Dartmouth Events

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

George Sher, Rice University

Talk title: "On Speaking One's Mind"

Description: "This paper explores the prospects for grounding a sweeping prohibition against content-based censorship in the interests of speakers as opposed to their audiences or the wider society. Such a prohibition, I argue, is called for by the need to protect two of our distinct though related vital interests: first, our autonomy interest in making and implementing our own judgments about what is worth having or doing and, second, our social interest in living in contact with others. This last interest enters the picture because the most readily available way of overcoming our isolation is to bring the thoughts of others into either alignment or engaged opposition with our own by talking to them. Once we realize that being censored prevents us from making our own decisions about when and how to broker these meetings with other minds, we can also see why every instance of it undermines our autonomy by preempting a choice which should properly be ours alone."

3:30pm
204 Blunt

Funded by the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.