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
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources

Content: For example, the freedom to criticize a government is generally thought to be more important than the freedom of an artist to offend her audience. If two speech acts clash  (when yelling prevents a political speech) a decision has to be made to prioritize one over the other, which means that there can be no unlimited right to free speech. For example, Alexander and Horton  (1984) claim that arguments defending speech on democratic grounds have many parts. One is a claim that the public needs a great deal of information in order to make informed decisions. Another is that because government is the servant of the people, it should not be allowed to censor them. 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.