Hate Speech and Pornography in Canada: A Qualified Deontological Response to a Consequentialist Argument
Bibliographic record
Abstract
InThe Hateful and the Obscene, Sumner offers a consequentialist reading of John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy that blinds him to the complexity and normative attractions of Canadian law's response to hate speech and pornography. This essay argues that qualified deontological moral philosophy provides a more adequate basis on which to understand the bodies of law examined by Sumner. The qualified deontological analysis is more adequate since it (unlike consequentialism) provides a basis on which to account for the presence within Canadian law of incommensurable values. The analysis offered here also addresses three further weaknesses in Sumner’s text. Sumner offers an inadequate account of the role played by the concept of community in the law’s operations. He also fails to recognise that a strong commitment to identity politics has shaped the development of Canadian law. But perhaps the most significant weakness inThe Hateful and the Obsceneis Sumner’s adoption of a ‘Millian’ position on free expression that fails adequately to address the threats posed by those political activists who seek to undercut liberal democracy's foundations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".