The Right to not be Offended
Hot topic lately, which I find rather scary. To be clear, such a 'right' does not currently exist. But there seems to be a movement that seeks to establish it. Anyone care to defend the position that this would be good for society?
Comments (126)
I don't care to name it - it is exactly whatever it is. If you don't agree there is such a movement, then duly noted.
I think everyone has the right to say "no", and typically the force of that statement ought to be respected.
[quote=guidelines]A respectful and moderate tone is desirable as it's the most likely to foster serious and productive discussion. Having said that, you may express yourself strongly as long as it doesn't disrupt a thread or degenerate into flaming (which is not tolerated and will result in your post being deleted).[/quote]
So there is a corresponding right not to be gratuitously offended. In other places, the libel laws establish the right not to have offensive falsehoods spread about one. The BBC has a policy of flagging up material that it thinks some people might be offended by, particularly relating to violence and sex.
So it is the case that such rights are widely acknowledged, not in the absolute, but in a nuanced way that is subject to social reform by either law and/or custom. I don't know why this is scary?
In the exchange, starting around 21:43 and proceeding to where the interviewer asks Peterson:
"Why should your right to Freedom of Speech trump a trans-persons right not to be offended?"
His response:
"Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive..."
The idea that someone would have a legal protection, enforced by laws, to "not be offended" is about as scary as it comes as a suggestion of a "right". It naturally lends itself to the abridgement of free speech, of the free flow and exchange of ideas, and of the "search for truth", as stated by Peterson, which is critical for areas and disciplines like science and philosophy. If there was a "right not to be offended", then any authority which is confronted with opposing views is able to shut down discourse by invoking that "right". Even in positions of "non-authority" it would have normal discourse extinguished (more than it already is).
For me, I imagine a creationist who is "offended" by the idea that humans evolved from an earlier branch of primates. Then I imagine them in political power where political discourse is framed with the "right not to be offended"...
So...I did not argue for it....
First, I think we need to admit to ourselves that what is offensive to one, isn't offensive to another. So, being offended is subjective and is typically the result of how one was raised and what they've been taught.
This movement seems to be one that seeks to limit free speech of those you don't agree with. Someone telling you that you are wrong isn't offensive. If it were, then we have all been offensive in one way or another on this forum. It only becomes offensive when one has made an emotional attachment to their belief.
Cited are guidelines which uphold the "respectful and moderate tone...may express yourself strongly as long as it doesn't disrupt a thread or degenerate into flaming". That highlights the difference between how content is communicated vs the content itself. The guidelines noted are the responsibility of the speaker/writer and that responsibility is upheld by the authorities recognized by the site in judging the post. That responsibility is not on the hearer/reader of the post who may otherwise still be offended by a perfectly respectable and moderate response or OP simply due to the content.
What would be the outcome of that here? If someone was "offended" by what the majority of others, including the moderators, thought was a legitimate post? If there was a "right not to be offended", then any mark of "offensive" would then obligate the moderators to remove what was otherwise considered to be an effective communication of content for open discussion.
I think it comes down to the difference between "offense" at how content is communicated versus the "offense" of the content itself. The line seems to become blurred at times, especially in provocations, but one seems to be centered on the intention of harm while the other is centered on open debate. The versions centered on harm, I think, are pretty universal in the incarnations and so can be ruled against (as per the guidelines stated for the writer of an OP here).
I was actually thinking you might be one to articulate a charitable case for the idea, thanks for responding. I notice a startlingly heavy emphasis on this duty not to offend lately in public discourse. I'm surprised if you really can't see why I might find this trend scary (careful, I'm almost offended by the implications).
I think you touched on something important here - the distinction between rights and duties. I might have a duty not to (gratuitously) offend. Sounds fair, but the qualifier is important. Do you have a duty to ensure I don't take offense?
Well I don't want to distinguish them really except as two sides of the coin. rights are duties seen from the other side, and vice versa. I see it a a matter of balance. We all have a duty to drive safely, with due care and attention and obeying the many rules of the road, and to have insurance, licence, and so on. But my duty does not extend to getting out of your way in every circumstance; when the lights are in my favour, I am entitled to expect cross traffic to wait their turn.
Similarly, if Oxford University wants to have a discussion on the virtues of the British Empire, or does not want to have a discussion on the merits of flat earth theory, they are entitled to do what they like on their own premises, and I am entitled to draw conclusions about them and express them. Or the German government is entitled to make holocaust denial a crime.
Now when it comes to how I am addressed or talked about, it seems to me that whoever knowingly addresses me in a manner they know I find offensive is being gratuitously offensive, or at least the onus is on them to demonstrate otherwise. For instance, I would not be entitled to be addressed as Dr unenlightened MD, because I am not an MD, but if you refuse to address me as Mr unenlightened BA, then I want to know the reason why. ;)
Canadian Senate Bill C-16, passed October 18, 2016
Peterson objects to any requirement that requested pronouns must be used, else risking liability under the hate crime legislation.
The term "Hate propaganda" makes me nervous, because "hate" and "propaganda" are not very precise terms, and can be variously interpreted by prosecution and defense, both. A person's public questioning of whether there is even such a thing as "transgender" could be considered hate speech. A refusal to use a particular pronoun (perhaps a neologism) could be interpreted as hate speech. Like a transgender persons might mash up she, her, he, him, and person and want to be called by the pronoun "shrimp". "Jerko said shrimp would attend."
Peterson doesn't want to be compelled to use "he, she, him, her, they, or shrimp" arbitrarily.
So Peterson's issue is more than a question of not offending people who claim to be transgendered, it is a question of liability to prosecution under hate speech law.
Ah, now I think we're in the transgender context. Another particular movement with good examples of the phenomenon I mean to discuss. Wanting to know the reason would be a perfectly reasonable reaction. And maybe you'd find out I have one (e.g. your degree was clearly photoshopped) or maybe you'd find out I'm just an asshole. That's an important step that seems to be getting skipped lately, in my estimation.
Just watched this, what a great example. Thanks.
Not matter what you say, someone somewhere may be offended. It is completely outside the control of a speaker to prevent this. For example: even if a speaker was to tone down their language in order to placate the dissenters of his/her opinion, the fact that he/she is "sugarcoating" his/her speech can upset the people that wanted to hear him/her speak in the first place. No matter what you say, someone will take offence.
So I don't think it is fair to hold a person accountable if he/she offends someone.
However it is important for members of a society to express themselves when they take offence. This process, I believe, helps a society at large determine whether an idea is "good" or not and build a moral system that can be agreed upon. I see offence as a mechanism people can use to show their disapproval regardless of how eloquent they are and if lots of people are finding a particular idea offensive, we, as a society, have a duty to explore why. Of course, this only works if there is no capital punishment for offending someone; an idea that is offensive is not inherently wrong, and radical, progressive ideas tend to offend a large number of the populous. In this case, it is the responsibility of the speaker to be eloquent enough to convince people not to be offended.
Lastly, I also support the right to not be offended. Personally, someone will find it very, very difficult to offend me with words alone. For example: I'm black and therefore I have been called some interesting and creative racial slurs. I have never been bothered by this and racism has never negatively affected my life. I actually encourage my partners to call me a N****r to desensitize them from the word and prevent them from being offended on my behalf. Which brings me to my point. People should have the right to not be offended so people like me, who just want to get on with life, do not have to worry about our lives being affected by people who are being offended on our behalf. Without the right to not be offended, I feel this could not happen and will cause even more political and social divisiveness then the people that espouse socially objectionable ideas.
Sorry, rambled a bit there.....
Indeed, and maybe my genitals have been photoshopped too, and I am not entitled to 'Mr'. Well no, actually, my position is that my genitals are none of your business, and you can take my word for my gender or eff off.
Sure, that's just fine. As long as you're the one who gets to define your own position. Telling me to eff off would be a perfectly appropriate, non-Orwellian, recourse.
Yes, however the two are not unlinked. If someone has a "right" to something, that legally entails protections of that "right" by the state, up to and including force. Is that fair to say?
If I have a "right" to free speech, then I can rest assured that the force of the state will ensure I can speak freely and is authorized to force acquiesence (to allow the speech to be expressed) from those who do not wish me to speak as such.
If I had a "right" to "not be offended", then the state is now obligated and authorized to force suppression of the source of my offense, whether it be speech or otherwise.
I got the impression that the purpose of this new Canadian law is to try to formalize transsexual's rights in legal terms of labor, housing, and other areas where bias is possible and that it was not the intent of the law to ban or control informal speech (as I get it).
Congress can make no law... but your employer can make rules, or you school (if private) can make rules, and one is stuck with those rules. Apparently the first amendment doesn't cover what private entities can do.
There are differences between Canada and the US: The US disallows double jeopardy, for instance, meaning that once one is acquitted of a crime, charges for the same crime can not be brought again. Unless it has been changed recently, Canada allows double jeopardy -- some people and organizations have been prosecuted several times on the same charge, but were acquitted, at least the first time.
That may be, but it does specifically mention hate propaganda, which draws a bead on speech.
Totally agree with your version of the right to not be offended. There's a very important difference between 'we have the right not to be offended' and 'we have the duty not to offend anyone'. Thanks for highlighting that.
My progression was only a proposed logical one of speech to offense to suppression of speech, not existing (or proposed) Canadian or US law.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Agreed and not just "employer" but also for "campus". Same for surveillance. You can "break" the rules and be supported in the freedom to do so, but you are also free to be retaliated against for same said event.
Makes me wonder what would happen if every US business and any private residence/property, those willing to anyway, banned the carrying of "arms" within their legal boundaries? What would the Second Amendment amount to then?
Hate speech, from what I was advised by my WikiLawyer, states "The (Supreme Court) ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that: "The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force, or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
It was also noted that it "has been modified very little from its inception in 1969 and the formulation is still good law in the United States. Only speech that poses an imminent danger of unlawful action,where the speaker has the intention to incite such action and there is the likelihood that this will be the consequence of his or her speech, may be restricted and punished by that law."
In the same piece:
"Justice Anthony Kennedy also writes: "A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society."
In the sense of the OP I perceived, the "right to not be offended" is a defense some social activists are using to assert "rights" actually afforded to them and to challenge those that would elect to and act to suppress them. But I think it is misguided and an overcorrection of sorts. At least in the sense that the speech of those that would or may want to suppress the rights of activists is the physical and legal equivalent to other actions that lead to or do actually suppress them.
Indeed, and I think it is a sorely understated difference in the kind of discourse you're referring to.
It starts with the prevailing patriarchy/white supremacy presumption which has been the ideological Zeitgeist of post-modern feminism for the last 50 years.
It also requires the addition of "intersectional feminist theory" which states unequivocally that if you just happen to belong to a demographic that is not the majority or is somehow statistically worse off then another demographic, then you are necessarily oppressed (or necessarily an oppressor) and that the more "oppressed" demographic categories you fall into, the more "oppressed" you actually are.
This is the ground floor of the standard racism = power (read: whiteness/maleness) + privilege (read: also whiteness/maleness) shtick, and it sets up the hardcore "identity politics" rhetoric that dominates the "SJW" movement.
Enter: A gay black trans paraplegic woman. She steps forward towards the microphone and the crowd falls deathly silent.
