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From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they'r

From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. More concisely, looking back through history a lot of those times we got so upset about people saying various things, we were wrong. Those people changed all of us for the better. Unless we continue to humbly think we could continue to be wrong, we stop evolving. Cue curtain. There's no way to have difficult societal discussions and fight for the moral and right thing for all of us if we're constantly going to use current group consensus as a measure of what can be said or not. That's not progress. That's a popularity contest.

yomly 6y ago
Once upon a time "the root of two is an irrational number" was heresy and the proponents were killed for blasphemy.
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  There has been a long list of assholes that people would have gladly shut up at the time that turned out to change us all for the better. Galileo, for instance, wasn't known as the nicest guy. He basically wrote a book calling the pope an idiot. (The guy probably wasn't a genius, but Galileo could have made his point without going that far) Offhand I could come up with a list of dozen people who were widely unliked by the folks in charge that were critical to our advancement. Oddly, many times the more unpleasant people found their personality, the more important the change eventually brought. They killed Socrates. ADD: Related fun read for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activists/dp/0143108115 https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activ...
- baddox 6y ago
  But whether the root of two actually is an irrational number does not depend on whether you are free to say it is or isn't. In other words, freedom of speech does not mean that there is no way to make any discernments whatsoever between the speech "the root of two is irrational" and "the root of two is rational."
CPLX 6y ago
I don’t think that’s actually a fair characterization of the argument of opponents in specific “free speech” examples. The typical opposition to speech isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s dangerous. It’s correctness may or may not be relevant, but it’s usually the potential consequences of the speech that are creating conflict.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Isn't that even worse? If there's one thing civil rights leaders should be aligned on, it's that people have a right to say true things which might cause conflict.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    It also completely misses the point. Speech has always had consequences, everybody knows that. That's why it's so important! If speech didn't have consequences then nobody would care about freedom of speech.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I would argue both you and GP are correct. Danger is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure the Pope considered Galileo's speech to be a danger, at the very least to the religious dogma of the day. Sure, there may be clear cut examples when speech is directly dangerous, such as when inciting some group to harm some other group "for no reason". The problem, though, arises when the situation isn't as clear and when the danger is actually to some people's privilege. To come back to the pope's example: what if some scientist can prove God doesn't exist and / or that the Pope is an impostor? That's clearly dangerous for the Pope. It could be argued that it might even be dangerous for the society, suppose this could generate some unrest. But maybe this could usher in a new era where something else is possible. Should that speech be banned?
- ulucs 6y ago
  The existence of irrational numbers was dangerous. The Earth being on an orbit was dangerous. Non-royalty having legal rights was dangerous. The prole having legal rights was dangerous. The idea of electing any public officials was dangerous. Women having the right to vote was dangerous. Not invading foreign soil to extract their natural resources was dangerous. All of these ideas were dangerous and had severe consequences at the time, some challenged scientific norms, some social norms and some effectively undermined the state. You don't get to look back at those ideas with your 2020 hindsight vision and declare they were harmless now because they were radical, revolutionary and terrifyingly dangerous ideas. Why else would the inquisition kill so many people?
baddox 6y ago
The problem I have is that so many people have come to think of “free speech” as meaning that all speech and all ideas are equally good/valid/desirable in any context, and that any criticism of speech or any attempt to establish conventions around what types of speech are desirable in any context is a violation of free speech. Some people even seem to be under the impression that you somehow become more free by deliberately saying things that are widely considered to be false/harmful/abhorrent.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  You're being downvoted, and I probably disagree with you (maybe not; hard to say without hearing more of your position), but I think it's important to be clear about what does and doesn't fall under the rubric of "criticism" because this is so often confused in the debates that I witness or participate in (including here on HN). When an angry mob physically beats someone, burns their business to the ground, or petitions their employer to terminate their employment (or incites others to do the same), these are acts of violence or intimidation and not merely "criticism". One can't say "the mob is merely exercising their own free speech rights to criticize the original speaker" as a rational defense. This is intimidation. Criticism is refuting their ideas.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >petitions their employer to terminate their employment Whether you agree with e.g. internet mobs doing this sort of thing or not, it's usually perfectly legal and happens all the time. And many (most?) would agree that's perfectly fine when someone in authority/in a public facing position does something that's clearly bad behavior. What's less clear is when someone rank and file says or does something dumb and it ends up on YouTube or simply somehow offends someone with a big following. The reality is that if you become a liability to most companies, they'll just follow the path of least resistance and show you the door.