To ban or significantly restrict visitors for patients in hospital could seem to be simply a sensible and easy precaution to take during a pandemic: a policy that is unpopular, perhaps, and even unfortunate, but not something that wrongs anyone. However, I argue that in fact such restrictions on visitors infringe upon a fundamental right, to freedom of association. While there may still be permissible restrictions on visitors, making the case for these becomes highly demanding. One common way to understand (...) the purpose of the fundamental liberties is as protecting us from interference in a core set of freedoms, even when such interference would be to our benefit or would promote the general good. This reframing of the importance of visitors in terms of a right also has implications for how to run hospitals beyond the pandemic era: it supports a rapid expansion of visitor access and suggests that any decision to significantly restrict visitors ought not be left in the hospital, or hospital trust’s, hands. (shrink)

People sometimes use speech to interfere with other people’s speech, as in the case of a heckler sabotaging a lecture with constant interjections. Some people claim that such interference infringes upon free speech. Against this view, we argue that where competing speakers in a public forum both have an interest in speaking, free speech principles should not automatically give priority to the ‘official’ speaker. Given the ideals underlying free speech, heckling speech sometimes deserves priority. But what can we say, then, (...) about situations in which heckling clearly seems to infringe upon people’s civil liberties, in a way that intuitively justifies intervention? In such cases, we argue, heckling infringes upon people’s associative freedom. We present and defend an ethical framework for the institutional management of ‘Speech Fights’, geared around this insight. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an interpretation of Kant’s conception of free speech. Free speech is understood as the kind of speech that is constitutive of interaction respectful of everybody’s right to freedom, and it requires what we with John Rawls may call ‘public reason’. Public reason so understood refers to how the public authority must reason in order to properly specify the political relation between citizens. My main aim is to give us some reasons for taking a renewed interest (...) in Kant’s conception of free speech, including his account public reason. Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the public guarantee of reliable media and universal education. (shrink)