The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

This volume draws on a range of approaches in order to explore the problem and determine what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech.Most liberal societies are deeply committed to a principle of free speech. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some kinds of speech are harmful in ways that are detrimental to important liberal values, such as social equality. Might a genuine commitment to free speech require that we legally (...) permit speech even when it is harmful, and even when doing so is in conflict with our commitment to values like equality? Even if such speech is to be legally permitted, does our commitment to free speech allow us to provide material and institutional support to those who would contest such harmful speech? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, which kinds of speech are harmful in ways that merit response, either in the form of legal regulation or in some other form? This collection explores these and related questions. Drawing on expertise in philosophy, sociology, political science, feminist theory, and legal theory, the contributors to this book investigate these themes and questions. By exploring various categories of speech (including pornography, hate speech, Holocaust denial literature, 'Whites Only' signs), and attending to the precise functioning of speech, the essays contained here shed light on these questions by clarifying the relationship between speech and harm. Understanding how speech functions can help us work out which kinds of speech are harmful, what those harms are, and how the speech in question brings them about. All of these issues are crucially important when it comes to deciding what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech. (shrink)

By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography’s harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds.

At the center of the hate speech controversy is the question whether it constitutes conduct. If hate speech is not conduct, then restricting it runs counter to free speech. But even if it could be shown that it is a kind of conduct, complicated questions arise. Does it necessarily follow that we restrict speech? Practically speaking, can speech even be restricted, either through new legislation or the enforcement of existing laws regulating conduct? (...) Are measures such as hate crimes legislation both useful and appropriate in protecting individuals and groups from violence? The present paper aims to address these questions by reconstructing and assessing Judith Butler’s important treatment of speech-acts and hate speech in her book Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative. (shrink)

According to philosophers like James Weinstein, our democratic values give us a compelling reason to tolerate hate speech. In fact, they argue that even if hate speech causes significant harms, our democratic values nonetheless sometimes call for a hands-off approach. In particular, they evoke the democratic value of citizens being free to criticize and voice dissent towards the laws that bind them. This paper seeks to establish two key points. First, that upon closer examination, the (...) kind of arguments that Weinstein presents against hate speech regulation is less than convincing. Secondly, that by building on Weinstein's discussion of the concept of viewpoint discrimination, we can construct a more convincing objection to hate speech regulation. That said, this more convincing objection falls short of calling for the abolition of all hate speech regulation, instead highlighting the need for transparency and consistency in the way governments regulate harmful speech. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to consider the question of whether democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality with regard to political speech – including extremist political speech, such as hate speech. The starting point of my discussion is Jeremy Waldron’s negative answer to this question. He argues that it is permissible for liberal democracies to ban certain extremist viewpoints – such as vituperative hate speech – because such viewpoint-based restrictions protect the dignity (...) of persons and a social and moral environment of mutual respect. According to Waldron, well-drafted narrow hate speech bans are not democratically illegitimate, and they do not undermine systemic democratic legitimacy – that is, the legitimacy of a democratic political system. In contrast to Waldron, I will argue that democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality to respect persons as thinking agents. I will defend a civil libertarian doctrine of viewpoint neutrality, and this doctrine requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any political viewpoint or idea, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views. It will be argued that any viewpoint-based restriction on public discourse (including narrow hate speech bans) is democratically illegitimate, and that such restrictions undermine systemic democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In ‘The Harm in Hate Speech’ Waldron’s most interesting and ground-breaking contribution lies in a distinctive epistemological role he assigns to hate speech legislation: it is necessary for assurance of justice, and thus for justice itself. He regards public social recognition of what is owed to citizens as a public good, contributing to basic dignity and social standing of citizens. His claim that hate speech in the public social environment damages assurance of justice has (...) wider implications, I argue: for hate speech conducted in private; for pornography; and indeed for any speech that thwarts knowledge of what justice requires. (shrink)

This dissertation has two principle aims: To show that current arguments from proponents and opponents of the regulation of sexually explicit Internet content are unsound and to construct an argument against content regulation that avoids the failures of current arguments. ;The dissertation is organized into seven chapters. In Chapter One I provide background information on attempts to regulate sexually explicit materials and briefly outline the development of the Internet. Chapter Two examines the current regulation of obscenity on the (...) Internet. Chapter Three investigates the claim that the Internet should not be regulated due to the value of free speech. In this chapter I examine the claims that opponents of Internet regulation make and the applicability of the First Amendment to Internet speech. I argue that proponents' claims, which are often based on the arguments originally expounded by John Stuart Mill, fall short and are not sound. The next three chapters investigate arguments in support of regulation. These arguments include claims that an unregulated Internet can harm children, women and societal morals. I examine each of the arguments proponents give in support of regulatory action and argue that they are defective. Given the faulted nature of proponents' arguments, it is my conclusion that the arguments fail to justify Internet content regulation. ;Drawing on the conclusions offered in previous chapters, in the final chapter I offer a consequentialist argument against the regulation of sexually explicit Internet materials. Given that, as concluded in previous chapters, the arguments provided to prove that sexually explicit materials on the Internet are harmful fail, there will be little utility gained by regulation. In addition, in this chapter I outline the harm that will be produced by regulating the Internet and conclude that, overall, disutility will ensue if such materials are regulated. (shrink)

