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Virtue, Freedom, And The First Amendment, Marc O. Degirolami
Virtue, Freedom, And The First Amendment, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
The modern First Amendment embodies the idea of freedom as a fundamental good of contemporary American society. The First Amendment protects and promotes everybody’s freedom of thought, belief, speech, and religious exercise as basic goods—as given ends of American political and moral life. It does not protect these freedoms for the sake of promoting any particular vision of the virtuous society. It is neutral on that score, setting limits only in those rare cases when the exercise of a First Amendment freedom exacts an intolerable social cost.
Something like this collection of views constitutes the conventional account of the First …