Can science, which has given us so many blessings, also help us settle disputes about free speech on campus?
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, thinks so. She argues in The New York Times that science can "provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn't be acceptable on campus and in civil society." It's a point that she doesn't prove, and that poses dangers to which she seems blind.
Barrett writes that science has shown that "abusive" speech damages listeners' bodies, especially their brains, and should therefore be considered a form of violence. But it has also shown that "merely offensive" speech does not have this effect. So campuses should let Charles Murray speak, since he is offering "scholarly hypothesis to be debated," but is not "a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos."
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