Here is someone who must be leading one of the most painful and oppressed lives imaginable, and it's clearly all the fault of non-gay-black-trans-paraplegic-women (because statistically they're better off). Not only do we need to listen to every single word that this person has to say (because their "lived experiences" will likely contain more truth than anything anyone else has to say), but to offend this person who has already endured lifelong racism, sexism, prejudice, sexual abuse, and general oppression (statistically) is therefore the most monstrous possible thing that you could do to her, and in fact constitutes the very patriarchal white-supremacist attitudes and forms of oppression which intersectional feminism as a whole is seeking to dismantle and destroy.
By offending someone who is oppressed because of their demographic, you are actually committing that oppression. (in other words, their feelings being hurt by you is why they have problems). Nobody worries about offending white males because it's impossible to be racist or sexist towards one, or to oppress one (because we have all the power and privilege!)... ... ...
There's simply no scientific merit to oodles of the made up pseudo-intellectual bull shit that some of these humanities professors have been festering in for too long, and some of the kids who ignorantly wander into their swamp can never leave. Emotion is the rhetorical vehicle of choice because it's the only way they can reach their previously assumed conclusions...
It turns out that if you try to explain everything in terms of oppression theory, you end up describing everything as oppressive, including having one's feelings hurt.
Quoting SnowyChainsawAgreed.
Quoting SnowyChainsawWell, I agree that we all have free speech, and if someone was offended, then they have the right to say so, but their right doesn't trump someone else's rights. Being offended, or having you feelings hurt should never trump logic and reason. If you don't like what someone said, use logic and reason to counter it, not claim that your feelings are hurt as if that somehow disqualifies a logical and reasonable statement someone had made.
As a matter of fact, that is why people resort to "I'm offended." - because they don't have any logical or reasonable argument to make, so they resort to trying to shut the other person up by claiming their feelings are hurt. Again, one's feelings have no bearing on what is true or not.
The I'm offended" movement is dumbing down society by allowing people to avoid the use of logic and reason in order to maintain some delusion that makes one feel good (safe spaces).
Quoting SnowyChainsaw
This is exactly what I've tried to explain - that different people can be offended by something that someone else isn't offended by. We need to explain why this is the case BEFORE we just start giving people rights that can override one of our other, more fundamental, rights - free speech.
There are hate speech laws in the UK. Up until 2014 it included "insults". Currently it only covers "threats" and "abuse".
On "microaggressions"
"Microaggressions are remarks perceived as sexist, racist, or otherwise offensive to a marginalized social group. Those popularizing the concept say that even though the offenses are minor and sometimes unintentional, repeatedly experiencing them causes members of minority groups great harm, which must be redressed....The University of California system has issued guidelines for faculty members warning that statements such as "America is a melting pot" or "I believe the most qualified person should get the job" could be microaggressions."
"Today, those whose morality is rooted in the ideals of dignity see microaggression complainants and others who highlight their victimhood as thin-skinned, uncharitable, and perhaps delusional. Those who draw from the newer morality of victimhood, meanwhile, see their critics as insensitive, privileged, and perhaps bigoted."
On culturizing microaggression
"In the last few years, activist students and faculty, sometimes with the support of administrators, have increasingly attacked the ideals of free speech.
The new activist culture calls for colleges to confront the small, perhaps unintended slights known as microaggressions, to provide trigger warnings for course material that might offend or upset, and to become safe spaces where ideas go unchallenged. It is characterized by extreme moral sensitivity, and in this way is similar to honor cultures of the past where men were highly sensitive to insults and responded to perceived slurs against their character with duels and other forms of violence."
"The dignity culture that began to replace honor culture in the 19th century cautioned against excessive moral sensitivity. People were taught to have thick skins and to ignore insults. Speech and violence were distinct, as seen in the aphorism commonly taught to young children: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
The new activist culture rejects this distinction, as did the honor cultures of old, and this has had major consequences for the free expression of ideas. For instance, in the honor culture of the antebellum American South, it was dangerous to be a newspaper editor. If a gentleman thought the paper had published anything unflattering about himself or a family member, he might challenge the editor to a duel (if he perceived him to be a social equal) or else simply beat him with a cane or whip."
"Today’s campus activists are concerned with different kinds of offenses: statements they see as slighting members of disadvantaged groups or in some other way furthering oppression. But they similarly view such statements as injurious, as akin to violence. Some go further, arguing that speech they view as oppressive is actually violence. And if speech is violence, universities must prohibit it. If they don’t, activists are justified in doing so themselves as an act of self-defense."
Sorry for the copy and pastes - but these lines manifest in the posts appearing in the thread or summarize them succinctly. I thought it relevant.
Personally, I did not approach it from the sociological view of "honor cultures", which is a very interesting avenue to take.
"A Hate Incident is any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a persons disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity or perceived disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity."
- https://www.westyorkshire.police.uk/advice/abuse-anti-social-behaviour/hate-crime/hate-crime-hate-incidents/hate-crime-hate-incidents
Perceived hate... by anyone is a "Hate Incident". This is where it gets out of hand and is indefensible, how do you put up a defense against such an accusation? banter with a good friend could be perceived badly by someone else and you've then commited a "Hate Incident". If people have a "right" not to be offended its nt hard to see "hate incidents", which are also reportable anyway, become a "hate crime".
The honor culture parallel had never occurred to me and I find it very interesting.
Agreed, however I think these rights should be valued equally in context of the law and wider society. People getting offended is not necessarily an argument against the logic and reason of a position, it may merely serve as a way gauge the public's thoughts on the matter. If you espouse an opinion and it offends lots of people, you can use that information to restructure your argument so it is more palatable for the general public and thus better educate them on the core principles of your position.
I am not sure this is true in all cases. Some? Definitely. Most? Probably, but there are a lot of people out there that are simply not eloquent enough to properly formulate their thought process into an appropriate argument and so they resort to "offence" as a reflex. They may have a valid argument, but are simply unable to or are not smart enough to take on a formidable debate opponent. .
I think you may be misunderstanding this part slightly. Some people are going to get offended and some people are not, true, but my argument here is that being offended on behalf of someone else is completely asinine and counter productive to the point of "being offended" in the context of social discourse. Otherwise, I agree.
TL:DR I think preventing offensiveness completely could be a problem, like what if there's opinions that can't be expressed without being offensive, it should be said if for no other reason that people should know to avoid that person.
To take seriously even for a moment the proposition that people have a "right not to be offended" seems to me to be quite mad.
People certainly have something like a right to due consideration and politeness, etc., depending on context. But a "right not to be offended?" - the abyss opens up right there. It really is just a power play by a quasi-religious political cult that seems to have blindsided Western civilization and wormed its way to a frightening degree of cultural hegemony (particularly as exacerbated by social media).
Enough is enough, it's time we stopped indulging these lunatics.
In response to Ms Newman’s question why his right to freedom of speech should trump a person’s right not to be offended, Peterson said: “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. (...) You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth.” (Daily Wire) To Ms Newman’s credit she did not attempt to push the point, what was a wise thing to do as she would be committing what Jürgen Habermas called a ‘performative contradiction’. Peterson’s argument is almost a textbook reference to Discourse Ethics, a transcendental-pragmatic position developed by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel (see On What is Right: The Problem of Grounding in Ethics).
According to Apel (Selected Essays: Ethics and the Theory of Rationality. Humanities Press International, 1996), “Humanity is in essence linguistic, and therefore depends always already for its thinking on consensual communication.”(p211) “The logical justification for our thought” therefore commits us to “understand arguments critically” and to “mutually recognize each other as participants with equal rights in the discussion.”(p29) The claim of ‘right not to be offended’ is incompatible with these conditions, as it either monopolises the discussion (makes a subjective demand of another to limit expression) or precludes understanding (if both parties claim offence). In any case, subjective judgement about what is offensive cannot even hypothetically be the basis of a normative principle (Setiya, Kieran. Explaining Action. The Philosophical Review, 2003). Setiya shows that subjective judgement provides only explanation of our reasons, not their objective justification.
There is a deeper logical consequence to Apel’s premise that all meaning, and therefore all thinking, is a product of public deliberation. If we were limited only to discussing things we already agreed on then no new meaning could ever emerge, no evolution of rationality, language or consciousness would be possible, because the process of transition from meaninglessness to meaningfulness would be barred. Deliberation is possible only if there is a mutual capacity to tolerate disagreement, but its application transcends disagreement even if explicit resolution cannot be achieved. It makes us who we are for ourselves and for one another, being the basis of our existence as thinking, conscious agents: a necessary condition of everything we believe in and of everything we value.
If disagreement can be used as a justification of personal offence than this is not an indictment on the subject-matter, the truth-claims or the value-commitments we disagree about, but an indictment on the possibility of rational justification of being offended. By imposing limits on what can be publicly discussed, on what claims can be defended, on what words can or must be used, deliberation is shut down, and little by little our meaning and therefore our identity fade away... in the ‘safe space’ of non-contention. The ‘right not to be offended’ entails that we value our existence, or our identity, but it also entails active nihilism, a pursuit of non-existence and non-identity, therefore a contradiction. If we do value our existence then we are rationally committed to accept the necessary condition of our existence - tolerance of disagreement - even if we don’t like how disagreement sometimes makes us feel.
(this is an abridged version of my article originally published on CulturalAnalysis.Net)
Free speech in Canada is not absolute, we define "Reasonable Limits", acceptable and justifiable in a free and democratic society, as per the Canadian Charter of Rights.
For example, telling someone they should commit suicide here is a serious criminal offence that can land you a decade in prison, weither or not suicide actually ensue.
Peterson did not just offend. He offered to create a Watchdog website tracking and scoring Higher Ed teachers according to their degree of Marxism/Pomo-ism. That's libel right there.
I do n`t even get why it might be considered that an individual has not got the right not to be offended in the first instance? I get that he might not have the power to off set a legal process where he or she was perceived to of been the victim. That is an entirely different concept though. It must be jargon for something entirely different then?
Do you consider that it should n`t be a criminal offence to offend someone no matter in what circumstances. Say, for instance, and it happened, I`m leaving the gym floor by the stairs but my punching the air, I`d managed a personal best time, causes a girl to have a panic attack,, and from this time on I`m accused of being a pervert and potential paedophile, thus compromising my safety. Is this not to be considered criminal?
I experience most of the threads here as no more than a group of people trying to prove how logical they are of thinking, and masterful they are of writing, but take me to anywhere where actual philosophy is in progression.. Even if it were the subject matter would likely be so obscure as to have no value beyond its mental exercise. All that could be worthwhile philosophical process is passed over presumably because it is considered beneath one to concern themselves over it?
Did you know that one of the 7 viable legal defenses for libel is that the libel in question is actually true?
It's quite confusing this whole issue.
One might say that if one has a healthy sense of self-esteem then some acts are offensive and need to be reacted to. Taking offense then is part of being a normal human being.
Viewed another way, immunity to offense is virtuous of character. Only the sage or the enlightened are wise enough to know that insults are empty of any real content and if they show anything its weakness of character on the part of the offender.
All in all it seems one doesn't need a right to be not offended. Rather one needs wisdom to be not offended.
One's self-esteem is the key here. It is those with high self-esteem that don't get offended and those without it do get offended. I don't know of anyone with a healthy dose of self-worth that gets offended by someone else's words. It is only those that are weak-willed and overly invest their emotions in whatever belief that they have that get offended. When someone questions their belief, they get offended.
It is when you have a reasonable and valid counter to some "offensive" statement that you don't resort to saying, "I'm offended." It is only when you don't have a valid counter, that one resorts to being "offended". If you had a valid counter, why would you ever resort to being "offended"? Which would you choose if you had the option - being offended, or logic and reason?