The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, in a landmark judgment, scrapped a draconian law [Section 66 (A)] that gave the police absolute power to put behind bars anybody who was found posting offensive or annoying comments online. This paper aims to examine the take of people on the “Free Speech via Social Media” issue and their attitude towards the way sensitive messages/information are posted, shared and forwarded on social media, especially, Facebook.,The research was carried out on a sample (...) of 200 social media users, all picked up randomly, from five Indian states/Union Territories. Data were collected through a questionnaire, and users were contacted through e-mail. Data collected were analyzed through the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K-S) Z test.,The findings indicate that hate posts/messages are on the rise, and more and more users are joining in. Besides, prosecution happens only when the aggrieved party is influential or powerful.,The findings of this research give a strong insight into the social media behaviour of users in relation to hate contents/posts. The study establishes the fact that Indian people are in favour of free speech, but with a sense of restraint and responsibility. The work could form the basis for future research on various aspects of hate speech on social media. Researchers could study the trials and prosecutions that have happened over the past few years and whether punishment has acted as a deterrent.,The research is likely to be important for those involved in work on freedom of speech or hate speech through social media. Social networking sites such as Facebook would also get some insights into users’ perception towards free and hate speech mechanism on social media. (shrink)

_One of the strongest arguments against hate speech legislation is the so-called Argument from Political Speech. This argument problematizes the restrictions that might be placed on political opinions or political critique when these opinions are expressed in a way which can be interpreted as ‘hateful’ towards minority groups. One of the strongest free speech scholars opposing hate speech legislation is Ronald Dworkin, who stresses that having restrictions on hate speech is, in (...) fact, illegitimate in a liberal democracy. The right to express oneself freely concerning any political decision is, according to Dworkin, a core democratic principle; it is what self-governance – and hence liberal democracies – are built upon. Dworkin and many other free speech scholars based in the United States see hate speech legislation as a threat to expressing oneself freely and critically. I argue that Dworkin and other US-based free speech scholars tend to overlook actual hate speech legislation in countries where such laws have been implemented and have functioned for decades. Furthermore, I argue that the real threat against political speech lies not in hate speech legislation but rather outside of the law, namely, in private institutions such as universities and museums. Restrictions on political speech in various societal circumstances have been on the rise over the last decades – first and foremost in the US. I analyse why these restrictions on political speech are more widespread in the only Western country without laws against hate speech than they are in countries with implemented hate speech laws._ _Keywords_: political speech, hate speech, hate speech legislation, private institu-tions, universities, USA. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's (...) influential contemporary justification for freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

The article is the author’s endeavor to reconstruct the semiotic conflict in the transatlantic legal appraisal of hate speech (between the USA and Europe) through Ancient Greek concepts of παρρησία (parrhēsia) and ισηγορία (isēgoria). The US Supreme Court case law on the First Amendment to American Constitution is, therefore, counter-balanced vis-à-vis la jurisprudence de Strasbourg on Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The author suggests that an adequate comprehension of the contemporary constitutional concepts of the (...) right to free speech in Western democracies is deceptive without a thorough analysis of its genealogy in the Ancient rhetorical cradle. (shrink)

The freedom to create and disseminate pornography has often been defended based on a liberal claim that the free speech of pornographers would be violated if pornography were censored. The classic defense of free speech, given by John Stuart Mill, is often invoked to defend this position. In opposition, many feminist theorists have advocated arguments for regulatory measures against pornography. Some of these authors have also utilized the writings of Mill. They have argued that, contrary to (...) the liberal defense of free speech, Mill’s arguments are compatible with, or even require, the forced regulation of pornography. Logically, unless Mill’s writings are contradictory, they should not be invoked to support diametrically opposed positions. This paper investigates this apparent dilemma and argues that, contrary to the antipornography feminist position, Mill’s writings do not support pornography regulation. In fact, in a surprising twist, the arguments of anti-pornography feminists can, using the writings of Mill, be seen as strongly supporting the liberal anti-censorship position. (shrink)

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may be thought to (...) be undermining the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state’s expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that to properly understand our commitment to a principle of free speech, we must pay attention to what should count as speech for the purposes of such a principle. We defend the view that ‘speech’ here should be a technical term, with something other than its ordinary sense. We then offer a partial characterization of this technical sense. We contrast our view with some influential views about free speech , (...) and show that our view has distinct advantages. Finally, we consider racist hate speech. Here, we argue that if certain theorists are right about what some racist hate speech does, then such speech should fall outside the scope of the free speech principle, and so, should be as regulable as any non-speech action. (shrink)

One of the most powerful arguments against state regulation of expression has, in recent years, been presented in a reinvigorated and developed form. The argument in question maintains that state regulation of expression undercuts the legitimacy of the law because it involves the suppression of a source of democratic contestation. The paper distinguishes between three importantly different versions of this legitimacy argument that existing work fails to clearly separate. Doing so is important because different forms of the legitimacy argument are (...) supported by different considerations, vulnerable to different objections, and have different implications. Further, the paper levels two serious objections to legitimacy arguments against hate speech regulation. Firstly, it offers a consolidated defence of an extant rejoinder to the legitimacy argument, based on the claim that some person’s speech can ‘silence’ the expression of others. Secondly, the paper challenges the claim that the regulation of hate speech is necessarily viewpoint discriminatory. (shrink)

