> Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want?
No. The main consequence of speech that is being opposed should be… speech, not action to get that speaker's speech curtailed, whether by speech or other means.
> I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not
These people didn't have to turn up to the talk. That's not the same as cancelling a talk because someone said they don't want it to happen.
> And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not
> …
> But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse?
Did MIT change its decision to host the speaker because of a well-reasoned argument - as you point out, one of the intended consequences aimed for via free speech - or was it due to some other kind of pressure?
>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?
I don't think so.
What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech.
If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.
>> First, where did you get this extra context that our OP and I both seem to be missing, that "free speech is about time and place," or that political rants are only ok when people are "free to leave?" I'm not finding anything like that clicking through the links. Is this just your personal value about what you believe "Free speech" to be? Does MIT agree? Has MIT codified something like this? I'd like to read it, if so, because I'm very interested in this conversation and idea.
Free speech, as in the first amendment, has to do with the govt making laws _prohibiting_ speech. It is silent on other bodies (companies etc) which are pretty much free to make their own rules.
Free speech gives you the right to say whatever you like (publish whatever you like etc). It doesn't give you the right to force that speech on me. If I don't want to hear you I'm free to leave. If collectively we don't want to hear you, we might ask (or require) you to leave.
In other words free speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in the context of a wider society.
Universities are in a strange meeting point of freedoms. MIT is trying to codify this (with inevitable shortcomings) because people seem to have forgotten why they exist.
Perhaps they could just come out and say "University is not a safe space, you might hear, or see, anything, at any place or time, and most of it will offend someone."
That doesn't sound like much fun though, because university is also supposed to be a place to learn. It's hard to properly pay attention while covered in the blood of an animal slaughtered in the quad by a vegan to highlight animal abuse.
I'm agreeing with you that in a university context is is impossible to opt out of some activities and situations. Thus there needs to be room for both "safe space" and free speech. I should be able to go to class, I should be able to stand outside the class handing out flyers, I should be allowed to invite any guest speaker I like. Because, it appears that people are people, who need rules, MIT has to try and codify each possible scenario and say what isok, where, and when.
The power dynamic between faculty and students is prone to abuse. Sleeping with a professor to get good grades has pretty much existed since we invented professors and students.
Most universities have codified the ethics around this, and it's well understood.
Equally professors have had radical political views since forever. In itself that's OK, but clearly the politics of the student shouldn't affect the grade (but sure, if does.)
But free speech is not Free behaviour.
If a professor denigrates a woman in class, (say a political studies, of gender studies class) as part of exploring an idea, then OK, that's part of the course. If a misogonist professor grades all women automatically lower, then that's not OK.
Grading is not speech (IMO, I'm not a constitutional lawyer.)
It seems like professors, and students have forgotten basic norms, and need to thus have all the rules written down. And yes, I agree, to MIT I say "good luck with that."
Except the argument here is person X doesn't get to talk.
The argument is Berkeley can stop people talking they politically don't like (Or any other reason) because as a business they have every right to discriminate on political views.
And sure that's legally true perhaps, we all understand that, but it's not right and against the idea of the first amendment.
To argue it's ok for universities to censor speakers is a very scary point of view, and this is what you are doing by bringing in the straw person 'it's legally allowed'
> Yet free speech advocates are all for forcing private institutions to open their platforms to any and all speech.
No, they are not in favor of forcing them to do so. You are making the unfortunately common mistake of confusing advocating something with making it legally required. These are not the same thing, and you'll be a more convincing advocate for your side once you really get that.
What free-speech advocates are stating is that while private universities are legally allowed to ban speakers, because as you correctly state they have no obligation to provide a platform to anyone or anything they don't want to... that this is illiberal behavior, not in the spirit of freedom of speech, and these universities are not living up to their claimed principles when they do it.
> We cannot have a truly free community of expression if some perspectives can be heard and others cannot... MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment
They're trying to have it both ways. "You can say absolutely, positively anything you want because that's the only way... except for these obvious exceptions that we're not going to define rigorously." It reads like that XKCD about physicists encountering other fields: https://xkcd.com/793/
Free-speech absolutism has a nice, simple, declarative ring to it. But it's not practical, anybody who tries to discuss the exceptions gets shouted down: perspectives that can't be heard.
