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.Let us consider the  marketplace of ideas rationale first.164 SpeechMill believed that discovering the truth (or believing what is true in theright kind of way) contributes to overall utility, and that an unregulated  mar-ketplace of ideas was most likely to secure the discovery of truth (or believingwhat is true in the right kind of way).Mill s commitment to the so-called marketplace is based on three claims about truth and our knowledge of it.First, Mill thinks we are not justified in assuming that we are infallible: wemay be wrong, and that is a reason to permit dissident opinions, which maywell be true.Second, even to the extent our beliefs are partially true, we aremore likely to appreciate the whole truth to the extent we are exposed todifferent beliefs that, themselves, may capture other parts of the truth.Third, and finally, even to the extent our present beliefs are wholly true, weare more likely to hold them for the right kinds of reasons, and thus more reli-ably, to the extent we must confront other opinions, even those that arefalse.For this line of argument to justify a type of speech, the speech in ques-tion must be related to the truth or our knowledge of it, and discovering thiskind of truth must actually help us maximize utility.Now one might won-der whether some of the purported  truths that cyber-cesspools profferfor example, the purported truth that Jane Doe has herpes are actuallytruths that contribute to maximizing utility.But, from the utililtarian per-spective, that is not even the right way of framing the question: for the realquestion is whether claims about Jane Doe s alleged herpes on Internetsites by anonymous individuals with unknown motives (it is even unknownwhether they have any interest in the truth!) are likely to maximize utility.It would seem not unreasonable, I venture, to be, at most, agnostic about anaffirmative answer to this question, especially once we factor in the likelyharms in the event that the claim is false.But Mill, it is important to recall, did not actually accept the thesis aboutour fallibility in its strongest form.For Mill held that there is no reason tohave a  free market of ideas and arguments in the case of mathematics(geometry in particu lar) since  there is nothing at all to be said on thewrong side of the question [in the case of geometry].The peculiarity ofthe evidence of mathematical truths is that all of the argument is on oneside. 18 This is all the more striking a posture in light of the fact that Mill isa radical empiricist, and so denies that there is any a priori knowledge:even logical and mathematical truths are a posteriori, vindicated by induc-tive generalizations based on past experience.On Mill s view, then, theresimply would not be any epistemic case for making room for the expressionCleaning Cyber-Cesspools 165of opinions on which there is no contrary point of view that could makeany contribution to the truth.This point is particularly important to bearin mind when it comes to material on cyber-cesspools aimed at privateindividuals.Permit me to take what I hope is not a very controversial position, namely,that there actually are not two sides to the question of whether Jane Doeought to be forcibly sodomized.If there are any moral truths, surely allthe epistemic bona fides are on just one side of this issue.In other words,the explicit and implied threats of sexual violence central to cyber-cesspoolslike AutoAdmit simply have no moral standing based on the  market-place of ideas : they are in the same boat, for any Millian, as a website de-voted to establishing that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isequal to the product, rather than the sum, of the squares on the other twosides.But what of dignitary harms more generally, and what of the spillovereffects attendant upon a legal regime in which website owners face inter-mediary liability? Surely some speech that causes dignitary harms actu-ally does facilitate the discovery of the truth, and surely much of the speechthat falls within the scope of spillover effects from more effective regula-tion of tortious harms in cyberspace would do so as well (and some of itmight even affect democratic self-governance).If we are to be genuineutilitarians, we must weigh the competing utilities and disutilities of dif-ferent schemes of regulation of speech.I shall advance two claims: first,dignitary harms are much more harmful in the age of Google; and, sec-ond, spillover effects of more effective regulation of tortious harms incyberspace will have little effect on the discovery of truth or democraticself-government.The AutoAdmit sociopath no doubt had his analogue in an earlier era:call him the Luddite Sociopath [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]