The controversy over the Muhammad cartoons has faded from the front page, but I'm not over it. I felt mixed emotions about it. Anyone who has ever taken a class with me knows I exercise my right to free speech even when everyone else in the class wishes I would not. It would be beyond hypocritical of me, then, to not support free speech. Yet in this case, I actually thought the Danish newspapers should not have printed the cartoons, and papers like the New York Times made the right decision in not rerunning them. This was hard for me to square, until I realized this: There is a cost to free speech, and in this case, that cost was not borne by the speaker.
Free speech is not the right to say whatever you want free of any consequences; rather, it is the right to say whatever you will free of government consequences. You may have the right to tell racist jokes, but I, and everyone else, will likely think you are a bigot. That is the price you pay. Terrell Owens has the right to run his mouth off as much as he pleases, but everyone around him is likely to think he is a jerk and in his next contract, pay him accordingly. That is the price he pays. I have the right to take the opposite position as everyone else in a class, and everyone else will likely find me irritating. That is the price I pay. No act of free speech, or at least no act of free speech that is at all controversial, is really without any cost. Even if governments don't judge, societies will, and it would be difficult to expect them not to.
So why were the cartoons different? Leave aside for a minute that they were offensive to some people. The controversial free speech we uphold is, almost by definition, offensive to some people. What was different here was that the people who spoke freely did not bear the cost of what they said. How many people can name any individual cartoonist, or even spell the name of the newspaper they submitted to? We do not know their names because their offices did not get firebombed, their homes did not get torched, and their lives did not get threatened. No, they were a continent away while their free speech got other people killed. Their free speech led to the endangerment of countless others, but not themselves. No one thought of the individuals themselves as bigots or irritating.The costs of their free speech, it seemed, was meant for someone else. When the costs are so grave, as they were in this case, we can not help but notice the dynamic.
In economics, such a situation is called an externality, where the societal costs of a product or an action are not reflected in the price the person doing it pays. The simpler word, of course, is unfair. This is why we react so negatively when someone says, for instance, that "all Muslims are terrorists" because one happens to be; a billion Muslims are then paying the costs of one person's actions. Individuals should be rewarded and punished for their actions, not the actions of someone they never knew.
The importance of this is pretty clear. Everyone can defend free speech in the abstract and should. The government should not lightly squelch what I have to say. But when you defend the right to speak, make sure you are not defending my questionable right to speak and have you bear the consequences. Such a thing is hardly brave, as we tend to view those who speak freely; rather, it is the very definition of cowardice.