Regarding hate speech, I disagree with Mill and believe restriction is
justified. Mill (1859) professes, “ There is no parity between the feeling of a
person for his own opinion, and... another who is offended at... it ” (p.142),
implying offence and harm are dichotomous. I argue hateful/offensive speech
reinforces marginalisation, constituting ‘harm’. Feinberg (1985) disagrees that
offence is ‘harm’ but asserts “ profound offence ” ‘disrupts social-order’ (p.50).
Similarly to Dworkin (1994) arguing pornography ‘suggests’ women desire
negative treatment (p.152); hate speech, like slurs and singling-out, ‘disrupts
social-order’ by ‘suggesting’ victims are lesser/inferior, which Wilkerson (2020)
terms a ‘pillar’ of a caste-like system (p.159), normalising harmful attitudes that
perpetuate discrimination. Perez (2021) reinforces this, “ men... do not suddenly
kill women, they work up to killing women ” through, presumably,
hateful/misogynistic speech, arguably ‘direct-cognitive discrimination’ (Abel et.
al., 2021, p.64). For example, gender-based violence victim Sarah Everard’s
killer’s private messages teemed with misogynistic hate speech before murder
(Thompson, 2023). This is certainly no coincidence, contradicting Mill’s ‘corn-
dealer’ analogy, as even private speech generates ‘harm’ through normalising
marginalisation. Defining harm as ‘damage to interests’ (Wolff, 2022, p.127),
combined with Young (1990) categorising marginalisation a ‘face of
oppression’ (p.9) - the unjust treatment of interests – marginalisation clearly
constitutes ‘harm’. Therefore, under Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’, warrants
regulation.
Conversely, similar to Mill’s (1859) argument that freedom allows the pursuit
of “our own good in our own way” (p.24), Scanlon (1972) asserts self-
sovereignty’s importance in “ deciding” beliefs (p.215). Put differently,
censorship limits autonomy (Abel et al., 2021, pp.34-35). However, Feinberg
(1985) argues that offence/hate speech , in fact, infringes autonomy by forcing
negative emotional experiences (p.23) and perpetuating marginalisation, as has
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