How Free should Free Speech be? Philosophical Perspectives

Public Symposium

Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Refectory, Quadrangle Building, The University of Sydney
1:00pm to 5:00pm (reception to follow)

Convenor: Duncan Ivison

Simone Chambers (Toronto)
Civility and Public Reason
This paper investigates informal norms of civility that accompany our conceptions of reasoned discourse. When does civility have a chilling effect on speech? Does the sincere wish not to offend, for example, take race off the table as a topic of public conversation? Is there a civil way to express outrage even disgust with the actions of others? Does the presence of injustice relax our expectations of civility? These are some of the questions that will be raised in the course of the paper.

Philip Pettit (Princeton)
Freedoms of Speech
How robust should freedom of speech be? Do you enjoy freedom of speech if you are not frustrated in saying what you happen to want to say? Or must it also be the case that you would not have been frustrated had you said anything else instead, or indeed said nothing? Or, to go to a yet higher pitch, must it also be the case that all this remains true under variations in how benignly others regard you. Must it be the case that it holds robustly and not just by grace of the goodwill of others? The paper argues that ideally freedom of speech should take the full, robust form and it suggests guidelines on how it is best served under progressively non-ideal conditions.

Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
What Should a Well-Ordered Society Look Like?
This paper will approach the question of hate speech (or group defamation) by asking about the importance of appearance, signage and display in a well-ordered society. To what extent, does a well-ordered society convey a message of respect to its citizens in the way it looks? To what extent, is it appropriate for a well-ordered society to forbid the display of contempt or hatred? Some might say that a society's being well-ordered has nothing to do with these issues of appearance. But the paper argues that it is important for citizens to show one another the basics of civic respect. And it argues that is particularly important, by way of reassurance, when a society which is presently well-ordered has a recent history of terror, intolerance and oppression.

with comments by Helen Irving (Sydney) and others.

No registration fee, but booking is essential.
Contact

Travel subsidies are available for postgraduate students from outside the Sydney region. Please contact Elia Mamprin,

The symposium is made possible through the generous support of Professors John and Christine Furedy, alumni of the University of Sydney.

Program

The Speakers

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She is a leading political theorist in the field of democratic theory and deliberative democracy, and has published extensively on these topics in leading journals in the field. Her other interests include critical theory; contemporary liberalism and ethics; theories of justice, democracy, discourse, and political participation, Canadian constitutional theory and history; constitutionalism and democracy. Publications include her groundbreaking Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Cornell University Press, 1996); Deliberation, Democracy and the Media, ed. with Anne Costain (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, ed. with Will Kymlicka (Princeton, 2001).

Philip Pettit is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. Irish by background and training, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; there he was Professor of Social and Political Theory and Professor of Philosophy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and is also a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Among his many publications include The Common Mind (OUP 1996), Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002), Penser en Societe (PUF, Paris 2004), Examen a Zapatero (Temas de Hoy, Madrid 2008) and Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP 2008). He is the co-author of Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; and Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith. Group Agents, co-authored with Christian List, LSE, is in the final stages of preparation and he is currently working on two sets of lectures. One, presented in 2009 as the Blackwell Lectures in Philosophy, Brown University and the Hourani Lectures in Philosophy, State University at Buffalo, is entitled The Conversational Imperative: Communication, Commitment and the Moral Point of View (Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming). The other, presented in 2009 as the Albertus Magnus Lectures in Philosophy, Cologne University, and in 2010 as the Seeley Lectures in Cambridge University, is entitled [[i||On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory of Democracy (CUP, forthcoming). Common MInds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E. Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at New York University School of Law and teaches legal and political philosophy. He was previously University Professor in the School of Law at Columbia University. He was born and educated in New Zealand, where he studied for degrees in philosophy and in law at the University of Otago. He studied at Oxford for his doctorate in legal philosophy, and taught at Oxford University as a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1980-82. From 1982-1987, he taught political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and from 1987-1995, he was a Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program in the School of Law (Boalt Hall) at the University of California, Berkeley. He was briefly at Princeton, as Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics, before moving to New York in 1997. Professor Waldron has written and published extensively in jurisprudence and political theory. His books and articles on theories of rights, on constitutionalism, on the rule of law, and on democracy, property, torture, security, and homelessness are well known, as is his work in historical political theory (on Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Hannah Arendt). Professor Waldron gave the second series of Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University in 1996, the 1999 Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University, the Spring 2000 University Lecture at Columbia, the Wesson Lectures at Stanford in 2004, the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School in 2007, and the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in Spring 2009. He travels widely and has delivered public lectures all over the world, from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

Helen Irving was appointed to the Faculty of Law in 2001. She teaches Federal Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutionalism and Gender and Constitution-Making. In 2005-2006 she held the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She has served as historical and constitutional advisor to many public and governmental bodies, as well as Justices of the High Court of Australia. She is a frequent newspaper opinion writer and media commentator. In 2003 she received the Centenary Medal for services to the Centenary of Federation. She is the author of Gender and the Constitution: Equity and Agency in Comparative Constitutional Law (Cambridge; 2008); Five Things to Know about the Australian Constitution (Cambridge 2004); To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution (Cambridge 1999), in addition to a number of edited collections. She has been the historical consultant for a number of television and radio documentaries, including as New South Wales Historical Consultant for the National Archives of Australia website 'Documenting a Democracy': http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/, and Historical Consultant for Film Australia's documentary 'Federation' 1999.