Society is promoting mass delusion. People think that because most people believe it and regurgitate it, then it must be true. They don't bother questioning the veracity of the belief. They just follow the herd. The moderators (or at least one of them) are one of these kinds of people. They just delete posts when they don't agree with you. They don't have a valid argument to make. Instead they resort to being offended and delete your posts. The standards are set pretty low to be mod. Why bother trying to reason with someone and explain why your post shouldn't be deleted when they don't value reason in the first place? They only value their opinion and anything that counters it is just offensive because they don't have any way to back it up, so they use their "hurt feelings", or the possibility that it hurts other people's feelings, as an excuse to shut other people up.
Wait, what? So you were punching the air and a girl had a panic attack, and because of this incident you are now accused of being a pervert and a pedophile? Is the implication supposed to be that this girl spread lies about you assaulting her? Because that has nothing to do with the topic of this discussion. That would be slander, which is spoken defamation. Not a criminal offense, but you can legally bring a lawsuit against the person. This discussion is about whether people do or should have a legal right to simply not be offended. In your example, you can legally sue her because she spread lies about you, not because what she said was offensive to you. There's a huge difference.
What is meant by "right"? I think there are no rights but legal rights; those enshrined in the law and subject to enforcement under the law. When "rights" which are not legal rights are spoken of, they're spoken of as if they were legal rights, and their infringement prohibited in some real sense.
Is there a legal right not to be offended? No.
Is the question about something that isn't a legal right? I'm uncertain what that might be, but I think that what is usually meant when it's asked whether a non-legal "right" exists, is whether "there oughta be a law" or whether something shouldn't be done--in this case, whether we shouldn't do something which will offend others. And that answer to that inquiry is: "It depends."
We're on the same page. When a movement insists that a right exists, but does not exist, my reading between the lines is that they'd like it to be legislated. So, I was wondering if anyone had a compelling case to make that this would be good for society.
Personally, I find it absurd and, as I noted, scary. Just trying to check myself before I wreck myself. Sometimes the smart folks here see angles that aren't apparent to me.
Not in Canada. Libel and slander covers anything which is stated as factually true, even if it is broadly believed, and the truth or falsity of the claim is not to be evaluated by the judge. Otherwise you encourage "scorched-earth" defences, where when you would want to libel about one thing, you libel about the whole life of the person you attack, and then force the court to go through every embarassing details of the life of the accuser. Even if you end up found guilty, you've done more damaged by way of the judicial process than by the infraction itself.
CCQ 1457. Every person has a duty to abide by the rules of conduct which lie upon him, according to the circumstances, usage or law, so as not to cause injury to another.
Where he is endowed with reason and fails in this duty, he is responsible for any injury he causes to another person by such fault and is liable to reparation for the injury, whether it be bodily, moral or material in nature.
He is also liable, in certain cases, to reparation for injury caused to another by the act or fault of another person or by the act of things in his custody.[/quote]
Actually in Canada you can indeed demonstrate that the offending speech is true as a defense against a defamation lawsuit.
From the Canadian Bar Association:
"A statement may hurt your reputation, but if it is true, anyone who says it has a valid defense if you sue them for defamation. They just have to prove, on the balance of probability, that their statement is true."
https://www.cbabc.org/For-the-Public/Dial-A-Law/Scripts/Your-Rights/240
When professors openly subscribe to and promote post-modern ideas, and then some students tell one another about it, it's not the student's fault; it's the fault of the professor.
A quote from Salmon Rushdie:
“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people. I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down."
Well, Bar website tend not to give the full picture. This part only applies to Fair and Accurate Report in a newspaper. Again, the Law is very clear :
Libel and Slander Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. L.12
means that a libel suit can be pursued and won despite the alleged facts to be true, because a faithful publication of a misapprehension of facts in a newspaper that led to a full retractation can still lead to actual damages being paid.
Perhaps are you thinking about the requirement for a criminal defamation suit? That's not necessary. It's always easier to go the Civil Law route.
If you publish a misapprehension of the facts, that means you've published something that was not true, so the justification defense obviously would not work under such circumstances.
Here's from the document you've quoted (toward the bottom)
The idea that causing emotional offense is somehow a worse reality than censoring political speech is so juvenile that it disgusts me. (you might say I'm offended, which would mean that everyone suggesting that the right to not be offended trumps free speech needs to be censored.
Why are children to interested in communism these days anyway? I was a communist when I was a teenager too, but did nobody remember to tell these twenty-somethings that the un-feasibility of large scale communism is what necessitated the gulags?
For those of you who don't know, the gulag's were a set of prisons (generally in Stalin's Siberian Russia) where they sent anyone and everyone who held political views which did not whole-heartedly support the party. Under Stalin approximately 2-3 million people were tortured, worked to death, and executed primarily because the state wanted their offensive and subversive opinions censored.
Reread. That only tells you how the court behaves when there are multiple incidence of a libel in a single cause.
As for Fair Comment, that's because statement of opinions cannot lead to a libel cause. Statements of facts and statement of opinions are to be distinguished by the court.
As un said earlier in the thread, a small group like this forum, or any voluntary society, has rules about people's remarks not being offensive. I'm glad of them; to be frank I find people ruder online than I feel comfortable with, and sometimes I don't even come to this relatively civilised forum because some posters are more aggressive than I can handle.
I quite accept that there is no 'right not to be offended'.
There is nevertheless, among civilised people, normally a tacit rule that one is not rude to others. When people are aggressive in their arguments I suspect their rationality is flimsy. When people insist that their need to express their opinion is more important than their feeling of mutual respect towards other people, I doubt their goodwill.
It adds a caveat that a justification defense shall not fail if the defendant stated additional untrue things which did not happen to defame the plaintiff. Are you suggesting that a justification defense can work in cases of multiple "charges" but not in cases of singular "charges"?
So if I accused you of something defamatory that was true, and additionally accused you of something that was untrue but not defamatory, you could not overcome my justification defense based on my misapprehension of the non-defamatory facts.
You `re so thick, you do n`t know how panic attacks work, and what do you imagine would be the benefit to me of coming here and making what happened up? You have no instinct for correct information, so you very definitely have no ability for philosophy. Panic attacks are not even concerned with the real world. My instinct picked up on your direction before you even moved, did n`t it, but you are clueless, and make everything up to suit your own flights of fancy as you go along. My teenage friends, mostly unemployed, qualified for nothing, are at the same time bright enough to know how their own specie functions, none of them have felt the need to question my account of events. What is the point of storing all that information when you can do nothing of any benefit to people with it, and as for the information it`s only two clicks away. I have not read much of the above because its immaturity is too far beneath me, and them for that matter, to bother. Good luck with your data storage though, pity about your philosophy.
So hypothetically, do you think we should never air-box when strangers might see us and possibly have panic attacks?
Do you think the victim of your "airboxing" ought to express herself by labeling you as a pedophile/pervert?
I legitimately have no idea what you're on about or why you are being so hostile and insulting towards me. Is English your first language? If not, I'm assuming that's why you seem to have misunderstood me so severely. Nowhere did I say or even imply that you were lying, I was simply trying to clarify what you were actually saying because your manner of speaking (or typing, I guess) is quite difficult to understand.
You are being extremely oversimplistic, in my humble opinion.
A right is a justified claim.
Rights depend on context. Something like voting in elections might be a civil right but not a human right.
With other rights, such as the right to finish what you are saying in a conversation without being interrupted, it is not so clear--we can't immediately appeal to status as a citizen or status as a human--what makes them a justified claim. It could be intuition that we have inherited from thousands of years of evolution that makes us recognize such a right. It could be that language and the use of language come with unspoken rights.
Clearly we can't just dismiss something as not being a right based on limited, biased things like our own culture's traditions, laws and values, even if the consequences scare us.
Just because we acknowledge/recognize a right doesn't necessarily mean wholesale cultural and political change. The U.S. Supreme Court could acknowledge a right not to be offended but say that it is outside of the scope of the U.S. Constitution.
In my humble opinion, your concern and the discussion it creates distract us from clearer, but well-obscured, realities. I could be wrong, but I think that it is safe to say that words--as in everyday, ho-hum exchanges, not just the exchange of ideas in political and scholarly contexts--can be very harmful and do a lot of psychological damage. If we acknowledge that words can damage a psyche and cause a lot of suffering just like pollution can damage lungs and cause a lot of suffering, that completely changes the nature of the issue. It takes us from what people do or do not like / approve of to what does or does not harm people and cause avoidable suffering. The latter, in my humble opinion, is where our focus should be. Only listening carefully and employing empathy will tell us if a social movement is the result of people's untold pain and suffering from verbal abuse or is simply people being extreme narcissists who believe that they are entitled to freedom from any words that they do not like or approve of. I don't sense that there is much of the latter going on, so I don't see what there is to be scared of.
I think you've missed the point of the question. Everyone has already done the calculation you've outlined (genuine suffering vs. narcissism), they've come up with different results so the question is where do we go from here? How do we now move forward when some people think those claiming offence are genuinely suffering but others think they're being overly narcissistic?
Words have absolutely zero inherent power to cause anybody harm or suffering. Words are nothing but verbal representations of thoughts. Can you hurt someone with your thoughts?
When you verbalize your thoughts, you are essentially giving them to whoever is listening to do with as they please. Can that person take your thoughts/words and inflict pain or psychological damage on himself? Sure, but you aren't responsible for how another person uses your thoughts/words. If you give a person a hammer and they slam it down on their own hand, breaking it, are you responsible for their broken hand? Of course not.
"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him."
- Epictetus
It depends on the extent of both, which is why we need to at least attempt some objectivity in our assessment of each (which is why I objected to WPoMo's suggestion that we all just need to be empathetic).
If the expression of political opinion is (or had a justifiable chance) of causing actual harm then I cannot see any argument that it should be allowed. It is not inviolable and I don't see any reason why freedom of speech should be the top of our list of freedoms.
Hurt feelings can lead to actual harm by psychological trauma or suicide, so there's no question about the possibility.
That means the remaining question (unless you want to argue that freedom of speech is inviolable under all circumstances) is whether the expressions in question actually are causing genuine harm. I think this is something that can be approached objectively. Has the suicide rate gone down with increasing political correctness? - no. Has the rate of therapy admissions gone down with the rising intolerance of bawdy language in the workplace? - no. We could go on.
Its not that I think it's impossible for there to exist a situation where the harms from free speech outweigh the right to it, it's just that I don't think the examples that have been talked about recently objectively are such cases.
Because if you don't have freedom of speech then you might not be able to acquire new or guarantee pre-existing rights. Russia or Uganda will send you to prison for publishing anything construable as pro-gay-propaganda because it suits the feelings of the people (people too stupid to afford democracy the respect it requires), and this is likely setting back acceptance of gays markedly.
If Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, then Democracy with no free speech is tyranny where you're not even allowed to whine about it.
Quoting Pseudonym
I see people using this argument very lightly, and they (you) really shouldn't. If you suspect someone might be a suicide risk, (for example, if them getting their feelings hurt could be their last straw), then serious intervention/assistance should be offered to that person. A part of being free means being responsible for one's self, and merely being offended because of a political opinion that someone else expressed falls well within the "deal with it" category. Democracy requires we tolerate the political opinions of others.
When it comes to outright harassment, we actually have anti-harassment laws which are more than adequate to deal with anyone who consistently emotionally badgers a particular individual.
But even if we do try to determine which political opinions we should outright disallow, do you have any bright ideas? Would you be the one to accept the position of deciding what is o.k and not o.k to express politically?
