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Speaker: Rae Langton, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In her talk entitled “Speaker’s Freedom and Maker’s Knowledge,” Rae Langton examined the prospects for developing a knowledge-based argument for the protection of pornographic speech. Ultimately, she seemed to think the prospects are not very good but that thinking about why such an argument would fail allows us to see an important connection between the type of knowledge generated by pornographic speech and its distinctive harms.
Feminists have long held that the standard arguments for the legal protection of speech do not extend to the case of pornographic speech. You might think, for example, that speech should be legally protected because of the special value of autonomy: our opinions will be blind and unreflective without the benefit of a free exchange of ideas. As Langton put it, “free speech is a condition of our being able to live our lives ‘from the inside’, autonomously.” You might think that speech should be protected because of a requirement of equality: voices are to be granted equal concern, respect and hence protection. Finally, you might think, along with J.S. Mill, that speech ought to be protected because of its special contribution to the value of knowledge: the free exchange of ideas contributes to the emergence of knowledge.
Langton pointed out that it is at least controversial whether any of these arguments would apply to pornographic speech. Whatever contributions to autonomy pornographic speech might make, it clearly also harms women’s autonomy by promulgating attitudes that perpetuate or increase discrimination and violence against them. It is also hard to see how a form of speech that perpetuates these social realities could be consistent with a commitment to equality. Finally, feminists have complained that pornographic speech is inconsistent with a commitment to knowledge because not only does it propagate lies about women -- that, for example, women are and ought to be sexually subservient -- but also because it operates on the audience’s beliefs in an irrational manner: pornographic speech does not forward claims about the nature of women on rational grounds, but rather insinuates them into the minds of the audience by conditioning or sublimation.
After reviewing some of this dialectical background, Langton considered the possibility that there might be a kind of knowledge-based argument for the protection of pornographic speech. Pornographic speech does, after all, generate what she called “maker’s knowledge.” This is “the special knowledge someone has of something, in virtue of making that thing.” Knowledge is usually understood in terms of a mirroring metaphor: my beliefs count as knowledge if they mirror the world in a certain way. Maker’s knowledge, Langton argued, is better understood in terms of a blueprint metaphor: a General Motors car designer has knowledge of next year’s car model not because his beliefs mirror the world, but because they are a blueprint for it. Likewise, Langton suggests, pornographic speech should not be understood on the mirroring model: it does not say women are like this. It works, rather, on the blueprint model: it says let women be like this.
Is “maker’s knowledge” really knowledge? Philosophers have generally thought that knowledge is justified true belief that meets some sort of reliability condition: if my having a particular belief is not reliably connected to its being true, then even if it happens to be true and justified, it doesn’t count as knowledge. Langton argued that on this understanding of knowledge, maker’s knowledge is indeed knowledge. After all, as she put it, “there is nothing accidental about a correlation between beliefs that women are servile, and women’s servility.” In short, the view is that by creating expectations on the part of men, and in turn self-expectations on the part of women, the beliefs about women expressed by pornographic speech are reliably self-fulfilling and hence, should count as knowledge.
According to Langton, then, it seems that pornographic speech does after all contribute to the generation of knowledge. Nevertheless, it does not follow that a Millian knowledge-based argument for free speech can be cross-applied to pornographic speech. As Langton put it, even if most knowledge is good, in this instance, the knowledge is bad.” And it is not simply instrumentally bad the way, perhaps, general knowledge of secret national security programs might be thought to be harmful; Langton suggests that the knowledge in this case is intrinsically harmful.
To see why she thinks so, consider again what maker’s knowledge is supposed to be. It is the sort of knowledge that an agent has of her creations; the sort of knowledge that the designer has of next year’s model or that an agent has of her own actions. But, as Langton put it, “for an agent to have maker’s knowledge of the actions of others [as is the case in pornographic speech] suggests an agent who is somehow a maker of the actions of others.” And this, of course, brings us back to the idea that pornographic speech threatens women’s autonomy.
Summary by Chris Furlong, Graduate Fellow in Ethics 2005-06