Events

16 September 2010

2010 New Zealand Aronui Lecture Series: Grasping Freedom of Speech

Lecture

Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve
Past President of the British Academy and Cambridge Professor of Philosophy.

With the advent of globalisation, how can we navigate the new roads of communication and understand what is being said?

We live in an era with rich and wide possibilities for communication that reflect developments in information technology, supported by and enabling more deliberative forms of democracy and aspects of cultural globalisation. Yet, curiously, discussion of ethical issues that bear on speech, including speech rights, is now far less concerned with communication than one might expect. In particular, contemporary construal of press freedom as ‘freedom of expression’ focuses not on acts of communication but on the dissemination of content. Self expression is not disrupted even when the other party can grasp neither what is being said nor what is being done; effective communication is possible only when there are means to judge both. Communicating is not merely a matter of having a shared language that renders the content of others’ utterances intelligible, but of gaining enough of a grasp of others’ speech acts to judge which sorts of assessment are pertinent.

Philosophy

Organisation:

The Royal Society of New Zealand