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Letters
Letters
Free Speech • God and Humour • Detecting Androids • Peter versus Paul
Free Speech
SIR: I enjoyed very much your recent issue on humour. I laughed especially hard at John Searle’s proposed defence of free speech, which he outlined in the interview with Julian Moore. Searle asserted that humans have a basic right to free speech “because we are speech act performing animals” and that the right to free speech is “like a right to move your body around.” But there is a big difference between the right to move one’s body around, a right which no sane person would ever deny, and the right to move one’s body in any way one pleases, which no sane person should ever accept. This last right, which we might call the right to free bodily movement, is unacceptable because it would entail that people have a right to kill, torture, and destroy as they please.
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