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> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the governmen

> But rights are inherently social No, the founding fathers specifically said that freedom of speech is a God given right and not something which the government gives to a person, instead the government simply recognizes that right. They specifically said freedom of speech is a "Natural" right. Right to clean water is not a right, right to education is not a natural right in their terms. Right to speech, right to self defense are natural rights.

surbas 7y ago
Not sure they said that... also “founding fathers” are not the be all end all of of what are “rights”. OP is talking about what is called the “social contract”.
kirrent 7y ago
Just because someone uses the word 'rights' doesn't mean they're referring only to the US bill of rights understood in a Thomas Paine-esque 'Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants' manner. Actually, even Thomas Paine considered a right to welfare (including education), so even founding fathers can reasonably disagree.
FireBeyond 7y ago
You may want to look into the Magna Carta before discussing the Founding Fathers as the arbiters of rights.
wpietri 7y ago
You seem to be arguing with some point I don't make. I'm saying rights only matter in a social context. If Elon Musk launches himself to Mars and lives alone there forever as a hermit, the concept of "rights" isn't useful there. That said, I think rooting rights in somebody's mythological figures isn't a good idea. And "natural" in this case isn't much more meaningful. It's fine rhetoric, but it's not a very strong conceptual model.
TheGrumpyBrit 7y ago
Speech is a God given right. Nobody can stop you from saying anything you like, but that doesn't extend to inviting you to share that belief with the student body of your local school. The school are absolutely free to refuse to allow you to use their podium if they don't like what you have to say. Equally, you have every right to set up a website to say whatever you want. That doesn't mean the people who provide the infrastructure behind that website have to continue to host your platform, it doesn't mean other peoples internet providers have to allow access to your website, and it doesn't mean search providers have to list your website in their results. Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest audience you could get was the people in your local tavern, but it doesn't scale to a global internet without some adjustment. Just like your other example of the right to self defence - the idea of taking arms against a tyrannical government made perfect sense when everybody had muskets, but it doesn't really scale when the tyrannical government has drones and nukes.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest audience you could get was the people in your local tavern Even then, even before printing presses or the written word itself there were major, major limitations. - You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in the name of committing fraud - You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in terms of threats; I don't know any society that would tolerate a person standing outside his neighbor's home and screaming death threats - etc. I make this somewhat pedantic point because the idea of "free speech with limits" is not some kind of modern idea that represents a watering-down of the lofty ideals upon which modern nations were founded, which is why many people seem to object to it. There were always necessary limits to free speech; the right to free speech has never trumped other peoples' rights not to be threatened, killed, defrauded, etc.
  - mathgeek 7y ago
    > I don't know any society that would tolerate a person standing outside his neighbor's home and screaming death threats Such societies did and do exist, but usually they are good examples of why we limit hate speech. Nazi Germany and the US South during the KKK’s peak are a couple easy ones to reference. Both of those are examples of societies without free speech that still allowed speech that most societies do not.
jacquesm 7y ago
- founding fathers are not gods - they can be wrong - there most likely is no god The absolutist nature of these discussions and the near deification of a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately fallible humans has me puzzled. There is no way that the people that wrote up the constitutions of the various still functioning (to greater or lesser extent) democracies had the foresight to deal with 100's of years of technological progress.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  There's two (well, at least two) issues at work here. One, unshakable faith in "The Founding Fathers" -- while naive and simplistic -- is appealing. Weak minds love the idea of having a few simple and absolute ideas to cling to, rather than attempting to reason about rights and laws in a more nuanced way. Pointing to something Thomas Jefferson said (typically out of context, of course) is just easier, you know? Two, there's a willful oversimplification of what the founding fathers actually meant. They enumerated various rights, sure, but never meant for those rights to be interpreted in some sort of intellectual vacuum that disregards all other rights of others. The founding fathers made some incredibly nuanced arguments and proclamations, and it does them an awful disservice to boil their thinking down to DUR HUUUUUURRRR FREEEEE SPEEECH ANYBODY CAN SAYS WHATEVER THEY WANT.
azernik 7y ago
That's a very US-centric view. Most democratic countries with constitutions less than 230 years old have broad exceptions for certain kinds of impermissible speech. (Germany takes it to an extreme, but even that seems to be compatible with a liberal democratic basic order.)
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  The US has always had those limitations as well. It's just that many of my fellow Americans choose to interpret our constitution in a simplistic, childish, and frankly incorrect way. Our constitutional rights (including free speech) were never meant to be interpreted in a vacuum, irrespective of all other rights. Our courts have certainly never interpreted things that way. Our courts have always weighed each individual, constitutionally-mandated right against other rights.
  - azernik 7y ago
    They have, but the absolute language of the constitution has led courts to interpret freedom of speech in the US much more broadly than in countries with more modern constitutions.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Germany has learned some pretty hard lessons with regards to what too much free speech can lead to.
JohnBooty 7y ago
The founding fathers enumerated rights like "free speech" because those were novel (not entirely new, but fairly novel) notions at the time. What many folks (often, seemingly willingly) fail to understand is that those rights were never intended to be parsed in a naive, simplistic way that supersedes the rights of others. The most obvious example would be speech that causes others to be killed: you have a right to free speech, but other people also have a right not to be killed. That's why you can't yell "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and cause a stampede that kills people, etc. There are many other examples of free speech that infringe on others' rights. Call free speech a "natural" right if you wish, whatever that means to you, but only a fool would think that either the Founding Fathers or basic human decency and sense dictate that free speech is meant to exist in some sort of vacuum independent from any and all other rights.
- luxuryballs 7y ago
  They were novel because they just came out of fighting for freedom against an oppressive empire who used all those things against them and they wanted to make sure that couldn’t happen again. Any argument otherwise should be met with harsh skepticism because you could be actively trying to oppress us again or accidentally enable some future people in power to be able to.
  - JohnBooty 7y ago
    Any argument otherwise should be met with harsh skepticism because you could be actively trying to oppress us again or accidentally enable some future people in power to be able to It works both ways. Russia's social media operations utilized (and is surely still aiming to utilize) our relatively permissive climate of free speech to sow discord within America and deepen our divisions. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/takeaways-russia-social-media-operations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/takeaways-rus... So, there you go - there's "people in power" using free speech to weaken/oppress us.
    - hanselot 7y ago
      And by Russia, you mean, the US Media machine? Honestly, social media is the thing that sows division, more than it brings people together.
stefanve 7y ago
Freedom of speech is really important but every person has a moral responsibility to use this right responsible. it is a bit akin to: the right to bare arms doesn't give you the right to shoot anyone you like. So you should be able to criticize the king/ president but does it mean you should say anything that pops in to your mind? Defending racist and other hate speech with the first amendment is a banalisation of the first amendment.

