I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley." She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock.
我想先从 佩斯利蜗牛案说起 1928年8月26日晚上 梅·多诺霍乘火车从格拉斯哥 前往向东七英里外的小镇佩斯利 在镇上的一家叫Wellmeadow 的咖啡馆里 她喝了一杯雪顶苏格兰 这是一种混合了冰淇淋和姜汁啤酒的饮料 是她朋友给她点的 姜汁啤酒的酒瓶是棕色的 ,且不透明 上面有“D. 斯蒂文森, 格林巷,佩斯利"的标签 她喝了一些混合冰激凌饮, 但当她把剩下的姜汁酒倒到 玻璃杯里时 一只腐烂了的蜗牛 从杯子里浮了上来 三天之后 她住进了 格拉斯哥皇家医院 被确诊为严重肠胃炎 并伴有休克
The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business.
之后发生在 多诺霍和斯蒂文森公司之间的官司 开创了一个重要的法律先例: 姜汁啤酒的生产商斯蒂文森 对梅·多诺霍女士负有 明确的责任 即便他们之间没有签订合约 甚至连这杯饮料都不是她自己买的 一位法官 阿特金爵士解释道: 人们应该尽力避免 那些可以合理地预知 会伤害到邻居的行为或疏忽 的确, 我们无法想象, 如果没有慎独义务 在斯蒂文森公司倒闭之前 还会有多少人得忍受肠胃炎的侵扰
Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. They're not just less politically engaged. They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy.
请记住佩斯利蜗牛案 因为此案包含了一条重要的原则 去年 一个无党派的慈善组织 伦敦汉萨德学会(Hansard Society) 为了加强议会民主 鼓励公众更广泛的参与政治 他们在出版年度政治参与度审计年报时 增加了一个专门讨论 政治和媒体的章节 以下是这次调查中 一些令人沮丧的观察结果 小报并没有的提高 读者们的政治公民权的迹象 他们甚至和那些 从不看报的人没什么两样 只读小报的人 持有负面政治观点的可能性 是不读报纸的人的两倍 他们不仅仅在政治生活中不作为 还通过媒体的报道来 强化他们负面的政治观点 从而对民主和 他们自身在民主中所扮演的角色 产生一种宿命论和愤世嫉俗的态度 很少有人会怀疑 这些报道得出这样的结论: 在这个方面,出版方 ,尤其是这些小报 明显地没有起到它们 在民主中所扮演角色的重要性
Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon.
我想这个房间里应该没有人会严肃地 质疑这个观点 但如果汉萨德学会没有错, 通常如此 那我们就遇到一个非常棘手的问题 一个我在接下来的十分钟想要 探讨的问题
Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. And the more you think about it, the stranger that is.
自从佩里斯蜗牛事件以来 尤其是在过去十年间 关于慎独义务的概念 产生了非常多的观点 它和公民社会中的很多方面息息相关。 通常,当一个个体 或一群个体从事一项 对他人可能造成伤害的活动 无论是身体、精神还是经济上 这就牵涉到慎独义务 这主要体现在比较明显的方面 如我们对儿童和青少年 对服务行业员以及老人和弱者的同情和理解 它很少会企及 关于政府现有体系的脆弱性 这一命题的重要性, 而诚实、准确和公平的概念 是建立和植入 一种(公众)知情并 积极参预民主的基础。 你越仔细思考 就会越觉得奇怪
A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the northeast of England. It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "Oh, that's our school motto." On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement.
几年以前 我很荣幸 在英格兰的东北部开了 一所新学校 学校学生们把它重新命名为360学院 在我穿过让人印象深刻 有着玻璃外观的门廊 在我的前方的墙上 以金色字体装饰着 马可奥利斯伍斯(Marcus Aurelius)的名言: 不对的,就不要说出来 不正确的 ,就不要去做 校长注意到我在盯着这行字看 告诉我说 这是我们的校训 回伦敦的火车上 这句话在我脑海里一直挥之不去 我一直想 ,难道我们真的需要 2000多年才能总结出 这一简单的主张 作为我们对彼此的最低期望? 难道现在不是我们该发展 慎独义务这种观念 并把它延伸成一种我们曾拥有 但日渐消亡的民主价值? 毕竟,在 很多行业都缺失的慎独义务 可以全部归咎于失职 那就是上面的案例。 我们是否能够真的认同 我们实际上忽视了 尊重我们自身社会的健康 以及所有支撑它们的价值? 谁能实事求是,有凭有据地指出, 汉萨德学会极力谴责的媒体 已经采取了足够的小心来避免 那些可以显而易见地 可能逐渐蚕食或侵害 我们与生俱来的脆弱民主的建立
Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities.
