Tag: politics

2.1 Freedom

Published on 10 July 2024, last updated on 13 July 2024

With regard to freedom, there’s a variety of subjects to think about as such that freedom should be secured from government so that citizens can act freely without oppression. Another is the exercise of one’s freedom and its relationship with other people in the same community. Government has their authority to coordinate different interests among different people, which could be interpreted to resolve the conflict of the citizenry.

It is often seen that discussions on freedom go to the extreme edge. When someone was asked not to do a certain behaviour or action, they may claim that it is their right to take the action, but it sometimes feels that saying it one’s own right doesn’t always justify the act. Assume that most people claim their behaviours as their rights even if that harms others, it can be, in other words, regarded that it is one’s right to harm others. Also, one sometimes asks, if it is free, whether one can do everything we want.

One can argue that just because freedom should be preserved doesn’t mean that people should be freely behave whatever they want. The debates around regulation are complicated ones. Some people in a society, those who are more liberal and human rights activists in particular, argue the importance of freedom, that is what I agree with, but in some cases it is dubious that we can prioritise freedom held by people to be exercised in all the cases. People often think of extreme cases that are extremely free or not free at all, but it is a matter that to what degree freedom is ensured. To what extent freedom is tolerated depends on how people create their own culture. The benefit of freedom is to be able to choose the ways in which one acts. If not allowed, one is not able to choose their preferrable way of behaving. It is likely to cause anxiety in the minds of people and distortion in society. It is basically a balance between to what degree we prioritise the freedom of people and to what degree we restrict the freedom of people due to the effect that one’s exercise of freedom causes. Although many support the deployment of human rights concept in societies, to what degree freedom should be exercised among citizens needs to be discussed since the exercise of one’s right can influence others in the same community.

If one is in power, it may be harder for them to allow others to have freedom as it may affect negatively the advantages of those who are powerful. Contrarily, the importance of freedom is easier to understand by imagining the situation that one is not able to behave freely. While learning lesson from the past history of oppression on freedom, people with liberal thoughts has been expanding the human rights culture with some countries moving towards democracy. The culture of human rights and respecting freedom are a progress which has been cultivated from the previous generations.

In talking about freedom, the topic of the rights of individuals are often associated in discussion. Claiming the rights is to claim being able to choose the exercise of power, that is to say that they can choose if they exercise it or not at the moment. The empowered individual has power to some degree. Regarding the rights of people, the United States is known for the unique history. Historically saying, it is described that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”(1). The United States has been focusing on the rights and its protection. They have the famous Bill of rights, to explain it concisely, “The Bill of Rights, drafted by Madison, was passed by the new Congress in 1789 and ratified in December 1791. Its ten articles, incorporated as the first ten amendments to the Constitution, explicitly protect a range of fundamental individual freedoms”(2). The history of these rights-related background in the US contributed to their current culture of the emphasis on the rights.

Footnotes

(1) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.13. This is what Thomas Jefferson wrote.

(2) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. 2008. The Federalist Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxiii.

1.1 Introductory

The purpose of this writing lies in proposing the new, or new connections of theories, to the problems around the topic of expression and its governance. In a civilised society where a large number of people live together, it is more likely to have wider range of issues which need to be dealt with. One of them is related to expression, and the importance of coping with it has been increasing. Expression is one of the fundamental human activities that not only lasts through different media and different ages but it also needs to be properly recognised by ourselves.

Expression is one of the fundamentals for people in society, and a core part in our civilisation. In relation with the concept of freedom which people value, the topic of expression is often talked. Freedom of expression frequently comes to the table of discussion, often having tension among several groups of people. While thinking of the importance in securing the freedom of expression, I came to recognise that there’s necessity to propose an idea to this topic by focusing on context. This finding that made me aware of the importance of context led to not only thinking of freedom of expression but also be conscious that the concept of context is indispensable for other domains as well. What work focuses on includes the inner part of oneself to alleviate tension among different groups of people in a society. Besides the argument on policies implemented in a society such as regulation of harmful speech, this work tries to progress the debate around freedom of expression by highlighting the importance of cultivation within oneself.

