Censorship and Access to Information
While there is much debate about censorship, there is little work in the philosophical literature on the concept itself. In this chapter I try to fill in this gap by providing a definition of censorship. I propose that censorship is "restricting or limiting access to an expression, portion of an expression, or category of expression, which has been made public by its author, based on the belief that it will be a bad thing if people access the content of that expression." With this definition in hand, I consider the sorts of justifications given for censorship and canvass the arguments against censorship.
MILLIAN PRINCIPLES, FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, AND HATE SPEECH
Hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other forms of group membership. The regulation of hate speech is deservedly controversial, in part because debates over hate speech seem to have teased apart libertarian and egalitarian strands within the liberal tradition. In the civil rights movements of the 1960s, libertarian concerns with freedom of movement and association and equal opportunity pointed in the same direction as egalitarian concerns with eradicating racial discrimination and the social and economic inequalities that this discrimination maintained. But debates over hate speech regulation seem to force one to give priority to equality or to liberty. On the one hand, egalitarian concerns may seem to require restricting freedom of expression. Hate speech is an expression of discriminatory attitudes that have a long, ugly, and sometimes violent history. As such, hate speech is deeply offensive to its victims and socially divisive. Though one might well be reluctant to restrict speech, it might seem that the correct response to hate speech, as with other forms of discrimination, is regulation. On the other hand, libertarian concerns may seem to constrain the pursuit of equality. Though one may abhor hate speech and its effects, the cure might seem at least as bad as the disease. Freedoms of expression are among our most fundamental liberties. Offensive ideas are part of the price one must pay to protect these constitutional rights.
[The brains of the Vogt collection].
To the Editor.— Three years ago, we published an article in theArchivesentitled "Basal Ganglia and Limbic System Pathology in Schizophrenia: A Morphometric Study of Brain Volume and Shrinkage,"1in which we presented morphometric data for brains of 13 schizophrenics and nine control cases belonging to the Vogt collection, University of Dusseldorf, West Germany. The normal and schizophrenic brains were collected by the Vogts and their coworkers between the years 1928 and 1953, ie, before the application of neuroleptic drug treatment. Recently, I was alerted by Elliot Gershon, MD, of the possibility that the brains investigated in this study came from the Holocaust. In the very extensive clinical records we have from all control cases and schizophrenics, there is a clear documentation that all control cases and schizophrenics had natural causes of death and died before 1935 or after 1945, with the exception of two 39- year-old schizophrenic