I'll give you a great contemporary example that actually somewhat applies to me: The black lives matter movement takes the position that violence done to black men by cops is the worst problem facing the black community, and that it is white privilege and racism which create this reality. For me to contradict their position is literally and emotionally interpreted by them as racism. I could choose to say nothing for fear of hurting too many feelings, but if I don't then I think there's a higher chance laws will be passed which are not only counter-productive to the general impoverished black community, but will be outright detrimental to everyone (including them).
Interestingly this kind of ultra-sensitive "to deny the white patriarchy IS white patriarchy" style identity politics can only thrive in an environment where everyone's feelings are coddled to begin with; it makes them emotionally weak; lacking thick skin. If everyone had thicker skin we could have emotional discussions about controversial topics without everyone flying off the objective handle...
You've given me a reason why freedom of speech is an incredibly important right, I asked for a reason why it might be considered more important than any other. Such an argument would require not just the presentation of the bad things that can happen when the right is removed, but a demonstration that they are somehow worse than what happens when any competing rights are removed. That's what I mean by adding some objectivity to this debate, at the moment it's too reliant on polemics.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
If you read my argument carefully, I'm using this form of cause and consequence to indicate that actual harm can result from insult. It's a philosophical point, establishing the parameters of what it is reasonable to argue. This is something which is essential in any professional discussion on ethics, but for doing which I'm constantly being misrepresented on this site. I don't suppose many people here have actually sat on ethics committees, but establishing the parameters is pretty much the first job. I'm merely stating that it is a reasonable proposition that insults can lead to direct physical harm and so a utilitarian approach could reasonably argue that these harms need to be accounted for. I'm not giving psychological advice on how to approach suicide victims.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again this is a misleading line of argument in ethics. What we have laws for and what is ethically right/wrong are two entirely different, and often unrelated, things. The argument ethically is whether we have a right to restrict freedom of speech in order to avoid offending people, not whether we have already done so and enshrined such a restriction in law. The law might be wrong, it might not go far enough, or go too far, such discussions are how laws are made/altered in the first place. The question for this debate is whether you agree that anti-harassment laws are morally acceptable. If you do then you have agreed that there are circumstances where someone's right to speak as they see fit is outweighed by the harm it is evidently doing a person. As I said explicitly above, the matter then is a practical one of establishing the harm caused, as we have already agreed on the principle that some harms justify a restriction on free-speech.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, and yes. That's the duty of any moral agent, we cannot simply absolve responsibility because the question is hard, we have to decide, and it is each person's duty to do so and to do what they can to persuade others of their position (if they think some harm might come from the position others currently hold). I fail to see how our duty to avoid allowing others to suffer could possibly be outweighed by our duty to be humble in the face of our uncertainty on any complicated moral decision.
As to how to determine such things, as I have outlined above, we have some small objective measures which we can bring to bear. It is unlikely that failure to be politically correct actually increases suicide risk, for example, because if it did we would have seen a lowering of the suicide rate over the last few years and we have seen the opposite.
Taking your example;
Quoting VagabondSpectre
this is an objectively verifiable fact, by some metric, they are either right or wrong about this.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
this is surely their prerogative as much as it is yours to state your views, you haven't specified any extent to which they're using force to restrict your freedom of speech here.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The key here is that you think there is a 'higher chance' of harm from not saying anything. You have made an assessment of the net value of your speech and acted accordingly. That's not the same as saying the people should be allowed to speak as they wish regardless of any such assessment.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is a reasonable sentiment, but you've failed to demonstrate either that it is the case, or that 'coddling' as you put is is responsible for the lack of a 'thick skin'. We can approach both issues with psychological experiment and insight, but we cannot simply presume either is the case based on personal experience alone. It is an equally reasonable argument to say that if we lived in a society where people restricted their public expression to show respect for the feelings of others the resultant 'safe' environment would lead to more fruitful, less polemic debates.
Justsome guy
Your response to me did n`t relate to the conversation, you simply made up the circumstances for yourself. It had just been put to us that slander should not be considered as being a crime. This was an example in response to that young lady.which was intended that she might reconsider her position, it is simple, and as well you know.. There is no mention of her spreading complaints, where is that? You know whom was spreading the complaints, I told you. The post which I reacted strongly to has since been taken down. It began, "Even if we are supposed to believe that she`d have a panic attack over you merely punching the air, prior to this, well, you already know what was said prior to this, so there is no point me repeating that post, also deleted, by you or by the moderators. Know, I`m not playing stupid immature games here, certainly not with you. If you find me misleading you are infinitely more so. Nobody is wholly here apart from our individual selves, perhaps a small fraction of another`s deceitful communication,, we are basically alone here, and alone to face the truth of ourselves..Even now there is deceit, putting down, and not accepting when another has been wronged, ego, ego ego, and this is why no actual philosophy will ever get done.
Firstly, I did give a reason as to why freedom of speech (and of thought) might be more important than other rights: because it's required to guarantee that we're able to even talk about other rights, let alone fight for them in a democratic system.
Secondly, we're not talking about freedom of speech trumping any other right, we're talking about it trumping "the right to not be offended".
thirdly, I should be clear that I'm not a free speech absolutist, and I'm defending political speech, not all possible speech.
Moving forward let's try to be very clear about what we're actually debating: I'm explaining why free speech is at the top of the list, not why it's more important than any other right across all possible scenarios. Which right is most important depends on a changing spectrum of needs that society at large has. There's no objectively most important right, but since ignorance does seem widespread of late I think free speech happens to be quite important.
Quoting Pseudonym
Is it reasonable to expect that someone will kill themselves because they got offended? Granted, it's possible, but just about anything can play roles in cause and consequences which are harmful. Driving a car comes with the risk of accidentally killing pedestrians or one's self, and we could sit around debating whether we should even be given the freedom to drive cars or walk on sidewalks, but it's not pragmatically feasible: we need to drive cars even though it kills people every single day, and we need to express our political opinions even though doing so may indirectly kill people every single day.
The only kind of "offense" that I can imagine driving someone to suicide is extreme harassment...
Quoting Pseudonym
No but you're giving legislative advice on how to treat them based on a psychologically causative description, so I really don't see the difference...
Quoting Pseudonym
That wasn't a normative argument, just stating the fact that we currently have anti-harassment laws which handle the harmful forms of non-political speech that you state are immoral, so from a simple practical point of view, I don't see why we need additional "anti-offense" laws, especially when an individual's notion of "offensive" can be entirely irrational and subjective.
Courts presently determine on a case by case what constitutes harassment, that's where we draw our legislative and moral lines as a society, and I really don't see why we should lower the standard to "so and so was offended".
Quoting Pseudonym
So you will get to decide for everyone else what beliefs they are allowed to hold and express, for everyone's own good, because you know best... What happens when someone disagrees?
Perhaps we should all be free to think for ourselves and communicate what we think is right in order to ensure that we can come to un-coerced decisions? That's free speech.
Quoting Pseudonym
O.k, and when I say they're objectively wrong about this, some of them might say "Aha! You are proving our point by denying our lived experiences; you're oppressing me; I'm offended; etc.."
In this particular example, should I be allowed to state my truth? You did accept the position of arbiter of decency after-all...
Quoting Pseudonym
You're proposing moral imperatives upon which legislation can be derived. I'm suggesting that to use force to restrict my freedom of speech in this manner on the basis of "right to not be offended/harm caused by being offended" would be unjust. Furthermore, when they say things like "all white people are racist" I'm genuinely offended, and if I subscribed to the idea that my emotional reaction to their beliefs is more important than their right to express their beliefs then I could morally rebuke them (or one day call for legislation against them) in the first place.
Quoting Pseudonym
Almost nobody is a free-speech absolutist, so please try to address the strong version of the position against "the right to not be offended".
My position is that merely being offended is not in and of itself harm worth considering when compared to more pressing harms, but furthermore that due to the subjective nature of offense taking, and the pragmatic impossibility of not ever offending anyone, it would be utterly futile to try and aim to never offend anyone. The only entities doing that are politicians and tv commercials. I also do think that being forbidden from expressing an honest belief is itself harmful at least to the same degree as being offended (people who're censored are well and truly offended; many of them have committed suicide).
Quoting Pseudonym
We've already seen the high water mark. Not oppressing/offending anybody turned into a political game of "who is the most offended/oppressed". We confuse being offended with being oppressed (like the idea that we should never offend someone for fear that they commit suicide) and it's beyond unreasonable.
Sometimes I just cannot participate in discussions where truth is a concern and also not offend people.
For some people, simply pointing out the logical fallacies in their argument qualifies as being aggressive. As I keep saying it is subjective. There are no objective rules as to what is offensive or not.
Even if no one complains about being offended, posts are deleted. They are deleted because there is the possibility that others might be offended. Trying to apply objective rules to something that is inherently subjective leads to the infringement on rights that we actually do have.
Saying that people have a right to be offended transfers the power to define the meaning of the words from the speaker/writer to the listener/reader. It no longer would be the intent of the speaker, and how they used the words, that would matter, rather it would be the intent of the listener that matters. The right to be offended would be the antithesis to the right to free speech. The "freedom" of your speech would be beholden to the greater freedom of some listener's interpretation of it.
It should also be noted that living in a society with free speech, being offended from time to time goes with the territory. Complaining about being offended in a free-speech-society is like complaining about the high insurance rates on your ocean-front property.
Right, so you've still not provided an argument for this. All you've done is move the objective. Now you need to provide an argument to show how "guarantee[ing] that we're able to even talk about other rights," and is a more important necessity then ensuring people are protected from the harm theoretically caused by views they find offensive. Do you have some evidence that the well-being of society will be more harmed by having some political speech restricted than by having it freely expressed, but potentially causing widespread offence? This is what I'm saying about the polemics, one side seems to be saying only that freedom of speech is really important, the other that insults can be harmful. Both of these are pretty well established facts, what's needed in this debate is some measure of the extent to which one outweighs the other.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
That's a very subtle distinction to draw. Do you have a definition for what constitutes "political speech"?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is exactly the point of the discussion. We do recognise that driving is dangerous but necessary, but we do not respond to this state of affairs by simply saying that people should be free to drive wherever they want in whatever manner they want to. Restrictions are placed on people's ability to drive freely, because of the severity of the potential consequences. This is an exact mimic of the argument being had here. Everyone seems to agree that restrictions on freedom of speech need to be in place (the harassment laws as you point out), so the argument is whether the existing restrictions are sufficient. We have had the same debate about driving and the result has been that the restrictions on driving freely were not sever enough and we have subsequently reduced the speed limit further in urban areas. We're having exactly the same debate now, and the same two questions are relevant - What are the actual harms caused, and how much do we value avoiding them relative to the freedom we're considering restricting?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I didn't say I get to decide 'for everyone else', just that we must each accept our moral duty to decide what is right and act on it if necessary, not to equivocate and expect someone else to decide for us (the existing law, the judiciary, the bible... whatever). If you think the law is adequate, then state why you think that, just saying it must be moral because the law says it is is absolving your own moral responsibility.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, but you've still failed to demonstrate an advantage to that process which outweighs the harms it might cause. Is there evidence that we actually, as a society, come to decisions this way which increase our well-being sufficiently to outweigh the offence that having such open discussions may cause? Are we really going to gain anything by inviting the far-right speaker to the table to air his racism? Lots of people would be deeply offended by his political opinions, history shows us that we're very unlikely to come to any usefully different conclusions after hearing from him, so where's the benefit?
