Accountability and dissent in a just society

Public debate in Australia today feels less like a conversation and more like a chronic injury. We poke at it every day; it hurts every day; and yet we no longer remember quite how we damaged it in the first place.

One camp insists that “you can’t say anything anymore”, that we are sliding into a culture of timidity where one clumsy phrase can end a career. Another counters that, for the first time, people who used to be caricatured or ignored are finally able to push back, and that what looks to some like censorship is actually overdue justice.

Both camps are partly right. But they are also, increasingly, talking past each other.

A Culture of Fear or Accountability?

Those who fear a culture of fear recognise, correctly, that the health of a democracy depends on the ability to ask difficult questions. A society where people self-censor for safety, where creative and scholarly risk-taking becomes career suicide, and where errors are interpreted as evidence of depravity cannot renew itself.

The most vital discoveries in science, the most radical movements in politics, the most transformative art and literature, none of these thrive in a culture of perpetual self-surveillance. They demand room for trial, error, clumsiness, even foolishness. A democracy that trains its teachers, researchers and young adults to avoid difficult ideas is slowly starving its own capacity for self-correction.

But those who insist on accountability recognise something equally vital – for many Australians, the public sphere has never been hospitable. For women confronting misogyny, for First Nations people confronting erasure, for migrants confronting caricature, for queer Australians confronting hostility, speech has long carried risks that others rarely see.

The fact that many now speak back, loudly, forcefully, insistently, is not evidence of creeping authoritarianism. It is evidence that the silent have finally found breath. Accountability, in this sense, is the price of becoming a more inclusive nation.

The difficulty is that both impulses are legitimate, and both, taken to extremes, become destructive. Fear flattens curiosity. Impunity corrodes trust. We are now living with the worst tendencies of each- a culture jumpy with denunciation and jittery with self-censorship.

So, the two stories we tell ourselves, about fear and about impunity, are both true, but in different places, for different people. The stakes are not symmetrical. A tenured professor who bites their tongue in a seminar is not in the same position as a young woman leaving social media because every post produces sexualised abuse. Both matter ethically; they do not matter in the same way.

The mistake, on all sides, is to imagine that we are fighting a single, binary war – free speech versus cancel culture, liberty versus justice. It is something subtler and more consequential – a breakdown in our shared understanding of what public life is for, who it belongs to, and how we ought to treat one another when we collide within it.

We have mistaken a debate about power, responsibility and belonging for a referendum on “political correctness” or “cancel culture”. As a result, the real moral stakes have been obscured behind partisan slogans.

In reality, we are grappling with a more complex, and more interesting question- how do we build a society in which people can name injustice without fear, challenge power without impunity, and still survive ordinary mistakes without being thrown away?

The first task is to dispense with the childish dichotomy that dominates public discourse. The idea that one must choose between “free speech” and “accountability” is a false dichotomy.  Neither principle, rightly understood, functions without the other.

Speech without accountability slides quickly into impunity – the powerful permit no challenge, the vulnerable retreat into silence, and public life becomes a stage for those who can wound most effectively. Accountability without freedom becomes fear – people whisper instead of reason, institutions hide behind risk-aversion, and our national culture grows timid, suspicious and intellectually impoverished.

The present disorder arises not because one camp is right and the other wrong, but because each grasps only half a moral truth.

To address this, we need to reach for a sturdier moral framework than the latest outrage cycle can provide.

Rights as “Capabilities”

One useful place to start is with the work of Amartya Sen, who has spent decades arguing that democracy is not just about elections but about “public reasoning”-  the ongoing process by which people argue, contest, explain and revise their views in common.

For Sen, rights are not just formal permissions; they are “capabilities”, real freedoms people possess to live the kind of lives they have reason to value. Applied to speech, this means that it is not enough to ask, “Do you officially have the right to speak?” We must also ask, “Do you have the actual capability to speak, and to survive the consequences of speaking, without being dominated?”

That simple shift in perspective already clarifies the landscape.

Speech is relational. No one speaks into a vacuum. Words are uttered in social space, heard by others, interpreted, contested, absorbed. They affect reputations, relationships, opportunities and sense of belonging. Speech is not merely self-expression; it is a social act, embedded in networks of power, history and vulnerability.

The great mistake of our current moment is to treat speech as a personal possession rather than a shared responsibility. People invoke their “right to speak” as if it exempts them from the moral consequences of speaking, and others invoke “harm” as if it entitles them to destroy those who err. Both are misunderstandings.

A mature society understands that freedom of expression is not a licence to be reckless, and accountability is not a licence to be cruel. Freedom demands that people be able to speak without disproportionate consequences; accountability demands that people be answerable for how their words affect others. Neither principle can be realised without the other.

This relational view of speech reveals the real ethical question of our time- do Australians, in practice, have the capability to speak honestly, to hear honestly, and to survive the consequences of inevitable mistakes without being dominated or destroyed?

Case Studies

That question cannot be answered in generalities. It must be answered in the particular.

Consider three different people. A well-known commentator with millions of followers loses a weekly newspaper column after years of inflammatory remarks; within weeks, she has a podcast, a book deal and a donation page. She loudly declares that she has been “silenced.

A junior employee on a temporary contract makes a clumsy joke in a staff chat, is named and shamed online, and finds her job quietly not renewed. An Indigenous activist receives torrents of racist abuse and rape threats every time she appears on television, and eventually stops appearing at all.

Formally, all three have freedom of speech. In practice, their capabilities are radically different. The commentator retains vast access to platforms and sympathetic audiences. The precarious worker has almost none. The activist is technically “free” but effectively driven out of the public sphere by sustained harassment. Treating these cases as morally equivalent insults our intelligence.

When we fail to distinguish among these situations, when we equate powerful with precarious, entrenched with marginal, influential with vulnerable, we commit ethical malpractice.

An ethically serious approach to speech, accountability and consequence has to start from this fact- people occupy different positions in webs of power, and the same reaction, criticism, boycotts, professional sanction, will have different effects depending on who receives it. Sen’s capabilities approach tells us that justice is about how these effects shape people’s real freedoms, not just their abstract rights.

A society committed to justice must therefore be attentive to three questions whenever disputes over speech arise-

1. Who holds the power in this interaction?
2. What consequences is each party realistically capable of absorbing?
3. What response would most enhance, rather than diminish, the capacity for everyone involved to participate in the public sphere?

These questions, not slogans, should guide our judgments.

But understanding power does not mean we should sneer at fears of suppression. Chilling effects, where people stay silent to avoid risk, are well documented in the legal and philosophical literature.

Recent work even suggests that when individuals self-censor out of fear, the resulting pressure can sometimes intensify group-level discourse in odd ways, pushing it into more polarised, underground spaces- a “heating effect” rather than silence, but no less corrosive to democratic life. The point is not that any consequence is wrong. It is that unpredictable, disproportionate consequences create a sense of ambient danger that harms everyone’s capacity to engage honestly.

Active Participants

This is where another strand of contemporary scholarship becomes helpful. Katharine Gelber, an Australian political theorist, has argued that the most promising way to respond to harmful speech is not simply to ban it or ignore it, but to resource those affected so they can “speak back”.   Rather than treating victims as passive objects of protection, Gelber argues, we should treat them as active participants in public reasoning, capable of answering, correcting and contesting hostile narratives if given the means to do so.

That idea, that accountability should expand speech for the harmed, not merely contract speech for the harmful, is exactly what our debate is missing.

Too often, calls for accountability are reduced in practice to campaigns for punitive exclusion- de-platform this person, fire that one, scrub their name. Sometimes such steps are justified; there are cases of sustained abuse, deception or incitement where maintaining someone in a position of power or trust becomes ethically untenable. But if our only tool is professional destruction, we will be strongly tempted to use it in marginal cases as well, simply because it is all we have. And when destruction becomes the default, fear follows.

A better model begins from a different question- in this situation, what response would best enhance the capabilities of everyone involved, the targets of speech, the speaker, and the wider public, to engage in truthful, just public reasoning?

In many cases, the answer will not be immediate expulsion, but structured “speaking back”-  guaranteed rights of reply in the same forum; institutional commitments to publish responses from those misrepresented; restorative processes that bring together speakers and those affected by their words; education and training that treat people as capable of growth. None of this precludes sanctions when someone shows themselves unwilling to change. But it insists that, before we reach for permanent exile, we exhaust the possibilities of repair.

Repair, however, requires proportion and procedure. Proportion means that not all mistakes are treated as equal. There is a moral world of difference between a student who asks an awkward question, a manager who repeatedly uses slurs after complaints, and a commentator who deliberately stokes hatred to build a brand. Intent, context and pattern matter. A society that refuses to distinguish among them cannot claim to take justice seriously.

Procedure means that institutions cannot outsource their conscience to social media. Universities, media outlets, workplaces and cultural organisations all need clear, transparent processes for handling complaints. These processes should protect complainants from retaliation and minimise the risk of impunity.

They should also give accused people a chance to respond, to apologise, to contest, and, where appropriate, to make amends. Secretive, ad hoc decision-making fuels suspicion on all sides. People feel either that powerful wrongdoers are protected, or that ordinary workers can be sacrificed without explanation to appease a passing storm. Both perceptions undermine trust.

Three domains of regulation

To make sense of the fragmentation we are living through, it is helpful to notice that “speech regulation” is not one thing. It operates, at a minimum, in three different domains.

First, there is the state- laws of defamation, vilification, national security, protest. Here, the risk is obvious. When governments gain broad power to decide which views may be expressed, especially under elastic labels like extremism or “national cohesion”, they are strongly tempted to entrench themselves and silence critics. Comparative research on authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes offers abundant evidence of this temptation. Australia is not exempt from such dangers; our history of sedition provisions, anti-terror legislation and protest restrictions should make us wary.

