Institutional Speech

We often connect free speech’s value to grand projects such as truth discovery, political critique or artistic expression, but most speech is more quotidian and mundane. The classic theories of free speech – democratic, truth consequentialism, and autonomy (e.g. as self-realisation) have difficulty accounting for this everyday dimension. Moreover, they presuppose, but do not by themselves explain, that our speech enjoys interlocutors. To avoid being an empty liberty, we require uptake from others for our speech. My aim in this paper is to explore and explain free speech’s value in the institutional sphere: the world of firms, parties, churches, unions, charities, universities, and similar associations. The basic idea is that institutional roles provide ready-made conditions for speech’s uptake among role-holders, and that institutional speech realises such roles. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, I sketch a view of norms as public rules with a deontic character which enable mutually accountability. Social roles are clusters of norms and include special rights, duties and permissions whose exercise helps realise roles’ inherent purposes. Institutions relate inter-connected roles and unite them through the promotion of an institution’s common purpose. I outline a fair play justification for institutional roles’ rights and duties in pursuit of morally acceptable common purposes. Second, I outline a distinctively relational view of free speech’s value where this consists in the way that speech affirms speakers as discursive agents whose views have appropriate weight for others (rather than serving some external purpose such as truth). Expressing oneself to another raises a claim for vindication of one’s speech from one’s interlocutor which their response (i.e. uptake) confirms; while the latter in turn raises a claim for vindication from the original speaker. Speech’s value lies in the mutual normative recognition of discursive agency. The third stage applies this picture of speech’s value to institutional roles. Institutions realise valuable speech through the way their roles define conditions of appropriate uptake. Through using speech in the exercise of their institutional roles, including roles’ rights and duties, member affirm each other as role-holders - and more generally members - in good standing of that institution; a form of recognition which exceeds basic recognition of discursive agency. Institutions enable, therefore, specifically valuable forms of speech At the same time, through the way that norms and roles maintain practices of mutual accountability, institutions also constrain speech, for example, if role holders fail in their duties or betray an institution’s common purpose.