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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I would say the reason censorship is less acceptable than other paternalistic regulation is that as long as we DON'T have censorship, we can at least read / talk / hear about the things regulated-away (does waiting for FDA approval cost more lives than it saves? Is the war on drugs worth the cost?) and perhaps decide to change the regulations from time to time.

But with censorship of ideas (if it were truly enforceable, which of course it isn't) there would almost certainly be no way to discuss the censorship itself, since the fact that censorship was occurring would undoubtedly be the first subject to be censored!

Or, nearly the same thing from another angle, there's no way to decide if the censors are are doing an appropriate job, because the public can't be allowed to review the material that's being censored.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Censorship bans opinions. Which "we all have a right to". Yes, I agree with you that we don't have a right to our own opinions, but that is not what most people think.

Opinions can't be 'wrong', even if they can be 'harmful'. This is again because people have a *right* to their own opinions, even if they do not have a right to hurt others directly. It's simply a price you have to pay, to respect these *rights*. Opinions needs to get to the level of *wrong* before regulations can be brought to curb it. But this they can never be, because voicing opinions is a *right*.

And what underlies opinion-as-right is I think opinion-as-expression, of loyalty, of one's identity. (You have probably mentioned this before). Regulations which are not censorships don't tread of these

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