Summary
Does free speech include a right to cause offence? Many thinkers have insisted that it must - but debate has raged for millennia over where the limits to insult can be set. While some maintain Enlightenment values must include permission to shock, offend and even injure, there is a growing sense that rights must be balanced by responsibilities to one's community, in speech as well as action. And as technology has given each of us an worldwide platform to express any idea, anywhere, the potential for instant, global offence has only grown. How are we to define how much is too much - and what really distinguishes insult from injury? Edward Stourton speaks to historians, theologians and philosophers to explore the outer limits of free expression. Producer: Polly Hope.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
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| 0:39.6 | This week Edward Stirtan delves into the past and future of free speech, and just a warning that some of what you |
| 0:45.1 | hear may prove offensive, but then after all he is asking, is there a right to offend? |
| 0:50.8 | Here are three statements you may well feel are too offensive to broadcast. |
| 0:56.0 | First, Martin Luther on Jews. |
| 0:59.0 | A base-horing people that is no people of God and their boast of lineage, |
| 1:06.2 | circumcision and law must be accounted as filth. |
| 1:10.8 | Next John Milton on Catholics. |
| 1:13.0 | We do not admit of the popish sect, so as to tolerate papists at all, |
| 1:19.0 | for we do not look upon that as a religion, but rather as a hierarchical tyranny under a cloak of religion |
| 1:25.8 | clothed with the spoils of the civil power which it has usurped to itself contrary |
| 1:31.6 | to our Savior's own doctrine. |
| 1:34.3 | And finally, Voltaire on black people. |
| 1:37.5 | We can say that if their intelligence is not from another species of our understanding, it is much lower. They originate from Africa |
| 1:45.5 | like the elephants and the monkeys. They think they're born in Guinea to be sold to the whites |
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