When Words Become Wounds, Who Still Defends Speech?

Are free speech limits now drawn by empathy?

Every attempt to define the limits of free speech initially sounds not like an attack on democracy, but like an act of care. The latest research, conducted among American students, confirms this trend.

It turns out that most students believe marginalized communities deserve additional protection from offensive speech. Most respondents support a principle according to which protection from words should depend on the identity of the person being addressed.

What matters is that, although most students place a high value on free speech, their attachment to it weakens when strong political and ideological convictions come into play. A young person declares loyalty to free speech and abandons it when that speech touches their own community.

This shows that support for free speech among young people is no longer absolute, but conditional — dependent, among other things, on whom it wounds. It is a symptom of a deeper change in the way the younger generation thinks.

The right to speak, or the duty not to wound?

The classical conception of free speech, associated with John Stuart Mill or John Locke, treated it as a fundamental right of the individual: the right to express one’s own thoughts, even if they are unpopular, controversial, or simply wrong. As long as they did not directly incite violence, they were to be protected.

The new generation reverses this perspective. Free speech is increasingly understood not as the right to speak, but as the duty not to wound. The question “Do I have the right to say this?” is displaced by another: “Will I hurt someone by saying it?”

In this approach, the emotional or psychological harm caused by words is compared to physical harm. A new hierarchy of values appears: empathy and safety above unrestricted truth.

Who decides what may be said?

It sounds noble. The problem is that verbal harm is an imprecise phenomenon. One person feels wounded by a joke, another by criticism of their views, and another by the mere fact that someone thinks differently.

If the limit of free speech is to be another person’s sense of injury, then that limit ceases to be fixed. It becomes mobile, subjective, dependent on the most sensitive listener.

Who, in such a situation, has the right to decide which words are too dangerous to be spoken in public? In a model where limiting free speech follows from care for the weakest, someone must determine what wounds and what does not. Someone must also decide who is “weak” enough to deserve protection. This criterion quickly proves extremely unstable, and dependent on the sympathies and convictions of the person judging.

This is precisely the weakest point of censorship based on empathy. John Stuart Mill warned that “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

Whoever draws the boundary of permissible speech must assume that their own sensitivity is an objective measure. History teaches us, however, that no censor ever considered himself a censor. Each saw himself as a defender of decency.

Can empathy and truth be reconciled?

Does this mean that “safe space” and free speech exclude one another? Not necessarily, but only if we understand safety as protection from real violence and threat, not from the discomfort of thought. The problem appears when “safe space” means a zone free from all ideas that someone may regard as harmful.

Empathy and truth can be reconciled, but not when empathy begins to define which truth may be spoken. Truth is often uncomfortable by nature. If it never wounded, we would not need courage to speak it.

History shows that the greatest advances of civilization — from the abolition of slavery, through women’s rights, to the struggle against totalitarianisms — required freedom of criticism, intellectual provocation, and words that were not always “safe.” Galileo, Voltaire, Martin Luther King Jr. — none of them acted in a “safe space.” They acted in a space of risk.

Will the new free speech limits become the rule?

The classical defense of free speech never claimed that everything is permitted. The famous Chicago Principles — a model of academic freedom — guarantee “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn,” while also noting that expression may be limited in narrow, exceptional circumstances: threats, harassment, and disruption of an institution’s functioning.

And this is the proper hierarchy. Free speech remains the rule. The restriction of free speech remains a rare exception, one that must be justified each time, not a default reflex.

What causes concern is not the younger generation’s empathy itself, but what may hide behind it: a readiness to make sensitivity the final judge of speech. The restriction of free speech we are observing is not only an act of empathy. It is a shift in the civilizational paradigm — from trust in human rationality to suspicion of it.

It is a move from a model in which adult citizens judge ideas for themselves to a model in which the state, institutions, or activist groups protect us from “dangerous” words.

A value that should not be put in question

The younger generation has noble intentions: it wants to protect the vulnerable. That is admirable. But the best intentions combined with censorship rarely end well. Free speech is not a luxury for the strong. It is a shield for the weak — because the weak are often the ones who most need the ability to object loudly to power and dominant narratives.

Free speech is not one value among others, something that can simply be exchanged for another. It is the condition that allows us to talk about values at all. That is why we should not put it in question. We may limit it only in exceptional cases, consciously and with the greatest caution. If free speech limits become a reflex rather than an exception, the language of care can quietly become the language of control.

Read this artcle in Polish: Słowa, które bolą za mocno. Pokolenie empatii chce cenzury?