ABSTRACT
Mill’s defense of free speech rests on the idea of a competition amongst arguments and ideas. We should avoid censoring speech, Mill argues, because we might find that unpopular ideas are in fact true, and even if they are wrong, they may help us come up with better arguments for better ideas
However, there is an important implicit assumption in the background of Mill’s account: that the population participating in free speech is unaffected by the content of debates. However, there are reasons to think that this is false where the subject of the speech and the participants start to overlap. Indeed, Langton (1993), Fricker (2007), and others have argued that certain forms of speech can serve to undermine the ability of others to fully participate in the marketplace of ideas. In this paper, I develop the argument that we have epistemic reasons for wanting to create more inclusive debates, and that may give us reason to shape discussion in a way that serves to create a more robust exchange of ideas. This may require us to place some topics out of bounds for reasonable discussion. However, placing too many things outside of the realm of discussion has its own problems, as it can undermine robust deliberation. As such, we need to look for a compromise between inclusion of ideas and inclusion of people as a deliberative principle.
We thus need a reasonable principle for distributing the burdens imposed by a more robust marketplace of ideas. However, this distribution is made more complex by the fact that different parties may hold different epistemic perspectives (as defined in Muldoon 2016) and as a result disagree on what might constitute a burden. As such, this distributive principle must be able to deal with deep disagreements on the kinds of burdens that participants recognize.