Second, there are the private infrastructures that now mediate most public communication- social-media platforms, messaging apps, virtual worlds. Their algorithms determine which voices are amplified, which are buried, which kinds of engagement are rewarded.

As recent investigations into online abuse and misogyny have shown, these systems often amplify the most inflammatory content and provide inadequate protection for users facing sustained harassment. Here, the risk is not that of a censorious state, but of a handful of corporations whose design choices effectively decide which types of public reasoning are possible at scale.

Third, there are the social and institutional sanctions we impose on each other- hiring and firing decisions, disinvitations, boycotts, public shaming. These operate through norms rather than law. They are not inherently illiberal; citizens have always used informal power to express moral disapproval. But when these sanctions become unpredictable, disproportionately harsh, or indifferent to differences of power and context, they create an atmosphere in which many people, especially the young and precariously employed, come to view public life as unsafe.

If we simply shout “free speech” or “accountability” at this complex system, we will solve nothing. The more constructive question is- in each domain, what arrangements best protect people from domination while enabling the widest possible participation in public reasoning?

For the state, that means narrow, tightly drafted restrictions aimed at the most serious harms, incitement to violence, targeted vilification, combined with strong protections for political dissent and investigative journalism. For platforms, it means building safety by design, investing properly in moderation, and giving users real control over their experience. For institutions, it means robust due-process systems and a default preference for repair, education and speaking back over instant expulsion.

What does this look like in practice? Imagine a university faced with a controversial speaker whose views many staff and students find offensive. A brittle culture will frame the choice as binary- host them uncritically or ban them outright. A more mature culture will treat the invitation as an opportunity for structured public reasoning.

The university can insist on rigorous questioning, ensure that affected groups have space to respond, and make clear that hosting a speaker is not endorsement. Protest is part of the speech ecosystem too; efforts to block entry or shout down events, however, infringe others’ capabilities to hear and argue. In this way, the institution defends both dissent and accountability without capitulating to either a heckler’s veto or a simplistic “marketplace of ideas” that ignores power.

Or take a workplace case. Staff raise serious concerns about discriminatory behaviour by a senior manager. A just response will protect the complainants, investigate thoroughly, and, if the allegations are upheld, impose meaningful consequences. That is accountability.

At the same time, staff accused of lower-level offences, thoughtless comments, misjudged jokes, should not find their careers destroyed overnight by unexamined outrage. They should be offered dialogue, training, and the possibility of demonstrating change. That is proportion and repair. Both are needed if the organisation is to cultivate a culture in which people feel both safe and able to learn.

It is worth emphasising that none of this is about moral mushiness. Compromise in ethics is sometimes portrayed as weakness, a failure of conviction. But when multiple moral values are genuinely at stake, liberty, equality, dignity, truth, the refusal to compromise is often the real abdication. It is choosing purity over responsibility.

A society that chooses only unrestrained expression will tend to entrench existing hierarchies. The loudest, richest and most media-savvy will dominate the conversation; those who pay the price of their “boldness” will be those with the fewest resources. A society that chooses only protection from offence will stifle the diversity of thought it needs to detect its own errors. In both cases, public reasoning shrinks, and the promise of democracy withers.

Arguing for the Common Good

The settlement we should be seeking is not a 50-50 compromise between “free speech people” and “social justice people”. It is a deeper, more demanding agreement –  that Australia will be a place where people can argue fiercely about the common good, where those harmed by speech are empowered to speak back forcefully and safely, and where no one is permanently discarded for failing to be flawless in public.

In such a culture, the person who fears saying the wrong thing would know that they are owed proportion, process and the possibility of redemption. Public life would not feel like walking a tightrope over a pit of permanent disgrace. And the person who fears being dehumanised would know that they are owed platforms, respect and the power to challenge those who misrepresent them. Public life would not require them to absorb injury in silence.

This is not a utopia. We will still have bitter disagreements about where to draw precise lines, about which harms warrant severe sanctions, about how to distinguish between structural critique and personal attack. No manifesto will relieve us of the hard work of judgment.

But we can do better than the brittle binary we have now. We can refuse the lazy comfort of stories in which only one value, liberty or dignity, is really at risk, and all evil lies on the other side. We can insist that any law, platform design or institutional norm be evaluated by a simple question- does it enhance people’s capabilities to participate in public reasoning without domination, or does it merely shift who gets to do the silencing?

If we answer that question honestly, we will find ourselves defending some forms of protest and criticising others; supporting some sanctions and opposing others; siding with whichever group, in that case, is most serious about preserving a public sphere where disagreement is survivable and voices long silenced can finally be heard.

That is not an easy posture to hold. It will satisfy neither those who crave the moral drama of permanent war nor those who long for a return to a more curated, quieter public life. But it is the only posture worthy of a democracy that takes both freedom and justice seriously.

We do not need a society in which elites can speak without challenge. We do not need a society in which ordinary people live in permanent fear of saying the wrong thing. We need a society strong enough to tolerate dissent, just enough to confront real harm, and humble enough to recognise that we are all capable of both wounding and learning.