Unfortunately, many people today see the regulation of lies, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news as an infringement of free speech, at least when such speech is ‘political,’ despite the damage that such speech can do. But this very protective attitude toward speech rests on a mistaken understanding of the role of free speech in a liberal society. The right to free speech is based on the liberal value of (...) freedom, and as such can be no broader than freedom itself. And freedom has always been subject to reasonable limits in a liberal society. Indeed, while the principles of toleration and neutrality are often cited as supporting a broad interpretation of the right to free speech, they also tell us that certain limits apply to that right. We need not tolerate speech that encourages intolerance, and while government should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, it need not be neutral between reasonable and unreasonable conceptions. These ideas form the framework of liberal society, and as I shall show, also provide a guide for understanding what kind of speech is protected in a liberal society and what it is not. (shrink)

Hate speech is commonly defined with reference to the legal category of incitement. Laws targeting incitement typically focus on how the speech is expressed rather than its actual content. This has a number of unintended consequences: first, law tends to capture overt or obvious forms of hate speech and not hate speech that takes the form of ‘reasoned’ argument, but which nevertheless, causes as much, if not more harm. Second, the focus on (...) form rather than content leads to categorization errors. Hate speech taking the form of ‘reasoned argument’ is often legally characterized as either political or academic debate, and so is deemed both permissible and justified in societies where free speech principles exist. In this paper, I argue that it is important to identify instances of hate speech as hate speech, no matter how articulately or reasonably the speech is expressed. The danger in mischaracterizing an instance of hate speech by calling it academic or political debate is that it risks normalizing the views and sentiments that are expressed and accepting those views as an important part of our political and academic discourses. With reference to Habermas’ account of ‘distorted communication’, I propose different criteria for defining and understanding hate speech and suggest that there might be good reasons for interpreting the concept of incitement more broadly, so as to include these different kinds of it. (shrink)

At a House hearing on December 5, 2023, the presidents of three universities—Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania—refused to state that certain kinds of hate speech, specifically calls for genocide of Jews, are prohibited on their campuses. The backlash against two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, was swift and devastating; both of them were successfully pressured to resign. Still, while Professors Gay’s and Magill’s responses were widely criticized as tone-deaf, they were legally correct. (...) At many private, and all public, colleges and universities, even the worst hate speech is generally protected unless it is accompanied by aggressive, threatening, or violent conduct. -/- These “demotions” augur even worse consequences, including termination, for less powerful faculty who say the “wrong” thing, in particular statements in support of Trumpism, an increasingly mainstream ideology that stitches together white supremacy, misogyny, a preference for autocracy over democracy, and several phobias—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia. The question I address in this paper is whether these consequences are constitutional at public schools. Whose right is stronger—a public-school teacher’s First Amendment right to express pro-Trumpist sentiments or a public school’s right to maintain a fair, inclusive, and welcoming learning environment? In this article, I argue that the public school has the upper hand here, that it is indeed constitutionally permitted to prohibit political hate speech that contributes to a hostile learning environment. Still, I narrowly limit this prohibition to dehumanizing speech—that is, speech explicitly suggesting that some human beings are “lesser”, intrinsically less valuable, than other human beings. -/- One objection to this position is that public schools may not prohibit any speech, no matter how dehumanizing, because such prohibition amounts to constitutionally impermissible viewpoint discrimination. I argue, however, that viewpoint discrimination is an integral part of education and therefore constitutionally permissible. Education necessarily involves promoting some values over others. These values fall into seven categories: constitutional principles, the humanist virtues, successful character traits and behaviors, knowledge and truth, art and beauty, health (both mental and physical), and social goods (such as justice, peace, and rule of law). (shrink)

This two-volume collection of essays brings together major contemporary theoretical works on freedom of speech. Volume I, begins with a theoretical overview of freedom of speech and then turns to the topics of what justifies freedom of speech and what kinds of acts raise free speech concerns. Volume II, examines the distinctions among content regulations and between content and content-neutral regulations. It also analyses the concept of the public forum, inciting and hateful (...) speech and lastly the tension between the subsidizing activities of the affirmative state and the negative liberty of freedom of speech. (shrink)

Democratic theories of free speech hold that the right to free speech is grounded in the nature of collective self-governance. The legitimacy of imposing laws on those who disagree with them depends on giving all citizens an equal right to participate in the lawmaking process, including the right to express their opposition. Ronald Dworkin argues that views of this kind are in tension with hate speech regulation. If we forbid the expression of prejudice, we (...) undermine the legitimacy of laws protecting minority groups. The aim in this chapter is to diffuse the tension Dworkin sees between a democratic justification of the right to free speech and hate speech regulation. This is done by developing an account of how our bodily rights constrain the right to free speech. (shrink)

Controlling access to the Internet by means of filtering softwarehas become a growth industry in the U.S. and elsewhere. Its usehas increased as the mandatory response to the current plagues ofsociety, namely, pornography, violence, hate, and in general,anything seen to be unpleasant or threatening. Also of potentialconcern is the possible limitation of access to Web sites thatdiscuss drugs, without distinguishing advocacy from scientificand informed analysis of addiction. With the rise of an effectivecreationist movement dedicated to the elimination of evolutionarytheory (...) in the curriculum, it is to be expected that attempts willbe made to limit access to sites presenting such theories, incertain jurisdictions in the U.S. The current preferred method ofchoice to limit access is to filter content either by blockingaccess to specific Web sites, referred to by their URLs, or byusing a large set of keywords to prevent accessing sites thatcontain one or more of these words. Another more insidious schemeis to encourage or even require every Web site to rate itscontent along a number of dimensions, including violence,language, sexual explicitness, and nudity. Then individualbrowsers can be programmed to return references only to thosesites that fall below a pre-specified profile. The dangers forfree speech inherent in such schemes will be discussed. Effortsto produce legislation in the U.S. to mandate the use offiltering or rating programs will be described, as will somerecent court decisions involving their use in libraries. (shrink)

