Words Are Not Bullets
My FBN show tomorrow night is about free speech and its limits. Last night I fought with Bill O’Reilly about that.
Reasonable people want to limit speech to protect the vulnerable. It’s why many places, colleges often, have rules against “hate” speech, “verbal harassment,” etc.
I recently interviewed students at Seton Hall Law School who were quite comfortable with the notion that words can hurt just like bullets do. But while words can indeed wound, I like what Jonathan Rauch wrote about that in his wonderful book, Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attack on Free Thought:
My own view is that words are words and bullets are bullets, and that is it important to keep this straight. For you do not have to be Kant to see what comes after “offensive words are bullets”: if you hurt me with words, I reply with bullets, and the exchange is even. Rushdie hurt fundamentalist Muslims with words; his book was every bit as offensive to them as any epithet or slogan you can imagine. So they set out to hurt him back. Words are bullets; fair is fair.
No, that’s not fair. It’s important to make the distinction: words are not bullets. Thank you, Jonathan Rauch.
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