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IN PRAISE OF EVIL THOUGHTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
Abstract
Freedom of thought means freedom from social tyranny, the capacity to think for oneself, to encounter even shocking ideas without shrinking away from them. That aspiration is a core concern of the free speech tradition. It is not specifically concerned with law, but it explains some familiar aspects of the First Amendment law we actually have—aspects that the most prevalent theories of free speech fail to capture. It explains the prohibition of compelled speech, and can clarify the perennial puzzle of why freedom of speech extends to art and literature. It also tells us something about the limits of legal regulation, and about the ethical obligations of private actors.
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- © Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2021
Footnotes
Thanks to Joseph Blocher, Jason DeSanto, Sam Fleischacker, Aziz Huq, Brian Leiter, Laura Pedraza-Fariña, Martin Redish, Steven D. Smith, Laura Weinrib, the other contributors to this volume, and participants at the Korean Association of Legal Philosophy, Korea University, Seoul, especially discussants Byung-Sun Oh, Jin-Sook Yun, and Sung Soo Hong, for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Tom Gaylord for research assistance. This essay attempts to pull together themes from some of my earlier writings; hence the embarrassingly high level of self-citation.
References
1 Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234, 253 (2002), quoting Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 566 (1969).
2 For example, it is enshrined in Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Pelican, 1968), chap. 37, 478.
4 Ibid., chap. 26, 332.
5 Ibid., chap. 42, 527.
6 Ibid., chap. 8, 137.
7 Ibid. On the reticence that Hobbes demands, see generally Bejan, Theresa M., Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 82–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Thus J. B. Bury (A History of Freedom of Thought [New York: Henry Holt, 1913], 7–8) says:
It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbours. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man’s thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions.
9 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (London: Penguin, 1974 [1859]), 63 Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., 95.
11 U.S. Constitution, amendment 1, provides in pertinent part: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
12 Police Department of the City of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U.S. 92, 95 (1972).
13 See Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1993); Harry Kalven, Jr., “The New York Times Case: A Note on ‘The Central Meaning of the First Amendment,’” Supreme Court Review 191 (1964): 191–221; Alexander Meiklejohn, Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People (New York: Harper, 1960).
14 “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail.” Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367, 390 (1969). Mill presses this argument in Chapter Two of On Liberty.
15 See Strauss, David A., “Persuasion, Autonomy, and Freedom of Expression,” Columbia Law Review 91 (1991): 334–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Redish, Martin, Freedom of Expression: A Critical Analysis (Charlottesville, VA: Michie Publishing, 1984)Google Scholar; Baker, C. Edwin, “The Scope of the First Amendment Freedom of Speech,” U.C.L.A. Law Review 25 (1978): 964–1040 Google Scholar; Richards, David A. J., “Free Speech and Obscenity Law: Toward a Moral Theory of the First Amendment,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 123 (1974): 45–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scanlon, T. M., “A Theory of Freedom of Expression,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 204–226 Google Scholar.
16 Frankfurt, Harry G., “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Ibid., 20.
18 Frankfurt, Harry G., The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20 Google Scholar; see also Harry G. Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, ed. Debra Satz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 14–16.
19 Frankfurt, Harry, “Reply to John Martin Fischer,” in Buss, Sarah and Overton, Lee, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 27 Google Scholar.
20 T. M. Scanlon, “Reasons and Passions,” in Buss and Overton, Contours of Agency, 167. See also Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, “Introduction,” in Contours of Agency, p. xii.
21 Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 97.
22 James Madison, “The Virginia Report,” in Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, rev. ed. (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1981), 229.
23 Schauer, Frederick, Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 40–44 Google Scholar.
24 Mari Matsuda writes that “racist speech is best treated as a sui generis category, presenting an idea so historically untenable, so dangerous, and so tied to perpetuation of violence and degradation of the very classes of human beings who are least equipped to respond that it is properly treated as outside the realm of protected discourse” (Mari J. Matsuda et al., Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment [Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993], 35).
25 Although the concepts of autonomy, democracy, or truth might be specified in ways that capture Mill’s concern, without further argument they are too vague to do the job. They can easily be understood in ways that embrace the self-censorship that Mill hoped to prevent.