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      > Whether you agree with e.g. internet mobs doing this sort of thing or not, it's usually perfectly legal and happens all the time. It might "happen all the time" nowadays, but that doesn't tell us whether or not it's sustainable or just. Moreover, I'm very skeptical that it was ever normal historically, at least not for any portion of our history that was worth repeating. I'm at least a little bit skeptical that it is "perfectly legal"; more likely that it hasn't been well and widely tested in court because it is in fact novel. > And many (most?) would agree that's perfectly fine when someone in authority/in a public facing position does something that's clearly bad behavior. I don't think this justifies it. Most people don't understand what happens to a civilization when the mob becomes the de facto justice system or why we have an actual codified legal system. Most of these people probably don't understand that the mob could turn against them at a moment's notice (although I think many are coming to this realization and consequently abandoning the "mobs are great!" position). > What's less clear is when someone rank and file says or does something dumb and it ends up on YouTube or simply somehow offends someone with a big following. The reality is that if you become a liability to most companies, they'll just follow the path of least resistance and show you the door. People don't even need to do anything "dumb". Mobs come for people all the time for stating unapproved facts or holding unapproved beliefs or for simply being born with the wrong race or gender. This is a national problem (I would even say it's our most significant modern social justice issue--of course here I'm using "social justice" literally, not to be confused with Social Justice the ideology) and we ought to do something about it.
honkycat 6y ago
> From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) All of them did, huh? Interesting. > Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. Did they though? Or are you constructing a strawman argument portraying the "anti free-speech" side as dumb and the "pro free-speech" side as reasonable?
- dataduck 6y ago
  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?
  - honkycat 6y ago
    You are moving the goal post but if you are really so ill-informed about this issue, I will go ahead and give you an example: If a well funded group of people are publishing information about a minority group in order to incite and justify genocide, like what we have seen happen on Facebook in Myanmar, I think the rights of the people being massacred should trump the rights of the genocidal's free speech. Is that argument dumb or evil?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - user982 6y ago
      "But what if the genociders are right?"
justin66 6y ago
> it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot The most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history are totalitarians or authoritarians who regard the truth or falsehood of the speech they're suppressing as immaterial, and won't bother to make a case unless they absolutely have to. It's a question of whether the speech is threatening or costly for those in power. > The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct In the United States you can find very recent examples of the press being excoriated by portions of the public and even threatened with imprisonment by the government for publishing things that were true. Think of the coverage of the Iraq war and some big examples should leap to mind.
jawns 6y ago
I don't think intellectual humility tells the whole story. I have a few opinions where my primary reason for supporting tolerance of the opposing viewpoint has nothing to do with "maybe I'm wrong." (I mean, sure, maybe I am, but that's not why I support my opponent's right to free speech.) Tolerance always means that you put up with something you think is wrong because there is something greater at stake: harmoniousness, libertarianism, etc. I would wager (though maybe I'm wrong) that people of higher intelligence have the ability to practice higher level-k thinking: "If I support the government having the power to suppress X, with which I disagree, then at some later time the government might use that same power to suppress Y, with which I agree, and that would be worse than tolerating X." Being able to anticipate potential consequences, especially those that aren't immediate or require a few hops to get to, does seem like a skill that is associated with general cognitive ability. I see this a lot in the way that people respond to Supreme Court rulings. The court interprets the law in a certain way, and it leads to a ruling that supports a favored ideological outcome, and so people cheer the decision, not necessarily taking into account that the reasoning the court used to arrive at their decision might be applied to later cases where it does not lead to the ideological outcome they want.
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  I completely agree with what you're saying. I find that one of my greatest frustrations with attacks on utilitarianism is how, well dumb they make the attacks. "Would you kill one person in a scientific experiment to save a dozen?" No, because any world in which such a trade was acceptable is not a just or fair world that I would want to live in. You have to reason at multiple levels. I usually make online comments for two reasons. One, to see if there's some neutral way of explaining things that might slightly advance understanding of my views without being offensive, perhaps start a friendly conversation. Two, to try to put these higher-level ideas into simpler and simpler terms in an effort to find out if there's some common-language leverage point to be found. The first goal has to avoid any kind of trigger phrase people are programming themselves to emotionally respond to. That's getting more and more difficult. More and more people just don't want to hear anything that's from a suspect source. People are treating online discourse as a game: identify friend-or-foe, engage (or support). The second goal is more fun, but I run the risk of oversimplifying. Apologies.
bwanab 6y ago
It is common in modern history for the opponents of free speech to use it in order to quash it. As far back as the French Revolution, royalists were happy to take advantage of the free speech guarantee of the 1793 constitution with the express purpose of destroying it.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
