How should Americans balance the values of equal respect and free speech? What role should universities play in protecting and promoting speakers? What makes free speech valuable anyway?

These questions have practical implications at UC Berkeley, where chancellor Carol T. Christ recently announced that the 2017-2018 academic year will bea free speech year. A “Free Speech Week”, planned by student groups and focusing exclusively on the ideas of right-wing speakers, hasbeen called off在组织者看似无能的策划之后。

It is worth taking a step back and considering the reasons for valuing free speech, and what sorts of policies those reasons support. (I will focus on moral and political reasons, rather thanthe legal status of speech on campus.) One set of reasons appeals tothe good of the group; another appeals tothe good of the individual.

在为言论自由辩护时，克里斯特议长引用了哲学家约翰·斯图亚特·密尔的话。密尔认为，每个人都不擅长发现真相:我们大多数人在没有证据或专业知识支持的情况下坚持己见。但正确的群体结构可以帮助我们做得更好:在一个言论自由规范强烈的社会中，我们会遇到不同的观点，这些观点会激励我们重新思考自己的观点。

Even encountering false opinions can be helpful, since it ensures that our true beliefs will be held reflectively, and not as a matter of mere dogma. Christ echoes this sentiment when she writes that “truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail.” A closely related argument by Mill appeals to the untrustworthiness of authority: authority figures are no better at discovering the truth than the rest of us, and prone to censor views that they find inconvenient or unflattering.

This looks like a reason for permitting right-wing speakers on campus, but it also cautions us that there are limits to the amount of space a college should grant them. The planned right-wing speeches appear to have取代了一位著名人类学学者的演讲. If truth is our aim, making sure unpopular speakers are allowed on campus cannot be the whole of our strategy; we also need to strategize about how to stop loud, chaotic speech from drowning out quieter voices. A plannedfree speech conference by Berkeley’s Center for New Mediawill address some of these questions.

Let’s now consider reasons for free speech that appeal to the good of the individual. Citizens in a free society are entitled to a certain degree of freedom from interference. Other people cannot touch your body without your consent, or imprison you without due cause... and your right to liberty extends beyond the physical boundaries of your body. There are limits on the extent to which people and institutions can interfere with the things you own, or control the material you read. We can understand the right to free speech as an extension of this right to individual freedom.

这一论点为校园言论自由提供了额外的支持，但它所确立的内容有重要的限制。个人自由不包括伤害他人的自由。常言道，你挥拳的权利止于我鼻子的起点。

We should draw a distinction, however, between harming others and offending them. Salman Rushdie so offended Ayatollah Khomeni with his novelThe Satanic Verses阿亚图拉悬赏要他的人头Maya Angelou’s autobiographyI Know Why the Caged Bird Singshas been banned for its discussions of racism (offensive to white people), and rape (offensive to a variety of sensibilities). These books may be genuinely confronting, but that’s not an adequate reason to ban them; the offense they cause is not the same as harm.

Milo Yiannopoulos，据说被安排在伯克利演讲，在区分伤害/进攻方面很有用。他的许多观点都非常无礼:他为成年人与13岁的孩子发生性关系辩护，声称“黑人的命也是命”活动分子比白人至上主义者更危险，并表示“同性恋者应该安静下来，回到壁橱里”。但这本身并不足以证明禁止他进入伯克利校园是合理的。

Yiannopoulos’s speech is not merely offensive, however; it is also harmful. On multiple occasions, he has used his platform to directly threaten the rights of others, including students at the universities where he speaks. At UW Milwaukee, heharassed one student—who was present at his speech—by projecting a photograph of her onto the wall and mocking her for being transgender. He hasthreatened to publicly name undocumented students at Berkeley, putting them at risk of deportation, and he has beguntargeting individual Berkeley students for internet harassment. (The internet attacks are part of a larger pattern; he wasbanned from Twitter因为他的粉丝在推特上用性别歧视和种族主义炮轰《捉鬼敢死队》主演莱斯利·琼斯。)

There are good reasons, both moral and political, for upholding a right to free speech. But a moral right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence. As Berkeley upholds the rights of individuals to express unpopular opinions, the university must also ensure that the loudest voices do not drown out everyone else, and that free speech does not become an excuse for harassment.