26 Mill, On Liberty, 76; see also ibid., 95.
27 Ibid., 97.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 95.
30 Ibid., 71.
31 He offers two inconsistent articulations of the limit, at one point saying that he would censor opinions “when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act” (ibid., 119), and at another saying that incitement may be punished “only if an overt act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be established between the act and the instigation” (ibid., 76n). Mill does not appear to notice the large differences between these two formulations. Both, however, obviously would permit a great deal of harmful speech that falls short of either threshold.
32 Ibid., 127.
33 Ibid., 95.
34 Ibid., 114.
35 Ibid., 129.
36 Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London: Routledge, 1974), 141. For a similar reading of Mill, see Isaiah Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 173.
37 I agree with John Durham Peters that the call to tolerate speech that articulates evil ideas for the sake of a greater good is already present much earlier, in Socratic dialogue, Jewish Torah study and Talmudic commentary, and the epistles of St. Paul. None of these, however, attempted anything like the creation of a legal doctrine that protects speech. John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 29–67. Milton, on the other hand, is addressing state actors and calling for a reform of the law.
38 John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957 [1644]), 739.
39 Ibid., 728.
40 Ibid., 733.
41 Ibid., 728.
42 That episode is the subject of Milton, “Paradise Regained,” in Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 470.
43 Milton, “Areopagitica,” 727. The importance of a free choice between good and evil is likewise emphasized in “Paradise Lost,” Book III, lines 102ff, in Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 260. The speaker here is God the Father, explaining why it was right to allow the rebel angels and, later, Adam to transgress:
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where only what they needs must do, appear’d,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not mee.
44 Milton, “Areopagitica,” 742.
45 Ibid., 744.
46 Vincent Blasi, Milton’s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment (Yale Law School Occasional Papers, 1995), 2, http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/ylsop/papers/6.
47 I elaborate on the parallels in “Waldron, Responsibility-Rights, and Hate Speech,” Arizona State Law Review 43 (2012): 1201–21.
48 See Waldron, Jeremy, “Mill and the Value of Moral Distress,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 115 Google Scholar.
49 Ryan, Alan, “Liberalism,” in The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 35–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Edmund Fawcett emphasizes this in Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
51 Here I follow Alasdair MacIntyre, who defines a “practice” as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 187. Practices, as MacIntyre understands them, don’t have essences. They have histories.
“A practice,” MacIntyre observes, “involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them” (ibid., 190). Those standards of excellence can constitute virtues: “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (ibid., 191).
The practice of free speech as I describe it in this essay is historically situated within the liberal tradition. MacIntyre thinks that recognizing the historically situated character of any practice entails skepticism: “each tradition is unable to justify its claims over against those of its rivals except to those who already accept them” Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 348. Liberalism itself, MacIntyre thinks, is a tradition in precisely this predicament (ibid., 335). He also thinks that “no tradition can claim rational superiority to any other” (ibid., 348). One can regard his description of how traditions operate, and his characterization of liberalism as a tradition, without going this far. The fact that liberalism is a tradition does not entail that we cannot discuss its merits. Other historically situated practices, such as scientifically based medicine, have turned out to respond to universal aspirations, such as the desire to see one’s children survive to adulthood. Liberalism may have similar universal appeal. It is too soon to tell.
52 That is why it’s nonsensical to talk about the moral effects of pornography. Both the pornography and the readership are too various. See Andrew Koppelman, “Does Obscenity Cause Moral Harm?” Columbia Law Review 105 (2005): 1635–79; Andrew Koppelman, “Eros, Civilization, and Harry Clor,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 31 (2007): 855–64. This variety of responses also forecloses the kind of liberationism that supposes that the relaxation of sexual constraints is always good. See Andrew Koppelman, “Sex and the Civitas” (review of Geoffrey Stone, Sex and the Constitution), New Rambler (2017), http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/law/sex-and-the-civitas. It’s better to acknowledge that there is a lot of very bad speech (including sexual speech) out there, but that the law is incompetent to distinguish it from what’s valuable. Andrew Koppelman, “Reading Lolita at Guantanamo,” Dissent 64 (2006): 53–71.
53 Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
54 Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring). See Blasi, Vincent, “The First Amendment and the Ideal of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion in Whitney v. California,” William and Mary Law Review 29 (1988): 653–97Google Scholar.
55 Whitney, 274 U.S. at 375.
56 Many of these are discussed in Koppelman, Andrew, “Veil of Ignorance: Tunnel Constructivism in Free Speech Theory,” Northwestern University Law Review 107 (2013): 647–730 Google Scholar.