It's disappointing to see MIT present a wishy-washy, vacuous stand as if they were actually saying something. If you want a free-speech absolutist stance, then take it, and deal with the consequences (which will include threats, harassment, and many other problems). Or take a stance that actually tries to boost voices that don't get heard because louder voices make it impossible to hear them -- and suffer the consequences of that, too.
Instead, they're trying to say both things at the same time, which doesn't actually say anything at all.
>Yes, speaking to someone in an attempt to pressure them not to speak to someone else is indeed a form of speech.
No, it isn't merely a form of speech. It's free speech. It's just as free as any other kind of speech. Free speech allows for conflict with speech, and it doesn't guarantee all speech all possible platforms.
You don't get to decide that only the speech you agree with gets to be free, but speech that disagrees with that doesn't.
>Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyone.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but a lot of people confuse Free Speech, the ideal, with Free Speech, the legal right. A lot of people get upset when people are fired or ostracized for their political positions. Even when it doesn't involve the government and isn't protected. E.g. a lot of people were fired or ostracized for being communists in the 50s.
The rest of your comment is just "other people's problem's are worse than yours, so you don't have any right to complain".
> If anything the people criticizing Brendan Eich are trying to take away his freedom...
Freedom of speech isn't freedom from criticism, and criticism isn't censorship. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from social consequences for speech. Freedom of speech isn't an unconditional guarantee of employment.
Sometimes, freedom of speech becomes distasteful. I don't feel like this is one of those times, but I can understand why someone might disagree. In this situation, I see one person exercising their freedom of speech (in the form of a campaign donation) and a group of people responding with their own speech. That seems fine to me; if you disagree, could you elaborate on why, or describe what you think these employees should do instead? It seems to me that people responding to Brendan Eich should not have less freedom of speech than him.
> And in this case, we're talking about a CEO, the public face of a company, not an otherwise private citizen.
This is true, and similar to what got people like Adria Richards fired in other scenarios where they've lost the ability to be able to professionally represent their company through their speech alone.
> Anyway, you're essentially arguing that free speech means freedom from consequences, and it just doesn't.
Yes, but keep in mind that there's a difference between individual freedom of speech among individuals and what society does to individuals. IMO people should modulate the consequences they are free to impose based on the principle that free speech is valued.
There's a reason Rockwell's famous painting exhibiting freedom of speech is a man standing in a crowded town hall meeting. Whatever that man says, he will have to still live with those people afterwards, and so everyone involved will have to understand their part in what "freedom of speech" really means in America.
Of course the government can't ban people from ostracizing someone based on their speech. The point is that in a free society (as opposed to a free governance), the people at large shouldn't need to be told by the government not to ostracize someone who speaks their mind.
Your boss imposing consequences for your stupid tongue is one thing. But should it be right for your boss to froth up a mob to go after you, as long as they don't break the law?
> Ok I'll bite: how is "you are free say what you want but you may have to face a firing squad"
That's not the consequence here.
The consequence is “other private parties might choose not to relay your speech or continue association with you, exercising their own rights to free speech and association.”
Me not allowing you to use my resources to magnify the reach of your message isn't analogous to the state subjecting you to capital punishment.
> The whole POINT of 'free speech' is that there are no consequences.
No, the whole point is that the state doesn't have their thumb on the scale, allowing ideas to succeed or fail by their ability, or not, to attract support from private actors. Legislation in which the state intervenes to prevent private consequences through the exercise of free speech are not only on their face contrary to free speech, but sabotage the operation of the marketplace of ideas.
> Free speech doesn't mean everyone listens to you.
The article is mainly about speakers on campuses. No one is forcing you to attend a speech. The issue is that people show up anyway to try and shut it down. That is a problem.
I am struggling to understand who is forcing anyone to listen to anything?
>This is sort of ridiculous. You don't have to keep someone on your payroll who is actively speaking out about white supremacy.
I explicitly agreed with that. Did you see this part?
>>That doesn't mean we should force you to keep buying from those whose ideas you don't like.
(Note: "keeping someone on your payroll" = "keep buying from them".)
>There should be social consequences for your speech, just not legal ones.
I just explained how the standard grounding for free speech doesn't distinguish between social vs legal consequences, and how the latter are only one part of the puzzle. If you dispute that logic, I'd like to hear your thinking.