This paper examines Mary Kate McGowan’s account of oppressive speech. McGowan argues that ordinary hateful speech can oppress by enacting discriminatory norms, and further, that this enactment sometimes renders the speech regulable under current United States law. In response, the paper raises two sets of questions. First, it asks about the contents of the norms enacted by a given hateful utterance, and specifically, about what determines those contents. Second, the paper also questions McGowan’s emphasis on the distinction (...) between causing harm and enacting (or constituting) harm. It argues that, contra that emphasis, this distinction doesn’t matter for the regulability of speech in McGowan’s central cases. (shrink)

Who should decide who gets to say what on online social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? American legal scholars have often thought that the private owners of these platforms should decide, in part because such an arrangement is thought to serve valuable free speech interests. This standard view has come under pressure with the enactment of statutes like Texas House Bill 20, which forbids certain platforms from “censoring” user content based on viewpoint. Such efforts (...) to regulate the speech policies of online platforms have been challenged for undermining the editorial speech rights of these platforms and allowing the proliferation of hate speech. This Article develops a democratic theory of free speech, according to which one of the most important reasons for protecting robust free speech rights is that free speech can contribute not only to democratic elections but to a democratic culture more generally. To achieve robust cultural democracy, a community’s speech environment must enable people not only to rationally persuade one another about matters of public importance and convey mutual respect to one another as political equals but also allow people to influence each other in a less articulate and rational manner—to “democratically vibe” with one another. This theory yields a qualified normative defense of government regulation of the speech policies of large social media platforms that can help to realize cultural democracy, suggesting that First Amendment doctrine should focus to a greater extent on protecting the speech rights of platform users, rather than platform owners. Although far from a ringing endorsement of H.B. 20 or S.B. 7072, this Article suggests that First Amendment law should be friendlier to state regulation of platform speech than many critics have thought. (shrink)

There have recently been a number of high profile political incidents, and legal cases, that raise questions about hate speech. At the same time, the tensions, and perceived conflicts, between religion and sexuality have become controversial topics. This paper considers the relationship between religious freedom, free speech and equality through an analysis of recent case law in Great Britain, Canada and the United States. The paper starts with a discussion of how conflicts between these values arise (...) in areas such as hate speech and explores the differences between the European and US approach to this issue. In Council of Europe member states there is an increasing use of the criminal law to regulate hate speech. This paper argues that criminalisation of hate speech poses a distinct risk to the values of free speech and proposes alternative non-legal responses such as a greater use of cultural policy. The paper also explores a range of cases where the religion and sexual orientation conflict has arisen in areas such as the workplace. An analysis of these cases suggests that although there is no perfect resolution of this issue, it is possible to develop a set of principles that encourage a balance between the values of religious freedom, free speech and equality even in difficult situations where there is a conflict between religion and sexuality. The paper concludes with some practical recommendations for managing the tensions or conflicts between religious freedom, free speech and equality in liberal democracies. (shrink)

This corpus analysis of linguistic and semantic features in French parliamentary debates concerning online hate speech regulation, highlights tensions between state powers and private rights. Two key themes are identified: first, the _problem of definition_: how such online content is defined in the debates, and second, the _problem of regulation_: how the debates negotiate the supra-jurisdictional and individual jurisdiction issues involved, in regulating both the global online content and the responsibilities of the owners of the platforms (...) who manage the content. For this analysis, the authors created a corpus of French National Assembly Examination Committee discussions and public sessions between July 2019 to January 2020 discussing the _Loi Avia _(Avia Law). The corpus was analysed using quali-quantitative methods. Overall, the study combines a top-down (global) and a bottom-up (local) analysis of the data, applying corpus semantic approaches (Lecolle et al. in Langages 210(2):35–54, 2018; Rastier in The Routledge handbook of semantics, Routledge, pp 507–522, 2015) to contextualize the analysis of the meta-discourse (Hyland in Meta-discourse: exploring interaction in writing, 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350063617 ). The analysis highlights the linguistic features revealing the power dynamics inherent within the discourse and counter-discourse of the dominant and opposition political parties respectively. (shrink)

The current UN policy regarding free speech presents a philosophical dilemma between accepting the free speech provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and exceptions carved out for hatred, hostility, and religious defamation. The Declaration should be understood to imply viewpoint neutrality and the exceptions for defamation are not viewpoint neutral. If the UN were to adopt J. S. Mill’s crucial distinctions between expression and performative speech, content and context, and mental (...) states and the acts motivated by them, it would be clear that hatred, hostility, and defamation cannot be exceptions to viewpoint neutral free speech. If the heart of free speech is freedom especially for the thought we hate, then the UN should abandon its exceptions or abandon appeals to free speech. However, I will offer a strong reason that it should not do the latter. (shrink)

