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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Censorship, even of false belief, harms both those whose ... — Carmelics
    Home/Rights & Liberty
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Censorship, even of false belief, harms both those whose speech is suppressed and their audience.

    Rights & Liberty
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Individuals need shared thought and discussion to justify their beliefs and actions.
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    • 2.Suppressing speech removes epistemic resources that speakers and audiences rely on for justification.
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    • 3.Even false beliefs, when discussed, contribute to the deliberative process that yields justified true belief.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Some speech acts constitute harm in themselves, not merely as causes of downstream harm—a point developed by Rae Langton on pornography as illocutionary silencing.
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    • 2.If suppressing certain speech actually restores the epistemic agency of marginalized audiences, censorship can expand rather than contract the deliberative resources available to a community.
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    • 3.Mill's harm principle already permits restricting liberty when it damages others, so censorship of genuinely harmful speech is internally consistent with the Millian framework, not a departure from it.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Plato's argument in the Republic holds that a well-ordered epistemic community requires gatekeeping falsehoods that corrupt the rational faculty of citizens before deliberation can occur.
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    • 2.If sustained exposure to sophisticated disinformation degrades the very cognitive capacities needed for Millian deliberation, permitting such speech is self-undermining and cannot be justified by appeal to the deliberative process it destroys.
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    Topics

    Rights & LibertyTruth & Knowledge

    Related

    Even false beliefs, when discussed, contribute to the deliberative process that ...If suppressing certain speech actually restores the epistemic agency of marginal...If sustained exposure to sophisticated disinformation degrades the very cognitiv...Individuals need shared thought and discussion to justify their beliefs and acti...
    +4 moreShow less
    Mill's harm principle already permits restricting liberty when it damages others...Plato's argument in the Republic holds that a well-ordered epistemic community r...Some speech acts constitute harm in themselves, not merely as causes of downstre...Suppressing speech removes epistemic resources that speakers and audiences rely ...

    Similar

    Freedom of expression is valuable even if censorship only ever suppres...78%Ordinary usage allows that people who hold a false belief can nonethel...76%Mill's truth-tracking defense of freedom of expression provides no obj...76%True beliefs ought not to be suppressed76%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: mill-moral-political
    View source passageHide passage
    Mill’s claim that the value of freedom of expression lies in keeping true beliefs from becoming dogmatic reflects his view that freedoms of thought and discussion are necessary for fulfilling our natures as progressive beings (OL II 20). For instance, Mill appeals to a familiar distinction between true belief, on the one hand, and knowledge, understood as something like justified true belief, on the other hand (II 22; cf. Scanlon 1972; Ten 1980: 126–28). Progressive beings seek knowledge or just
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit