Title: Freedom of Speech (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Speech
1. Introduction: Boundaries of the Debate
2. The Harm Principle and Free Speech
2.1 John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle
2.2 Mill's Harm Principle and Pornography
2.3 Mill's Harm Principle and Hate Speech
2.4 Responses to the Harm Principle
3. The Offense Principle and Free Speech
3.1 Joel Feinberg's Offense Principle
3.2 Pornography and the Offense Principle
3.3 Hate Speech and the Offense Principle
4. Democracy and Free Speech
4.1 Democratic Citizenship and Pornography
4.2 Democratic Citizenship and Hate Speech
4.3 Paternalistic Justification for Limiting Speech
5. Back to the Harm Principle
6. Conclusion
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Content: Such arguments show that one of the main reasons for justifying free speech (political speech) is important, not for its own sake but because it allows us to exercise another important value (democracy). Whatever reasons we offer to protect speech can also be used to show why some speech is not special. If speech is defended because it promotes autonomy, we no longer have grounds for protecting speech acts that undermine this value. If our defence of speech is that it is crucial to a well-functioning democracy, we have no reason to defend speech that is irrelevant to, or undermines, this goal. And if we agree with John Stuart Mill (1978) that speech should be protected because it leads to the truth, there seems no reason to protect the speech of anti-vaccers or creationists. Speech is important because we are socially situated and it makes little sense to say that Robinson Crusoe has a right to free speech. It only becomes necessary to talk of such a right within a social setting, and appeals to an abstract and absolute right to free speech hinder rather than help the debate. At a minimum, speech will have to be limited for the sake of order. If we all speak at once, we end up with an incoherent noise. Without some rules and procedures we cannot have a conversation at all and consequently speech has to be limited by protocols of basic civility.