Eric Peterson is an assistant professor of practice in business ethics at the Dolan School of Business of Fairfield University. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University. He is interested in too many things. These include business ethics, imagination, and philosophy of religion. He still very much enjoys being the Managing Editor for this wonderful blog. And finally, he can’t believe that he is the father of a high school graduate!
A post by Eric Peterson
Free speech is either a civil liberty essential for a flourishing liberal democracy or a threat to that very democracy, depending on who you ask. There are many arguments that can be proffered from political philosophy and ethics both for the value and the disvalue of free speech. In this post, I take a different route. I intend to argue that free speech has a unique value for our imagination. To the extent that we value imagination, then we should also value free speech. However, the value of free speech is not absolute. There ought to be limits on free speech. Thus, I also intend to argue that imagination has unique value for free speech. In a slogan: free speech matters for what we can imagine, but imagination matters for what we ought to say.
My argument relies on a few assumptions that I think are plausible, but I do not have the space to defend here. These include 1) imagination (properly constrained) can justify our beliefs about the world (cf. Kind 2016, Balcerak Jackson 2018) and 2) imagination is a skill that we can improve (cf. Kind 2020a, 2020b, 2022) I will also use “free speech” in a very broad sense as roughly any content that can be thought, shared, and expressed. Finally, when it comes to the justification of free speech, I consider myself to be a Millian. Free speech has value for ascertaining truth and falsehood. If p is a true proposition that gets restricted, then we (or some or many) miss out on acquiring a new truth. If p is a false proposition that gets restricted, then we (or some or many) miss out on understanding why it is false. Either way our knowledge suffers (Cf. Mill On Liberty). With those assumptions clarified, I now turn to the arguments for the mutual reinforcement of value between imagination and free speech.
From Free Speech to Imagination
This argument is quite simple. The gist is that to the extent that free speech is restricted it will impede one’s imagination. So the value of free speech for imagining is that free speech will allow for an expansive and diverse imagining. To see this, consider first a relatively uncontroversial property of imagination:
DEPENDENCY: Imagination depends on perceptual experiences, knowledge, memory, background-beliefs, and perhaps other cognitive attitudes.
While at times our imaginations may create novel content ex nihilo, most mundane uses of our imaginations make use of existing content and phenomenal experiences. If DEPENDENCY is true, then it follows that any lack in our perceptual experiences, knowledge, beliefs, etc. will lead to an impoverished imagination. Recall that I am using free speech to refer to any content that can be thought, shared, and expressed. It is plausible to think that free speech can inform our experiences, beliefs, and knowledge. In fact, we can argue that free speech ensures a kind of diversity of experiences, beliefs, and knowledge. Thus, at this point in my argument, one way of seeing the value of free speech for imagining, is by seeing that free speech + DEPENDENCY leads to diverse and expansive imaginative experiences.[1] We can go a step further. This is because we not only want to imagine more things, we want our imaginings to inform us on more things (i.e., to give us knowledge of the world). As Balcerak Jackson argues, our imaginations can justify some beliefs “in virtue of being by their very nature derived from or parasitic on perceptual experience…” (2018, 221) Arguably, this can be generalized. One way of seeing this is in Kind’s (2016) instructive use of the imagination where our imaginations are constrained by constraints such as the Reality and Change constraints. Our perceptual experiences can be one kind of reality constraint, but surely not the only one.
It follows, then, that imagination needs to be fed with properly constrained content in order to aid in justifying our beliefs. That means if imagination either lacks content or lacks the appropriate constraints on content, then arguably its justificatory function will be impeded. The justificatory function of imagining works better with the most expansive set of content. This is because content that is not imagined will obviously play no role in the justificatory function of imagination. Additionally, it is plausible to think that constraints are not absolute in that they can evolve, become more nuanced and sensitive as we learn and discover more about our world, and this also might cause us to adopt new constraints. Again it seems that the more content we have the better for such a process. Free Speech contributes to an expansive set of content. A reduction in this set of content is an ipso facto reduction in content to imagine, and this reduction in content to imagine is a reduction in justified beliefs from our imaginings. The value that free speech has for our imaginings is that it increases the diversity and justificatory force of our imaginings. But what value does imagination have for free speech?
