PHIL0067, Term 1 2023-24
Free Speech and Theories of Autonomy
Summative Essay Instructions
Recap of Formative Writing Instructions
Answer all parts of the question that you select
It’s better to discuss a few arguments in detail, than a lot of arguments in brief
Don’t “fence-sit”; figure out a position that you want to defend
Develop your position in a way that allows you to argue against another author
Don’t just assert your position – make an argument for it
Most of the work in a philosophy essay is about explaining why you think what you think
Don’t overstate the strength of your conclusions; you don’t have to pretend to have settled the issue that you’re addressing, once and for all
Further Instructions for Summative Essays
It’s 100% okay to use a revised version of a formative essay as your summative essay submission.
It’s better to discuss a few arguments in detail, than a lot of arguments in brief. This is just repeating from the formative instructions. It bears repeating, though, because so many essays go awry on
this front. In your first draft of a philosophy essay, it’s natural to try to touch on many different
themes and arguments from the module, that are relevant to your analysis. But once you’ve worked
out what your main one or two lines of argument are, in defence of your position, you should
structure your essay so that the majority of your words are spent presenting, explaining, and defending that argument. You can, at the same time, demonstrate breadth of understanding succinctly, by acknowledging some of the issues and authors that you might have discussed, given unlimited length, but which you have to set aside in order to meet the word count.
When editing your essay, ask yourself: would a reader coming to this work for the first time find it
easy to grasp what my answer to the essay question is Can I make my overall conclusion easier to
grasp, with a bit of judicious editing Does my conclusion constitute an answer to the question that
I’ve chosen If not, how can I “join the dots” between the two
If you’re getting a bit lost, and worried that your essay is falling apart, remember: it’s very hard to
not award at least a solid 2:1 to an essay that is (i) written in grammatical English, (ii) which includes a detailed and accurate exposition of at least one other author’s view, and the argument they
use to defend it, and (iii) which provides a clear answer to the question/prompt, partly drawing on
the exposition in (ii). If you get lost, just try to, at minimum, deliver on (i), (ii), and (iii).
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Administrative Information
Strict word limits
BA Students: 3,500 words
MA Students: 4,000 words
MPhil Students: 4,500 words
Word counts don’t include title, front-matter, or bibliography, but they do include footnotes.
Write your essay question / prompt at the start of your submission, to avoid confusion (this isn’t
included in your word count).
Submissions will be online, via Assessment UCL. The philosophy office will contact you to advise
you on how to upload your submission. If you haven’t received this information by Wednesday the
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rd of January, email Emily Wilkes in the philosophy office (philosophy@ucl.ac.uk) and she’ll be
able to point you in the right direction.
The deadline is the first day of term 2, Monday the 8th of January. I believe the upload deadline is
4.00pm that day, but please double-check communications with the philosophy office to confirm.
If you’re going to apply for an extension, via extenuating circumstances, please try to apply before the deadline, if possible. If you’re using a SORA to claim an extension on this piece of
work, please notify the philosophy office of this in advance, so that they can manually adjust
your submission deadline in the Assessment UCL system.
Plagiarism – i.e. passing off other people’s work or ideas as your own – and self-plagiarism – i.e. directly reusing written work that you’ve already been assessed on in other modules – are both infringements of UCL’s academic integrity policies. You should include citations to indicate when
you are (a) quoting another author’s work, or (b) paraphrasing their ideas and arguments. (See referencing instructions below.) You don’t have to include a citation for every single sentence. You
just need to put the reader in a position to tell the difference between your ideas and the ideas of
other people whose work you’re discussing. If you’re unsure about anything plagiarism-related,
UCL has various resources you can consult here. (Also see my instructions on using AI resources
below.)
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Questions (Same as for Formatives)
1. Is it a reflection-constraining factor, in Christman’s sense of that term, to be subject to formal legal
restrictions on “terroristic speech”, i.e. speech that explicitly encourages acts of violence in order to promote certain political goals
2. “Individual autonomy is not a good that we are aiming to promote. Rather, it is a source of categorical
individual rights, which we should be aiming to respect. The justification for free speech must therefore
be spelled out in a non-consequentialist fashion.” Do you agree Why or why not
3. Do smartphones and social media have a positive or negative impact, overall, on human autonomy
Do legal constraints on people’s use of these things – for example, in countries that ban certain popular
sites and apps – undermine autonomy
4. How would you use a content-neutral theory of individual autonomy to make an autonomy-based argument for free speech What are the advantages and disadvantages of appealing to an explicitly contentneutral theory, for this purpose, compared to a substantive theory of autonomy
5. Is it possible to formulate a purely autonomy-based justification for free speech Or will any such argument also need to invoke an underlying theory of state authority and political legitimacy
6. Would we have more autonomy if there were stricter legal constraints upon – and thus, if we had less
exposure to – paid advertisements in public, e.g. on the street, on public transport, or on social media
7. “Misinformation and political propaganda make it harder for people to think for themselves. Therefore, laws that restrict misinformation and political propaganda are a good thing, from a pro-autonomy
point of view.” Do you agree Why or why not
8. Consider two countries: one that has relatively strict free speech protections, and another that has a
number of content-based restrictions on speech, e.g. restrictions on hate speech, Holocaust denialism,
or medical misinformation. Other things being equal, which society is more likely to result in people
having non-autonomous adaptive preferences
9. Does it ever make sense to silence people for the sake of free speech Why or why not What conception of autonomy is underpinning your answer to this question
Referencing Info and Instructions
There is no ‘industry-standard’ method of referencing used in philosophy books and scholarly articles.
