ABSTRACT
Liberals insist that people have the legal right to say what they wish on matters of political or social controversy. But should they be free to incite racial hatred, for example? British and American law give different answers to that specific question. The United Kingdom Race Relations law makes it a crime to advocate racial prejudice, but the First Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids Congress or any of the states from adopting any such law. Pornography in its various forms presents an instance of the same issue. The chapter considers the question of how the right to moral independence might be defended, both in its abstract form and in the more concrete conception in considering public display of pornography. This question is important beyond the relatively trivial problem of obscenity itself: the right has other and more important applications, and the question of what kinds of arguments support a claim of right is a question in political theory.