现在可能有些人会反驳 这很容易变成 检查制度或自我检查, 但是我不同意。 通过普世道德和社会责任 来平衡言论自由 是可能的
Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. I'd go further. A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable.
我来解释一下为什么 举自己作为电影导演的例子 在职业生涯中 我从未认同 导演应该把工作 置于一种高尚价值观 之外或之上 无论是对自己的还是家庭 以及我们所处在的未来社会 我想延伸一下 一个负责的导演不应贬低自己的工作 使其比他们自己期望栖居的世界 要低的地步 我认为电影工作者 记者 甚至博客作者 都应该直面社会期待 这种期待同媒体固有的力量相连 同他们的职业技能相连 很明显 这并不是规定的义务 但对于有才华的导演和负责的记者 或博客作家,能打动我的是他们的非常自觉。
We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active.
我们应时刻谨记自己对 个人自由以及它的朋友——创作自由的见解 在西方思想史中 不是久已有之的价值 正因如此 它才会被贬低 会被逐渐蚕食 这种价值很容易被遗忘 一旦遗忘, 一旦妥协 就很难再追回。 而它的第一道防线 是我们自己的标准 不是强加于我们的审查或立法, 是我们自己的标准和正直。 当我们同他人工作时 的正直 以及在参与社会活动时的标准 我们的这些标准 需要成为可持续发展的社会议程 他们是集体责任的一部分 艺术家和记者的责任 按照世界的真实情况来处事 并且反过来,必须同治理社会的原则 相联系 共同面对世界 而且不会被 不正当的理由所引诱。 然而,这在过去的几年中 这种责任在很大程度上 越发明显地 被媒体削弱。 由此导致 拮抗各方的过于简单化的政策 和他们的请愿的巨大幻灭,这在西方世界尤为普遍 老龄人群 还有冷漠的 被琐碎之事困扰的年轻人 全都混杂在一起 ,还有其他 类似的当代问题正在 步步逼紧,让生活中不再 拥有积极的讨论和政治参与。 在此我强调积极。 最热忱的自由主义者也许会认为
The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse.
多诺霍和斯蒂文森公司应该被抛出法庭 并且如果他继续卖有蜗牛的姜汁啤酒 公司会最终停业 但是 ,我们中的大多数都认同 州立法在加强慎独义务上应有的小角色。 这里的关键词就是合理 法官们需要自问, 他们是否采取合理的谨慎 他们是否能合理预见 自己决策带来的影响? 那远非放大了州立法的权力 而是小小的合理的常识性的试验 我希望我们对媒体也一样。 媒体毕竟为我们现在的民主话语 设置了导向和内容 为了发扬民主
Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership.
理性的人们需要花时间理解并讨论 一些困难复杂的问题 他们会在一种能够激发 某种理解的氛围下讨论 这种理解即便不能使他们达成一致 也会有所进展 ,并有可行的折中办法 政治关乎选择 在选择之后 ,政治关乎优先 是随时随地基于事实调节 对优先偏好的冲突 但如果事实已被扭曲, 结果只能会给今后制造更多的冲突 整个社会都会不可避免的 疲惫不堪 媒体需要做出决定 他们的角色是加剧愤怒 还是传播信息 因为最终都归结于 信任和领导力的结合 50年前的这周 肯尼迪总统
Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. Thank you very much for listening to me. (Applause)
发表了两个划时代的演讲 一个是关于裁军 另一个是关于公民权 第一个演讲马上引出了 禁止核试验条约 第二引出了1964年民权法案 二者都是巨大的飞跃 完善健全的民主 可以带来伟大的成就 但得有一个前提 我们需要相信那些做决策的人 不是在为他们自己谋福利 而是在为人民 我们需要以事实为基础的选项 明确的布局 而不是几个 潜在的操控的大公司 各自追逐他们自己的小利益 我们应该追逐准确没有偏见的信息 来做出自己的判断 如果我们想为自己的子孙后代 提供一种合适的充实的生活 我们需要尽最大可能 履行慎独义务,为了充满活力的 而且希望是一个持久的民主 感谢聆听 (掌声)