ABSTRACT
This claim generally involves what someone once called the Mucius Scaevola school of argument-there is an awful lot of on the one hand, on the other hand. On the one hand, bad to provoke and offend, on the other, bad to threaten murder and commit arson, to seek to destroy liberty of expression, to impose one’s taboos on everyone, everywhere, with threats of massive violence. Sometimes the claim is not so even-handed: the recklessness and cruelty of the first act was frivolous and inexcusably stupid, whereas the second act was moved by powerful principle and honest moral passion. In the New York Times, the reliably contemptible Stanley Fish opined that insofar as a commitment to free speech, “an abstract principle,” is a moral commitment, one that differs from the sterner morality of those who wish to murder heretics and blasphemers, “the difference … is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.”
