‘There is no right not to be offended!’: It’s a popular slogan. At least, it must be if Google is anything to go by. I typed the phrase ‘no right not to be offended’ into ‘advanced search’ and came up with ‘about’ 1,780,000 sites. The slogan is especially favoured by those who, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as taking a stand for freedom of speech and expression against its enemies, and that includes Nicholas Hytner, Philip Pullman, John Cleese, Shami Chakrabarti, Rowan Atkinson, Peter Tatchell, Ronald Dworkin, Ricky Gervais, and the late Christopher Hitchens. That’s a fairly broad range of intellectually capable individuals , and I am sure the list could be extended considerably. (I can’t say that I have checked out every single one of the websites in question.)

Even so, there is a major problem with the claim, namely that it is completely false. At least, that is how it looks to me. Moreover, it doesn’t take much of an argument to demonstrate the point. Thus: Suppose that I were approach a randomly selected passer-by and say – e.g. – ‘Oy pigface! You smell like a rat’s backside’. That would be offensive, would it not? Alternatively, suppose that I were to deliberately offend some person by publicly insulting them on the web. It seems to me that any person whose moral sensitivities are at all normal could only deplore such behaviour. If you agree, then you are thereby recognising that people have a right not to be treated in such ways, from which it follows, tout court, that there is a right not to be offended, – at least in cases resembling those I have just described.

Or, so I have often argued. But then I do agree with John Stuart Mill that one should, whenever possible, test one’s ideas against those which conflict with them, so is there anyone out there who can tell me what, if anything, is wrong with the foregoing argument? If you’re inclined to answer, please bear the following points in mind, though.

My argument does not yield a carte blanche justification for censorship. If it’s right, all it demonstrates it that people have a right to not to be gratuitously offended, as in the cases described. The conclusion is perfectly consistent with the view that there are other cases in which it is perfectly OK to be offensive. A serious defence of freedom of speech and expression should determine the line which divides the two types of case. (As I see it, simply asserting the false claim that there is no right not to be offended doesn’t help.) I tend not to be impressed by talk of ‘balancing’, as in ‘the right to free speech needs to be balanced against other considerations’. Such talk usually overlooks the question of how the balancing is meant to be done. More often than not, it’s a cop-out rather than a real argument. The majority of those who claim that there is no right not to be offended tend to support liberal causes; causes of which most people who read this would approve, – or so I guess. However, this is not invariably the case. Some proponents of the claim are, quite clearly, fairly nasty. For example, some defend the ‘right’ of racists to abuse the people they hate on the grounds that their victims ‘have no right not to be offended’.

If these are murky issues, then the culprit could be the concept of offensiveness itself, or so I suspect. Is it really the appropriate concept with which to handle what is really at stake when arguments over free speech arise?