CRC & CSUS 2017 Ethics Symposium – The Ethics of Saying Things
Session #6: John Stuart Mill on Free Speech
Main Speaker: Robert Taylor, Professor of Political Science, UC Davis
Abstract: This will talk will take a deeper look at the philosophical foundations of free speech and open inquiry through the work of John Stuart Mill. The discussion will examine the underpinning reasons why free speech in a society is vital, and whether or not free speech should be suppressed by either government or societal entities.
Bio: Robert S. Taylor is a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. He specializes in contemporary analytic political philosophy and the history of liberal political thought. He has written numerous articles on Kant, Mill, Rawls, autonomy, self-ownership, and commercial republicanism, and he published his first book, Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness, in 2011. His second book, entitled Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2017.