>The issue to me is that people view free-speech-as-moral-principle often as a binary choice. It's either "you allow all speech or it's immoral"
I disagree with this argument not because I disagree with your conclusion, but because the issue is much, much darker.
It's not that folks are claiming "you must allow all speech," it's that they're saying "your free speech rights aren't as important as mine. As such, you should be forced to host/amplify my speech even if you don't want to do so."
That's not advocating for free speech, that's demanding that some folks' free speech rights be limited in favor of those of others.
And that's not only wrong, it's hypocritical and morally reprehensible.
> The reason is that if you try to stop people from speaking freely, eventually over time the tables will turn against you, meaning you won't be able to speak freely.
I think there are ways to "try to stop people from speaking freely" that are acceptable and indeed vital. We as a society generally have conventions around what speech is appropriate, and we generally teach people (both explicitly and implicitly) to, for example, ask for things nicely, compliment people, express gratitude, etc. And we as a society generally "punish" people who violate these conventions by being reluctant to interact with those people. I don't see this as a violation of freedom of speech in any sense.
And also, I don't really agree with the mode of argument of "eventually the tables will turn against you." I don't oppose strict legal consequences for murder, for instance, because one day someone might frame me for murder. I support the legal consequences for murder and I support various mechanisms to increase the likelihood that only actual murderers receive those consequences.
> Yes, they don't want to be associated with someone who might use that association to emotionally harm others. I don't see the contradiction.
OK. I don't know how else to explain it.
> Private organizations are allowed to prohibit certain types of speech. That is part of what freedom of assembly means.
Sure, they are free to do this and no one should force them otherwise. However, if your mission is to pursue knowledge, then you should often engage publicly with people whose views you find repellant. (In other words, we are talking about a hypothetical imperative rather than a categorical one.) This is indeed MIT's mission, which is why MIT (and most universities) sometimes make the conscious choice to engage with despicable people in this way, even if they have a freedom of association not to.
The connection to Mills is not that he thought people were required to always associate with unsavory individuals, it's that he thought two things: (1) People shouldn't punish others merely for having bad views, including non-violent forms of punishment like boycots. (2) Empirically, human brains are led to the best and most robust beliefs by engaging with bad ideas rather than by being shielded from them; insofar as exposure to bad beliefs leads them to be adopted by human, this is a failure of their reasoning and preparation, not a failure of someone else to prevent exposure.
> If we don't like someone else's opinion, we don't have to express it for them.
I never meant to imply otherwise. The rest of your comment seems to think I did. Sorry if I was unclear.
> How about you clarify to me what the freedom of assembly means, and its connections to the freedom of speech?
> You can't claim to support free expression while saying that certain forms of speech are unacceptable.
I'm not making this claim; I'm claiming that it's inconsistent with free speech ideals. I'm not working to prevent anyone from expressing speech which isn't consistent with free speech ideals, and I'm certainly not trying to get anyone fired for their anti-free-speech ideals.
> So it's not that we welcome speech we disagree with, (e.g. see the reception of Abolition or Women's Suffrage), it's that we mustn't use the force of law to silence those we disagree with.
We mustn't use the force of law to silence those we disagree with? Is that all? If we didn't in our heart of hearts welcome speech we disagreed with, I think we at least acted as though we did.
In my view the idea that freedom of speech just means that we can't or won't prosecute you for what you say is a sad declension from how Americans at their best thought about free speech. I won't prosecute you, but I will rile up my friends online and get you fired for what you said? That is the very attitude that I think violates the historic ethos of free speech in America.
> A commitment to free speech is, to an extent, an endorsement of all the speech that results.
Absolutely not. I'd argue that anyone should be free to talk with others about their opinion, but that doesn't mean I agree with that opinion. And letting then speak without shutting them down doesn't mean I agree either, just means I agree that they should be able to speak freely.
What kind of dystopian viewpoint is that? You go around stopping everyone from saying stuff you disagree with?
No. The main consequence of speech that is being opposed should be… speech, not action to get that speaker's speech curtailed, whether by speech or other means.
> I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not
These people didn't have to turn up to the talk. That's not the same as cancelling a talk because someone said they don't want it to happen.
> And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not > … > But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse?
Did MIT change its decision to host the speaker because of a well-reasoned argument - as you point out, one of the intended consequences aimed for via free speech - or was it due to some other kind of pressure?
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