I think there are philosophical arguments for free speech that can be evaluated on their own merits:
1) If some idea is true, I'd like to be able to learn that it's true.
2) If a system silences a dissenter, then other dissenters (who could have better arguments) will know that there's no principled protection for them, and won't speak.
3) If some idea has been silenced, then most people don't know the best arguments for it, so they can't in good conscience support the silencing.
4) Clearly false ideas don't need silencing. Historically, an alarming proportion of silenced ideas have been true, but dangerous to the prevailing power of the day.
Again, this is absolutely not the main justification for free speech.
As a thought experiment, suppose we had a way of knowing which speech would advance knowledge and which speech would hinder our knowledge; by your reasoning, it would then be ethical to silence the speech that we knew would hinder our knowledge, since the point of free speech is to improve our collective knowledge.
This is wrong on its face. It's not what free speech is about. The concept exists because it's unethical to harm others over what they say.
Perhaps some people against free speech don't even claim that the people they want to silence are wrong. Is that better?
> are you constructing a strawman argument portraying the "anti free-speech" side as dumb and the "pro free-speech" side as reasonable?
Certainly all the anti free speech arguments I've encountered are either dumb or evil. But maybe that's on me; let's say there is a non-dumb, non-evil argument against free speech. Why don't you share it with us all?
So you call silencing tactics a form of freedom of speech as long as it's not by the government? I find this a really shortsighted way of looking at freedom.
According to the original Enlightenment ideals, during which the idea of freedom of speech was created, freedom of speech is valuable not because it is inherently so, but because it's supposed to improve society. It creates a Marketplace of Ideas, and through rational debate, the best idea wins. During the French Revolution, Liberté was supposed to be equally important as Egalité and Fraternité, i.e. societal responsibility mattered just as much as freedom.
What is the point if freedom of speech is used to destroy the Marketplace, and if freedom of speech devolves into a form where everybody shouts but nobody listens to each other (i.e. the post-truth society)? What is the point of shouting on an island, instead of reconciling differences?
I'm also pro free speech and I also think this "intellectual humility" argument is a sort of a bad reason to be pro free speech.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but his construction of belief is often not rooted in a rational search for truth.
Man might be a reasoning animal, but the words he chooses to speak are often motivated by the wielding of political power rather than an attempt at expressing his actual underlying beliefs.
Or, in modern vernacular, trolls exist and trolling is often quite effective. A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. That typically means abandoning the underlying assumption that the end goal of free speech is to enable a search for the truth. In fact, I really believe that once you start talking about the goal of free speech as a way of enabling search for the truth, censorship becomes a lot easier to justify.
I know this isn't the popular opinion in the modern world, but originally free speech was argued to be better than censorship, because even though negative or false ideas are present, these bad ideas can illuminate the truth.
Free speech creates a sort of natural selection of ideas--keeping the herd of ideas stronger.
If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, it's actually quite easy to determine who should prevail. Back in 1644, John Milton argued in favor of allowing bad ideas to be published for the following reason[1]:
> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]:
> You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views.
If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either.
That's not true. Free speech as a concept is speech free from censorship, period, not just censorship by government fiat.
Look, you can disagree with that, but I'm not sure why you would. The entire concept is that two ideas, presented before a reasoning audience, can be examined and the one that is better will be likely to be adopted. This is impossible to do if one of the ideas is never presented as it is censored.
I've thought about this quite a bit recently and have come to the conclusion that free speech, broadly speaking, is way more than a constitutional amendment protecting us from government persecution. That's a last resort protection.
Free speech is an ethic, an ideology, a deep part of our culture as Americans and essential to western enlightenment. It's a human right.
You don't have to agree with someone to think it's wrong to censor them. Corollary, you don't take away someone's human rights because they have an opinion you think is reprehensible.
History has a pretty damning record of what happens when societies allow silencing of undesirable voices.
You don't have to defend speech that everyone likes. It's when it's unpopular and you could make an argument for banning it that it's most important to make arguments against banning that speech. If we let people we don't agree with be silenced, how long until those precedents silence us?
So goes the argument. I don't think the author has really proven it, it was pretty theoretical. It's not clear the tiny minority won't just weaponize the powers that be to silence those that disagree with them even further.
That said, I don't think free speech is a utilitarian principle (greatest good for the greatest number) but rather a deontological one, that it is wrong to muzzle an individuals right to express themselves as a first order effect. The author's argument describes second or nth order effects.
It's pretty obvious that people who have their own speech being suppressed would be advocating for freedom of speech. That's almost tautological, and not a particularly interesting argument.
I really do believe arguments about the 'freedom' of speech should be kept to the context of government versus the populace.
The government censors people through force, sometimes in autocracies this quite literally means a gun to a dissenter's head.
