Natalie Stoljar (McGill) and Éliot Litalien (CRÉ) collaborated on an article entitled “Relational Inequality and the Social Uptake of Speech”, forthcoming in The Journal of Ethics.

Abstract

Prominent justifications of the value of free speech—such as the argument from truth and the argument from democracy—presuppose that the contents of the opinions expressed through speech are successfully communicated to listeners and interlocutors. Communication will be unsuccessful when disincentives or external obstacles like censorship are in place that prevent people from voicing their opinions. However, even when such obstacles are absent, broader social conditions can undermine the “reciprocity” that is required for successful communication. This paper has two main goals. The first is to argue that social conditions can undermine reciprocity by distorting the reception of speech by listeners and interlocutors—that is, by distorting the social uptake of speech. The second goal is to connect the notion of reciprocity with work in political philosophy on relational egalitarianism. Relational egalitarians argue that what matters for an equal society is not only that citizens have equal amounts of some resource, but also that they regard and treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that systematic failures of social uptake of speech will occur in situations of relational inequality. When speakers occupy inferior rank or are attributed lower moral status, and listeners have superior rank and higher status, the reciprocity required for successful communication will often not exist.