“You can’t tell somebody how to express themselves — you can’t. But I think you can tell people, ‘Hey, the way you’re expressing yourself, that hurts me.’ "
- Paul Beatty, an American writer and 2016 winner of the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. Beatty is the first writer from the United States to be honored with the prize.
Is free speech a fundamental right and does it have appropriate limits? Pope Francis has provided the most memorable recent attempt at an answer. Yes, there is such a thing as a right to free speech but if you upset people you might have a punch travelling towards your face. But the Pope’s intervention is only one amongst many. In the wake of the recent terrorist outrages in Paris, and the massive responses to it globally, a debate has erupted about the nature of free speech and its appropriate boundaries. It is an intense and global debate, but, as often happens when human emotions are all aquiver, there has been more heat than light. In what follows, I will make an effort to untangle the issues before tackling the question I posed in the heading.
And in doing so, I am going to take two views of free speech. The first is what I call the internal view: free speech considered within the boundaries of specific countries and legal systems. The second is what I call the global view: free speech within the emerging global public sphere. I begin with the internal view.