> "But they're wrong!" I'm pro-free speech, but this is a pretty disingenuous take on the other side. Pretty much without fail, the argument to restrict speech is not merely, "but they're wrong!", it's some variant of, "but they're harmful! Their speech is hurting people!" And the truth is, quite often they're right. Not in the sense of "people's feelings are hurt by bad speech", but in the sense of, "this speech openly displayed encourages X, which is associated with actual, tangible harms to people". E.g. maybe that one racist dude isn't himself inciting anyone to violence through his screeds, but he's encouraging sentiment that does lead to real world violence and other harms. One of the more understandable restrictions is the ban on Nazi imagery in Germany. Yes, it's a violation of free speech, but given their history one can see why they would consider this a special case.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  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.
  - haberman 6y ago
    > A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. This must be accompanied by a realistic assumption of how power is used. Wielding of political power (particularly tyrannical power) is nearly always accompanied by suppression of speech that expresses dissent. Demagoguery may pollute a search for the truth, but nothing cements misinformation like a climate where people are prevented from saying true things.
neutronicus 6y ago
I'm essentially supportive of your point, but I think your characterization of free speech advocacy is ... idealistic. Any time you reserve the right to upset people, there's a question of whether you're doing so because you're altruistic or because you're just cruel, or at least so insensitive that you prefer casual cruelty over bothering to be sensitive. Being protective of the right to upset people is an implicit judgment that sensitive people ought not participate in public discourse. And maybe you're okay with that, because the hedge-against-consensus angle is so valuable, but I think the standard counter-argument is that the actual result of a free-speech approach is a yet-unhedged consensus determined by the insensitive jerks with the stomach for a public discourse privileging insensitive jerks. This is orthogonal to the "this meme is so dangerous it must be suppressed" argument. One thing you can do if you want more acceptance to a pro-free-speech viewpoint is actively address the exclusion-of-sensitive-people angle, and try to decouple "having controversial ideas" from "being a jerk about it."
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  Excellent point. We have a tech problem that is orthogonal to the free speech issue. It's making things worse, yet the principles of free speech don't go anywhere simply because other problems have arisen. Up until a decade or two ago, everybody spoke and everybody spent most of their time not listening to one another. Instead we did other things. Today, however, we carry these wondrous little devices in our pockets which connect us to every angry person and demagogue all over the world. We can find and associate with people who believe some really eccentric things we also believe. We can spend our free time encouraging one another to become more and more radical. I didn't comment in order to go down this path, but your point is valid. Unfortunately, speech is not the only thing under attack. Pervasive tech has changed much of the definition of what it means to be human. That's a much more involved subject (!) that seems a bit OT for now. But I agree.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  You can't fight the power without upsetting people.
  - 6y ago
vore 6y ago
It _is_ a popularity contest. People must agree with what others are saying, otherwise it has no effect. How you come to change your mind on something might be important here, but trying to elevate some ideal of "progress" without considering the material conditions by which how it happens is extremely handwave-y. With regards to the first point, Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance) describes how in a supposedly tolerant society, not all viewpoints can be tolerated. For instance, if we use an example from today's society (and let's avoid getting stuck in the weeds about people's motivations for believing what they believe in), supporting white nationalism is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people. Naturally, those in the second group of people aren't going to be hearing out those in the first and want to work towards stamping it out: one of the actions involved being denying speech. There is a line to be drawn of course, but erecting a strawman that anyone opposed to free speech is so unprincipled and only the most reasonable would support unfettered free speech is downright disingenuous.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  The paradox of tolerance applies to speech too. In a society with free speech not all speech can be tolerated, these that oppose free speech should be censored. It is similar to the idea that the GPL is based on. > is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people That was the case for abolishing slavery too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
happytoexplain 6y ago
Regardless of my opinion on the topic, how can you start off with a premise so obviously faulty as "evil === incorrect". You can be one, the other, both, or neither. Unless you're saying that, even without the additional adjectives, an accusation of "wrong" is always the premise of the argument, which is maybe even an even more extreme twisting of reality.
claudiawerner 6y ago
> From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) Although you're talking about historical cases, perhaps some more modern cases against free speech would better update you as to the state of the arguments in philosophy. I have a comment with some citations here[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Hey, this is politics, not philosophy. Those philosophical arguments will affect the politics in... maybe 30 to 70 years? Of course, by then the philosophical arguments will have moved on...
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    I think our politics should be grounded in solid philosophical principles, after all, that's what gave rise to the high-minded principles of freedom of speech, privacy, and abolition of slavery. Besides, all it would take to turn this from "philosophy" (which is already philosophy of the first amendment and law) to "politics" is for someone to argue for it. When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier. The philosophical issue is already political, and it was made political by MacKinnon and Dworkin during the Sex Wars in the 80s and 90s.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      What I mean is, most people don't think. They get their philosophy second-hand. So the philosophical ideas of today take decades to affect the thinking of enough people to move the needle of politics. > When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier. Absolutely. And yet it is also true that, if you want to move the bulk of people today, you have to start from a point that fits within their existing philosophical framework.

