You cannot harm a religion

Comments (28)

1. Thanks for your comments, John.

   One quibble: I don’t think I offer significant resistance to the *right* to publish offensive cartoons. The bar must be set high in that regard, to prevent undue repression of speech by state agents. My intent was rather to try to contextualize that right so that free speech is not a conversation-stopper, an obstacle to better understanding and depiction of what is going on in minds not our own.

   I don’t argue for protection of religions, or any institutions, per se. But the people who comprise such institutions can, by association, suffer meaningful, tangible harm, and it is not entirely clear to me where the one stops and the other begins. There happens to be in this case a co-extension of an identity group, Muslims, and an institution, Islam, which is not fluid as the relationship between, say, the membership and institution of the UN, or Doctors Without Borders. We can criticize the charter of these (though I would not) without endangering the social standing of their participants.

   Modernity, I recognize, scorns such distinctions, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong to do so. But the “facts on the ground” are that this is not a bargain the whole world has signed up for, and if we want to make the case for it, we would do a better job than pointing to the primacy of historical developments that could not have anticipated the present moment.

   1. But the people who comprise such institutions can, by association, suffer meaningful, tangible harm, and it is not entirely clear to me where the one stops and the other begins.

      Herein lies your problem.

      This whole issue really bugs me, mainly because I live in America where this attitude is so rampant that it perverts our entire political discourse. A large chunk of our population has no problem with denying rights to gay individuals, but get all up at arms about regulating carbon emissions, as if it somehow violates the “rights” of corporations.

      This confounds rights with powers, and treats abstractions as if they were more valuable than concrete organisms. Corporations have no rights, and neither do religions. People have rights, insofar as they are people, but the fact that they might identify with some abstraction does not entail that the abstraction itself has any rights or deserves any protections or privileges. You have the right to practice whatever religion you want, but that does not mean that the religion itself deserves any protections or privileges in any sense (legal, moral, whatever).

      Blasphemy is a wonderful thing. It undermines the abstractions with which the illegitimate powers of religious institutions are justified. It devalues symbols and puts those who exert power in the name of those symbols on the defensive (which is why they are so desperate for blasphemy laws to “protect” their abstractions from “injury”). I’m all for burning flags, slaying sacred cows, desecrating wafers and mocking prophets with cartoons.

      The problem is that, whenever the power structures which use these abstractions as justification are attacked, those who benefit most from those structures deflect the attacks onto their own followers. The nonsensical phrase “insulting Islam” is used to imply “insulting you, Mr. or Mrs. Islamic Follower”, but the very people doing this are the ones oppressing those who they want to feel “insulted”. That’s how you get women in burkhas protesting “insults” against Islam. The only real harm done is the callous manipulation of religious followers by their leaders.

      1. Wes,

         I will give my stock response that I have not offered the argument that religions qua religions should have a defense against offensive speech. I’m not totally sure why John decided to focus on this concept, but if you read through the linked posts you won’t find it there.

         I do think you are wrong, however, to imply in this case that the power relations involved are unidirectional. For one thing it’s not for you to say a woman in a burka is oppressed. She may or may not be. (In contrast I think it’s instructive to ask even the most free and secular among us how much we would need to be paid to dress unfashionably, by our own lights, for one year. There are intense social pressures on all of us, and we shouldn’t only project them onto allegedly more confined sectors of society.)

         For another thing, as many have pointed out in this thread, whether or not Muslims are oppressed by their clerical leaders does not preclude their also being discriminated against by secularists on the basis of their supposedly being terrorists. Our right to critical speech does not morally extend to encouraging derogatory stereotypes.

2. Well, yes, you can harm a corporation. For instance, falsely saying that a corp. exploits third-world labour could cause people to stop buying from that corp., causing it financial harm.

   So while nobody/nothing should be exempt from criticism, everybody/-thing should have the same rights to go after slanderers and libellers.

   1. No, you cannot harm the corporation, because there’s no person there to have moral interests and suffer the harm. You may have harmed shareholders, who do have moral interests; you may have harmed the careers of the executives of that corporation. You may even have harmed those employed by the corporation – these are all persons. But the corporation is not a moral agent, and suffers no actual injury.

      1. This is to reiterate Lord Thurlow’s nearly 300 year old observation that a corporation has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked. But more to the point, Thurlow made that remark in answer to his own question, “did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience?” The corporation is indeed not a moral agency: it does not *act* morally. The fact that it doesn’t suffer harm by the actions of others is at most a side effect.

      2. Does one have to be a “moral agent” to suffer harm? Animals are not moral agents, nor their habitats, nor are young children, and yet they all have interests not instrumental to our own.

         Institutions, on the other hand, are instrumental, but that doesn’t make harm to them negligible. We suffer if we derogate libraries, transit, sanitation, schools. Some defense against libel would seem to be required if we are to be able to evaluate whether or not to perpetuate these institutions.

         This is a bit of a separate issue from the question of the Muhammad cartoons, since as I wrote in an earlier note, the people who make up these institutions are not generally coextensive with them, (though in theory they could be.) A cartoon of Melvil Dewey with a bomb in his cap is probably not in serious danger of demonizing librarians. But I don’t think it’s true that only moral agents have a defense against harm.

