Book: A history of laws on hate and abuse
…‘offence’. ‘Offence’ has indeed been too widely accepted as a reason for speech restrictions. People may feel offended without being offended in a significant way, and even those being offended may suffer no meaningful harm. And while people can be compensated for harm from free speech, there is no way of compensating people for removing the freedom to speak. In any case, on purely pragmatic grounds it is nearly always best to allow serious disag…