Abstract
Freedom of speech is the central point of numerous constitutions in the world. From the first amendment to the 1776 US constitution to the Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared in 1948; it has been presented as an indispensable factor of achievement and progress in the history of mankind. However, freedom of speech, also called freedom of expression, may be highly contested when it has to deal with some practical issues and has to quit the theoretical grounds in which it is rooted. Indeed, there are several contemporary issues on which freedom of expression has been denied. The notion itself of free speech is practically disclaimed by an environment of competing values within which it has been evolving so far; here one may refer to instances such as pornography or any other forms of "hate speech".
Hence, Thomas Scanlon, a famous American political philosopher, gives a quiet interesting account of freedom of speech on the ground that for him it does "single out a class of "protected acts" which it holds to be immune from restrictions to which other acts are subjects" (204: 1972). Despite the fact that free speech may harm directly or not one in some ways; the very consideration of freedom of speech as a "protected acts" spares it from any form of legal sanctions or restriction for Scanlon. In this context, the extent to which there is ever a justification for limiting freedom of speech because of its content seems very thin. In the first part of this essay, one may highlight the idea that any limitation on freedom of speech should not be accepted on the ground of the argument of one's right to live autonomously. In the second part, one may emphasize on the extent to which Mill's harm principle and Feinberg's offense principle are necessarily unjustified reasons to limit one's freedom of speech.
