giving you a variety of opportunities to hear the responses to them by those who disagree

3. You will feel at home in the free speech tradition.

If the world had been created yesterday, the first two course goals would be sufficient. But it wasn't. The debates we are entering do not begin with us; we are joining an episode already in progress. And it is vital to become aware of what has gone on in the debates before. Why? I'll suggest three reasons.

First, a reason of efficiency. Arguments do evolve; the better ones flourish and grow, the weaker ones tend to die. To become a good arguer, therefore, it is very useful to be familiar with and borrow from the best arguments that have survived the stresses of previous debates.

Second, so as not to look stupid--or even better, to look smart. The people you'll be debating with know the tradition, and will use it. They'll be throwing around phrases like "chilling effect," names like Whitney and Gitlow, and quotes like "don't burn the house to roast the pig." To gain their respect, you'd better be able to do the same thing, too.

And finally, it is only if you appreciate the weight and direction of the free speech tradition that you will be able to participate in it fully, and even direct it. The goal in this course is not just to give you the tools to win your battles, one by one; I hope you will be developing an overall view or philosophy of free speech as a whole--the role speech plays in our society, why it is valuable, and how it can cause harm. If you are going to realize your philosophy--to make it real in the world--you have to have an overall perspective of where we have been, in order to direct us to where you think we ought to be going.

Again, there are two key intellectual abilities required to help you feel at home in the free speech tradition. The first is the ability to recognize and remember bits of the tradition ("chilling," "Whitney", "pig") when you see them; to develop this ability, you'll to become familiar with the tradition in detail.

This course will help you become familiar with the free speech tradition:

by exposing you to large parts of it, at least those parts of it fought out in the U.S. Supreme Court,
by encouraging you to pay close attention to it, through the briefing of cases, and
by encouraging you to review and organize your knowledge prior to a midterm exam.

The second intellectual ability required is to be able to use the tradition. We will be discussing a variety of uses. The simplest is to borrow eloquence--to lift striking quotes from others' arguments, and use them to enrich your own work. In a more complex form of borrowing, you can use and perhaps even improve lines of argument that have been deployed in the past. And finally, you will be able to use controversies that have already been decided as precedents in order to resolve new debates.

This course will help you draw from the tradition:

by systematically discussing the use of prior precedents, and
by giving you many opportunities to use eloquence, arguments and precedents in your own arguing.

4. In conclusion

If you systematically develop the three key thinking abilities discussed here, by the end of the course you should be developing what I call "responsible views"--views which respond or answer to the deepest sources of your own thinking; to the serious concerns of others; and to the free speech tradition itself.

http://faculty-web.at.nwu.edu/commstud/freespeech/