I'm generally in agreement that we should not legislate against offending people, what I dislike are the sloppy arguments used to defend this principle, they risk undermining an important position.
The freedom to express one's opinions (political or otherwise) has to be restricted because at some point in time, the benefits to society from having those opinions aired simply outweighs the harms from the offence.
Therefore, the only relevant questions to establish where this point is are;
How harmful is the offence taken? And; how much benefit is likely to accrue from the ideas being expressed?
I don't see either of these questions being addressed with evidence.
I'm deliberately simplistic about rights because, outside of the legal domain, it's a very imprecise and flimsy concept that generates endless semantic quibbling. If you think you have a certain right, but the folks you're interacting with simply disagree, then you don't have the right. Everyone has veto power on that one. That's how I see it.
Importantly, you don't just think that, it's an actual legal right.
I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue reaction to your line of argument here. My sense is that the ability to perform the duties you're outlining, to balance benefits of free speech vs harms and hash it out, is actually contingent upon free speech in the first place. Free speech is a pre-requisite to reasonably evaluate and uphold other rights. It's the mechanism by which we achieve the other social goods.
I probably don't agree with you about the kinds of speech it's reasonable to restrict. e.g. I think the racists should be allowed to state their position. We have to live with them either way. Better to know what they're up to and have the chance to talk some of them out of it. I suspect the alternative is much worse.
Those making the case to restrict free speech rely on free speech to make the case.
Agree or disagree? Is there any significance to this? I'm sensing something like a fundamental hierarchy to the structure of rights that just happens to be obscured by our vernacular. I'm not sure. If someone can help me untangle this, that'd be great.
I'd like to restrict them form teaching my kids their nonsense. I'd like them not to be treated by reputable media and educational bodies as if their views were worthy of serious consideration. I like that they are not allowed to express their position on this site. Same goes for flat-earther's; life's too short.
I'll just say it's very important to me that you're free to articulate that. You keep the racists out of teaching positions by exercising free speech, not by restricting it.
But if all these consequences amount to speech being unfree, and speech must be free absolutely, one of the consequences of that will be the undermining of the value of speech itself.
Your moniker is well-fitted (friendly tease).
A reality that is "well-obscured", but nevertheless still "clearer" is a condition indeed.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
That acknowledgement is one of the items under examination.
1. If I verbalize content I know the hearer finds offensive, they suffer a damaged psyche.
2. If I verbalize content I don't know the hearer finds offensive, they suffer a damaged psyche.
From the point of view of the "hearer" of the content, what difference, if any, is there between 1 & 2?
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Not all agree that any mechanism, in this case speech, conveying content causes psychological harm to the point where otherwise "avoidable suffering" occurs. Even if true, does it require action on the part of third parties compelling the speaker to silence in pursuit of the avoidance of the other's "suffering"? I think that there are demonstrable incidents where the socially normative approach (the everyday ho-hum "ignore the haters" approach) is jumping the various "rights" or "action" categories.
You mention that "Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
That is true, but it also does not oblige anyone else to do anything about silencing the exchange. The makeup of a differing psychology may already be "damaged" or may be more prone to being "damaged", whereas others may be more well-adjusted or resilient.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
A softly worded assertion of the truth of relativism?
It sounds reasonable, but is it a sort of "law" in how it is applied? Or is it only a useful reasoning tool that can be employed to help uncover biases which would normally be undetected and influence a conclusion? Could one say the statement, taken as a tool of interaction to arrive at a common denominator of agreement, is itself a singular partition in the camp of "limited, biased things like our own culture's traditions, laws and values"? I see you wrote "Clearly we can't just dismiss something", which I take to mean "dismiss without investigation and reflection". But that does not guarantee that after a balanced, inclusive investigation and charitable reflection that something can't be dismissed.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
So, in other words, would it be fair to say that context is the mechanism which justifies the claim of a right?
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
So the group consensus as a function of listening skills and empathic capability is the "context" which justifies another's right or the legitimacy of a "movement"? What if there is a dull, selfish, and oblivious population?
Minor quibble - I am unaware of any "social movement" resulting solely from verbal abuse. Are there any?
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Could it also be possible that some members are part of both sets of categories? They are both narcissistic and part of a group that is persecuted? From a psychological approach, narcissism tends to be a dominant strategy in social hierarchies, especially newly formed ones with little sense or history of unified identities, which translates to (under certain conditions), the narcisissists getting to make the rules and/or make the demands for and/or give the communications for everyone else within the same group. Could that become, under certain circumstances, detrimental to both the bulk of remaining members of the persecuted group as well as for members outside of that group? It is with that dynamic that I think the original OP was written and don't find it to be simplistic at all in theory or practice. I think it is closely linked to the problem of "intolerant tolerance" and "tolerating intolerance" and what forms both concepts take in social structure and interaction.
I don't think this is true, within the statement you've already made a couple of presumptions.
Firstly, that we should 'reasonably evaluate' rights. How are we going to enforce a 'reasonable' evaluation without preventing people from making claims which are unreasonable?
Second, that this is "the mechanism by which we achieve the other social goods". What cause do you have to believe that all discussions on rights are necessary to achieve social goods. It seems empirically the case that only those discussions likely to lead to an improvement in social goods are [I]necessary[/I]. The others can be discarded without impacting on the benefits of the necessary discussions. Since we are, presumably, measuring 'social goods' by some metric, there will clearly be cases where all options brought to the table by some political opinions will fall short of that metric. How then is having the discussion necessary to bring about the social good?
It's not possible to allow all reasonable claims while preventing all unreasonable claims. So, we have to be able to deal with unreasonable claims. What chance does a confused person have at being corrected if we prevent them from articulating their beliefs?
I don't see how we'll determine which discussions are good and which are bad if they don't take place to begin with?
I'll give this some more thought, I'm not sure I've given you the most charitable read that I can come up with.
I'm not following your argument that a "discussion" is automatically necessary before arriving at a moral decision. I already know racism is bad, I don't need to discuss it beforehand, nor did I need to be taught it by discussion. I was taught it by example. So I'm failing to see why a racist need be allowed to publicly voice his political views (knowing as I do that many people will be deeply offended by them). We live in a society in which racism is routinely frowned upon. Unless this person has grown up in isolation somewhere, he will know full well that society considers racism wrong, he's not waiting for a good argument against it, he knows them all already and doesn't care.
I want to say I'm fine with this and that I'm content to draw the line at legislation. Corruption ensures there are still serious, related, problems but corruption is another matter.
All discussions don't need to take place, but the potential for them to take place is foundational. The lack of a discussion is also more meaningful if it's permitted. I believe you're missing my point, which is entirely my own fault, so I'll take some time to reflect on my position.
It is likely the case that I agree with you. I too know that racism is bad, don't need to discuss it, and so on; EXCEPT that what one person means by racism may include much more than what someone else includes. That's why racism continues to be discussed.
Some people put so many different things under the terms of "sexist", "racist", "elitist" "misogynistic", and so on, that one has to spend considerable time and effort to clarify what is what. Discussions of racism end up revolving around the application of terms, rather than a common, dictionary meaning of racism.
Regarding shit holes: saying that African countries are shit holes because black Africans live there is racist. Saying that African countries are shit holes because they are poor, corrupt, lack access to capital, and have been subject to exploitative colonialism for a couple of hundred years is merely true. Claiming that American Indians are all drunks and Mexicans are all lazy are racial and ethnic slurs. Observing that whites, on average, are richer than American indians and Mexicans is only to observe reality.
Then, there are people who believe that some people are inferior because they are black. They qualify as racist. There follows then the question of whether it is permissible to hold such beliefs. Some will say it is permissible, however wrong the opinion is, others will say it is impermissible without respect to the freedom to hold wrong opinions.
But these definitions are not a problem so far as refusing to discuss certain political opinions is concerned. When you're comparing a theoretical "racists opinion" with a real-world need to discuss, of course the real-world example is going to appear more complicated, but comparing like with like, we very rarely encounter a person wishing to speak whose opinion we are not already vaguely aware of.
Racists, and there's no ambiguity about it, have shown absolutely no reasonable contribution to a discussion about the direction society should head in order to maximise well-being.
To those still considering the need to "include" all speakers in 'the debate', I'd ask why they are not including children in that. If you think a racist should not be banned from speaking on university campuses, then why are we not also inviting the opinion of three-year-olds, the clinically insane, the mentally retarded? We dismiss the involvement of huge sections of the community in 'the debate' all the time and we do so on the perfectly reasonable grounds that we can tell before they even start to speak that they will not have anything particularly constructive or useful to say. The same is true of people we can identify by their actions as being racist, more so, in fact. I'd rather hear more of the opinion of children and the mentally ill than from racists.
Roke
One is only required to be human , surely, to already have an in depth instinct for how (full) freedom of speech would pan out, the time frame remaining the only real question. Sure, those that fancy children might still be outnumbered by those that do `t, just about, who knows, but they`d be very strong in their numbers, and coming out would explode. The concept of under age sex is far more popular with men than is currently claimed for, or for that matter even officially realized.. This circumstance alone could reduce a child`s safety a hundred fold. For engagement in such activities to occur it is enough for many individuals that only a given fresh hold .of back ground support is arrived at. One of course would be quite free to make inflammatory accusations, and they would become common place, many without a scrap of real world evidence. Why, because we have departed the world of logic, and adopted the world of our emotions. Killings, many of them of the innocent, would go through the roof, not to mention rioting on the streets. The time frame for given events, and actual numbers on the ground, now this is the only real question.. This is supposed to be a social philosophy thread, so we are supposed to have solid instincts. It makes for far briefer exchanges too. .
Then we need to ask if actions fall under the hood of "free speech". Is it "free speech" to take an action against what someone said? It's not illegal to use hate speech. What is illegal is for you to act on your whims, rather than just say them. That is when we counter actions with reaction.
The fact is that someone's free speech doesn't trump someone else's. Your rights cannot override someone else's. What we do with our freedom of speech is use it to express ideas that can trump someone else's ideas based on which one is more logical and reasonable. Logic and reason should be the determining factors of what speech is actually useful or not, not some arbitrary whims. When someone spouts racist comments, then it is to be countered by other free speech. Shutting people up isn't the answer. Hate speech is easy to counter with logic and reason because racism itself is illogical - usually based on unfounded assertions.
I've seen mods allow certain conversations to keep going, even when it is obvious that the speaker of one side isn't making very good arguments, and isn't being reasonable. Then why not allow others to speak their minds and then counter it with reasonable arguments. You'd be taking away their rights, even though they didn't do anything illegal.
By limiting the speech of those you don't agree with, you end up harming yourself because you remove the knowledge of what it is that that person is about, and what their intentions are. Shutting people up makes you ignorant to their intentions, and prevents the opportunity to root out hatred with logic and reason. Shutting people up just makes them more crazy, and more likely to act out their intentions rather than just saying them.
The whole point of having a free-speech society is to allow all ideas to be expressed and compete in the arena of free ideas. Logic and reason would be the determining factors of which ideas win. When culture evolves based on true knowledge, rather than the delusions and self-loathing of a few, it is a good thing.
Nonsense. My right not to be murdered overrides your freedom to murder me. You don't have that right.
Quoting Harry Hindu
More nonsense. Much is allowed by mods, and some things are not. One reason for not allowing racists on the site is that it gives an air of legitimacy to their views, and associates the members with them. Another is that it is sufficiently offensive to deter serious posters from frequenting the site. Unmoderated discussions are not worth reading or participating in. Absolute freedom of speech undermines the value of speech itself, as I mentioned above, because flames, fake news, cliches, polemics and irrationality overwhelm logic and reason, by sheer weight of numbers.
There simply is not universal agreement about who the racists are. You seem to have an unfounded confidence in understanding other people's positions before they speak. Are you ever wrong about someone? How do you find out? I don't trust the folks in position to do this filtering to be as infallible as you.
Why is deciding on a person's liklihood to bring something useful to the debate based on their actions 'unfounded confidence' but deciding whether to believe them after they've spoken is not.
People lie, misrepresent and misunderstand all the time, it is you, I think, who has the 'unfounded confidence' in the power of language.
At some point in our interactions with a racist we have to decide that their opinions are not in any way useful to us. Why not decide early on and avoid the offence of having to listen to them?
Your question is why I think it's unfounded confidence to believe you understand, and can accurately assess the public value of, someone's beliefs before they speak but not after? Not sure what to tell you there, man. You're either asking some real softball type questions or we're really misunderstanding each other.
Care to define racism? I bet we couldn't reach a consensus within this thread, much less in society at large.
Roke is absolutely right, your argument is based on two very incorrect assumptions: that you know what all other people believe without them telling you, and that the things you believe are morally right and wrong are absolute or "correct" and un-debatable. These are the exact same mistakes that lead to all of the stupid and ridiculous political fighting between the left wing and the right wing in the United States. Everybody thinks that what they believe is "right", what their opponents believe is "wrong", and that they know what other people believe based on very little evidence. The lack of discussion because of these attitudes has been--and continues to be--extremely detrimental to society.
Consider the scenario in the real world. Someone owns and controls a platform for speech, could be a broadcaster, a university campus, a news programme... A person who they believe, based on what they already know about them, is a racist (by their definition) asks to speak. They then have a moral choice, either allow the person to speak, or not. Like any moral choice, they must weight the harms;
To speak -
Lots of people might be offended.
Some impressionable people might be persuaded by them to act in a harmful way.
They might be encouraged by the legitimacy of the right to speak and take further harmful action or allow their views to become more extreme.
To deny speech -
They might actually have something useful or interesting to say and our judgement that they are racist was actually wrong.
Denying them a platform might make them or their sympathisers more angry and promote further harm.
They might have their views changed by others in the debate.
At no point would the person deciding that the harms from allowing them to speak outweigh those from not, suffer either of the incorrect assumptions you're accusing them of.
At no point have they had to presume they 'know' what a person has to say before they say it. At no point do they have to claim they 'know' what is morally right. But they must act nonetheless. They must either allow them a platform or not. There is no position where their 'knowing' anything for sure has any relevance. They are forced by circumstance to guess what the consequences might be, part of making that guess requires that they guess something about the person's character and what they're likely to say. There's no avoiding making such a guess.
The reality is that a decision must be made and decisions often require us to use our best guess. It's not hubris, just pragmatism.
Our moral duty now is to guess whether the harms from allowing them to speak (the only other option) would be greater than 10. The only way to do this is to make some speculation about what sort of thing they might say, how useful it may be, and how insulting it may be.
There is no option where we get to throw our hands in the air and say "well how could we possibly know what he's going to say before he says it?" because that does not advance our weighing excersice any and such an excersice must be carried out.
You're essentially making the same argument you made for restricting freedom of religion a few weeks ago, which isn't surprising since it's a similar issue, but I don't really want to get into this again since the last discussion was anything but productive. You have made clear what you believe, which is essentially that it is your (and everyone's) responsibility to do whatever you can to restrict the freedom of others to prevent them from doing things you see as wrong or harmful. I and others have tried to explain to you what the problems are with this way of thinking, but you are very set in it and don't seem to even consider the counter-arguments, so I see no point in making another attempt.
You're so right(Y)
Unless your Benevolent Administrator doesn't subscribe to your utilitarianism. Then it's an altogether different analysis they're making, isn't it? Maybe the analysis is 'does the speaker's views undermine my particular conception of social justice?'. I'd rather decide for myself and let others do the same.
I see an important distinction to be drawn between 1) expressing or clarifying an idea vs 2) repeating a fully communicated idea ad nauseam. To me, free speech is much more important with respect to 1) than 2).
Thoughts on this?
What do you mean 'decide for myself and let others do the same'? That doesn't make any sense. You are deciding for yourself, for who else would you be deciding? It doesn't change the nature of the decision you have to make. You are arguing here that the administrator should not deny the person a platform. That was one of the two options available. To decide this you have concluded that the harms from denying them speech outweigh the harms from not. You still had to weigh up the harms to make that decision, which means you still had to answer the question that required you to speculate on what they might say. You haven't escaped having to use your best guess, you haven't successfully sat on the fence, you've decided.
What you've not done is justify your decision by reference to the full set of harms on both sides because you've tried to avoid the question of predicting the utility of what the person might say.
This is a very sloppy bit of philosophy. "...don't seem to even consider the counter-arguments" is a classic ad hominen. I don't agree with you, you think you simply must be right, so the only logical conclusion you can reach is that I must have not considered you counter arguments. What about the option that I've considered your counter arguments, countered them in turn but that you did not understand the argument? Is that so impossible for you to conceive?
Perhaps you could furnish us with an example of these two approaches in this thread because they sound entirely subjective to me. The only distinction I can see would be that 'clarifying' an idea might involve changing it slightly as the discussion progresses. Can you identify anyone's position that has changed, even slightly, as the discussion has progressed?
You don't seem to understand the way arguments work. You had made a claim which you were arguing for. Other people, myself included, presented valid criticisms--problems with your argument. Instead of responding to these criticisms, you dismissed them without reason. Saying that you disagree with somebody or something is meaningless unless you provide legitimate criticisms. This is why we didn't get anywhere last time, and why I said I didn't want to try again. You think that disagreement without reason is enough, and so there is no way to have a productive discussion with you. You just keep asserting your own beliefs, and disregarding any counterpoints because you simply disagree with them, without any reason other than they go against your currently held beliefs. It's very similar to religious fundamentalism, which is ironic considering the subject of the discussion we're referencing.
I'm not going to continue this conversation, though. It's far off topic from the current discussion, and as I said already it's futile anyway.
I've had the sneaking suspicion that, to some extent, you and Un both have the 2nd type in mind while it's really the 1st type (ability to express ideas) that's important to me. Suppressing speech is not quite the same thing as suppressing ideas and it's occurred to me that equivocation, on my part, might have us bogged down a bit (granted, it doesn't fully account for our disagreement).
So, it's one thing to allow the expression of unpopular ideas and it's another to allow someone to beat people over the head with them once clearly expressed. At its edges, this is not at all an easy distinction to make, but I think it's a significant one.
If you think we should actually forbid certain ideas because those ideas lead to harmful actions (rather than just emotional offense) then that's a slightly different discussion, but I'm willing to have it.
And no I do not have to show why free speech is necessarily a more important right in every possible scenario. I have already explained, as you have admitted, why it is fundamentally an important right, and so I posit that we should be cautious about how we choose to restrict it. The constitution is not ordered by importance, changing needs make and changing trends make people appreciate and benefit from some rights more than others. Maybe one day we won't need political participation, and being emotionally offended by the ideas of others might be our biggest problem as a society... Until then I think the burden is actually on you to show how the fragile ego of a single individual should mean the censorship of potentially everyone else when political participation and the freedom to express political ideas is the founding mechanic of our system of governance?
I would be interested if you could give any good evidence that people are up and killing themselves after being exposed to ideas they find offensive though... If you're talking about bullying, you're still not recognizing my actual position: we have anti-bullying laws and it's for the courts to decide case by case what constitutes bullying...
Quoting Pseudonym
Sometimes people deserve to be insulted. That may sound uncivilized, but I assure you it's actually one of the cornerstones of civilization. If I'm not allowed to use words to settle disagreements, what else do you think mankind might be want to use?
As I've said before, when mere insults turn to harassment or bullying, we actually have many sophisticated laws and previous cases we use to sort out whether or not such behavior is justifiable, case by case, butwe're talking about situations where a singular indirect exposure to an offensive idea and the emotional harm that renders, not instances of legitimate harassment.
Sometimes insults themselves can be a part of political speech (heh heh, ain't no denying that!). The idea of Trump's indescribable vulgarity might spring quickly to mind, and you're right, but it's a sword that cuts both ways; the rest of the sane world is making more regular use of direct insults against a single individual than anything that has ever came before in human history, and we should not lightly risk removing their right to utter those insults. Using insults is a rhetorical dagger that cuts both ways; those who use them are themselves fair game for insults (so use them wisely) and anyone who actually relies on them are inherently sullied to the more mature and logically discerning among us.
There's no objective answer to which right is more important across all possible scenarios, and if you really want to weigh the likelihood of harm such as suicide resulting from oversensitive reactions to political opinions or insults vs outright political censorship, I would be happy to compare numbers.
Ironically, if you'd like to shift the discussion and suggest that certain ideas are themselves harmful or might lead to harm (like Nazi rhetoric for instance), in order to explain how they might lead to harm, you will necessarily have to describe them, which would beto utter speech that others may find emotionally offensive. The irony is that in order to demonstrate why an idea is bad, we need to actually confront and expose ourselves to said idea. If we ban certain ideas outright, we will only make rebellious youth curious and sympathetic towards it, and because it will exist in the rhetorical shadows we can then never disabuse them of their bad ideas with dialogue and reason.
Quoting Pseudonym
You keep asking me to lay out how harmful "being exposed to an idea that one finds emotionally offensive" might be, and I've already given an answer: not very. We value freedom of speech because in order to predict the future accurately enough (and to then apply functional policies), the democratic public at large requires access to as much information as possible, and the freedom to debate (NOT the freedom to specifically and credibly call for violence, NOT the freedom to harass and bully, NOT the freedom to yell "Fire!" in a crowded police standoff). If we start banning ideas or the right to express them then we're not going to have all the information. You might consider yourself to be so well informed that you no longer need to ever consider certain ideas, but young people (tomorrow's you) aren't born with pre-existing knowledge, and telling them "some ideas are forbidden for your own good" doesn't seem like it would be helpful in making them into well informed voters.
Quoting Pseudonym
I haven't equivocated morality with the law, I was actually giving clear reasons as to why I think the current laws are adequate for dealing with the moral dilemma you're hung on. Anti-harassment laws clearly cover the example situations you brought up (i.e: being emotionally badgered to the point of suicide). Democracy is the system that I want to live in because it's the least worst system we've yet come up with according to the historical evidence, and democracy requires I have freedom of thought and be well informed. Banning an idea forever because we all agree it's a bad idea only works for about half a generation because young people are never made aware of why the ideas are actually bad.
Quoting Pseudonym
And you've failed to demonstrate to any reasonable degree that a measurable rise in suicide rates caused by exposure to emotionally disagreeable ideas is even existent, nor have you addressed the problems concerning the practical difficulty of ensuring that nobody ever gets emotionally offended (the subjective nature of offense means that we would need to ban just about everything).
.
Quoting Pseudonym Some people are offended when talk of marijuana legalization occurs, and yet many American states had the open discussion and came to a democratic decisions which were economically and medically beneficial to many individuals, and harmful only in the sense that a few people with old school prejudices got emotionally sour about it.
Yes we make decisions this way (democracy) and yes many of the decisions we make outweigh the emotional harm talking about these decisions incurs.
