Salman Rushdie on Freedom of Expression
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
Good sentiment.
Too extreme. What is freedom then? Without the freedom to kill people, it ceases to exist.
Not exactly a good sentiment.
offending isn't killing
shareI know. But what is freedom without killing? If you're not really free to do anything then it's not really freedom. If you can't eat dog meat then it's not really freedom. If you can't bang 17-years old girls then it's not really freedom. If you can't do Nazi salute in a synagogue then it's not really freedom.
Taken into extreme levels, all human concepts crumble. Freedom of expression pushed into it's limit will break as well.
In other words, there is no real freedom. There is no real freedom of expression. Any kind of freedom realistically would be limited in some ways.
An absolute freedom of one person inevitably will intervere with another person's absolute freedom. Except if Salman Rushdie lives alone in the world (or other people don't have the same freedom) then he can have his true freedom of expression all he want.
I believe what was being described was operational/functional/effective freedom, not 'absolute' freedom, which would be the state of nature Hobbes talked about.
Any good must be measured, or balanced as you say, against other competing goods/imperatives.
Rushdie didn't use the word absolute, I'm sure he didn't mean to.
You are correct. Any sensible person knows Rushdie was talking about the freedom to write or say something that might offend others which is exactly what happened when he wrote a book that happened to offend Muslims.
The other poster is a troll.
You could also say that his recent near-lethal knifing is evidence that, in a larger sense, criticizing Islam runs the risk of great bodily injury or death.
So freedoms sometimes are considered within a narrow nationalistic legal sense, but there is also the trans-national cultural impact or constraints upon freedom.
It's written there... "it ceased to exist." Which is absolutism. As if freedom of expression is either all or nothing at all.
He should have said, "Without the freedom to offend, it's not ideal.” You can still have some freedom of expression EVEN WITHOUT the freedom to offend. It does not cease to exist.
I think his point was that 'the freedom to offend' was diagnostic of an effective freedom.
As an example, you can now be imprisoned for, I think, 15 years in Russia if you refer to their war with Ukraine as, well, a war. So, by his rather pithy and succinct definition, Russia no longer has an effective freedom of expression.
Here in the US, criticizing Israel will earn you brick-bats or accusations of anti-semitism, but not a prison sentence. There is the difference.
If that's his point then I agree. But by how he said it, it's patently false. Freedom of expression does not cease to exist simply without the freedom to offend.
It's just about how offensive the expression is, and who the offended party is.
USA certainly has more freedom of expression than Russia, or any other country in the world probably. That doesn't mean only in USA freedom of expression exists.
My original point was simply saying "without freedom to offend it ceases to exists" is too extreme.