It is a separate thing all together, On the other hand, if individuals freely choose to criticize, flame, or just simple disassociate themselves with someone else because they disapprove of their opinions. We should all be free to do at least this without fear that merely by agreeing with the majority we will be accused of 'censoring' the minority.
The best argument I’ve heard for being a free speech absolutist is that speech is the highest form of thought in Humans. We think via dialogue. We arrive at the truth via dialogue.
Criminalizing free speech limits our ability to think and arrive at the truth, and that can’t be good for anyone long term.
I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning.
When I was younger, I was a free speech absolutist. I believed in rationality and that if you couldn't defend/oppose ideas then your position had no strength. Censorship was a sign of weakness. Even clearly "good" censorship (say, banning child porn) has problematic boundaries.
Now...I'm far less confident. I still believe in rationality, but I also see clear weaknesses in human's ability to process. Rationality emerges over time, not in the moment. Speech isn't just ideas, it's emotion. It creates social pressure, fears, threats. And humans are social creatures. Even this forum is chock-ful of signaling patterns and inclusion. These aren't personal failures, but human facts - to be without these would be to dissolve the functions that make us form communities - to remove the items that make us NOT be "defectors" (to signal).
We have to trust others, or we'll spend all our time verifying all the information we get and never accomplish anything. But this introduces the ability for others to exploit this. Speech has never been inherently good nor bad, and thus "free speech" is also neither inherently good nor bad. It is just a force multiplier for whatever you try to do. And "good" speech can't be solely dedicated to battling "bad" speech if it wants to achieve any change, while bad speech achieves its goals just by existing, or even by demanding the attention of those giving "good" speech. An inherent imbalance.
In the big picture, this all shakes out over time. The good speech investigates and explores ideas. Bad speech is beaten. Speech in the middle helps ensure that the "good" speech really is good, and periodic bouts of bad speech help the system enforce the boundaries that move everything in a healthy-for-society direction. But to zoom out to that level is to ignore all the suffering such a system entails. "You can't have a society that is afraid of hurting feelings!" free speech advocates will cry out...correctly. Some amount of suffering is unavoidable. Pick any arbitrary line between restricted speech and unrestricted speech and it's easy to see that people will suffer as a result. But that does not mean that we should automatically accept that unrestricted speech is the answer. That we should be blind to all the suffering that IS happening because we fear the suffering that MIGHT happen.
Or perhaps unrestricted speech IS the answer...but a lot more of us need to be calling out for the societal responsibilities. Free speech is a powerful tool, and like any tool should be used wisely. If we aren't calling people out for using it poorly, but are calling out people for any attempt to restrict it, we're empowering only one side of the equation. But that gets into a circular argument, because if you replace government restrictions with social ones, you have the same result - restricted speech.
I don't know where I stand on this. The only thing I see clearly is that the number of people that seem to be seriously examining the issue is vanishingly small relative to the population.
As I said, it doesn't really matter, if they defend a good argument for the wrong reasons.
It's quite possible that some people who want free speech now might be against free speech for others, but that's hardly an argument against having free speech in the first place.
It's an interesting thought experiment: under free speech you should be free to advocate for a restriction of free speech.
I don't have a platitude for why we need to defend speech. My only argument has ever been that my icky speech today is your essential speech tomorrow. By the time you think something needs to be censored is beyond the line of where you could still rationally discuss the idea.
If you think the government should suppress an idea the only reason must be that you personally cannot reasonably consider the concept. Banning a subject because you cannot fathom talking about it means you must be willing to impose your internal and personal morals on others, by force if necessary.
I believe that people should have the right of freedom of speech. However, it also means that you should have the freedom of speech to argue against them too.
(However, if you wish to state your view, it would be better to try to make an argument for it, if you can do so. (It is possible that it is just a guess, in which case you can say so; if you know why you made that guess then you might mention that too.) If a reasonable argument can be made on both sides then a better debate will be possible, rather than merely being ignorant and saying things without any good reason to do so. If you actually explain things, then you can learn better, isn't it?)
I do believe in the free exchange of ideas, the right to oppose government etc. All the usual concerns about who watches the watchers, abuse of power if granted censorship rights etc etc etc, are perfectly valid.
But the notion that free speech necessarily promotes positive progression in an honest marketplace of ideas, or the discovery of 'truth', seems naive and really quite outdated.
1) If some idea is true, I'd like to be able to learn that it's true.
2) If a system silences a dissenter, then other dissenters (who could have better arguments) will know that there's no principled protection for them, and won't speak.
3) If some idea has been silenced, then most people don't know the best arguments for it, so they can't in good conscience support the silencing.
4) Clearly false ideas don't need silencing. Historically, an alarming proportion of silenced ideas have been true, but dangerous to the prevailing power of the day.
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