This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, bullying, pornography, “hate speech” and “fake news” will slowly disappear from the internet - it enables tech companies to censure our society. It is the social media (...) companies who define what is blacklisted in their community standards. And given the dominance of social media in our information society, we run the risk of outsourcing the definition of our principles for discussion in the public domain to private companies. Instead of leaving it to social media companies only to take action, the authors argue democratic institutions should take an active role in moderating criminal content on the internet. To make this possible, tech companies should be analyzed whether they are approaching a monopoly. Antitrust legislation should be applied to bring those monopolies within democratic governmental oversight. Despite being in different stages in their lives, Anne Mette is in the startup phase of her research career, while Frederik is one of the most prolific philosophers in Denmark, the authors found each other in their concern about Free Speech on the internet. The book was originally published in Danish as Dit opslag er blevet fjernet - techgiganter & ytringsfrihed. Praise for 'Your Post has been Removed' "From my perspective both as a politician and as private book collector, this is the most important non-fiction book of the 21st Century. It should be disseminated to all European citizens. The learnings of this book and the use we make of them today are crucial for every man, woman and child on earth. Now and in the future.” Jens Rohde, member of the European Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe “This timely book compellingly presents an impressive array of information and analysis about the urgent threats the tech giants pose to the robust freedom of speech and access to information that are essential for individual liberty and democratic self-government. It constructively explores potential strategies for restoring individual control over information flows to and about us. Policymakers worldwide should take heed!” Nadine Strossen, Professor, New York Law School. Author, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. (shrink)

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features and practical considerations . The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of (...) the principled arguments. Finally, it argues that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue. (shrink)

Among the most persuasive arguments against hate speech bans was made by Ronald Dworkin, who warned of the threat to political legitimacy posed by laws that deny those subject to them adequ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Chloë Taylor Female Sexual Dysfunction, Feminist Sexology, and the Psychiatry of the Normal It is really weird that doctors should be the reigning experts on sex. —Leonore Tiefer1 The first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality provides a compelling and influential critique of the “sciences of sex.” In this work, Foucault suggests that there (...) is little that is scientific about the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sexology that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 In each case, Foucault argues that the authority of science is exploited to facilitate the regulation of sexuality in a biopolitical era in which the sex life of the population has become a crucial political stake.3 Sex, according to Foucault, is managed by doctors not so much to cure health problems as to enforce social norms, and sexual science does not provide the truth of sex or make people healthy, but naturalizes the monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear family.4 1. Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004), 180. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978). 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 133–160. See also Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974 (New York: Palgrave -MacMillan, 2006) and Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003). 4. This is not to say that for Foucault doctors do not ever cure health problems or that their intentions are not to cure health problems. However, Foucault 260 Chloë Taylor Feminism has also posed powerful critiques of the sexual sciences. As Janice Irvine notes, feminist epistemology has rejected the purported neutrality of science, especially of the sciences that claim knowledge about sex and gender.5 Feminist and queer political theorists and activists have, moreover, “underscored the hollowness of solutions based on techniques” that are favored by sexologists; teaching men skills to resist premature ejaculation or to better stimulate their wives’ clitorises are not adequate resolutions to widespread and profound dissatisfactions with sex, gender, and marriage in a heterosexist and patriarchal society.6 As Irvine writes, Feminism and lesbian/gay liberation…challenged power inequalities between men and women and questioned the very concepts of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity.…They presented alternatives to tradition and to expert power and authority. Therein lay their threat to American sexology.7 Given this antagonistic relationship, combining feminism and sexology has proved controversial. The work of feminist sexologist Shere Hite in the 1970s and 1980s was critiqued by sexologists and feminists alike: sexologists complained that the 1976 Hite Report was political and thus undermined the scientific prestige of sexology, while feminists criticized Hite for aspiring to a masculine scientific authority.8 Describing the relationship between feminism and sexology, Irvine notes that “the incompatibility of their concerns—science and market, on the one hand, versus shows that what we consider “healthy” is thoroughly political and that the effect of doctors’ practices is normalizing whatever their intentions may be. For two recent Foucauldian studies of the ways that medical and sexual science function to sexually normalize individuals and populations, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 5. Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology, rev. ed. (1990; repr., Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 101. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 117. Chloë Taylor 261 progressive political change, on the other—led…to a contentious and emotionally charged history.”9 Drawing on both Foucauldian and feminist perspectives, this article explores a new chapter in this history, examining self-described feminist sexologists’ responses to the psychiatric diagnoses of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). While psychologists had pathologized female sexuality under the label of frigidity since the nineteenth century, sexual dysfunctions were relatively marginal in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952. In the DSM-1, frigidity (like impotence) was... (shrink)

No serious attempt to answer the question ‘What is hate speech?’ would be complete without an exploration of the outer limits of the concept(s). This book critically examines both the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech, contrasting social media platform content policies with national and international laws. It also explores a range of controversial grey area examples of hate speech. Part I focuses on the ordinary concept and looks at hybrid attacks, selective (...) attacks, reverse attacks, righteous attacks, indirect attacks, identity attacks, existential denials, identity denials, identity miscategorisations, and identity appropriations. Part II concentrates on the legal concept. It considers how to distinguish between hate speech and hate crime and examines the precarious position of denialism laws in national and international law. Together the authors draw on conceptual analysis, doctrinal analysis, linguistic analysis, critical analysis, and diachronic analysis to map the new frontiers of the concepts of hate speech. (shrink)

It is often said that if free speech means anything it means freedom for the thought we hate. This core idea is generally referred to as “viewpoint neutrality” and is consistent with the liberal intuition that governments should remain neutral with regard to conceptions of the good life. None of the traditional defenses of free speech seem to secure viewpoint neutrality, however. Instead, each justification leaves room to censor some viewpoints. Ironically my defense (...) of viewpoint neutrality does not come from the liberal assumption that governments should remain neutral about the good life. I defend a version of the virtue argument for free speech that is explicitly perfectionist—-government does not have to remain neutral when promoting good lives for its citizens. Free speech is not just a means to promote virtue but is part and parcel of intellectual virtue—-a decidedly perfectionist value. (shrink)

Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic epithets) have long played various roles and achieved diverse ends in works of art. Focusing on basic aspects of an aesthetic object or work, this article examines the interpretive relation between point of view and content, asking how aesthetic contextualization shapes the impact of such terms. Can context, particularly aesthetic contexts, detach the derogatory force from powerful epithets and racist and sexist images? What would it be about aesthetic contexts that would make this possible? (...) The article puts into aesthetic contexts both Absolutist and Reclaimer views about the power of derogatory terms, applying an inferential role semantics, developed for language, to both words and images. The Reclaimer’s position, that derogation is a matter of pragmatics, of use, emphasizes the context-sensitivity of the term, that is matters who says it, to whom, when, where, and why. Understanding derogatory terms used as hate speech helps to make this position clear. The Absolutist’s position, that no contextual variations can detach the derogation from these deeply derogatory terms, is developed here through attention to subordinating images in pornography. The article argues that art may be able to achieve the deviant interpretations that the Reclaimer needs to undermine the derogations while maintaining sensitivity and awareness of the history of oppression. (shrink)

Hate speech involves the vilification of individuals for characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, and sex. The argument for and against the regulation of hate speech is controversial, partly because it remains unclear whether hate speech is encompassed by general arguments for free speech. Some think that the opportunity to engage in hate speech is the price we must pay for living in a democratic society where individuals take responsibility for what (...) they think and can freely contribute to the moral and social environment. Others think that hate speech undermines the dignity or sets back the interests of those who are vilified by it, and thus should be regulated. It is argued here that one way of making progress with these issues to think more carefully about a set of rights which underpin the opportunities we can expect to get in a society that takes free speech seriously: these are rights of association and disassociation. In taking these rights seriously, we can see the outlines of a principled case for regulating hate speech. (shrink)

Much of the most influential free speech scholarship emphasises that ‘political speech’ warrants the very highest standards of protection because of its centrality to self-governance. This central idea mitigates against efforts to justify the regulation of political speech and renders some egregiously offensive or harmful speech worthy of protection from a theoretical perspective. Yet paradoxically, in practice, in many liberal democracies such speech is routinely restricted. In this paper, I develop an argument that is (...) compatible with both the argument from democracy and the notion of political speech, and that can justify the regulation of hate speech, by joining an understanding of the constitutive role of speech in individuals’ lives derived from Nussbaum's capabilities theory with ideas of democratic deliberation and legitimation drawn from a Habermasian framework. This approach attends to the conditions required at an individual level for democratic legitimation to occur at a social level. It permits the development of a robust theoretical justification for the protection of a broad range of speech. It simultaneously provides a guiding framework for regulatory policy designed to ameliorate the effects of, and inhibit the expression of, that speech, which could imperil the conditions required for individuals to develop their own capabilities and which instantiates anti-democratic practice, and thus discourse, preventing the very communications required to perform democracy from being uttered. Thus, my argument also strengthens and transforms the argument from democracy as a justification for free speech protection more generally. (shrink)

The paper explicates the stages of the author’s philosophical evolution in the light of Kopnin’s ideas and heritage. Starting from Kopnin’s understanding of dialectical materialism, the author has stated that category transformations of physics has opened from conceptualization of immutability to mutability and then to interaction, evolvement and emergence. He has connected the problem of physical cognition universals with an elaboration of the specific system of tools and methods of identifying, individuating and distinguishing objects from a scientific theory domain. The (...) role of vacuum conception and the idea of existence (actual and potential, observable and nonobservable, virtual and hidden) types were analyzed. In collaboration with S.Crymski heuristic and regulative functions of categories of substance, world as a whole as well as postulates of relativity and absoluteness, and anthropic and self-development principles were singled out. Elaborating Kopnin’s view of scientific theories as a practically effective and relatively true mapping of their domains, the author in collaboration with M. Burgin have originated the unified structure-nominative reconstruction (model) of scientific theory as a knowledge system. According to it, every scientific knowledge system includes hierarchically organized and complex subsystems that partially and separately have been studied by standard, structuralist, operationalist, problem-solving, axiological and other directions of the current philosophy of science. 1) The logico-linguistic subsystem represents and normalizes by means of different, including mathematical, languages and normalizes and logical calculi the knowledge available on objects under study. 2) The model-representing subsystem comprises peculiar to the knowledge system ways of their modeling and understanding. 3) The pragmatic-procedural subsystem contains general and unique to the knowledge system operations, methods, procedures, algorithms and programs. 4) From the viewpoint of the problem-heuristic subsystem, the knowledge system is a unique way of setting and resolving questions, problems, puzzles and tasks of cognition of objects into question. It also includes various heuristics and estimations (truth, consistency, beauty, efficacy, adequacy, heuristicity etc) of components and structures of the knowledge system. 5) The subsystem of links fixes interrelations between above-mentioned components, structures and subsystems of the knowledge system. The structure-nominative reconstruction has been used in the philosophical and comparative case-studies of mathematical, physical, economic, legal, political, pedagogical, social, and sociological theories. It has enlarged the collection of knowledge structures, connected, for instance, with a multitude of theoreticity levels and with an application of numerous mathematical languages. It has deepened the comprehension of relations between the main directions of current philosophy of science. They are interpreted as dealing mainly with isolated subsystems of scientific theory. This reconstruction has disclosed a variety of undetected knowledge structures, associated also, for instance, with principles of symmetry and supersymmetry and with laws of various levels and degrees. In cooperation with the physicist Olexander Gabovich the modified structure-nominative reconstruction is in the processes of development and justification. Ideas and concepts were also in the center of Kopnin’s cognitive activity. The author has suggested and elaborated the triplet model of concepts. According to it, any scientific concept is a dependent on cognitive situation, dynamical, multifunctional state of scientist’s thinking, and available knowledge system. A concept is modeled as being consisted from three interrelated structures. 1) The concept base characterizes objects falling under a concept as well as their properties and relations. In terms of volume and content the logical modeling reveals partially only the concept base. 2) The concept representing part includes structures and means (names, statements, abstract properties, quantitative values of object properties and relations, mathematical equations and their systems, theoretical models etc.) of object representation in the appropriate knowledge system. 3) The linkage unites a structures and procedures that connect components from the abovementioned structures. The partial cases of the triplet model are logical, information, two-tired, standard, exemplar, prototype, knowledge-dependent and other concept models. It has introduced the triplet classification that comprises several hundreds of concept types. Different kinds of fuzziness are distinguished. Even the most precise and exact concepts are fuzzy in some triplet aspect. The notions of relations between real scientific concepts are essentially extended. For example, the definition and strict analysis of such relations between concepts as formalization, quantification, mathematization, generalization, fuzzification, and various kinds of identity are proposed. The concepts «PLANET» and «ELEMENTARY PARTICLE» and some of their metamorphoses were analyzed in triplet terms. The Kopnin’s methodology and epistemology of cognition was being used for creating conception of the philosophy of law as elaborating of understanding, justification, estimating and criticizing legal system. The basic information on the major directions in current Western philosophy of law (legal realism, feminism, criticism, postmodernism, economical analysis of law etc.) is firstly introduced to the Ukrainian audience. The classification of more than fifty directions in modern legal philosophy is suggested. Some results of historical, linguistic, scientometric and philosophic-legal studies of the present state of Ukrainian academic science are given. (shrink)

