Free Speech Is a Special Case

Free speech is a special case. It provides the conditions within which all other debates, moral, political, economic, scientific, mathematical, philosophical can be incrementally improved. As we cannot predict the growth of knowledge, the argument that there is some speech or some things that can never be said is a claim about knowing that in the future such things will not possibly form an ingredient in the growth ofknowledge. The problem with proscribing speech in that way is that it causes the debate around that speech to also be shut down. So anyone who wants to explain why such things are bad say in the first place can't say them. They can't say the very thing that they want to be