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Weight of Words: Moral Responsibility and Freedom of Speech

Feng, Sihan
Abstract
In this thesis, I will propose a moral responsibility framework termed “the Anticipation Model,” which argues that for an agent to be held morally blameworthy for any act, two necessary conditions are required. First, they can freely choose not to perform the action, and second, the committed act either violates their normative judgment at the time of action or violates the agent’s general moral beliefs. Based on the above moral framework, I will subsequently defend freedom of speech through arguing that a positive moral responsibility judgment for speech is seldom justified. If, under rare circumstances, speech responsibility can be determined, people still ought to be skeptical about the amount of blameworthiness that can be rightfully attributed to the speaker.
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2021-05-01
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Undergraduate Honors Theses
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Swenson, Philip
Bestman, Jennifer
Costelloe, Timothy
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Philosophy
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https://scholarworks.wm.edu/handle/internal/11151
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