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When people realized that violent speech can be considered violent action as random people took the fearmongering and attacked other people or threatened to bom

When people realized that violent speech can be considered violent action as random people took the fearmongering and attacked other people or threatened to bomb hospitals and libraries in stochastic terrorist attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism

slowmovintarget 3y ago
Violence is the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Writing and speech does none of those things. It may inspire people to take those actions, but that does not make it violence in and of itself. We can discuss the morality of speech and writing that stimulates others to violent action without the coercive construction of attempting to convince people they are the same thing.
- locopati 3y ago
  If it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear that results in physical violence or calls people to violence directly or indirectly, then I'd say speech can be violent. I disagree with free-speech absolutism that pretends speech is simultaneously capable of moving the world and also either not an action or an action that cannot be violent.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    There are ways to accomplish allocation of responsibility (or blame) that don't include muddying the waters by declaring equivalence. Alice tells Bob to kill Charlie. Bob murders Charlie with a knife. Bob is a moral agent and is the one who committed the violence. Alice instigated it. The questions that must be answered as to how much or how little Alice is to blame are: 1. Does Alice have authority or coercive power over Bob, making her urging carry more weight? (Was it a command that Bob had some degree of need to carry out?) 2. Is Bob's moral reasoning (will) impaired, and does Alice know this? 3. Did Alice know that her urging would result in Charlie's death? 4. Did Alice intend for Charlie to be harmed? The answers to these questions attach guilt of varying levels to Alice. They also weigh on the punishment. If Alice is a commander ordering troops to commit war crimes, she's absolutely culpable. She has not been violent, but she is responsible. If however, Alice is a stranger on the ground who shouts at Bob to push Charlie off a ledge at random, Bob bears the majority of the responsibility. Alice is still to blame, but Bob made the decision to act and should bear the brunt of the punishment. This has nothing to do with free speech absolutism. It has everything to do with clarity. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not violence, but it is morally wrong, and punishable by law. Speech can cause violence, but that doesn't mean that it is violence, nor does it have to be seen as violence in order to attach blame and consequences.
    - locopati 3y ago
      If only the world were so simple and clear as your ABC example. However, I agree with your last paragraph so, to reframe, the kinds of speech I'm referring to, which I would call violent speech, but are not necessary to be understood as violence, fit into the category of morally wrong and should be punishable by law. At the very least, a private platform (like X or Reddit or whatever) can and should make choices about whether to allow speech that creates an atmosphere that fosters violence.
- aae42 3y ago
  What about yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater?
  - Akronymus 3y ago
    Risk of imminent harm due to panic. Fundamentally different from saying something and someone deciding to act based on that a while after hearing/reading it.
    - aae42 3y ago
      I'm not so sure it's fundamentally different. I've been seeing a lot of violence that, while premeditated, seems to very much trace back to speech causing panic.
  - dpifke 3y ago
    That's a quote from Schenck v. United States which was decided in 1919, and overturned by Bandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It's by no means the law (it came 150 years after the law was written), and it was never a particularly good analogy. Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it. Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Violence is the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Writing and speech does none of those things. It may inspire people to take those actions, but that does not make it violence in and of itself. We can discuss the morality of speech and writing that stimulates others to violent action without the coercive construction of attempting to convince people they are the same thing.

locopati 3y ago
If it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear that results in physical violence or calls people to violence directly or indirectly, then I'd say speech can be violent. I disagree with free-speech absolutism that pretends speech is simultaneously capable of moving the world and also either not an action or an action that cannot be violent.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  There are ways to accomplish allocation of responsibility (or blame) that don't include muddying the waters by declaring equivalence. Alice tells Bob to kill Charlie. Bob murders Charlie with a knife. Bob is a moral agent and is the one who committed the violence. Alice instigated it. The questions that must be answered as to how much or how little Alice is to blame are: 1. Does Alice have authority or coercive power over Bob, making her urging carry more weight? (Was it a command that Bob had some degree of need to carry out?) 2. Is Bob's moral reasoning (will) impaired, and does Alice know this? 3. Did Alice know that her urging would result in Charlie's death? 4. Did Alice intend for Charlie to be harmed? The answers to these questions attach guilt of varying levels to Alice. They also weigh on the punishment. If Alice is a commander ordering troops to commit war crimes, she's absolutely culpable. She has not been violent, but she is responsible. If however, Alice is a stranger on the ground who shouts at Bob to push Charlie off a ledge at random, Bob bears the majority of the responsibility. Alice is still to blame, but Bob made the decision to act and should bear the brunt of the punishment. This has nothing to do with free speech absolutism. It has everything to do with clarity. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not violence, but it is morally wrong, and punishable by law. Speech can cause violence, but that doesn't mean that it is violence, nor does it have to be seen as violence in order to attach blame and consequences.
  - locopati 3y ago
    If only the world were so simple and clear as your ABC example. However, I agree with your last paragraph so, to reframe, the kinds of speech I'm referring to, which I would call violent speech, but are not necessary to be understood as violence, fit into the category of morally wrong and should be punishable by law. At the very least, a private platform (like X or Reddit or whatever) can and should make choices about whether to allow speech that creates an atmosphere that fosters violence.
aae42 3y ago
What about yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater?
- Akronymus 3y ago
  Risk of imminent harm due to panic. Fundamentally different from saying something and someone deciding to act based on that a while after hearing/reading it.
  - aae42 3y ago
    I'm not so sure it's fundamentally different. I've been seeing a lot of violence that, while premeditated, seems to very much trace back to speech causing panic.
- dpifke 3y ago
  That's a quote from Schenck v. United States which was decided in 1919, and overturned by Bandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It's by no means the law (it came 150 years after the law was written), and it was never a particularly good analogy. Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it. Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.