Professor Ronald Dworkin joins the list of distinguished scholars, like Peter Singer, who fear more the consequences of repressing viewpoints they loathe than they fear the consequences of freely expressing them.

“Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.”

Ronald Dworkin, “The Right to Ridicule,”
The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006

Ronald Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU and Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College, London. His books include Life's Dominion, Freedom's Law, and Sovereign Virtue. His new book, Justice in Robes, will be published in April.

Distinguished Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, the author of (among many other books) Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna, lost grandparents in German-occupied Poland. In an editorial in The Jerusalem Post , however, he argues that the West simply cannot defend cartoonists while jailing revisionists. At least not consistently and not without making a mockery of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Article 10 (which, he notes, “the vague qualifications of Article 11 . . . threaten to render . . . meaningless”).


Singer despises revisionism, but does not fear it. What he fears is the creation of the impression that “people are being imprisoned for expressing views that cannot be refuted by evidence and argument alone.” He insists that “those who are skeptical about the enormity of the Nazi atrocities should be confronted with the evidence for it.” I reject the suggestion that revisionists have been less than industrious delvers into the relevant evidence. (The quality of popular perception of World War II revisionism was encapsulated by an elderly man who, just after Irving’s conviction last week, exposed his forearm to the cameras to reveal tattooed numbers and declaimed: “Irving says I did this to myself!”) I’m also not as sure as he seems to be about the way things would shake out after such confrontation and attempts at refutation. My admiration for Professor Singer’s openness to that truth-honoring process, however, an openness which at this hour requires courage, is unbounded.

In “Free David, But Don’t Forget Goliath,” Michael Hoffman appreciates Professor Singer’s “welcome if toddling baby step” in the right direction. He says, however, that it will take a good deal more than merely freeing Irving to convert Muslim masses to belief in Western “evenhandedness.” Freeing a man who fights with a pen would be, as members of Singer’s profession would put it, a necessary but hardly a sufficient condition of such conversion.



And, before they take it down, listen to the incarcerated writer himself as he is interviewed from his prison cell. Thanks to Michael Hoffman for alerting people to this rare event.