Quoting Pseudonym
How about disabusing them of their racism? How about showing them and audiences just how weak racist ideas and ideals really are when reason is applied to them. There are people out there who aren't yet "alt-right", and they're looking at your desire to censor "the alt-right" like you're terrified of their ideas, and that makes them more attractive. By not allowing racists to express their opinions and be debated in broad daylight (especially if a bunch of students invites them to speak on a stage rented from a university), people won't then get exposed to the ideals which naturally immunize them against those particular brands of ignorance. That actually makes them more vulnerable to those ideas in the long run.
Quoting Pseudonym
The important position of banning racist thoughts and statements to emotionally coddle everyone at all times?
Quoting Pseudonym
When do we reach that point (politically)?
Quoting Pseudonym
Nobody can know for certain what the impact of ideas will be, both in terms of emotional harm and real world benefit accrued. You cannot decide before hand what the impact of an idea is and how useful it will be; you're not all knowing-god. Which is why we need the right to free speech, to as you say, decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.
You started this thread in a deliberately clandestine way, referring to a 'movement', but would not say which, that was raising the right not to be offended, but hat's not what's got us bogged down though, as I've had many ethical discussions that have started out trying to define a general trend, they've generally sought to first define that trend and then move on to discussing the ethics without too much trouble.
What's got us bogged down here is that your failure to specify any particular movements has invited people to jump on an opportunity to signal how virtuous they are by speaking out in defence of free-speech, against some Orwellian nightmare of the Thought Police stamping out alternative ideas when no-one, and I mean absolutely no-one, in the public debate is suggesting anything of the sort.
The trouble with these internet forums is that only a small minority of posters are actually interested in practical ethics, the nitty-gritty of how to decide what a government or authority should do for the best in a particular situation. The rest see it as nothing more than a public declaration of their own values, a preening exercise, and what's worse, they presume others do as well and read that intention into everything they write.
I've sat on several ethics committees in my career and to be honest, I'm here because I miss the cut and thrust of the debate, but having to wade through this sea of virtue signalling to get to any actual practical issue is tiring to say the least.
If I might be forward enough to provide some advice on starting another debate about an ethical issue, First avoid stating that there's a general trend but not specifying any examples, then avoid asking "what do you think?", when the only relevant question in practical ethics is "what should we do?"
Who's argued for the censorship of potentially everyone else?
When we make structures in society to assist the disabled, do we abandon them because now everyone with a limp will get special treatment? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.
When we make laws to restrict people's freedom of movement do we abandon them because now the government can keep us chained to our beds if they want? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.
When we have laws to protect people from slander and defamation do we abandon them because now everyone who thinks they've been in the least bit criticised can sue? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.
So why, when people propose laws, or social trends, towards restricting the use of certain language and the platforming of certain ideas do you consistently create this straw man of a world gone mad with every slight offence being policed and virtually all debate shut down? What on earth makes you think we wouldn't be just as capable of applying exactly the same sense of proportion to claims of offence, exactly the same ability to weigh each case on its merits when people claim to be offended?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, we're not, no-one is talking about that. Despite the clandestine beginning, the topics that have been mentioned are; the repeated use of a personal pronoun opposite to the one a transgender person prefers, the banning of certain speakers with known racist or politically unsavoury views from university speaking institutions, and the offence taken at unwanted sexual advances within the MeToo movement. Absolutely no-one has suggested that a single indirect exposure to an offensive idea requires intervention. These are all repeated uses by society (or particular sections of it), of language that many people (virtually half the population in one case), find offensive in the expression of ideas which have been talked about since civilisation began. No-one is suggesting that the expression of ideas be banned off the cuff because one person is offended by them.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, no-one has mentioned banning an idea, the public debate has been entirely about denying platforms to speak at the very extreme, but mainly about restricting language use.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
For a start, this goes down exactly the same straw man as you've used before, no-one is suggesting banning ideas. But to take the point itself, it is not automatically true that a free ability to speak raises the amount of information in the debate. People who get up and propagate lies, for example, are not adding information to the debate, they are removing it, making it actually harder for people to see what the real issues are. Denying such people a platform assists proper rational decision making, not hinders it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Some people clearly think they do not, that's why I was asking you for your reason why you think they do. People are claiming that the lives of, for example, transgender people, are being harmed significantly by the repeated use of the opposite personal pronoun to the one they prefer. Where this activity is carried out by society as a whole, it is not covered by anti-harassment laws, yet (the argument goes) it is causing significant psychological harm for very little public benefit.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not relevant to the debate, but actually historical evidence has shown that small-group egalitarianism is the the least worst system, creating stable societies for several hundred thousand years before agriculture. But I'm not sure what this has got to do with the debate, is it another straw man for you to valiantly knock down, are we suggesting that the evil transgenders and anti-racists are calling for the dismantling of democracy now?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Are you really that naive to believe that people adopt ideas on the basis of a rational assessment, what world have you been living on for the last 200 years? People adopt ideas because they are part of the Zeitgeist, they're the "talked-about" idea of the moment, they're the idea their parents had and they're too lazy to think of anything else, it's the idea shared by someone they fancy and they want to get laid. Pretty much everything but actually thinking about it rationally. If you honestly think that ideas get accepted and rejected on their merit, then explain why ideas have consistently gone in waves of fashion. Have people's brains changed over time? Have people changed the way they reason? Or is it more likely that people have just got swept along by the latest craze - free-love, communism, anti-communism, the American dream, fascism... They're all just trends people follow for social reasons. If we want to have any influence of direction such trends go, then making a clear statement about how we tolerate them is an extremely effective way.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What? I thought your suggestion that people were denying the right to express ideas was crazy enough, who the hell said anything about banning thoughts?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is the non-sequitur at the heart of this problem. Stating that no-one can predict the harm or the benefit from the expression of an idea is a cop out. Someone has to nonetheless, we still have to decide whether to give someone a platform (if it is ours to give), we can't just equivocate and say we don't know. A decision has to be made.
You're talking as if language was the only means of communication, that some-one's right to express how they feel in speech is somehow the only defence against extremism. We have many ways of displaying and teaching our children how to be moral citizens, not least of which is by our behaviour, the moral decisions we actually make about who we want to talk too, whose ideas we find worth discussing, who we consider to have reached the level of politeness we expect of anyone wishing to take part in public discourse.
Yes, and all of this influencing is via the spoken word, thus, we can already predict that there shall be influencing through speech, and we can already predict which direction successful speech in favor of a given notion will take one. That the implications for people for full freedom of speech would be far worse than a highly dangerous social experiment is already next to proven.
Actually, it is you that is being nonsensical. Read what I wrote again. We don't have the right to murder someone else. We do have the right to life. We may have the freedom to kill, but that doesn't mean you have the right to kill, precisely because we have the right to life, which is the antithesis of the right to murder. Just as you don't have the right to limit other's free speech because you are offended. No one is saying you don't have the freedom to be offended, but you don't have the right to use that to limit the rights of others.
Quoting unenlightened
Actually, more nonsense from you. Do you bother thinking about what it is you are saying before you type it and submit it? If allowing racists on the sight gives an air of legitimacy, then why doesn't allowing anti-racists on the sight give them an air of legitimacy? You do know that when someone posts something racist, the anti-racists (which more than likely outnumbers the racists) will come out in droves and tell the racist why they are wrong, don't you? By allowing the anti-racists to argue against the racist you actually end up giving the legitimacy to logic and reason, by allowing free and open conversations to happen in the arena of free ideas. You seem to somehow think that by allowing a racist to post something gives them legitimacy, yet don't think that allowing the anti-racists to argue against doesn't provide them legitimacy. Does this forum legitimize every post made on it, or just the one's you wouldn't happen to agree with?
Racism would never stand by itself. There would always be counter posts to any racist post, and any serious posters would recognize that and not be deterred by one post where many other posts logically counter it. I could argue that serious posters in a philosophy forum are deterred when they see to much irrationality and a lack of logic and reason, or see that posts are edited or deleted based on some arbitrary, subjective rule.
Quoting unenlightened
When someone edits my, or someone else's post, that discussion isn't worth reading or participating in because you don't have the freedom to actually say what you want because of the fear of someone subjectively determining whether or not your post is offensive or not.
The sheer weight of irrationality hasn't seemed to stop the progress of science and how it has made our lives better - both rational and irrational people alike. Using the number of irrational people as an excuse to not be rational is simply intellectual laziness.
Have you tried an unmoderated site? If they were more productive, why wouldn't we be there?
No, you've got me wrong. Everyone seems to understand the phenomena I wanted to discuss pretty well. Sorry if you don't like the discussion. It's gone OK from my perspective. Thanks for the advice...
But this is exactly what I'm trying to say in my post to V above. I don't think people do understand the phenomenon. They think they do, which I why we've heard such vitriolic defences of the right to think and express ideas privately, the right to have meaningful, reasonable political debate to promote the well-being of society, but when looking at concrete examples, the whole argument is a fight against something that isn't there. That's why your failure to give specific examples was such an oversight, it allowed this kind of flag-waiving narcissistic exercise without any actual progress having been made on any real-world moral dilemmas.
I don’t think that’s a charitable read of what folks have said. I haven’t come away with the same impression. I try to be careful not to misdiagnose genuine passion for virtue signaling, as common as the latter is these days.
I don't think that would be a case of misdiagnosis. I wouldn't want you to think that I considered virtue signalling to be a universally bad thing. It think it often derives from genuine passion. It's just not a very efficient way to get ethical decisions made, especially in a discussion where pretty much everyone already shares those passions. I haven't heard anyone here say that free speech is rubbish and can be discarded at the drop of a hat for no good reason. Nor have I heard anyone say there should be no restrictions at all on free speech. So where does all the virtue-signalling get us? We still, it seems to me, just have a list of harms from restricting free expression and a list of harms from not which will be somewhat different in each case. Very little discussion has focused on comparing the two lists, and even then hardly going beyond personal opinion as to why one harm trumps the other.
Obviously we're not all utilitarians, but I've yet to hear a deontological or virtue-based argument either.
Because restricting the use of certain language limit's individual's ability to express themselves, and because using laws to systematically "de-platform" certain ideas from being spoken is tantamount to thought-policing. If a coalition of students/citizens want to rent a private theatre, invite a guest who has controversial views, and hear them speak, and you want the state to intervene and censor/ban them, then you actually are fucking with the freedfom of thought of some individuals in order to preserve the emotions of some other individuals.
There's no proportion to outright censorship, and there's no objectivity to emotional offense taking.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm referring to the discussion that you and I are having: I get rather confused then when you keep asking, in principle, at what point an individual's right to not be offended becomes more important than another individual's right to free speech. The only example you gave is that causing emotional offense can lead to suicide. If these are your chosen hills though, so be it.
Referring to someone by the pronouns of their choosing is the respectful course of action, but there's no law that says I have to be respectful. I will in fact happily use he, she, or they when asked, but I will not use quay/xey/zey or any other made up pronoun. I won't use made up pronouns because I refuse to accept an obligation to learn and remember an ever growing list of made-up words that are required to secure the emotions of people who have been trained to have an emotional breakdown when they don't get their way (if being referred to as quay is required for your happiness, I actually think you may need to be committed to a mental institution). If an individual calls a transsexual by the gender they do not identify with, intentionally, a single time, should they have just committed a crime?