surbas 7y ago

Not sure they said that... also “founding fathers” are not the be all end all of of what are “rights”. OP is talking about what is called the “social contract”.

kirrent 7y ago

Just because someone uses the word 'rights' doesn't mean they're referring only to the US bill of rights understood in a Thomas Paine-esque 'Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants' manner. Actually, even Thomas Paine considered a right to welfare (including education), so even founding fathers can reasonably disagree.

FireBeyond 7y ago

You may want to look into the Magna Carta before discussing the Founding Fathers as the arbiters of rights.

wpietri 7y ago

You seem to be arguing with some point I don't make. I'm saying rights only matter in a social context. If Elon Musk launches himself to Mars and lives alone there forever as a hermit, the concept of "rights" isn't useful there. That said, I think rooting rights in somebody's mythological figures isn't a good idea. And "natural" in this case isn't much more meaningful. It's fine rhetoric, but it's not a very strong conceptual model.

TheGrumpyBrit 7y ago

Speech is a God given right. Nobody can stop you from saying anything you like, but that doesn't extend to inviting you to share that belief with the student body of your local school. The school are absolutely free to refuse to allow you to use their podium if they don't like what you have to say. Equally, you have every right to set up a website to say whatever you want. That doesn't mean the people who provide the infrastructure behind that website have to continue to host your platform, it doesn't mean other peoples internet providers have to allow access to your website, and it doesn't mean search providers have to list your website in their results. Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest audience you could get was the people in your local tavern, but it doesn't scale to a global internet without some adjustment. Just like your other example of the right to self defence - the idea of taking arms against a tyrannical government made perfect sense when everybody had muskets, but it doesn't really scale when the tyrannical government has drones and nukes.