         (This is another point made in closing in the Asad paper. What if “blasphemy” were taken seriously not as a religious token but as a general expression of outrage at the violation of things of value–needless wars, pollution of rivers with PCBs, corporate ownership of plant genomes… This is a potentially anti-democratic notion, but it is not totally without appeal).

      3. Animals do not have rights, in my view, unless and just to the extent that they are considered “persons”, which I gloss to mean agents within our (rights-ascribing) society. Harm done to animals must be of the kind that society abhors (we do not usually ascribe rights to goldfish, even if they have a longer than three second attention span, or to wild fish caught by anglers). They suffer injury in the organic sense, as organisms that undergo harm that will adversely affect their lives, but they suffer no legal injury unless we ascribe it to them. Fish do not hold civil rights campaigns, and I think that it attenuates the notion of civil rights to propose that they should have them.

      4. Let me agree with you about goldfish. My intention was not to elevate every creepy crawly thing to the status of persons. But do I need to grant fish (or ecosystems, which are harder to trivialize) civil rights in order to say they can suffer harm? This is a little far afield from my main point, and maybe not worth getting too wrapped up in here and now, but I’m prepared to argue that there are more reasons that poisoning a lake is wrong than that we can no longer drink from it.

3. I’m with you, John. We should be scaling back concepts such as defamation of corporations rather than trying to extend such concepts further.

   As for freedom of speech being a conversation stopper, that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. Of course, people can continue the conversation anyway – they have the freedom to keep talking, but they won’t necessarily be listened to. The whole point of political principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion is to act as conversation stoppers in public policy: they take the finer merits of certain issues off the political agenda, and thus carve out areas of freedom that are protected from government or even majoritarian control. In a democracy, they trump the will of an electoral majority, and usually for good reasons.

   1. Russell,

      This is all true in the context of legal restraint of speech, which I don’t advocate in the case at hand.

4. I made some comments about this issue over at Underverse and won’t repeat ’em here–my position is roughly similar to John’s. I would like to add a thought inspired by Russell Blackford’s remark about how free speech rights “carve out areas of freedom that are protected from government or even majoritarian control.” While I agree that minorities need to be protected from majorities, I think it’s important to note that in almost all practical cases, what we need protection from are not majorities but minorities: religious zealots, economic elites, true believers with automatic rifles. Discussions of rights can be put in a distorted if the picture of the mob at the gate frames our thinking . In my country, at least, the people who talk the most about minority rights are only interested in the rights–and privileges–of the minority to which they belong, a minority that always seems to consist of the same bunch of white guys, most of whom have Southern accents, a group of people who have a very long history of oppressing other minorities. Thing is, democracy can certainly conflict with liberty of thought, but in my experience, at least, oligarchy is more often its enemy.

5. The people who worded the recent blasphemy law in Ireland rather sneakily made it an offence against the adherents of the religion in question, not the religion itself.

   The law defines ‘blasphemous matter’ as ‘that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion…’

   In other words, the so-called victims of blasphemy seem to be the adherents of the religion in question, not the religion itself. Very sneaky.

6. Following Mill, I would argue that the only justifiable curb on the rights or freedoms of any individual human being is to prevent the exercise of those rights or freedoms injuring the rights and freedoms of other human beings.

   A corporation is not a human being and as such should not be entitled to human rights or freedoms. It is sufficient that the individual human beings who work for it have the same entitlement to protection from injury as all others.

   Again, in the case of freedom of expression, any curb could only be justified on the grounds of preventing injury to the rights of others.

   A religion cannot be harmed by criticism or even the worst insults and it is absurd to even suggest that the all-powerful deity some of them worship could possibly be harmed by anything we might do.

   There is no doubt that individual believers can be deeply offended by the comments of others about their faith but there is no recognized right not to be offended, although the UK seems to be getting close to it, sadly.

   In one sense, it’s a pity there isn’t such a right. Imagine all the things we could seek legal redress for if there were: Australian soaps, American televangelists, the French (just kidding), the British upper classes, sportsmen who spit on the field, ‘reality’ TV, rap, Sarah Palin….the list is endless.

7. Expanding the domain where we don’t have freedom of speech seems a very slippery slope. First religion, but then any designated collection of ideas, like ideologies and political manifestos.

   I fully agree that limiting protection from defamation to persons is a great way forward.

   1. Bjorn,

      I advocate no expansion. Rather I argue for a universalization of the principles we already apply in secular society. We are morally accountable for our speech when we promote racist or sexist stereotypes, even though that speech is protected, as it should be.

      Limiting protection from defamation (which includes slander and libel) introduces serious problems to how we safeguard social capital, especially in a world where corporatized media is the norm. Rupert Murdoch could ruin your life on a whim if you did not have legal protection from libel.

8. On a seprate note. Ive grown very interested recently in the relationship between the origin of particular beliefs and humour.

   Some of the narratives philosophers have used as an example as the origin of religious thought are also highly entertaining and funny. i.e D. Dennets use of talking trees.

