1/ If it’s right to criminalize, and deploy the power of the state to punish, a grave wrong, is it also right to criminalize and punish the speech of those who say that it is not a wrong? Some on the left and right unite in saying "yes." Advocacy of injustice is itself injustice.

2/ They say: Such advocacy is violence or authorizes and enables violence or its equivalent; the rights of victims “are not up for debate.” So dissent, they say, should be shut down, using the power of the state to silence those advocating or defending certain grave injustices.

3/ This makes the debate between them especially interesting. Consider abortion. One side says it’s unjust to permit it; the other that it’s unjust to prohibit it. Both think the other side’s advocacy (speech) should, or may legitimately, be prohibited and subjected to sanction.

4/ So the political struggle goes beyond a fight over what the policy on abortion and unborn life should be; it’s conceived by both sides as a fight for the power to silence those advocating or defending the grave injustice embodied in the other side’s view of the matter.

5/ There are also people on both the right and left who unite in holding that acts of injustice should be criminalized and punished, but the speech of those who dissent from the belief that the acts in question are wrong or merit punishment should not be prohibited or punished.

6/ Typically those on the right and left share some (prudential) reasons for their belief that advocacy (even of what is--contrary to the advocate’s erroneous belief--unjust) should not be punished, but have very different understandings of the deeper moral ground of free speech.

7/ On the left, belief in a content-independent right of advocacy is often grounded in ideas that are antiperfectionist (in Rawls’ sense), individualistic, and Lockean inspired. On the right, the belief tends to be perfectionist, common good-oriented, and Socratic in inspiration.

8/ These differences also underlie and generate important substantive differences in understanding what is and isn’t protected as free speech. The differences emerge clearly in debates over pornography, such as my debate with Ronald Dworkin, who defended a “right to pornography."

9/ Dworkin’s argument is presented here. https://www.jstor.org/stable/764457 . A short version of my critique of the argument is here (with a more detailed version presented in my book *Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality*). https://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/02/private-acts-public-interests