yomly 6y ago

Once upon a time "the root of two is an irrational number" was heresy and the proponents were killed for blasphemy.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
There has been a long list of assholes that people would have gladly shut up at the time that turned out to change us all for the better. Galileo, for instance, wasn't known as the nicest guy. He basically wrote a book calling the pope an idiot. (The guy probably wasn't a genius, but Galileo could have made his point without going that far) Offhand I could come up with a list of dozen people who were widely unliked by the folks in charge that were critical to our advancement. Oddly, many times the more unpleasant people found their personality, the more important the change eventually brought. They killed Socrates. ADD: Related fun read for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activists/dp/0143108115 https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activ...
baddox 6y ago
But whether the root of two actually is an irrational number does not depend on whether you are free to say it is or isn't. In other words, freedom of speech does not mean that there is no way to make any discernments whatsoever between the speech "the root of two is irrational" and "the root of two is rational."

CPLX 6y ago

I don’t think that’s actually a fair characterization of the argument of opponents in specific “free speech” examples. The typical opposition to speech isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s dangerous. It’s correctness may or may not be relevant, but it’s usually the potential consequences of the speech that are creating conflict.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Isn't that even worse? If there's one thing civil rights leaders should be aligned on, it's that people have a right to say true things which might cause conflict.
- bhupy 6y ago
  It also completely misses the point. Speech has always had consequences, everybody knows that. That's why it's so important! If speech didn't have consequences then nobody would care about freedom of speech.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
I would argue both you and GP are correct. Danger is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure the Pope considered Galileo's speech to be a danger, at the very least to the religious dogma of the day. Sure, there may be clear cut examples when speech is directly dangerous, such as when inciting some group to harm some other group "for no reason". The problem, though, arises when the situation isn't as clear and when the danger is actually to some people's privilege. To come back to the pope's example: what if some scientist can prove God doesn't exist and / or that the Pope is an impostor? That's clearly dangerous for the Pope. It could be argued that it might even be dangerous for the society, suppose this could generate some unrest. But maybe this could usher in a new era where something else is possible. Should that speech be banned?
ulucs 6y ago
The existence of irrational numbers was dangerous. The Earth being on an orbit was dangerous. Non-royalty having legal rights was dangerous. The prole having legal rights was dangerous. The idea of electing any public officials was dangerous. Women having the right to vote was dangerous. Not invading foreign soil to extract their natural resources was dangerous. All of these ideas were dangerous and had severe consequences at the time, some challenged scientific norms, some social norms and some effectively undermined the state. You don't get to look back at those ideas with your 2020 hindsight vision and declare they were harmless now because they were radical, revolutionary and terrifyingly dangerous ideas. Why else would the inquisition kill so many people?