57 Stone, Geoffrey R., Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: Norton, 2004), 352 Google Scholar.
58 See generally Redish, Martin H., The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression and the McCarthy Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
59 See Bork, Robert, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 31 Google Scholar; Auerbach, Carl A., “The Communist Control Act of 1954: A Proposed Legal-Political Theory of Free Speech,” University of Chicago Law Review 23 (1956): 186–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Meiklejohn, Alexander, “What Does the First Amendment Mean?” University of Chicago Law Review 20 (1953): 468 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 The Miltonic roots of Meiklejohn are elaborated in Andrew Koppelman, “You’re All Individuals: Brettschneider on Free Speech,” Brooklyn Law Review 79 (2014): 1023–1030.
62 Berger, Peter, Berger, Brigitte, and Kellner, Hansfried, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage, 1974), 68 Google Scholar.
63 Ibid., 79.
64 Koppelman, “Veil of Ignorance,” 707–15; Vincent Blasi, “Free Speech and Good Character: From Milton to Brandeis to the Present,” in Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, eds., Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 60.
65 Blasi, “Free Speech and Good Character,” 84.
66 There is a rich literature on the importance of education for democratic citizenship. See, e.g., Macedo, Stephen, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Callan, Eamonn, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Mill, On Liberty, 99.
68 Koppelman, Andrew, “Entertaining Satan: Why We Tolerate Terrorist Incitement,” Fordham Law Review 86 (2017): 535–42Google Scholar.
69 Howard, Jeffrey, “Dangerous Speech,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (2019): 208–254 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 Kateb, George, “The Freedom of Worthless and Harmful Speech,” in Yack, Bernard, ed., Liberalism Without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 235 Google Scholar.
71 Galston, William, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 On the virtues associated with liberalism, see Galston, Liberal Purposes; Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
73 Thus Nietzsche:
Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), sec. 39, p. 49.
74 Peters, Courting the Abyss, 130–36.
75 Peters and Waldron are both skeptical of this ideal, and correctly point out that it can be carried to ridiculous lengths. See Jeremy Waldron, “Boutique Faith,” London Review of Books 28, no. 14 (July 20, 2006): 22 (reviewing Peters, Courting the Abyss). Waldron dismisses “the boutique faith of a few liberals who take the resilience of their own voyeurism as a sign that speech is really harmless” (“Boutique Faith,” 22). But Waldron’s insistence on the value of moral distress involves similar paradoxes.
76 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2003), 292 Google Scholar.
77 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943).
78 Steven D. Smith, “Barnette’s Big Blunder,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 78 (2003): 625–68. The complaint can, however, be overstated. See Andrew Koppelman, “No Expressly Religious Orthodoxy: A Response to Steven D. Smith,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 78 (2003): 729–38.
79 Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in dissent:
Children and their parents may believe what they please, avow their belief and practice it. It is not even remotely suggested that the requirement for saluting the flag involves the slightest restriction against the fullest opportunity on the part both of the children and of their parents to disavow as publicly as they choose to do so the meaning that others attach to the gesture of salute.
Barnette, 319 U.S. at 664.
80 Ibid., 641.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 The demoralizing effects of compelled speech are catalogued in Redish, Martin H. and Kaludis, Kirk J., “The Right of Expressive Access in First Amendment Theory: Redistributive Values and the Democratic Dilemma,” Northwestern University Law Review 93 (1999): 1114–17Google Scholar.
84 This difficulty is explored in detail in Mark V. Tushnet et al., Free Speech Beyond Words: The Surprising Reach of the First Amendment (New York: New York University Press, 2017). The authors offer a variety of answers, but admit that they are unsatisfactory. Here I offer a different take on the same problem.
85 Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 67 (1973), citing John M. Finnis, “‘Reason and Passion’: The Constitutional Dialectic of Free Speech and Obscenity,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 116 (1967): 222–43; see also Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 34–35 (1973); Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 484 (1957).
86 Shiffrin, Seana Valentine, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 88–89 Google Scholar.
87 Ibid., 91.
88 Ibid., 117.
89 Ibid., 89.
90 Andrew Koppelman, “Is Pornography ‘Speech’?” Legal Theory 14 (2008): 71–89.
91 The Court has held that one factor in determining whether nonverbal conduct is protected by the First Amendment is whether “the governmental interest [in regulation] is unrelated to the suppression of free expression.” United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 377 (1968). Alan Chen claims that “under O’Brien, musical expression is conduct that is protected only when the government’s interest in regulating it is to address its speech or cognitive component.” “Instrumental Music and the First Amendment,” in Tushnet et al., Free Speech Beyond Words, 49. But O’Brien refers to expression, not to the cognitive component of expression. Any attempt to regulate the content of music will involve thought control.
