Speech Theories 8 values

Individual Self-Fulfillment & Promoting Tolerance

The Eight Ideals of Free Speech hold great importance because they form the foundation of our society. These ideals include a wide range of concepts that are necessary for free and inclusive societies to function and guard against censorship and the deterioration of democratic ideals. Upholding the principles of free expression is essential for safeguarding constitutional rights, advancing knowledge, and ensuring that constitutional societies flourish globally. These values include promoting diverse viewpoints, fostering public debate, and ensuring that people are held accountable. These eight principles can help us understand the significance of free expression in a connected and evolving society. Considering all of this, I believe the most important value of free expression is individual self-fulfillment and promoting tolerance.

The concept of individual self-fulfillment essentially means that we have the right to form our own opinions and speak on them no matter what they are. Promoting this value will create a very diverse environment for our democratic society because everyone will be able to express themselves freely, which could lead to human dignity, human agency, and autonomy. 

The value of promoting tolerance argues that any kind of speech, including hate speech should also be accepted under the First Amendment. All speech whether it is positive or negative will be accepted and tolerated, no matter how destructive and hateful it is. This could lead to society learning valuable lessons about what not to say out loud, and why that kind of speech is considered destructive, which will benefit it as a whole.

Individual self-fulfillment is a value we hold to a very high standard in America, but some nations do not support all the values of free speech. In countries like North Korea, citizens are given almost none of the individual expression liberties that we are. This causes a culture with little to no diversity of thought and no variance in culture such as what is seen in the United States. Amnesty International outlines a new law in North Korea that any use of the South Korean dialect within North Korea is punishable by several years of "reform through labor." This discourages the citizens of North Korea from creating a diverse culture through the use of other languages. This will lead to a cultural standstill where everyone will appear to hold the same exact opinions when it comes to the North Korean government, and there will be no diversity of speech at all throughout the country. This is what can happen when individual self-fulfillment is not seen as a right in other countries, and why it is so important to hold this value at such importance.

Promoting tolerance is a little more personal for me. A situation occurred last year where this value was upheld in my life. My mother was previously an anchor for Sports Center on ESPN. My mother was often in conflict with the ideals of her company, and she was criticized heavily for it on social media. It all came to a head in 2021 when they asked her to get the vaccine. She did not want to get it but eventually gave in because ESPN threatened to fire her if she did not take it. She stayed quiet about this for a long time, until she was asked about it publically, where she then criticized ESPN for putting her in an awkward situation when she said she did not want it. ESPN caught wind of this, suspended her, and removed her from several events she had been assigned to host. Shortly after, she sued them for violating her First Amendment rights. After months of back and forth, my mother got a settlement from ESPN and is now hosting her own show elsewhere. One of the arguments my mother had against ESPN is that they allowed other public figures of theirs to speak publically about far more sensitive, inherently political topics and they were not punished like she was. 

Situations like this demonstrate why the sixth value is so important. Even if the opinion being said is not fully agreed upon by everyone does not mean it should be held at a lower value than another. ESPN did not tolerate her opinion or her free speech rights, so she sued them, which I believe was the right choice. If they can value and support the opinions of their other representatives, they should value all of their representatives, but they did not, which could be extremely harmful to society.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/north-korea/report-korea-democratic-peoples-republic-of/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEVibWsTbtQ