Beyond the rhetoric, all they are saying is this: “These ideas or words are very upsetting to me and to some others.” Yes, they are upsetting. But if everyone has a right not to be upset, then all criticism, and therefore all scientific inquiry, is at best morally hazardous and at worst impossible. Even joking becomes impossible.

The unhappy reality is that some people are always going to say gross and vicious things to hurt other people. If they don’t destroy property or do violence, ignore them or criticize them. But do not set up an authority to punish them. Any guidelines elaborate enough to distinguish vicious opinions from unpopular ones will be too elaborate to work.

In other words, liberal science is built on two pillars. One is the right to offend in pursuit of truth. The other is the responsibility to check and be checked. Here, and here alone, is the social morality which finds error as fast as possible while keeping hurt to a minimum: intellectual license checked by intellectual discipline.

allowing mistakes is risky, suppressing them is much riskier, because then a “mistake” becomes whatever it is that the authorities don’t like to hear. Suppressing offensiveness, too, comes at a high cost, since offensiveness is not the same thing as wrongness—often just the contrary. Sometimes patently “offensive” verbiage turns out to be telling

The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse. Liberal systems, although far from perfect, have at least two great advantages: they can channel conflict rather than obliterate it, and they give a certain degree of protection from centrally

Respect is no opinion’s birthright. People, yes, are entitled to a certain degree of basic respect by dint of being human.

When a state legislature or a curriculum committee or any other political body decrees that anything in particular is, or has equal claim to be, our knowledge, it wrests control over truth from the liberal community of checkers and places it in the hands of central political authorities. And that is illiberal. If the principle is ever established

In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralized community of checkers, and it is nothing else.

To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge. In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s