JohnBooty 7y ago
Freedom of speech worked really well when the largest audience you could get was the people in your local tavern Even then, even before printing presses or the written word itself there were major, major limitations. - You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in the name of committing fraud - You were never allowed to "say whatever you like" in terms of threats; I don't know any society that would tolerate a person standing outside his neighbor's home and screaming death threats - etc. I make this somewhat pedantic point because the idea of "free speech with limits" is not some kind of modern idea that represents a watering-down of the lofty ideals upon which modern nations were founded, which is why many people seem to object to it. There were always necessary limits to free speech; the right to free speech has never trumped other peoples' rights not to be threatened, killed, defrauded, etc.
- mathgeek 7y ago
  > I don't know any society that would tolerate a person standing outside his neighbor's home and screaming death threats Such societies did and do exist, but usually they are good examples of why we limit hate speech. Nazi Germany and the US South during the KKK’s peak are a couple easy ones to reference. Both of those are examples of societies without free speech that still allowed speech that most societies do not.

jacquesm 7y ago

- founding fathers are not gods - they can be wrong - there most likely is no god The absolutist nature of these discussions and the near deification of a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately fallible humans has me puzzled. There is no way that the people that wrote up the constitutions of the various still functioning (to greater or lesser extent) democracies had the foresight to deal with 100's of years of technological progress.

JohnBooty 7y ago
There's two (well, at least two) issues at work here. One, unshakable faith in "The Founding Fathers" -- while naive and simplistic -- is appealing. Weak minds love the idea of having a few simple and absolute ideas to cling to, rather than attempting to reason about rights and laws in a more nuanced way. Pointing to something Thomas Jefferson said (typically out of context, of course) is just easier, you know? Two, there's a willful oversimplification of what the founding fathers actually meant. They enumerated various rights, sure, but never meant for those rights to be interpreted in some sort of intellectual vacuum that disregards all other rights of others. The founding fathers made some incredibly nuanced arguments and proclamations, and it does them an awful disservice to boil their thinking down to DUR HUUUUUURRRR FREEEEE SPEEECH ANYBODY CAN SAYS WHATEVER THEY WANT.

azernik 7y ago

That's a very US-centric view. Most democratic countries with constitutions less than 230 years old have broad exceptions for certain kinds of impermissible speech. (Germany takes it to an extreme, but even that seems to be compatible with a liberal democratic basic order.)

JohnBooty 7y ago
The US has always had those limitations as well. It's just that many of my fellow Americans choose to interpret our constitution in a simplistic, childish, and frankly incorrect way. Our constitutional rights (including free speech) were never meant to be interpreted in a vacuum, irrespective of all other rights. Our courts have certainly never interpreted things that way. Our courts have always weighed each individual, constitutionally-mandated right against other rights.
- azernik 7y ago
  They have, but the absolute language of the constitution has led courts to interpret freedom of speech in the US much more broadly than in countries with more modern constitutions.
jacquesm 7y ago
Germany has learned some pretty hard lessons with regards to what too much free speech can lead to.

JohnBooty 7y ago

The founding fathers enumerated rights like "free speech" because those were novel (not entirely new, but fairly novel) notions at the time. What many folks (often, seemingly willingly) fail to understand is that those rights were never intended to be parsed in a naive, simplistic way that supersedes the rights of others. The most obvious example would be speech that causes others to be killed: you have a right to free speech, but other people also have a right not to be killed. That's why you can't yell "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater and cause a stampede that kills people, etc. There are many other examples of free speech that infringe on others' rights. Call free speech a "natural" right if you wish, whatever that means to you, but only a fool would think that either the Founding Fathers or basic human decency and sense dictate that free speech is meant to exist in some sort of vacuum independent from any and all other rights.

luxuryballs 7y ago
They were novel because they just came out of fighting for freedom against an oppressive empire who used all those things against them and they wanted to make sure that couldn’t happen again. Any argument otherwise should be met with harsh skepticism because you could be actively trying to oppress us again or accidentally enable some future people in power to be able to.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  Any argument otherwise should be met with harsh skepticism because you could be actively trying to oppress us again or accidentally enable some future people in power to be able to It works both ways. Russia's social media operations utilized (and is surely still aiming to utilize) our relatively permissive climate of free speech to sow discord within America and deepen our divisions. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/takeaways-russia-social-media-operations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/takeaways-rus... So, there you go - there's "people in power" using free speech to weaken/oppress us.
  - hanselot 7y ago
    And by Russia, you mean, the US Media machine? Honestly, social media is the thing that sows division, more than it brings people together.

stefanve 7y ago

Freedom of speech is really important but every person has a moral responsibility to use this right responsible. it is a bit akin to: the right to bare arms doesn't give you the right to shoot anyone you like. So you should be able to criticize the king/ president but does it mean you should say anything that pops in to your mind? Defending racist and other hate speech with the first amendment is a banalisation of the first amendment.