For commercial purveyors of digital speech, information and entertainment, the biggest threat posed by the Internet isn''t the threat of piracy, but the threat posed by free speech -- speech that doesn''t cost any money. Free speech has the potential to squeeze out expensive speech. A glut of high quality free stuff has the potential to run companies in the business of selling speech out of business. We haven''t had to worry (...) about this before, because speaking in a meaningful way to a large audience was expensive, and people couldn''t afford to do serious mass speaking for free for very long. The Internet has made it much cheaper. It doesn''t take much to give out information to the whole world, every day, for free, for years. And people do. If we are trying to increase the abundant dissemination of information, free speech is good. If we are trying to increase commerce in information, free speech is arguably bad, in that it competes with pay speech. Information merchants would obviously prefer that the only speech in the marketplace be pay speech. In the past two years, commercial content owners have scored significant progress in herding free speakers off the Net. There''s an important synergy between persuading the government to give your industry some friendly new laws or regulations, and using new and old legal tools to make life more difficult or expensive for inconvenient competitors who aren''t necessarily doing anything illegal. Recently, businesses have been able to combine the two strategies to make the Internet a much safer place to sell speech, by making the Internet a less friendly, more dangerous place to give away speech for free. (shrink)

The dignity approach to racist hate speech regulation maintains that hate speech ought to be regulated because it impugns targets’ dignity and poses a threat to their equal treatment. This approach faces the significant causal challenges of showing that hate speech has the power to erode its targets’ dignity and that regulations can successfully protect that dignity. My aim is to show how a friend of the dignity approach can resolve these challenges. To do (...) so, I borrow insights from the critical legal studies (CLS) approach to hate speech. Specifically, I argue that hate speech can erode its targets’ dignity 1) by constituting an act of discrimination, and 2) by enacting norms that call for treating targeted groups as inferior. Yet while I maintain that the CLS approach offers valuable resources for shoring up the dignity approach, I reject the CLS approach in favor of the dignity approach. (shrink)