This work takes look at what expression is in relation to its context as such that expression is linked with the past that we have gone through, this linkage could ultimately lead to the argument that free will doesn’t exist (as things are in relation to the past). In addition, it is written, not limited to looking at the perspectives often come to the discussion on this topic such as whether hate speech should be banned, but expanding its sphere to the topics of context which is rules and how people built up the world, culture, history of language, information theory, and the inner part of oneself such as sentiment. Without taking into consideration these domains, the discussion on freedom of expression rests too limited and cannot expect the further progress. Freedom of expression is a political topic, and reflecting on it from a variety of perspectives finally converges on the topic.

As regards the contents, this work addresses the question: what is the principle, or the solution, that should be promoted to govern freedom of expression in a society where there are different groups of peoples with different backgrounds? The term govern is used in a sense that this writing emphasises the governance of a community and takes the stand that governance of freedom doesn’t have to be based on not merely laws but also norms, cultures, and others if any which have effect on peoples’ activities.

People’s activity has certain effects on others in the community. In many cases where a society or a community is phrased in this work, it is used to mean it in multiple levels. From the smaller to the larger to give a few examples, it covers a multiple scales of community such as a community within a nation-state as multiple communities exist within the nation-state, a nation-state as a community, international community as a community, and others. In others, there are cases that refer to a particular size of community, however it should be better to be noted that many refer to different levels of a community simultaneously in one description which readers would enjoy contemplating on communities whose scale is different. This is because one phrase of a community is applicable to not only one size of a community but also other different sizes as well.

In addition, with regards to the meanings embedded in the question above that different peoples of different backgrounds live in a community, although there is dispute between globalism and nationalism, the benefits the civilisations got from the progresses such as the transferability of persons, goods, and information from one place to another has made possible the interactions of different persons, different cultures. This is a progress in terms of technology which brought about the benefits to the world. Also, the progress in terms of the rights of citizens is that the importance of human rights are what societies came to care for. Securing the sphere of freedom for all persons which is one of the essentials, however, there problems also arise given that the exercise of a protected right means taking a certain action towards society in which persons of different backgrounds and interests live. The world became more complex and is interrelated, in which an action of person has an effect to the society. In this worldview, this writing aims at analysing the nature of freedom, what expression means in society, analysing how it works (in association with freedom of expression). Its purpose is to find a way to have less conflicts among different persons living in the same society while taking into account the importance of preserving freedom, and what can be thought of as a principle to guide. Even though the focus is put in the domain of freedom of expression in this writing, it supposes the further extension towards other domains of freedom. It demonstrates the potentials of this topic’s development towards other domains of freedom as well as the relationship of freedom and persons’ actions in a society.

The reason of choosing the topic of freedom of speech and expression is my recognition that this topic will continue to attract the attention of people including the future generations presumably without disappearing completely the topic from our civilisation. People express their ideas and opinions in their daily life. It is one of their rights regarded as a fundamental human right. However, while many people came to be aware of its importance, the world continues to have controversies around this topic. The continuance of the emergence of problems related to freedom of speech and expression is partly because of the change in the conditions of our life.

We have updated our environmental conditions by implementing new technology in the past. It made possible that people of different context encounter more frequently in the real and online world. For example, the transportation system spread over the globe enabled us to move to a different location in a short period of time. This made easier for people to migrate to a different country, study abroad for a short term as well as a long term, and visit a different country as a tourist. It is a positive result of development of transportation system in the sense that people are able to move more conveniently, but in the same time it changed the condition of the world that visiting a different country have never been that easy for people in the past.

Also, due to the evolution of information technology, people of different backgrounds are able to speech online without having shared context on topics. Even, some groups of people strengthen their views and others also move on their own way. The circumstances around expression have been increasing its complexity. Not just the problem of polarised views, but also there’s been a situation that at least some social media platforms have been trying to regulate hate speech online. As time passes, the world changes, we have problems that we need to deal with.

At the beginning of 21st century, the world is globalised ever before, people of different backgrounds are more likely to see each other in-person and online. These changes of the conditions of the world due to the updates of societal circumstances require us to think about our world and continue to redefine our world by dealing with the complex issues in the domain of expression.