From Imagination to Appropriate (Free) Speech
Many concerns surrounding free speech have to do with others thinking, sharing, or expressing content that is deemed as offensive or hateful. While I think that these concerns can be valid, it is still quite difficult to provide a conceptual analysis of hate speech. Further, it seems to me that those who are broadly “pro” free speech seem more concerned with what we can say and those who are broadly “against” free speech (for hate speech concerns) seem more concerned with what we ought to say. And so there is sometimes a sort of modal talking past one another. However, I do not intend to sort all of this out or provide some general principle to guide us in terms of permitting and restricting speech. Instead, I concede that there may be situations where speech should be restricted for reasons from morality or etiquette, among other sources, and so I intend to show how imagination has a unique value in this regard.
I believe that our imaginations are uniquely suited to help us navigate relationally with others. Why think that? One way to see this is by considering moral imagination and empathy. Construed broadly, moral imagination is an ability to consider, evaluate, and act on possibilities of moral salience. It allows us to consider how a particular decision, judgment, or action might affect another either for good or ill. Given that much of our ethical decision-making is constrained by what has happened (someone has done something right by or good for us, therefore, we owe gratitude) or what we would like to happen (bring about benefit/refrain from harming), it seems to follow that imagination is already implicated and entangled in our ethical reasoning. This is seen naturally because following Liao and Gendler (2020) “to imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are.” Further, given that I think that moral imagination is a particular use of our general capacity for imagining, I believe, following Kind (2020, 2022) in taking our imagination to be a skill—it is something that we can get better at. Okay, so what value does this have for our speech practices? One simple answer is that by using our moral imaginations, we can become better at ascertaining why certain speech might be offensive or threatening to a particular person or group of people. We can do this by imagining how a person might react to a particular expression and judge it to be better to refrain from speaking. This, I would argue, would be an example of a general use of moral imagining, where one might not enter into another’s perspective or empathize in any way. However, we could empathize with another and arguably this would be a more specific instance of moral imagining. Following Bailey (2020), we can take empathy to involve “using one’s imagination to “transport” oneself, such that one considers the other’s situation as though one were occupying the other’s position.” (3) Bailey argues that empathy has a unique value in providing a certain kind of understanding, what she calls humane understanding. She claims that “[t]o humanely understand another’s emotions is to have a first-hand appreciation of the emotion’s intelligibility.” (8) Once again, given that empathy is a kind of imaginative transporting, it seems plausible that it is a skill that we can get better at. Using our empathy to humanely understand another person can provide an even deeper insight into what sorts of speech may cause offense or a sense of being threatened. Thus, moral imagination in general and empathy in particular can be of value for the permissibility or impermissibility of certain speech.
The mutual value of free speech and imagination can be summed up like so: what we can say has value for what we can imagine, but how we imagine has value for what we ought to (or ought not) say.
Like many Junkyard posts, these ideas are still in early development requiring nurturing cultivation from this wonderful community.
[1] These ideas mirror an argument from LeFevre (2003) who argues that the value of diversity in the sciences can be tied to a forming of more diverse hypotheses via more diverse creative imaginings. Importantly, he states that creative imagining depends on a host of things such as background beliefs, experiences, formative education, etc…Thus, he would seemingly endorse DEPENDENCY.
References:
Bailey, Olivia. (2020). Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding. Philos Phenomenol Res., 00:1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12744
Jackson, M. B. (2018). Justification by imagination. Perceptual imagination and perceptual memory, 209-26.
Kind, A. (2016). “Imagination under Constraints.” In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Kind, A., & Kung, P. (eds) (2016). Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press Uk.
Kind, A. (Ed.). (2016). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination. Routledge.
Kind, A. (2020). What imagination teaches. Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, 133-46.
Kind, A. (2020). The Skill of Imagination. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill And Expertise (pp. 335-346). Routledge.
Kind, A. (2022-online). Learning to Imagine. British Journal of Aesthetics.
LeFevre, J. (2003). The Value of Diversity: A Justification of Affirmative Action. Journal of Social Philosophy, 34(1).
Mill, J. S. (1989). JS Mill: 'On Liberty’ and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.