baddox 6y ago

The problem I have is that so many people have come to think of “free speech” as meaning that all speech and all ideas are equally good/valid/desirable in any context, and that any criticism of speech or any attempt to establish conventions around what types of speech are desirable in any context is a violation of free speech. Some people even seem to be under the impression that you somehow become more free by deliberately saying things that are widely considered to be false/harmful/abhorrent.

throwaway894345 6y ago
You're being downvoted, and I probably disagree with you (maybe not; hard to say without hearing more of your position), but I think it's important to be clear about what does and doesn't fall under the rubric of "criticism" because this is so often confused in the debates that I witness or participate in (including here on HN). When an angry mob physically beats someone, burns their business to the ground, or petitions their employer to terminate their employment (or incites others to do the same), these are acts of violence or intimidation and not merely "criticism". One can't say "the mob is merely exercising their own free speech rights to criticize the original speaker" as a rational defense. This is intimidation. Criticism is refuting their ideas.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >petitions their employer to terminate their employment Whether you agree with e.g. internet mobs doing this sort of thing or not, it's usually perfectly legal and happens all the time. And many (most?) would agree that's perfectly fine when someone in authority/in a public facing position does something that's clearly bad behavior. What's less clear is when someone rank and file says or does something dumb and it ends up on YouTube or simply somehow offends someone with a big following. The reality is that if you become a liability to most companies, they'll just follow the path of least resistance and show you the door.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    > Whether you agree with e.g. internet mobs doing this sort of thing or not, it's usually perfectly legal and happens all the time. It might "happen all the time" nowadays, but that doesn't tell us whether or not it's sustainable or just. Moreover, I'm very skeptical that it was ever normal historically, at least not for any portion of our history that was worth repeating. I'm at least a little bit skeptical that it is "perfectly legal"; more likely that it hasn't been well and widely tested in court because it is in fact novel. > And many (most?) would agree that's perfectly fine when someone in authority/in a public facing position does something that's clearly bad behavior. I don't think this justifies it. Most people don't understand what happens to a civilization when the mob becomes the de facto justice system or why we have an actual codified legal system. Most of these people probably don't understand that the mob could turn against them at a moment's notice (although I think many are coming to this realization and consequently abandoning the "mobs are great!" position). > What's less clear is when someone rank and file says or does something dumb and it ends up on YouTube or simply somehow offends someone with a big following. The reality is that if you become a liability to most companies, they'll just follow the path of least resistance and show you the door. People don't even need to do anything "dumb". Mobs come for people all the time for stating unapproved facts or holding unapproved beliefs or for simply being born with the wrong race or gender. This is a national problem (I would even say it's our most significant modern social justice issue--of course here I'm using "social justice" literally, not to be confused with Social Justice the ideology) and we ought to do something about it.

honkycat 6y ago

> From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) All of them did, huh? Interesting. > Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. Did they though? Or are you constructing a strawman argument portraying the "anti free-speech" side as dumb and the "pro free-speech" side as reasonable?

dataduck 6y ago
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?
- honkycat 6y ago
  You are moving the goal post but if you are really so ill-informed about this issue, I will go ahead and give you an example: If a well funded group of people are publishing information about a minority group in order to incite and justify genocide, like what we have seen happen on Facebook in Myanmar, I think the rights of the people being massacred should trump the rights of the genocidal's free speech. Is that argument dumb or evil?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - user982 6y ago
    "But what if the genociders are right?"

