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Free speech has only ever been a means. Some elements of enlightened society got caught in the local optima for awhile (Locke, Hume, etc.) but that only worked
by sagichmal 7y ago
Free speech has only ever been a means. Some elements of enlightened society got caught in the local optima for awhile (Locke, Hume, etc.) but that only worked out as long as the bad-faith actors could be marginalized or overpowered in a given context. Now that we have the ubiquity of the internet, coupled with the N-chans and Voat and whatever, the trolls have successfully weaponized the unthinking elevation of a means to an end. Ethical society is both justified and obliged to develop more sophisticated responses to more sophisticated attacks against it.
Free speech is a tool, like democracy and discussion and rhetoric and liberty and communalism and a thousand other things besides, which we should judiciously and precisely in order to make our society better.
- reader5000 7y agoWhoever is in power determines what is "ethical society" or what makes society "better". Censorship is a form of physically violent oppression and is never justifiable.
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoSo who gets "physically violent" against who when Reddit bans some subs? Or do you mean to say that isn't censorship?
- reader5000 7y agoBurning a book is physical violence. Banning a sub is physical violence. In censorship you are forcibly destroying a communication between two nonviolent third parties.
- sagichmal 7y agoSociety is nothing more than the aggregate form of its constituent parts, i.e. all of us. It’s not separate from us, it is us, and we all have an obligation to act to improve it. Censorship is a tool, just like free speech or liberty or law or justice or rhetoric or tradition, that we have to wield to those ethical ends.
- reader5000 7y agoInasmuch as different parts of society disagree on how to "improve" it, one part does not have the right to censor the other.
- sagichmal 7y agoYes, parts of society absolutely have the right to censor other parts of society. Just as we have the right to imprison, or regulate, or chide, or squelch. None of these things are sacred and inviolable lines. All of them are tools, which we have the moral obligation to use, judiciously, to improve the human condition.
- reader5000 7y agoFree speech improves the human condition. Therefore, by your own argument, the authorities have the moral obligation to forcibly censor your own anti-free speech comments.
- sagichmal 7y ago> Free speech improves the human condition. Free speech is an amoral tool, which can be used to improve or degrade the human condition, when wielded appropriately. It's our job to decide when and how to use it, and not act naïvely and pretend it's a virtue in itself.
- KozmoNau7 7y agoRacism and white supremacy are not valid viewpoints.
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y agoWhich means censorship vectors get to wrap things they want censored as "racist". Soviet censorship vectors were able to wrap dissenting viewpoints as "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois" without regard for the consistency of content to the wrapper.