Julian Baggini writes about free speech and the causing of offence:
He goes on to give as an example of the sort of background one must take into account that British Muslims are a beleaguered minority and we shouldn't mock them because laughing at the weak isn't funny.[N]ot all complaints about religious offence can be so easily dismissed as failing on their own terms. What are we to say of these?
As I said, it depends. Doughty defenders of free speech will have no truck with such quibbling. They insist on a right to offend, wheeling out John Stuart Mill's venerable "harm principle" to clinch the case: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." And, no, "mere offence" does not constitute harm.
There are two problems with this simple view. Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend. I have a right to tell random strangers that I think they're ugly, or that they have terrible taste in clothes, but it would be wrong of me to exercise that right, and not just because of the pots and kettles principle.
But isn't mockery good, and any belief system incapable of putting up with it deficient in some way? That's true, but you can't just ignore the background against which lampooning takes place.
Julian is right that having a right is different from being right in the way you exercise your right. He's also right in what he says about mockery of the weak. But I think the balance of what he says is wrong nonetheless.
'Wheeling out' (in 'wheeling out John Stuart Mill's venerable harm principle') is obviously a pejorative. Wheeling out is what you do thoughtlessly, or with some tired old cliché, or with a piece of supposed wisdom that isn't actually true and so needs to be challenged. I very much doubt that this is what Julian thinks of Mill's harm principle, but in any case the latter is an indispensable guideline for a liberal society, and for reasons I now go on to argue it must carry more weight than the other truth Julian articulates, namely, that one can act within one's rights and still act wrongly. Yes, though I have a right not to admit you into my house if you arrive later than we'd arranged, I'd be behaving appallingly if I did that. However, in non-trivial cases that are morally and/or politically controversial, we face the problem that what is the right or the wrong way to behave is itself contested. In that situation it is having the right that becomes decisive over what is thought (by Julian, or by me, or by the parties to whatever disagreement) to be the right or morally proper way to behave. To have the right to say or do something is to have, precisely, the protected liberty to do it. Now, I may think that if you say or do some particular thing, you'd be behaving badly. But you may not think so. If you go ahead, I can criticize you. But I can't rightly stop you from going ahead. Julian may agree with me that you're wrong to speak or act as you do; but we would both be making a mistake if we said you were 'wheeling out' your right here, as if the right didn't count for much. On the contrary, in these situations it counts for a very great deal, which is why we call it a 'right'.
By his choice of example Julian makes life too easy for himself. Mockery of the weak is an egregious practice of course. But what if someone makes a criticism of Islam - or any religion - in perfectly measured terms and some take offence, perceiving this criticism as mockery? What if the satirical treatment of a sacred figure in a work of fiction arouses anger, pleas for censorship, death threats? What if it is disputed between different parties whether certain images or statements are offensive or not? In such cases, the right to say what you think - within the usual limits concerning incitement to violence and defamation - trumps what any of us might believe is the right way to behave.