   I suspect humour poses a particular danger to belief, as humour and entertainment may be a an important factor that motivates the original spread of some narratives that will form part of the enviroment that allows the construction and maintenance of other beliefs and it is often laughter that dissolves such perspectives as the pattern we see in things changes over time.

   Humour is a touchy subject for faith groups for a number of reasons.

   Perhaps to some degree religion carries within itself from it’s origin the seeds of it’s own distruction?

   A potential that does not go un-noted by adherants to a particular belief or indeed dis-believers.

   Bit of topic but not utterly unrelated.

9. Oh, it is well known (by me) that humo(u)r and godlessness go hand in hand.

10. We are morally accountable for our speech when we promote racist or sexist stereotypes, even though that speech is protected, as it should be.

    Chris, I think you are making a fundamental category error. Gender and race are factors of birth; religion is not. To insult somebody on grounds of their gender or race is different to insulting them on grounds of their religion. I choose my religious belief and am free to change it at any time but I can’t change my race and changing my gender is a rare and difficult procedure. To put these three aspects on a level is, as I say, a category error; religion is an accidental property of my personality; gender and race are primary properties.

    1. To insult somebody on grounds of their gender or race is different to insulting them on grounds of their religion. I choose my religious belief and am free to change it at any time but I can’t change my race and changing my gender is a rare and difficult procedure.

       I disagree (and I see John has already as well). It doesn’t matter how malleable the characteristic is: in a free society I should not be coerced to even try changing it. Furthermore, you’re implying that beliefs are a choice in the same way as what I choose to order in a restaurant. I don’t think so. While I can be coerced by threats into faking a different religion, the only way to change my actual belief is through either reasoned argument or coercive brainwashing (and only the former is ethical). I have in fact changed religious opinion several times in my life, but not as a “free choice” in the sense you seem to imply — I got convinced otherwise by something.

    2. Thony,

       I’m aware that religion is fungible in a way that race and gender, among other factors of identity, are not. And I’m also aware that bigotry usually functions by conceptualizing inherent difference and deficiency. But Islam is perhaps a special case, owing in part to a long history of orientalism in Europe, and in part to extremes in cultural difference as great as any presently on our planet. For the most part Christians (in the US, anyway) are not particularly distinguishable from anyone else at the mall or on the train. Muslims in Europe function, in part, as a race, even if they don’t technically comprise one.

       Which I guess is to agree with John about the difficulty in separating “primary” and “accidental” characteristics.

11. I suspect that many people would respond by saying that this is more of an argument to cut back restrictions on copyright and similar things than anything else. And many Westerners (such as myself) are against restrictions on hate speech. I don’t think there needs to be therefore such an effort to distinguish people and institutions.

12. First of all, this is a matter of public accountability. I object to racial and sex-based laws, but only because I tend to think that you cannot legislate good behaviour; however, one can be morally accountable for all kinds of things – not legally where no injury is had. Nobody is injured by my saying that Mohammed is a pedophile, to take an example often used, nor that Jesus was a Jewish exclusivist and hated the goyim. My saying, on the other hand, that all Muslims are terrorists and should be interned or expelled, or that all Christians are child abusers, leads directly, and with intent, to the injury of others.

    It doesn’t matter to me if the properties being attacked are essential or not; that is entirely beside the point. I am quite unconvinced there are such things as essential or accidental properties except linguistically and definitionally. What matters is whether actions are foreseeably going to cause direct harm to actual people.

13. Unfortunately, no matter where the line is drawn, the legal grey areas will attract both the bigots (who imagine they are “protected”) and the aggrieved (who imagine they are “victims”). We should attempt to measure speech/actions by the direct harm to actual people they deliver, but I suspect there is little hope of deflecting the efforts of those determined either to offend or be offended.

14. I object to racial and sex-based laws, but only because I tend to think that you cannot legislate good behaviour…

    But I guess you *can* legislate bad behavior, as the Jim Crow laws proved. In any event, I don’t think you mean this as broadly as your words seem to imply. Surely you’re not arguing against legislation like the repeal of Jim Crow or the implemention voting rights. In the US, the armed services were desegregated by fiat and that seems to have worked out reasonably well.

15. http://www.cagle.com/news/Muhammad/images3/stahler.gif

16. I am not free to say all Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus are bastards. The latter injures persons by inciting others to treat them badly.

    This assumes a degree of intelligence and discrimination on the part of “others” to which, empirically, the bastards are not entitled.

17. I’d say: The more prejudiced and harassad and poor minority – the less rights You have to mock and humiliate them in cartoons. The more power You have the less free speech You have. The presidents of US and CIA has least free of speech 😉 Poor and minor jew and muslim people have right to mock Obama and Westergaard constantly but Obama and Westergaad have not moral rights to humiliate poor Mr. Jones and jews and muslims constantly. If those minors try to get power (elections, party etc) then You have rights to draw funny cartoons of those single persons (incl imams too) and parties.
    (Physicist ‘d formulate: FreeSpeech*Power ~ constant. It means more equal effects for everyone).

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