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.
Censorship
Censorship has been a key point of struggle and negotiation between the state, citizenry and media industries in South Asia. In several South Asian countries— Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—film censorship was introduced by the British colonial government. Colonial governments along with nongovernmental groups constructed natives as puerile subjects who required colonial guidance; otherwise, according to the state, these natives would become susceptible to moral depravity, or religious and ethnic hatred. Such categorisation assisted in constructing the colonial state as a parental figure and justified its rule over their colonies. The bogey of the volatile native male spectator who upon seeing sexualised images of white European women on screen would desire her in ‘real’ life often haunted these discourses (Arora, 1995; Jaikumar, 2006). When postcolonial governments came to power in these countries, they felt it necessary to retain censorship, expressing similar concerns about cinema’s impact on public morals; they too imagined film audiences as unruly children or adolescents. Often, state censorship is viewed as a characteristic of developing ‘Third World’ nations while voluntary or non-governmental regulation signals advanced developed nations (Mehta, 2009, 2011). What is forgotten and left unexamined in this developmentalist discourse is how colonial governance has shaped state structures of postcolonial nations. A dominant paradigm in scholarship on censorship in postcolonial nations has focused on the state and its apparatuses (Bhowmik, 2009; Vasudev, 1978). These investigations often assume the following: (i) the state only prohibits or cuts representations, overlooking other state practices such as certification and classification; (ii) the state solely exercises power in the field of censorship. This approach ignores the role(s) of citizenry, film industries, corporations and non-governmental organisations in advocating for censorship; (iii) the state discourse on censorship is totalising, thereby neglecting possibilities of collaboration, negotiation and resistance. Within such accounts, censorship is cast as a sign of state authority and located within the ambit of state laws, rules, committees and juridical cases. This framework situates censorship in relation to freedom of expression, alternately arguing that censorship is required in the interest of public or national security and unity, or that censorship harms a director’s right to present their vision. In these discussions, censorship is imagined as cutting, a supreme act of authority through which the state imposes its vision on works of
An Essay on the Nature and Significance of the Normative Nature of Economics
It is conventional in economics to distinguish between the normative and the positive. The normative has to do with goodness and badness, and with what ought and ought not to be done;1 and the positive has to do with objective description and/or explanation, with what is and with what is necessary given some normative end. The normative has to do with desirability; the positive has to do with truth (in the sense of either descriptive accuracy or serviceability of a means to a given end).2