MORE than 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill put forward a sensible proposition. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,” he wrote in On Liberty. First Amendment law has hewed closely to Mill’s harm principle, permitting all sorts of disreptuable speech and behaviour that do not pose an imminent physical threat. Campus protesters, by contrast, argue that some speech causes psychological harm, and is therefore covered by Mill’s dictum. Do those claims withstand academic scrutiny?
Take “micro-aggressions”—a particular concern of activists. Somewhat nebulously defined, they can be thought of as inadvertent slights, like a professor asking a non-white student, “Where are you really from?” The cumulative effect of these slights is said to be psychologically damaging, so activists argue for sensitivity training for students and...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2ggIGsF
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