92 Paris Adult Theatre, 413 U.S. at 63 (citations omitted).
93 Sherman, Jeffrey G., “Love Speech: The Social Utility of Pornography,” Stanford Law Review 47 (1995): 682 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
94 Ibid., 685 n. 130. The implications of Sherman’s claims are further elaborated in Andrew Koppelman, “Madisonian Pornography or, The Importance of Jeffrey Sherman,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 84 (2009): 597–613.
95 Mill, On Liberty, 129.
96 The persistent effect of repression is nicely illustrated by this story told by Clancy Sigal, a writer whose parents were arrested and jailed during the Palmer raids of 1920. Decades later, when FBI agents arrived to question Sigal about his politics during the cold war,
my mother politely met them at the door, invited them in for coffee and charmed them out of their intended purpose. But she was pale and terrified when I got home. In an understandable slip of the tongue she said: “The Palmers have been here. What have you done?”
Clancy Sigal, “John Ashcroft’s Palmer Raids,” New York Times, March 13, 2002.
97 See Haidt, Jonathan, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012), 170–77Google Scholar.
98 The term was originally coined by George Weinberg in an effort to invert the then-conventional notion that homosexuality was a mental illness, by arguing that the aversion to homosexuality was itself pathological. George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972).
99 Koppelman, Andrew, Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 181–90Google Scholar.
100 One danger that we have recently seen is the attribution of nearly magical power to specific types of speech, such as the claim that pornography silences women and that its suppression would ameliorate this silencing. See Koppelman, Andrew, “Another Solipsism: Rae Langton on Sexual Fantasy,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review 5 (2013): 163–87Google Scholar.
101 Sue, Derald Wing et al., “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice,” American Psychologist 62 (2007): 273 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 Heather Mac Donald, “The Microaggression Farce,” City Journal, Autumn 2014, https://www.city-journal.org/html/microaggression-farce-13679.html. Mac Donald doesn’t appear to perceive any real harms from microaggressions. For a more nuanced picture, see Keith E. Whittington, Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
103 Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron and Khalid, Amna, “The Rise of ‘Bias Response Teams’ on Campus,” New Republic, March 30, 2016Google Scholar.
104 Koppelman, Andrew, “A Free Speech Response to the Gay Rights/Religious Liberty Conflict,” Northwestern University Law Review 110 (2016): 1125–67Google Scholar.
105 The intense monitoring of unconscious facial signals was already imagined by Orwell:
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (incredulity when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), 1.5.62.
106 Mill, On Liberty, 63.
107 For a catalogue of examples, see Soave, Robby, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (New York: All Points Books, 2019)Google Scholar.
108 Mill, On Liberty, 144.
109 Cook, Phiip and Heilmann, Conrad, “Two Types of Self-Censorship: Public and Private,” Political Studies 61 (2013): 178–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
110 George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in My Country Right or Left: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters 1940–1943, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 158.
111 Richard C. Sinopoli, “Thick-Skinned Liberalism: Redefining Civility,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995), 612–20.
112 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 178. Revealingly, in the revised edition, Rawls changed “honored” to “respected.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 155–56. The revision grasps the problem, but one may doubt whether the revised sentence is true. The fact that others respect our right to pursue our endeavors, but regard them as silly, does not give us any reason to think them worthwhile.
113 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18, 233.
114 David Van Mill, “Hobbes and Free Speech,” in Hobbesian Applied Ethics and Public Policy, ed. Shane D. Courtland (New York: Routledge, 2018); David Van Mill, “Civil Liberty in Hobbes’s Commonwealth,” Australian Journal of Political Science 37 (2002): 23–27.
115 Hobbes, Thomas, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 262–63Google Scholar.
116 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 30, 381.
117 Bejan, Mere Civility, 110. Bejan observes that Hobbes anticipated the modern sensitivity to microaggressions (ibid., 87).
118 Parkin, Jonathan, “Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of Self-Censorship,” in Baltussen, Han and Davis, Peter J. eds., The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)Google Scholar.