Rival notions of free speech and competing views of its proper limits have been debated by philosophers and political theorists for centuries. In our day, discourses on this topic usually center around concepts of autonomy and freedom, but all generally within a classical liberal or postmodern paradigm. I’d like to approach this topic from the point of view of Catholic Social Teaching, drawing upon the classical legal tradition and the heritage of the Western philosophical canon. My argument will also be influenced by integralism, which advocates a unified social and political order under the aegis of the universal moral law.
I think the most plausible way to limit free speech would be to restrict any speech that is hostile to the common good and ethos of a just society. It is lunacy and even irresponsible for a state to sanction speech that antagonizes the very core of its own moral principles, if and only if those principles are founded upon the common good. To allow such speech, and undoubtedly to encourage it, is a recipe for civilizational suicide. However, in order to make this argument one must first define the terms “common good” and “just society.”
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “the common good is the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” Notice in this definition is that the common good is the highest good for individuals, but it is not the sum total of an individual’s personal desires. The common good assumes that human beings are fundamentally social creatures made for communion with each other and ultimately with truth, goodness and beauty itself (God). This reaches back to the heart of the classical legal tradition which defines law, according to Thomas Aquinas, “as an ordinance of reason for the common good promulgated by the one who is in charge of the community.” Because of mankind’s communal nature, our well-being both as an individual and as a society is interdependent upon one another. Therefore, speech that impedes upon the rights of human beings to come to know the good, true and beautiful and speech that actively seeks to oppose a society built upon the foundations of this common good should be restricted in some way, so as to protect the well being and development of people and society at large.
In the words of Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, “the best society would be one where it was easier for men to be good.” The role of the just society is not to enable its people to do and say whatever they want, but rather to foster good rule. How would the former be just or loving? Unrestricted liberty and therefore unrestricted free speech can never equal the truth ipso facto. Teleologically, human beings are made for the truth. To know it, love it and serve it. Freedom is found then in ordering one’s desires to it. Therefore free speech ought to be the process of ordering our thoughts and words in the ever increasing direction of the truth. As Daniel McInerny states, “The right of free speech protects us from interference from others as we pursue truth; it does not imply moral approval of all speech.” Free speech is a means to an end then, not an end in itself.
This argument has contemporary relevance. For example, in December of 2023 Michael Cassidy, a United States Navy veteran toppled a satanic display which stood near a Nativity scene at the Iowa state Capitol building. Mr. Cassidy was charged with a “felony third-degree mischief and a hate crime under Iowa state law.” It is my contention that this Satanic display should never have been allowed to be erected in the first place as a limit to free speech and that Mr. Cassidy should be fully exonerated. As the Latins have always said, “Error non habet ius” (error has no rights). Satan represents darkness, death, chaos and evil, which are all in direct opposition to a just society founded upon the common good. I don’t think this argument is that outlandish, just as I think it is safe to say that lawmakers in the Western world and the public at large would be outraged if a group attempted to erect a statue of Adolf Hitler, and rightly so. In my argument, free speech’s emphasis on the common good, in the words of Harvard Law professor and leading theorist behind Common good constitutionalism, Adrian Vermeule puts it, “is a candid willingness to legislate morality.”
Perhaps the strongest retort to my argument could be: “Morals evolve and get better over time, so why would we rest our society in the worldview of people who lived 1,000 years ago? After all, the moral values mankind has adopted has simply been because of evolutionary and societal pressures. We change our ethics and adapt our moral principles so we can survive and thrive in the given circumstances we find ourselves in. You can’t “just legislate morality”, that would be unfair to those who do not agree with your moral system. You would take away citizens’ freedom to pursue their own happiness. This argument tramples individuals’ autonomy and makes citizens less free.
My response to such a critique would first be to mention that you have to prove that objective moral values are invented rather than discovered. The fact that we may think that morals are a result of socio-biological pressures has nothing to do with whether or not they are indeed an objective and timeless reality. This would be a genetic fallacy, which tries to invalidate an idea simply because of how someone came to believe in it. Likewise, evolution is a biological system. It would be a category error to assume that evolution can account for a metaphysical and transcendental reality like ethics. As David Hume puts it, “You can’t get an ought from an is.” So, if you want to prove that morality is simply a social construct you are going to have to do better than citing a scientific paradigm as evidence, which by nature isn’t asking epistemological or metaphysical questions.
The assertion that my argument would strip citizens of their freedom may be warranted, if and only if, my interlocutor is defining freedom as simply indifference. It is my contention that my argument helps aid individuals in having true liberty, namely being free to pursue excellence. Here I am drawing upon the work of the Belgian Dominican, Fr. Servais Pinckaers and his Thomist disciple, Bishop Robert Barron. Allow me to briefly sketch and delimitate Pinckaers contrasting notions of freedom and how they can better help us understand free speech.
Freedom of indifference stands above the morality or immorality of a certain proposition and on the basis of no obligation whatsoever, the self decides between a simple choice of contrasts. This freedom of indifference is autonomous self-assertion guided by nothing other than subjective fancy. In this view, the good that everyone is after is the self’s ability to choose, to choose what to say or do. In the freedom of indifference, according to Pinckaers, “nature no longer orders freedom or happiness; rather, the good is found in the choosing.” The threat to this kind of freedom is anything extrinsic to the self which tramples its capacity to arbitrate the ultimate values and meaning of its own existence.
On the other hand, freedom for excellence is the “disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible, and then effortless.” I should also mention that according to Pinckaers, freedom for excellence is the “classical view of freedom, which largely predominates almost since the time of Plato and Aristotle.” In the freedom for excellence the transcendent and extrinsic entity is not the enemy to one’s freedom, but is the ultimate object that the individual must come to align with in order to be truly free. Think of someone who is attempting to learn how to play chess. They can’t bend the game to their own will, rather they must discipline their own desires in order to master the game by its rules. Then, once they fall in line, they can actually be free to master the game to the best of their abilities, which is a far greater freedom than they ever had before. There exists a certain humility in the freedom to excellence that is lacking in the freedom of indifference. Once you order your own will to be enlightened by the external and transcendent truth then you can truly be free. In a strange kind of way, there may be no figure who better articulates this point than the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in his song Jokerman, “Freedom just around the corner for you. But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?”
Therefore autonomous free speech devoid of the truth, doesn’t do the speaker any good. Likewise, speech that is not attuned to the transcendent good, true, and beautiful, such as we saw in the Satanic display situation, is not going to help aid a society or an individual. The society founded upon my argument’s notion of the common good enables citizens to freely pursue the objective universals that their nature is designed for.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 1906-1909)
Aquinas, Thomas, St. STh I-II, 90, 4.
Maurin, Peter, Easy Essays, Foreword, paragraph 18.
McInerny, Daniel (01/21/13). “What do Catholics believe about free speech”? Aleteia.
Brown, Jon (01/31/2024). “Navy vet who toppled satanic display slapped with ‘hate crime’ charge, felony mischief”. The Christian Post.
Vermeule, Adrian (03/31/2020). “Beyond Originalism”. The Atlantic.
Hume, David (1739). book III, part I, section I, “A Treatise of Human Nature”.
Pinckaers, Servais, Fr. (05/28/2017), “A Tale of Two Freedoms”. Mother of America Institute.
Barron, Robert, Bishop. (01/22/2006). “The Glory of God is a Human Being ‘Fully Alive”. Word On Fire.
Pinckaers, Servais, Fr. (05/28/2017), “A Tale of Two Freedoms”. Mother of America Institute.
Dylan, Bob. (04/14/1983). “Jokerman.” Infidels.