I don't know. I think, you know, we can almost only speak as amateurs, but what I would say is: in a way, it's problematic to talk about someone trying to achieve this effect. The sort of culture we're talking about is one for which we're ...

No, absolutely, and that's why three has a kind of priority, because the law really should operate as a backstop measure where things go dreadfully wrong, and ideally what you want is to have a situation where people have been habituated to complying with certain standards that make it ...

I think the initial answer is one and three. Of course, you should always enforce the law. If the law's not being enforced, it should be enforced, and of course you should be doing things to promote the culture that realises values beyond those necessarily that can be in ...

I don't think I'd want to concede to that particular point. So I think it might be the case that you really are confronted with a situation where there are just two alternative ways of specifying a legal requirement or a right and that require you to balance ...

Correct.

Can I just add something? There are sort of two points at which you might think the institutional extra power of the press -- institutional (inaudible) extra power -- creates more limited space. One is in the right itself, so individuals may have a right to express certain things that the press ...

That's right. I think we have to understand law as not a kind of self-enclosed system. It's a set of norms. It's trying to achieve some valuable purposes and these purposes are appropriately described as ethical purposes, generally, on a suitably broad understanding of what the ethical ...

It's a difficult question. I think you could come to certain questions -- we think both answers are legitimate answers. You could have a situation where -- when one society would say, "The way we're going to understand privacy is pretty deep going and it excludes people prying into things ...

Right. There are interesting questions about what the difference might be, but I'm happy to go with duties. Duties I take to be particularly sort of compelling reasons which, if you violate, either you should certainly feel guilty about and others should be legitimate in blaming you or sanctioning ...

I think it is a fair point. That's right. The impact of a certain kind of speech is relevant both in the individual case and the institutional case. Whether something's liable to be noticed, what effects it's liable to have on other people's perceptions must be ...

-- that's assumed there, because it seems to me that the law in many ways tries to shape people to have at least morally decent characters. For example, through the education system, through the various sorts of rules and requirements about public interaction and offensive behaviour and so forth. So ...

I'm not sure that I buy into the contrast that you're drawing --

I think I agree with that, but the question is: how do you operationalise the idea of bulwark against tyranny? I mean, you could be claiming to be operating as a bulwark against tyranny. I think the most you can say is: well, when the press is dealing with certain ...

I think it's hugely important to emphasise that entertainment is something in the public interest, that it is a collective public good. That's its importance, and you identified, I think, two aspects of that. One is just the intrinsic value of people being entertained, but then we have ...

Can I make a point about the free market point and that's that it's dangerous to think of the free market as a law of the jungle situation. A free market can only exist if certain fairly stringent conditions are satisfied: conditions like people having roughly equivalent knowledge ...

Again, there's a very great tenancy in the world to think of freedom as an unalloyed good. So once the word "freedom" comes in, we all put our hands up and vote for it. That's a mistake for reasons that have been given more than once, but beyond ...

I think that's, as a presumption, probably correct. I'm not sure about using the word "free market", but in general, as a way for the state to proceed, it does seem to be correct that if it's contemplating any kind of measure that restricts people's freedom ...

So no one is credibly going to say any restriction on freedom of expression in itself constitutes some kind of unacceptable muzzling. So the question then becomes, in a kind of piecemeal approach -- careful piecemeal approach, when you start to identify certain forms of restriction: what case can be made ...

But anyone who believes in free speech presumably also believes that there are limits to things like: you can't defame other people.

Another thing to say is that there is an asymmetry between the individual case and the case of the press. One of the reasons we tolerate the fairly broad-ranging right of individual expression is that individual's remarks are typically limited in their impact, if it's one individual making ...

I think there's always been a tendency to think of press freedom under the rubric of individual freedom of expression or communication. I think that's probably a mistake. The sort of reason that Professor Hornsby gave the subjects are different. In the one case, you're talking about ...

That's right. The question is: could my interest in shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre generate a duty on anyone else to let me shout and not to interfere with me doing that and not to punish me for doing that, and the answer is: clearly not. So to ...

If you mean by "an absolute right" a right that can never be overridden by competing considerations under any circumstances, which is how I characterised it earlier, then I would say that it's not an absolute right. But I think that's the less interesting question. I think the ...

That's the philosophical issue. I would want to distinguish two questions. One is whether, as a matter of morality, the right not to be tortured is absolute, and the second question is an institutional question, whether we should have absolute rights in law. There might be good reasons for ...

Good question. It assumes that there are absolute rights and it's not clear to me that there are absolute rights. There might be some rights that we quite properly treat as absolute for legal purposes. So, for example, it might be that there are very compelling reasons for treating ...

It's possible that "rights" gets used in all sorts of different ways, but I think there's a kind of consensus, at least amongst philosophers, that the strict sense of a right is one that implies the existence of a duty and that's why the idea that violating ...

We need to distinguish them because typically in political and other forms of discourse they're supposed to carry a great deal of weight, and because they carry this great deal of weight, people are often eager rhetorically to present various arguments in terms of rights and that leads to ...

My main areas of interest are in moral and legal philosophy and in recent years I've specialised in human rights punishment and issues about international law.