Suchergebnisse

AbstractIt is a familiar mantra of American politics that the best response to dangerous speech that incites violence and spreads hate is 'more speech'. Yet the principle obscures at least three crucial questions. Who, in particular, is to undertake the counter-speech that the doctrine recommends? What, exactly, are they required to do? And why is it morally justified to demand that they do it? This article argues that if citizens are to rely on counter-speech to defuse the dangers of dangerous expression, it is not enough to cheerlead its abstract importance and then sit back and hope for the best. Someone needs to do the work, and do it well. The article defends the thesis that all citizens have a moral duty to engage in counter-speech against dangerous expression. Focusing on counter-speech against expression that implicitly or explicitly advocates wrongful criminal violence, it argues that these duties can be derived from a much more basic normative source: the samaritan obligation, held by all moral agents, to rescue others from risks of harm. The specification of these duties' content, however, depends upon interdisciplinary work that integrates normative theory with social scientific research on human communication.

Should hate speech be banned? This article contends that the debate on this question must be disaggregated into discrete analytical stages, lest its participants continue to talk past one another. The first concerns the scope of the moral right to freedom of expression, and whether hate speech falls within the right's protective ambit. If it does, hate speech bans are necessarily unjust. If not, we turn to the second stage, which assesses whether speakers have moral duties to refrain from hate speech. The article canvasses several possible duties from which such a duty could be derived, including duties not to threaten, harass, offend, defame, or incite. If there is a duty to refrain from hate speech, it is yet a further question whether the duty should actually be enforced. This third stage depends on pragmatic concerns involving epistemic fallibility, the abuse of state power, and the benefits of counter-speech over coercion.

This article advances a partially epistemic justification of democratic authority by defending what David Estlund has called the democracy/contractualism analogy: the idea that democracy can track justice due to crucial similarities between effective democratic politics and the hypothetical deliberations employed by contractualist liberals to explicate or construct correct principles of justice. According to this analogy, the collective decision making definitive of democracy is best conceived as an attempt to realise the process of intersubjective justification that (according to contractualist liberals) defines what is just; therefore, any tendency democracy might have to produce just outcomes could conceivably be attributed to the success of such an attempt. This article explains why Estlund's arguments against the analogy fail. It argues that in a society in which the modes of reasoning specified by the analogy are widely entrenched, there is a justifiable presumption that majoritarian voting will have a tendency to result in reasonable outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

Democratic contractarianism aspires to unite two previously unconnected strands in political philosophy: a democratic commitment to a social world in which citizens wield equal power; and a contractarian commitment to a strictly prudential justification of political morality. It is argued in this article that the commitment to democratic equality is theoretically unmotivated and risks limiting the applicability of the view to societies in which equal bargaining power already obtains. It is also argued that the view cannot account for why a political order governed by democratic contractarianism will be stable over time. Ultimately, it is suggested that these problems are traceable to a fundamental incompatibility between the two dimensions of democratic contractarianism. The view can be democratic, and it can be contractarian, but it cannot be both.

This article advances a partially epistemic justification of democratic authority by defending what David Estlund has called the democracy/contractualism analogy: the idea that democracy can track justice due to crucial similarities between effective democratic politics and the hypothetical deliberations employed by contractualist liberals to explicate or construct correct principles of justice. According to this analogy, the collective decision making definitive of democracy is best conceived as an attempt to realise the process of intersubjective justification that (according to contractualist liberals) defines what is just; therefore, any tendency democracy might have to produce just outcomes could conceivably be attributed to the success of such an attempt. This article explains why Estlund's arguments against the analogy fail. It argues that in a society in which the modes of reasoning specified by the analogy are widely entrenched, there is a justifiable presumption that majoritarian voting will have a tendency to result in reasonable outcomes.