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  • Silencing Speech
  • Ishani Maitra (bio)

I Introduction

Pornography deserves special protections, it is often said, because it qualifies as speech. Therefore, no matter what we think of its content, we must afford it the protections that we extend to most speech, but don't extend to other actions.1 In response, Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton have argued that the case is not so simple: one of the harms of pornography, they claim, is that it silences women's speech, thereby preventing women from deriving from speech the very benefits that warranted the special protections in the first place.2 At first glance, it is hard to see how to make sense of this response. If the claim is that pornography prevents women from actually uttering words, then it just seems false; on the other hand, if that isn't the claim, then it isn't clear how [End Page 309] anyone can be said to be silenced. Faced with such worries, many have been inclined to dismiss these claims about silencing as confused.

In this paper, I offer a way of making sense of this notion of silencing, according to which it is coherent to claim that pornography silences women. On my view, the truth of this claim does not require that women be prevented from uttering words. Rather, I develop an account of silencing that, unlike the competing account, can help make clear why a speaker who is silenced is thereby unfairly deprived of (some of) the benefits that lead us to place a special value on speech in the first place. Moreover, on my account, silencing turns out to be a distinctively speech-related wrong, in the sense that a silenced speaker is deprived of benefits that speech, and only speech, can provide.

Much of the recent philosophical discussion of silencing has in fact focused on the nature of the special protections due to speech. In my view, not enough attention has been paid to the phenomenon of silencing itself, and in particular, to the kind of wrong it constitutes. This paper is an attempt to rectify this oversight. I argue that, given their own view about the form the special protections for speech should take, Hornsby and Langton should prefer my account of silencing to their own. But, further, even if their particular view about special protections were to be rejected, my account still shows why silenced speakers suffer a significant wrong with which feminists (and others) should be particularly concerned.

Though the current philosophical interest in silencing arises in the context of discussions of pornography and its harms, it is not my aim to establish that pornography in particular silences. For all I say here, sources other than pornography (e.g., racist hate speech) may silence as well. Moreover, while other discussions of silencing have concentrated on the silencing of women in particular, my view makes room for the possibility that other sorts of speakers can also be silenced. My aim here is to offer a general account of the phenomenon that makes clear what it is for a speaker to be silenced, and further, that lays bare the empirical commitments of claims about silencing, thus enabling us to see what evidence bears on their truth. These points will be developed further in the final sections of this paper.

II The Silencing Argument

To motivate my account of silencing, I will begin by briefly presenting, and then criticizing, an alternate account of the phenomenon, due to Langton and Hornsby. As I understand it, they are committed to two theses. The first of these I dub the 'Silencing Thesis': [End Page 310]

Silencing Thesis: Pornography systematically silences women.3

There may be more than one conception of silencing that makes the Silencing Thesis plausible. However, for Langton and Hornsby, there is a further constraint on acceptable conceptions of silence. They want a conception that also renders true their second thesis, which I label the 'Free Speech Thesis':

Free Speech Thesis: Speakers who are systematically silenced thereby suffer an infringement of their right to free speech.4

If both the Silencing Thesis and the Free Speech Thesis are true, then pornography infringes women's right to free...

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