Today's ethical theory , both utilitarian and non-ontological theories dominated. However, we found that many of its subsequent development in the evolution of those who encourage virtue ethics, feminist care theory, social contract theory and the theory of rights-based build. But usually lacking in this discussion - the teaching of ethics by the majority of it seems - is the natural law theory. Natural law theory has its very long history, starting from the Stoic school, it had occupied in the (...) outside world, a strong Anglo-American influence . But today it is still a strong defender of its existence , Joseph Bauer , and Yue Hanfen Jonas ). But in any case it does absent in most contemporary research into ethics, even when it was put in time, is often quickly oppose the theory. Why this theory is often ignored or opposed? We can give a lot of reasons. Some will mention the problem with it ought to. That is contrary to natural law where the basic claim that a person who can not be on the moral statements of a person's actual state is. Some of the attacks this theory is the theory because it is a natural, stable together on it called) natural fallacy, moral assets is a "simple "and do not be a natural thing to be defined . Some critics oppose the natural law theory because they believe that all laws are based is only the ordinary and customs, so it does not matter the existence of any universal moral law. Others argue that natural law theory assumption that there exists, but there is no reason to believe the world for such a presence. Again, some people think that today there is a widespread skepticism that regardless of this objective, universal the existence of moral standards - in other words, a standard applied to all human beings, regardless of their cultural origin or its existence in time and space. In any case, even if this standard exists, we may still ask where they come from? Can we know what they are? And we can determine their legitimacy? In this paper, Maritain's natural law philosophy as a theoretical basis for showing this philosophy of good reasons to lies. Natural law and moral philosophy to provide the philosophy of the relationship and differences between the lies. Thus natural law is natural, because it - especially its first principles, "can be as good, evil can be avoided." - The content is naturally knowable. The first principle is not innate, but it still is not wrong with the talent. We can through all of the knowledge and understanding, to explain the different knowledge of natural law, natural law is the knowledge of the process. The world as we know more, we also know more of their own; we found congenital beyond time. But the fact of moral knowledge needs to transcend time, it does not make a relationship of knowledge, and scientific knowledge that is required is some, as it is relevant. It concluded that the object of this essay have been presented in Maritain's study of natural law. Of Maritain, natural law is "a tendency to order, one can find it, and it will have to act in accordance to meet the person and the nature of the purpose of the inevitable." Considerations of such a proposal is not only a description of human behavior, also on the basis of moral action and human rights standards. Maritain accepted the idea that this law is not only associated with the human and natural to be known. He believed that his theory of knowledge and to give arguments for metaphysics, we can have a human experience consistent with natural law theory of historical perception, as is should be a bridge, and explain why the differences in the nature of moral knowledge not against natural law of reason. If we can take this route - Maritain from the plant into the road on St. Thomas Aquinas - Maritain believe we can at least respond to the majority of the criticism of natural law theory. Of course, natural law theory, there are more than epistemology and metaphysics considerations. Obviously, there are many other kinds of law related to the demand . We also need to indicate whether we know something of natural law. How can we compare Maritain's theory of natural law and other laws of nature? In particular, once popular in the eighteenth century rationalist ideas. Nevertheless, it is obvious that a complete discussion of this article, we should not totally against Maritain's theory - it should be included in today's major moral theories. (shrink)

This article addresses the captive audience doctrine, according to which it may be permissible, even under the First Amendment, for governmental authorities to pass laws that abridge freedom of expression for the sake of protecting the interests of unwilling recipients of unwelcome speech. More specifically, it examines the issue of whether or not the captive audience doctrine could be plausibly applied to circumstances in which persons are compelled by the facts of life in the Information Age to access messages (...) and content through the Internet and subsequently become unwilling recipients of unwelcome hate speech. (shrink)

In June 21, 1990, the Joneses, an African-American family living in the mainly white and working-class neighbourhood of St. Paul in Minnesota, saw a small white cross burning in their yard. By placing the burning cross on the yard, the Minnesota Supreme Court argued that one of the accused, Robert A Viktora, had engaged in ‘fighting words’. However, the US Supreme Court reversed this decision, arguing that the local authority in St Paul only legally banned certain ‘fighting words’, but not (...) others. Judith Butler explores this legal case, R.A.V. v. St. Paul. Judith Butler argues in her earlier work that the Supreme Court in effect represented the burning cross as being non-performative and simply a vehicle of expression rather than a historical symbol of hate speech towards African-Americans. In this paper, I look again at the R.A.V. case. But I do so by both drawing on what Butler explicitly says about the case in her early work and integrating this with her later work on the ethics of grief, state hegemony and public assemblies. Furthermore, I also incorporate some of the insights of the Bakhtin Circle into Butler’s work to strengthen her arguments. The paper then revisits R.A.V. v. St. Paul and shows how Reaganite state hegemony effectively transformed issues of racism surrounding this free speech case into ‘monologic’ and ‘ungrievable’ public matters of concern. The paper concludes by briefly discussing counter-hegemonic politics of free speech. (shrink)

Feminists all over the world are united in their contentions on many fronts such as societal norms and conditions that militate against a woman’s expression of her rights and abilities. In as many fronts, they have gained grounds, if not outright victories. However, we observe that among the Igbo women of Eastern Nigeria there is a front which accounts for substantial female deprivation, and which feminists have consistently passed over in their contentions, namely, the feminine cognition also known as (...) class='Hi'>epistemology of womanhood. In this paper, using the random sampling method, we have arrived at the conclusion that consciousness oftheir own gender has deprived Igbo women of free expression of their rights and abilities, sometimes as much as constraining societal norms and conditions have done. Consequently, we recommend a conscious adjustment of the epistemology of womanhood among Igbo women. (shrink)

Marketing restrictions to promote public health invoke competing rights, including the right to free commercial speech which for-profit entities use to protect their freedom to market products without undue regulation. The right to free commercial speech in South Africa has been developed through case law since the adoption of the first democratic constitution in South Africa in 1996. This article examines the impact of this recent judgment and the lessons for policy makers to ensure effective regulation (...) of marketing practices in South Africa. (shrink)

The relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis (...) of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity. (shrink)

Questions concerning what hate speech is, how it harms, whether it is protected by free speech principles, and how it might be legally regulated have been at the centre of debates about free speech...

This review critically summarises Alexander Brown and Adriana Sinclair’s book, The Politics of Hate Speech Laws. The review proceeds by canvassing the main arguments presented in each of the book’s nine chapters, while also highlighting the book’s overarching themes and ideas. Ultimately it is suggested that the book will be of use to anyone interested in the political and philosophical aspects of the highly vexed issue of hate speech regulation. In particular the review praises the book’s (...) pluralistic, ecumenical style, arguing that readers are sure to find arguments within the book with which they can engage, regardless of their pre-existing commitments and values. However, the review also notes that the book’s breadth-over-depth approach has several drawbacks. It is suggested, for instance, that some of the key proposals in the book would have benefited from being explored in greater critical detail. (shrink)