ABSTRACT
The simplest and clearest way to consider the proper moral limits of free speech on campus is to consider the proper moral limits of any sort of actions. Put differently, we can best address this issue by determining when interference with any given activity—including speech acts—is permissible. Such interference is pro tanto permissible when there is significant harm. When one agent harms another, there is pro tanto reason to think interference with the first permissible. This holds on college campuses as well as anywhere else. If that is right, though, we need a clear understanding of harm.
In this paper, I defend an account of harm as event-based but also in the mold of the account offered by Joel Feinberg in his magnum opus, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. The analysis I offer is meant, that is, to be serviceable in a project like Feinberg’s—that is, it is one of normative political philosophy—and, importantly here, useful for determining when speech might rightly be limited. On the account defended here, to undergo a harm is to be the subject of an event wherein one’s interests are wrongfully set back and wherein the status of the undergoing of the harm derives from its being the sort of event that it is (namely, a setting back of interests), independently of the badness of any resulting state. When harm in this sense is present, there is pro tanto reason to interfere with the actor. In the context of this book, this is when speech might be permissibly limited. Put differently, genuinely harmful speech (where harm is understood as just specified) is the only sort of speech that can possibly be rightly limited—on campus or elsewhere.