justin66 6y ago

> it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot The most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history are totalitarians or authoritarians who regard the truth or falsehood of the speech they're suppressing as immaterial, and won't bother to make a case unless they absolutely have to. It's a question of whether the speech is threatening or costly for those in power. > The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct In the United States you can find very recent examples of the press being excoriated by portions of the public and even threatened with imprisonment by the government for publishing things that were true. Think of the coverage of the Iraq war and some big examples should leap to mind.

jawns 6y ago

I don't think intellectual humility tells the whole story. I have a few opinions where my primary reason for supporting tolerance of the opposing viewpoint has nothing to do with "maybe I'm wrong." (I mean, sure, maybe I am, but that's not why I support my opponent's right to free speech.) Tolerance always means that you put up with something you think is wrong because there is something greater at stake: harmoniousness, libertarianism, etc. I would wager (though maybe I'm wrong) that people of higher intelligence have the ability to practice higher level-k thinking: "If I support the government having the power to suppress X, with which I disagree, then at some later time the government might use that same power to suppress Y, with which I agree, and that would be worse than tolerating X." Being able to anticipate potential consequences, especially those that aren't immediate or require a few hops to get to, does seem like a skill that is associated with general cognitive ability. I see this a lot in the way that people respond to Supreme Court rulings. The court interprets the law in a certain way, and it leads to a ruling that supports a favored ideological outcome, and so people cheer the decision, not necessarily taking into account that the reasoning the court used to arrive at their decision might be applied to later cases where it does not lead to the ideological outcome they want.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
I completely agree with what you're saying. I find that one of my greatest frustrations with attacks on utilitarianism is how, well dumb they make the attacks. "Would you kill one person in a scientific experiment to save a dozen?" No, because any world in which such a trade was acceptable is not a just or fair world that I would want to live in. You have to reason at multiple levels. I usually make online comments for two reasons. One, to see if there's some neutral way of explaining things that might slightly advance understanding of my views without being offensive, perhaps start a friendly conversation. Two, to try to put these higher-level ideas into simpler and simpler terms in an effort to find out if there's some common-language leverage point to be found. The first goal has to avoid any kind of trigger phrase people are programming themselves to emotionally respond to. That's getting more and more difficult. More and more people just don't want to hear anything that's from a suspect source. People are treating online discourse as a game: identify friend-or-foe, engage (or support). The second goal is more fun, but I run the risk of oversimplifying. Apologies.

bwanab 6y ago

It is common in modern history for the opponents of free speech to use it in order to quash it. As far back as the French Revolution, royalists were happy to take advantage of the free speech guarantee of the 1793 constitution with the express purpose of destroying it.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

> "But they're wrong!" I'm pro-free speech, but this is a pretty disingenuous take on the other side. Pretty much without fail, the argument to restrict speech is not merely, "but they're wrong!", it's some variant of, "but they're harmful! Their speech is hurting people!" And the truth is, quite often they're right. Not in the sense of "people's feelings are hurt by bad speech", but in the sense of, "this speech openly displayed encourages X, which is associated with actual, tangible harms to people". E.g. maybe that one racist dude isn't himself inciting anyone to violence through his screeds, but he's encouraging sentiment that does lead to real world violence and other harms. One of the more understandable restrictions is the ban on Nazi imagery in Germany. Yes, it's a violation of free speech, but given their history one can see why they would consider this a special case.

throwawaygh 6y ago
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.
- haberman 6y ago
  > A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. This must be accompanied by a realistic assumption of how power is used. Wielding of political power (particularly tyrannical power) is nearly always accompanied by suppression of speech that expresses dissent. Demagoguery may pollute a search for the truth, but nothing cements misinformation like a climate where people are prevented from saying true things.

