Write a paper using one of the following prompts. Your paper should be roughly 1500 words.
Prompt 1
Consider this argument for a law against offensive speech:
- Offensive speech is harmful. For example, take an Israeli mother whose daughter is being held as a hostage in Gaza. Imagine the distress she would experience if a youth wearing a swastika armband were to tell her that Jews were no better than animals, and that her daughter had it coming. That would hurt more than a punch in the arm. Since laws protecting people from harm are legitimate, a law prohibiting offensive speech is legitimate.
Is this a good argument? Why or why not? If it has flaws, can they be repaired? Whatever your verdicts, your paper should present and evaluate objections to the argument, and should make use of distinctions and ideas from Feinberg’s book.
Prompt 2
In “Words that Silence?” Caroline West writes:
- Racist hate speech could in principle prevent comprehension in a yet more extreme way: by producing in its audience beliefs that prevent them from recognizing that the speaker has any communicative intentions at all. While pornography may change audience perceptions of the meaning of women’s utterances in sexual contexts, racist hate speech could, in the extreme case, remove it altogether.
Explain how a proponent of free speech could use the ideas in West’s paper and also in Langton’s “Unspeakable Acts” to argue that certain kinds of speech should be restricted. Do you think that any argument for speech restrictions based on the considerations offered by West and/or Langton succeeds? If so, what kinds of speech should be restricted?
In reading your paper, we will be asking these questions:
- Is the paper well written (no grammatical mistakes, no convoluted sentences, clear expression of ideas)?
- Are philosophical ideas and arguments from the reading represented accurately?
- Are good reasons given for the paper’s claims?
- Does the paper show evidence that the student has thought through the topic?
As you know, all your writing must be your own; please refresh your memory of class policies by consulting the syllabus. MIT’s policies about academic integrity may be found here: Academic Integrity: A Handbook for Students.
This essay is due during session 21 and will count for 20% of the course grade.
