• Socrates:
  • He pleaded for intellectual freedom by asserting the supremacy of his conscience over the verdict of the jury and by maintaining that when he exercised freedom of inquiry he was a public benefactor -- that free discussion had a supreme public value.
  
   
  
• John Milton, "Areopagitica" (1644):
  • The idea of a marketplace of ideas in which truth wins out over falsity.
     
    "And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"
     
    
  • The notion of a "slippery slope" in censorship. Once you ban one idea, what's next?
     
    "If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sun, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest."
     
    
  • Tried to show the social evil of censorship and the social utility of liberty."
     
    "Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition."
     
    "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
     
    "It will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made, both in religious and civil wisdom."
     
    "[W]ho kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."
     
    "[T]here is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool that which being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly."
     
    
  • "Even if a censor is intelligent and broadminded (and it is hard to get such a man to undertake the unpleasant job) it is safer for him to resolve his doubts by ruling against publication. The very fact that he has power to suppress information makes him vulnerable to the inference that failure to do so implies approval -- even though the inference is wholly unfair."
     
    
  • Milton was not really urging complete freedom of expression, only a reasonable toleration of varieties of Protestant opinion. He had no intention of tolerating Catholics.
     
    "Yet if all cannot be of one mind -- as who looks they should be? -- this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian: that many be tolerated rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and mislead...."
  
   
  
• John Locke, "A Letter Concerning Toleration" (1689):
  • He argued for separation of church and state.
     
    "I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other."
     
    
  • The church is responsible for the salvation of the soul; the state is responsible for life, liberty, health, and indolence of body and possessions.
     
    
  • He preached religious toleration, but he had no toleration for atheists.
     
    "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. . . . those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration."
     
    He had no toleration for Catholics, who accepted the authority of the pope.
     
    "Again: That church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another."
     
    
• Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America" (1835):
  • Censorship carries with it the danger of publicizing the subject being censored.
     
    "First you bring writers before juries; but the juries acquit, and what had been the opinion of only an isolated man becomes that of the country ... You hand the authors over to permanent magistrates, but judges have to listen before they can condemn, ... and what would have been obscurely said in one written work is then repeated in a thousand others."
     
    
  • Censorship is an absurdity in a democracy.
     
    "When each man is given a right to rule society, clearly one must recognize his capacity to choose between the various opinions debated among his contemporaries and to appreciate the various facts which may guide his judgment."
     
    
• John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1859):
  • Argued for absolute freedom of:
    • opinion on all subjects,
    • tastes and pursuits without social interference, and
    • assembly.
    
     
    
  • Liberty of expressing and publishing opinions is part of the freedom to have opinions on all subjects.
     
    "The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns people, but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it."
     
    
  • Stressed the protection of minority viewpoints.
     
    "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind... The worst offense of this kind which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatize those who hold a contrary opinion as bad and immoral men."
     
    (However, Mill recognized exceptions to these "absolute" freedoms.)
     
    
  • "Harm Principle" -- Self-protection alone can justify either the state's tampering with the liberty of the individual or any personal interference with another's freedom.
     
    "The object of this essay is to assert one very important principle . . . the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute."
     
    (But what constitutes harm? Who defines it? How would you define it?)
     
    
  • Mill excluded children and "backward states" from his fundamental positions.
     
    "We are not speaking of children or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end."

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