I like the thrust of your and Ken's post overall, but I think this misses the mark: > To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. I

I like the thrust of your and Ken's post overall, but I think this misses the mark: > To be free of shame or shunning is to be free of other people's speech. If you're saying something provocative, you are almost certainly responding in a sense to something someone else said; if you think you have the right to speak without shame or shunning, so does the person you're effectively responding to. While it's true that almost anything you might say contradicts something that someone else has said before, it's not the case that anything you might say, even something provocative, encourages shaming or shunning of that previous speaker, or really harms or threatens them in any way.* No one is advocating for the "right" to speak without any response. They're advocating for the liberal norm that one can speak freely without disproportionate shaming and ostracism. *And there's the rub. Anyone can claim to have been horribly harmed, shamed, or excluded by something a speaker said, which then justifies retaliatory harm, shame, or exclusion against that speaker. We can't get away from adjudicating these claims of harm if we want to have a healthy culture. No abstract system of rules and rights will suffice.