Exactly one year ago I was experimenting the functionalities of WordPress opening a (now closed) blog on wordpress.com. That blog was intended to be about democratic principles and it was eventually merged into Rational Patterns, or better not really merged because I didn’t actually exported the posts, but the idea of writing about the argument persisted.

Today again is 25th April, the day of Italian liberation from nazi-fascism, and I decided to come back to the starting topic of that old blog: Freedom of Speech.

My 2008-04-19T09:10:11Z post was titled A cell phone will not make you free… if you are not allowed to use it for criticising your government as you like. However this was just the third or fourth reformulation I have done of it. The first formulation sounded like this A cell phone will not make you free… if you cannot say whatever you like using it. Unfortunately when you state freedom of speech in this way many problems arise and this is what we can call the problem of speech limits.

Firstly I note that (as in any human action) we have two sets of limitations: physical limitations and social limitations. So we can distinguish among what we can say and what we are allowed to say. The whole problem seems to be not to much about what we can say but mostly about what we can say without being allowed to say it. So the problem is just or mainly a social problem. We can say almost everything our tongue, mouth and vocal cords are able to articulate, but we are not always allowed to say it. In other words, should we be allowed to say whichever thing we can say and we want to say?

This last formulation also introduced a new element: our will. Now the problem seems to me just a subset of a wider problem, the problem of the conflicts among what we can do, what we want to do and what we are allowed to/have to/must do¹. Anyway let’s come back to the speech problem a little. Assumed that what we can say is the basic dimension upon which we can “move”, the actual conflict arises among what we want to say and what we are allowed to say, or better it arises when we want to say something we are not allowed to say.

Well, what does it really mean not being allowed to say something? It means that we will have to pay some price if we will say it, maybe we will lose social appreciation or even we’ll be punished by some kind of authority. However digging a little in the idea makes clear that the conflict is among what we want to say and what other people do not want us to say. So coming back to the general point of view the freedom of speech problem, as many other problems about the limits of liberty, appears to be a problem of conflicting wills.

Ok, it’s enough for the moment. I’ll be back on this problem in the future.
Have a good 25th April!

¹ In Italian this sounds a bit better Ciò che possiamo fare, ciò che vogliamo fare e ciò che dobbiamo fare. It was the topic of a little set of posts I published on an other old blog, this time on blogspot, just at very beginning of my blogging carrier. Again I do not think to have a copy of them, maybe I’ll search a little when I will have time.