The censor's burden

Abstract

Censorship involves, inter alia, adopting a certain type of epistemic policy. While much has been written on the harms and benefits of free expression and the associated rights thereof, the epistemic preconditions of justified censorship are relatively underexplored. In this paper, I argue that examining intrapersonal norms of how we ought to treat evidence that might come to us over time can shed light on interpersonal norms of evidence generation and sharing that are relevant in the context of censorship. The upshot is that justified censorship requires the censor to meet a very high epistemic burden regarding the target proposition(s)—importantly, one that exceeds knowledge.