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The 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects free speech from government regulation, but that does not mean it is free speech. Free speech as a concept

The 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects free speech from government regulation, but that does not mean it is free speech. Free speech as a concept absolutely does mean an absence of consequences for, or at least a relative tolerance of, speech that people in society may generally disagree with. It stems from the belief that the truth can sometimes be unpopular, and that in order for us to benefit from the truth we must give people some latitude to be unpopular. The 1st Amendment does not enforce free speech in the social sphere merely because that is not the purview of the Constitution.

thingification 7y ago
I'm not sure I'd have put this quite as emphatically as you, but there's a very important point here about the principle of free speech as compared with government suppression of speech. While nodding towards quite real problems involving, let's say for example vaccines, I don't think any of that troubles the principle of free speech in the slightest. Practically applying it is difficult and as error-prone as is anything else, but the principle is enlightening in that task. There does exist a principle of free speech that is not the same thing as the various legal principles, constitutional rules, laws, or rules of thumb that say government suppression of speech is worse than other kinds. Crucially important though those have been, it's still true that suppression of speech itself is uniquely bad: Fundamentally, knowledge is not infallible, all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and speech is the means of correcting all other mistakes. Practically, we find it all too easy to socially suppress good ideas. It's hard to see the true extent of that because it's impossible to see the upside that hasn't happened as a result of that suppression. I hardly need to refer explicitly to some of the specific ideas of the not-distant past about social control that we have since learned, though they were certainly obviously good, were not good. Practically, it's hard to escape the idea that taking seriously the millennia-long stream of historical failures of ideas -- and their replacement with better ones -- does entail treating ideas that are obviously wrong with considerably more flexibility and humility than is tempting. I recommend David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity to shake up anybody's ideas about this, no matter where you start from.

thingification 7y ago

I'm not sure I'd have put this quite as emphatically as you, but there's a very important point here about the principle of free speech as compared with government suppression of speech. While nodding towards quite real problems involving, let's say for example vaccines, I don't think any of that troubles the principle of free speech in the slightest. Practically applying it is difficult and as error-prone as is anything else, but the principle is enlightening in that task. There does exist a principle of free speech that is not the same thing as the various legal principles, constitutional rules, laws, or rules of thumb that say government suppression of speech is worse than other kinds. Crucially important though those have been, it's still true that suppression of speech itself is uniquely bad: Fundamentally, knowledge is not infallible, all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and speech is the means of correcting all other mistakes. Practically, we find it all too easy to socially suppress good ideas. It's hard to see the true extent of that because it's impossible to see the upside that hasn't happened as a result of that suppression. I hardly need to refer explicitly to some of the specific ideas of the not-distant past about social control that we have since learned, though they were certainly obviously good, were not good. Practically, it's hard to escape the idea that taking seriously the millennia-long stream of historical failures of ideas -- and their replacement with better ones -- does entail treating ideas that are obviously wrong with considerably more flexibility and humility than is tempting. I recommend David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity to shake up anybody's ideas about this, no matter where you start from.