However, for this module I would advise you to follow a particular version of Harvard-style referencing.
Being able to accurately adhere to referencing instructions is one of the elementary skills of scholarly
writing. If you prefer to use some other recognised citation system/format (e.g. Chicago-style footnotes),
that’s totally fine, as long as you apply it consistently and accurately. If your referencing and citations do
not accurately and consistently adhere to some recognised citation format – whether this one or another
– then we will deduct one point from your mark for the summative essay. (Note: this penalty is separate
from any plagiarism-related offences; those are governed by UCL’s academic integrity policies.)
The method of citation that I am advising you to use is fairly simple. In essence, it just involves in-text
citations that look like this (Simpson 2020, p. 11), combined with an alphabetically-ordered list of all
cited works at the end of the essay, under the heading ‘References’. Every direct quotation from a
source in your essay must be “clearly marked out as a quotation, like this”, and followed by an in-text
citation, like this (Scanlon 1972, p. 205). If you quote from the same source again, shortly afterwards,
and there are no other in-text citations in between, then the next time you quote that source you can do
it like this (Ibid., pp. 208-09). Notice that when you are just citing a single page, you just do a single p,
i.e. “p. 10”, whereas when you are citing more than one page, you do a double p, i.e. “pp. 10-16”.
With the style of in-text citations that I’m presenting, notice that the parenthesis always sits ‘inside’ the
comma or full stop, like so (Simpson 2020, p. 12). The one exception to this is demonstrated below.
It’s when you’re quoting a longer passage of text, where you inset this passage separately from the
rest of the text, like what I’m doing here. In that case you don’t need to put the quotation in inverted commas. You just finish the quote with a full stop, and then include the in-text citation, including the page numbers, at the end of the passage, like this. (Simpson 2023, p. 4)
Apart from quotations, you should also use this type of page-based citation if you paraphrase a passage
from a source, or if you want to specifically refer to an individual claim that is put forward in the source
that you’re citing – the kind of thing for which, like a quote, the reader would benefit from being
shown exactly where, within the cited source, the relevant content can be found.
If you’re citing a co-authored piece, write the citation like this (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000, p. 10). If
there are three or more authors, you should write the citation like this (Jones et al. 1997, p. 44).
Sometimes you want to cite a source but you don’t want to quote a particular passage, or refer to a specific claim or premise – rather, you just want to make a general statement about the author’s overall position, or the gist of the argument they use to support it. In those cases all you need to do is: when you
mention the author’s surname, include the year of publication in parentheses immediately afterwards.
So, you might say: “Similar to the view just discussed, Nagel (1995) is another author who thinks that
free speech should be seen as a categorical right, whose grounds cannot be spelled out in instrumental
or consequentialist terms”. In these cases, you don’t need to include a citation for every single sentence in
the essay that involves a discussion of the relevant source. When you start talking about the Nagel paper, you should include a (1995) with the first mention of it, and then after that the reader will infer
that all subsequent references to Nagel will be referring to that paper – unless you bring in another paper by Nagel, in which case you should introduce a new in-text citation, to make that obvious. (But
note: if you include a specific quotation, in the continuing discussion of Nagel, then you do need to accompany that quotation with an in-text citation, including the page reference, as explained above. In
that case, the citation would look like (Ibid., p. 8).)
The one other way that you might make an in-text citation, working under this method of referencing,
is when you just want to mention – but don’t really want to explain or discuss – the work of an author or
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authors who defend a view that’s connected to the point you’re making. For example, you might say
something like this: “Several authors argue that there is some kind of deep and inextricable connection
between free speech and our capacity for thought itself (e.g. Baker 1989, Shiffrin 2014).” If you need to
include citations of that kind, simply follow the referencing format that I’ve just shown here.
If you’re following this system, your reference list should be formatted as below. You can just mimic this
formatting. Notice that the listings are alphabetised by surname, and when there are two entries by the
same author, they’re ordered from oldest to most recent. There are examples here of three (and a half)
types of sources: (1) articles in scholarly journals, (2) scholarly books, and (3) individual chapters in (3a
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single-authored books and (3b) edited collections of scholarly articles. You should usually only cite
sources of these types in your essay. If you have another type of source that you think you have a good
case for including, please contact me and I will advise you about whether it’s suitable, and if so how to
cite it. In any case, in summary, your reference list should closely resemble the following format.
Just to be clear, the instructions and formatting examples that I have provided here aren’t some singu_x005f larly correct or orthodox system for referencing and citation in philosophy. Different journals and pub lishers have different formatting customs and preferences. The relevant skill that you’re cultivating and
practising here is not the precise use of some specific referencing system, but rather the ability to employ
any referencing system precisely and in accordance with instructions and examples.
