Freedom of Speech

Charles Lawrence says that there are strong reasons why some racist speech should be protected. Among these reasons is that tolerance of racist speech should be taught as a value, leaving government regulation out of the picture, and forcing society to deal with the problems by itself. But when free speech conflicts with the elimination of racism, according to Lawrence there is a problem. He highlights the conflicts of legislation by describing current results, i.…

…learn for themselves how to identify and deal with these situations. In this argument, Hentoff assumes that everybody has a choice whether to be around the racist speech or not. This is an assumption that weakens the argument. He has a point, where he says that the protected students wouldn’t learn about “bad ideas,” but where is the line drawn? Which kind of education is more important? Is it ethos education or pathos education?