Ethics Newsline®

In the last few weeks, four pieces of a free-speech puzzle have dropped onto America’s table. Three concern standards of decency:

• Last Tuesday, in a 99-to-1 vote, the Senate approved a ten-fold increase in fines paid by entertainers and broadcasters that violate decency standards on the public airwaves, raising the penalty to $275,000 per incident for a maximum of $3 million per day.
• That same day, ironically, Vice President Dick Cheney found himself in the news for directing a vulgar expletive at Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy during a photo session in the Senate chamber.
• Later that week officials at Infinity Broadcasting, a unit of Viacom, responded to the threat of legislation by defending one of their top radio personalities, Howard Stern, for his “shock jock” techniques of pushing the indecency envelope.

Are we facing a national epidemic of vulgarity? Worries about it surfaced well before pop singer Janet Jackson’s breast was partially exposed during the Super Bowl game broadcast on CBS television (also a unit of Viacom) earlier this year. That incident ratcheted up the clamor for tougher decency standards — especially because many viewers suspected it was less a “wardrobe malfunction” than a deliberate publicity stunt.

Either way, the incident reminds us that our language of public discourse, and the visual imagery accompanying it, have been shifting toward more explicit reference to sexual and excretory functions. Books and movies now routinely use words that, a few decades ago, would have been harshly censored. At the same time, the language overheard in public spaces is far less restrained. While pundits can ponder whether the entertainment media shape, or merely reflect, standards of public decency, few would disagree that a marked change in tone has occurred within the space of a single generation.

That’s an unfortunate trend. To the extent that language reflects thought, a roughening of the vocabulary used to describe human interactions suggests a coarsening of relationships. Such a vocabulary also tends to diminish rather than expand the capacities for expression, as individuals resort to broad, undefined, and grunt-like clichés (which most vulgarities are) rather than to more precise descriptions of feelings or circumstances. In addition, the popularity of these vulgarities betrays a kind of hypocrisy. Given that these words are designed to invade the most private and intimate spheres — which explains why they shock — it’s odd that so many users of these epithets are so conscious about preserving their rights of privacy.

There are, in other words, good reasons for replacing a decline of decency with a new commitment to dignity. The question is how to do so. Given that Vice President Cheney is hardly the only politician using such expletives, any effort to legislate language is bound to raise perceptions of a double standard. Those perceptions are sharpened by the fourth piece of the puzzle, which came into view at a conference in Paris earlier this month on Internet hate speech. There, U.S. diplomats refused to join a European move to clamp down on racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic language. “We are appalled by some of the speeches on the Internet,” U.S. Justice Department advisor Dan Bryant told the conference. But he nevertheless toed a firm free-speech line in noting that “the government of the United States may not restrict a speech because of its ideas or merely because it disapproves its views.”

So do Americans hate indecency more than hate-speech? I don’t think so. I think they realize that a few F-words, corrosive though they may be, are far less consequential than hurling the N-word around in the United States or firing up anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe.

What remains confusing, however, is how best to contain these expletives. Some parts of a culture are best regulated by laws. Others are best defended by a moral and ethical impulse. In the end, given democracy’s dependence on freedom of speech, it may be dangerous to penalize linguistic choice. Does that mean vulgarity triumphs? No, it simply means that it must be reined in through ethics rather than law, through education rather than legislation, and through obedience to canons of decency that, although ultimately unenforceable, are widespread, teachable, and frequently articulated.

Meanwhile, should we remind the senators who voted for the indecency fines that, as Mr. Bryant argued, “the government of the United States may not restrict a speech because of its ideas”? Or should we remind Mr. Bryant that such restriction is exactly what the public seems to want these days? Either way, we won’t solve this puzzle by clamping down on obscenity while overlooking the virulence of hate-speech.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics