Huang-Blog Post 7

In Seana Shiffrin’s chapter three of Speech Matters, she delineates the difference between “thinker-based” freedom of speech and “speaker-based” and “listener-based” approaches to freedom of speech. She highlights that the significance of this “thinker-based” approach to freedom of speech is one that ensures that we are able to “develop and exercise our capacities for cultivating and conveying our thoughts, beliefs, and other mental states” (34). She argues that a “thinker-based” approach must also operate such that “Foundationally, freedom of speech is as crucial to children as it is to adults” (41). Shiffrin admits that to an extent young children and people with disabilities are not capable of full protection of free speech. However, this raises a few questions. 

First, Shiffrin is firm to believe that children’s freedom of speech is in general equally essential as adults in general even if their full faculties are not developed. Children may be guided and taught along the way, but their freedom of speech should be considered. However, in the status quo we know that children can be excused for their speech because they might “not know any better” or because they are just regurgitating what they have heard from someone else. Another impact of taking children’s speech at their full word is that we simply do not allow children to take full responsibility to make decisions and therefore are not accepting their speech at full value. For instance, we do not allow children to decide whether or not they attend school, make large purchases or loans, or decide if they want certain medical procedures done among others. While these are significant decisions that require clear communication of desires and responsibility, we have deemed children incapable of making that decision nor communicating that decisions to adults. To what degree do we genuinely take children’s speech as fully theirs and tangibly meant to carry out actions?

Second, if we are also to take people’s communication to be actionable, at what age does Shiffrin insist that individuals become “full-fledged” adults? What determines this concept of a “full-fledged” adult (psychology, social norms, or something else)? It seems indisputable that there is no definitive determination of at what exact age a “full-fledged” adult really means. According to psychology, the brain does not fully develop until the age of twenty-five. However, there is no country in the world that assigns the responsibility of adulthood to such a late age. In the United States, someone becomes an adult at the age of eighteen, but in Iran the age of adulthood is fifteen and in the United Arab Emirates the age of adulthood is twenty-one. Even within the U.S., even though the age of adulthood is eighteen, people are eligible to drive at different ages in different states and allowed to drink at a different age than the age of adulthood in other jurisdictions. As such, because the age of adulthood is a blurry line, Shiffrin’s determination of having full protections of freedom of speech upon adulthood is also unclear.