Tyranny of Opinion

Russell Blackford is a philosopher, legal scholar, literary critic based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced (2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (2016) and Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination (2017). In 2014, he was inducted as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Introduction and overview2. Mill on liberty: Morality, paternalism, and harm3. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech4. The limits to speaking our minds5. Conformity and its limits6. Ideology, propaganda, and outrage7. You can’t say that! Identity politics and the flight from liberalism8. Cyberspace and its discontents9. Conclusion: What can you do?BibliographyIndex

Blackford does a good job explaining how the rise of the internet has made self-expression much more risky, since any violation of supposed norms can result in the formation of an internet mob in hours.