Forum For Protection and Promotion of Lawful Unsafety
Forum For Protection and Promotion of Lawful Unsafety (FFPPLU or F2P2LU) is a proposed forum or platform conceived by Sunil Abraham to explore lawful unsafety and critique the emerging human right to safety. The idea distinguishes between activities that may be unsafe and activities that are unlawful, while questioning the expansion of safety concerns into psychological harm.
An expanded right to safety may affect lawful speech and lead to demands for greater censorship and surveillance.
Lawful Unsafety
Many activities can be unsafe while remaining lawful. Examples include gymnastics, automobiles, adventure sports, mountaineering, gangster hip hop and death metal.
The idea is that people should be able to consensually choose unsafe activities and products where they are lawful, rather than having safety become a lowest-common-denominator standard for everyone.
Right to Safety
The traditional understanding of safety discussed by Sunil Abraham relates to the protection of life and health. More recently, safety has increasingly been extended to psychological harms, with lived experience and self-reporting becoming a basis for determining whether someone has been harmed.
This raises questions about the role of objective evidence, expert testimony and the reasonable person standard, and about the consequences of an expanded right to safety for censorship and surveillance.
One alternative framing discussed is to understand some aspects of safety through consumer rights, particularly as a “right not to be surprised” when receiving a product or service.
Free Speech and Lawful Unsafety
The idea also has implications for free speech. If psychological safety becomes a broad basis for determining harm, speech that is lawful but disturbing, offensive, provocative or uncomfortable may increasingly become a target for regulation.
This is particularly significant in education, research and the arts, where encountering difficult ideas and experiences can be part of the activity itself. Students and researchers may need to examine ideas that are dangerous, disturbing, discredited or deeply opposed to their own views. Artists and audiences may similarly choose forms of expression that are deliberately provocative, violent, frightening or uncomfortable.
The concern is not that every form of speech or conduct must be permitted everywhere. Rather, where an activity is lawful, its regulation should not simply be justified by imposing one person’s or group’s standard of psychological safety on everyone else.
Diverse Lawful Spaces
Lawful unsafety also extends to different kinds of spaces. There can be safe and unsafe spaces, including shouting, non-shouting, whispering and screaming spaces, provided that they remain lawful.
Different institutions, communities and private organisations may establish their own lawful rules and purposes. The broader idea is to preserve diversity between spaces rather than establish a single standard of safety for everyone.
FFPPLU therefore explores whether a society can protect people from unlawful harm while continuing to preserve room for lawful speech, research, education, art, enterprise and activities that some people may regard as unsafe.
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