“And if we agree with John Stuart Mill (1978) that speech should be protected because it leads to the truth, there seems no reason to protect the speech of anti-vaccers or creationists.”
This sentence assumes that the state, however it is made up, or perhaps the scientific elite or even clergy, is the final arbiter of truth. If we bring ourselves back a few hundred years, the latter part of the sentence could instead have been written like this: “there seems no reason to protect the speech of round-earthers and atheists.”
I think this illustrates quite well the difficulty of regulating speech, at least from the standpoint that it should protect “truth,” because immediately the qestion of “who's truth?” arises.
This sentence assumes that the state, however it is made up, or perhaps the scientific elite or even clergy, is the final arbiter of truth. If we bring ourselves back a few hundred years, the latter part of the sentence could instead have been written like this: “there seems no reason to protect the speech of round-earthers and atheists.”
I think this illustrates quite well the difficulty of regulating speech, at least from the standpoint that it should protect “truth,” because immediately the qestion of “who's truth?” arises.