neutronicus 6y ago

I'm essentially supportive of your point, but I think your characterization of free speech advocacy is ... idealistic. Any time you reserve the right to upset people, there's a question of whether you're doing so because you're altruistic or because you're just cruel, or at least so insensitive that you prefer casual cruelty over bothering to be sensitive. Being protective of the right to upset people is an implicit judgment that sensitive people ought not participate in public discourse. And maybe you're okay with that, because the hedge-against-consensus angle is so valuable, but I think the standard counter-argument is that the actual result of a free-speech approach is a yet-unhedged consensus determined by the insensitive jerks with the stomach for a public discourse privileging insensitive jerks. This is orthogonal to the "this meme is so dangerous it must be suppressed" argument. One thing you can do if you want more acceptance to a pro-free-speech viewpoint is actively address the exclusion-of-sensitive-people angle, and try to decouple "having controversial ideas" from "being a jerk about it."

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
Excellent point. We have a tech problem that is orthogonal to the free speech issue. It's making things worse, yet the principles of free speech don't go anywhere simply because other problems have arisen. Up until a decade or two ago, everybody spoke and everybody spent most of their time not listening to one another. Instead we did other things. Today, however, we carry these wondrous little devices in our pockets which connect us to every angry person and demagogue all over the world. We can find and associate with people who believe some really eccentric things we also believe. We can spend our free time encouraging one another to become more and more radical. I didn't comment in order to go down this path, but your point is valid. Unfortunately, speech is not the only thing under attack. Pervasive tech has changed much of the definition of what it means to be human. That's a much more involved subject (!) that seems a bit OT for now. But I agree.
BurningFrog 6y ago
You can't fight the power without upsetting people.
- 6y ago

vore 6y ago

It _is_ a popularity contest. People must agree with what others are saying, otherwise it has no effect. How you come to change your mind on something might be important here, but trying to elevate some ideal of "progress" without considering the material conditions by which how it happens is extremely handwave-y. With regards to the first point, Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance) describes how in a supposedly tolerant society, not all viewpoints can be tolerated. For instance, if we use an example from today's society (and let's avoid getting stuck in the weeds about people's motivations for believing what they believe in), supporting white nationalism is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people. Naturally, those in the second group of people aren't going to be hearing out those in the first and want to work towards stamping it out: one of the actions involved being denying speech. There is a line to be drawn of course, but erecting a strawman that anyone opposed to free speech is so unprincipled and only the most reasonable would support unfettered free speech is downright disingenuous.

dependenttypes 6y ago
The paradox of tolerance applies to speech too. In a society with free speech not all speech can be tolerated, these that oppose free speech should be censored. It is similar to the idea that the GPL is based on. > is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people That was the case for abolishing slavery too.
- deleted 6y ago
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happytoexplain 6y ago

Regardless of my opinion on the topic, how can you start off with a premise so obviously faulty as "evil === incorrect". You can be one, the other, both, or neither. Unless you're saying that, even without the additional adjectives, an accusation of "wrong" is always the premise of the argument, which is maybe even an even more extreme twisting of reality.

claudiawerner 6y ago

> From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) Although you're talking about historical cases, perhaps some more modern cases against free speech would better update you as to the state of the arguments in philosophy. I have a comment with some citations here[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Hey, this is politics, not philosophy. Those philosophical arguments will affect the politics in... maybe 30 to 70 years? Of course, by then the philosophical arguments will have moved on...
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  I think our politics should be grounded in solid philosophical principles, after all, that's what gave rise to the high-minded principles of freedom of speech, privacy, and abolition of slavery. Besides, all it would take to turn this from "philosophy" (which is already philosophy of the first amendment and law) to "politics" is for someone to argue for it. When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier. The philosophical issue is already political, and it was made political by MacKinnon and Dworkin during the Sex Wars in the 80s and 90s.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    What I mean is, most people don't think. They get their philosophy second-hand. So the philosophical ideas of today take decades to affect the thinking of enough people to move the needle of politics. > When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier. Absolutely. And yet it is also true that, if you want to move the bulk of people today, you have to start from a point that fits within their existing philosophical framework.