If I intentionally refer to a woman as a man, it's possible she may be very offended and insulted. She may cry, question her body image/identity, but she probably will not call the cops on me just for calling her a man. If I follow that woman down the street calling her a man, and it's clearly causing her mental and emotional anguish to boot, then what I'm doing is textbook harassment. The mere fact that someone gets emotionally offended is not sufficient criteria to make any normative claims whatsoever about the action which caused the emotional reaction, otherwise anytime emotional offense is taken, an investigation would be required to determine "if the emotional harm in question is greater than the potential value resulting from allowing free speech". Really what I think you're asking is why I take free speech so seriously while I don't take the emotions of others very seriously at all (I care about truth, and emotions don't help me get there, free speech does). But the main reason is that the upward limit on possible emotional harm caused by allowing certain ideas to exist is far more insignificant than the amount of physical and all other forms of harm which history has demonstrated can easily be inflicted upon a population, by it's own government, when free speech is forbidden.
You're trying to create the best possible case scenario where we all tip-toe around one another's emotions out of respect and society works and everyone is happy, and I'm trying to avoid the worst case scenario where democracy is slowly eroded by the slow banning of ideas in the name of safeguarding the emotions of the sensitive.
Surely pronouns have nothing to do with democracy, but what about banning "racist" speakers who were invited by private groups of "racist" students who paid money to rent privately own theaters? The famous Milo/Shapiro protests have all been done under the banner of anti-racism and anti-fascism; In a world where being racist gets you summarily banned from making public appearances, the most powerful political rhetoric becomes "you're a racist" whether it's true or not. But again, even if they are racist, banning them is only going to give them publicity and allure. There's a genuinely racist alt-right faction growing right now (one that ive been trying to engage/combat) and their formation has quite a bit to do with the fact that "the regressive left" has utterly succumbed to the "as a white man, I cannot possibly deny the lived experiences of women of color who state I am their oppressor" syndrome. Remember when some BLM activists stormed a Bernie Sanders stage and threatened to shut it down if they did not get the microphone? That's how powerful the accusation of racism has become, and so, a new wave of social media whores (mostly men, to be clear) have decided to fully and openly adopt anti-political-correctness and in some cases outright racist ideals (such as wanting a white ethno-state) and will happily preemptively offend you, causing you to call them racist and ban-worthy, which then allows them to say "See everyone? They have no argument because we have the truth". At which point they've already peaked the interest of the audience, and the individuals who had the emotional breakdown look like over-sensitive idiots who are unable to buck up and have a debate.
If you're interested in using this as a case study for our disagreement, the following video is a quite recent "You-Tube" clash between two social media whores who happen to have massive degrees of influence over a fairly spread out cross-section of 15-40 males (specifically, conservative liberals vs genuinely racist ethno-nationalists). For you and me both, watching this video is like listening to nails on a chalk board (the stupidity contained therein), but for them and their followers it might mean the difference between gaining/maintaining semi-sane political positions or succumbing to the absolute intellectual retardation that is on offer. It's definitely "offensive" and wide spread calls to have the video taken down because it platforms racists have been made.
Even if you do not watch the video (I don't actually expect anyone to have the time), can you tell me whether you think the video should be taken down on the grounds that it's offensive racism and no political gain can possibly come from it? If so, do you recognize how banning Spencer in this way only makes people more curious about his ideas? And when they have to go looking for them in the darkened corners of the media, they don't then get exposed to informed objections.
I remain firm that even the most offensive ideas and speech needs to see the light of day even if only so that it can be ridiculed and destroyed.
P.S: regarding the #MeToo movement, I really don't think it's a good idea to conflate the morality of sexual advances/harassment/rape as they pertain to authority/subordinate relationships with the right to express honest political opinions...
Quoting Pseudonym
Denying someone the right to a private platform is up to whoever owns the platform, that said, what I'm arguing against is A) the legally mandated deplatforming of individuals who espouse certain unsavory ideas (which you seem to constantly suggest is O.K in principle) because it is utterly un-pragmatic and potentially dangerous to do so, and B) that there is no such thing as, nor should there be, "the right to not be offended" because offense taking is subjective in nature.
Quoting Pseudonym
Transgenders who do not "pass" as the gender they're conforming to experience this, and it can indeed be very hard for them. If a person is repeatedly subjected to use of their undesired pronoun by an individual who is knowingly causing them anguish in doing so, then we can construct a harassment case. If however, you expect everyone in society to always know before hand and to use the correct gender someone prefers (when perhaps they may appear ambiguous), then you're asking for an impossible task.
If you essentially want to make using the incorrect pronoun into a kind of illegal slur, then obviously that would lead to problematic litigation.
Quoting Pseudonym
You accused me of fallaciously equivocating free speech (that we have the legal right to it) with what is moral. The fact that democracy works best, historically, is why morally I support democracy, and the fact that free speech is a fundamental requisite for a functional democracy, is why morally I support free speech.
Regarding small group-"egalitarianism", we have evidence of stable hunter gatherer societies who frequently warred, raped, enslaved, and dominated one-another while individuals died around the age of 32 on average. But since there's 7 billion of us now, small group egalitarianism isn't even on the table anyway...
Quoting Pseudonym
Ummmmm..... The enlightened one?
If it's your position that the voting public cannot be trusted to form their own rational assessment based on the evidence then what would you have once we tear down democracy?
Quoting Pseudonym Individuals adopt ideas for their own individual reasons; they truly do. Since we generally share similar environments, we generally share "reasons". Why do politics change you ask? It's simple: changing circumstances; changing environment. When the situation you're in changes, rationally the best strategy for making your situation better would also change, right?
There's also this science thingamabob that's really been helping us get toward better ideas in addition to the slow progress made by various democratic states themselves.
Quoting Pseudonym So then tell me your prognosis. In what ways should we not tolerate which political speakers, where should we not tolerate them, and how do we identify them?
Quoting Pseudonym You're talking about smashing private soap-boxes because of the beliefs and ideas expressed by the speaker, are you not? (a privately rented theater, privately owned by a university is a "private soap-box").
Quoting Pseudonym Oh I see, in your view, denying people the right to gather and speak in public wherever possible isn't bad as long as it's not the total and outright banning of the ideas...
Quoting Pseudonym We also can't equivocate and just say "risk of using the wrong pronouns is like the risk of driving drunk, and so speech should require a license".
I think it's a much more reasonable position to say that freedom from emotional offense is not in and of itself a sound basis for a right, while the need to express one's belief actually is in a democratic system.
Quoting Pseudonym
There's already a large swath of self-styled intellectual rebels who will be intentionally impolite and offensive for the sole purpose of making you look silly when you then react and disregard them out of hand (the ethno-state supporting alt-right). The more you suggest that we should disregard ideas because of the politeness of the person or the flavor of the idea, the more you appear to fit their description that "they're afraid of the truth".
They need to actually be invited into the open so they can be thoroughly trounced by better ideas. That's kind of what the enlightenment was all about...
Very well said.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, I understand that the direction of these discussions in not in the hands of any one person and that if people want to simply talk about their gut feeling, or political opinion that's up to them, but I do miss chance to explore the difficulties of a real-world ethical issue with a wider group, and so I appreciate your direct use of actual cases.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Any ethical decision must be based on evidence, otherwise we simply have rule-by-guesswork and that does not help anyone. Most ethical decisions made by institutions are made on the basis of utilitarianism. Most boards of ethics will have a religious representative, but the only degree to which their actual religious tenets are taken into account is the extent to which people may be grossly offended, which is considered a harm. You may well disagree with utilitarianism (I don't know), but very few other ethical systems are actually defensible in democratic institutions, so I'm presuming it is the default system here. So, in order to make these decisions, we need a list of harms (with evidence) and a list of benefits (with evidence). All the evidence gathering is time consuming, and as early empiricism showed us, is prone to selection bias. So what we generally do first is set the parameters. Would an increase in suicides of transgenders linked to the misuse of personal pronouns be a significant enough harm for the government to intervene in enforcing/encouraging their proper use? Because if it wouldn't, we do not need to waste our time looking for any evidence that this is happening. The same is true of any other parameter. We establish first what would be the value of any harm whereat it would outweigh the benefit, and then we look for evidence to see if it is at that value. That is why I'm asking for the values first, it's just the way I normally work. If it's unsuitable for this format, then I apologise, I'm still getting used to using such a platform as this, not entirely sure it's suitable for me.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You've missed a few important ifs in your argument here. If the list were ever-growing, then it would indeed be a burden that might well outweigh the harms, and if the individuals had been simply 'trained' to have an emotional breakdown when they don't get their way, then the harms would indeed be too trivial to be of concern. So there is the first requirement for evidence. Personally, on this issue I am of the opinion that the greater harm is done to the transgender person by the therapist/transgender movement encouraging them to consider their gender and their pronouns to be a vital part of who they are. I believe that such an attitude is actually manufacturing excessively fragile individuals who place too much of their self-worth on the successful presentation of their image and we shouldn't be encouraging this by the use of special pronouns. But that opinion would need to be backed up by some evidence (which I don't yet have). Even then, it would not be that we should not restrict language use to protect people's emotional state. It would be that, in this case, restricting language use would be further harming people's emotional state and should not be done. solely on utilitarian grounds.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again this is rather taking a polemic view which I don't think the evidence has shown is warranted. It is perfectly possible (though difficult to prove outright) that much of what we take for granted as 'civilised' society is held together by our day-to-day levels of politeness and the thousands of acts of small polite acquiescence we all engage in on a daily basis to live peaceably with one another. Likewise, restrictions on certain freedoms to speak (inciting hatred, defamation, harassment, racial and sexually abusive terms, etc.) have all shown themselves to be very useful in stabilising society and none of these interventions, so far, have been any kind of 'slippery-slope' to Orwellian thought-policing. So no, I do not accept your argument that it is simply a given that people taking offence is automatically shown by history to be of less harm than the restriction of free speech. It is still about weighing the harms in each individual case, there are no absolute positions on this that I can see.
I will not quote sections of your approach to the de-platforming of racists, because I think the issue we have here is one of fundamental axioms. If you would reconsider the rough list of harms I outlined when I first tried to talk about the weighing exercise, the idea that denying these people a platform makes their ideas more attractive was in the list of harms, as was the idea that opportunities might be missed to counter their ideas with good arguments. But also on that list was the idea that providing any official sounding platform might give their ideas legitimacy, and that arguing with them as if we believed they had a point to make might encourage more extreme views (as many of these people simply enjoy being the maverick). So I understand you consider the evidence to be in favour of the harms caused by making their views more attractive and not countering them. I tend more towards the evidence being in favour of the greater harm being legitimising their views and inviting them to become more extreme (in trying to get banned, simply for the kudos).
Given the difficulty in trying to find conclusive evidence in this area (we can't simply run our future both ways and see what happens), I think we may simply have to agree to differ on this one. History is littered with examples of views given open platforms that have not been challenged, but instead grew out of control (Nazi Germany), as it is with ideas driven underground that grew by virtue of being repressed (Arab Spring). At the end of the day, this one will be a judgement call, from a utilitarian perspective. From a virtue ethical perspective, however, progress I think can be made. I would not tolerate that kind of language in my house simply as an expression of the virtues I hold to be important to my character, I don't see why YouTube should tolerate it on their website, nor why a university should tolerate it within their buildings, nor why, by extension, the democratic will of a population should tolerate it within their country. Sometimes our actions are expressions of our fundamental virtues and institutions like universities and democratic governments have just as much right to express their virtues by their actions as any person does.
The rest of your argument seems to centre on another area where I feel we will simply have to agree to differ on axiomatic grounds. Yes, I absolutely do think that "the voting public cannot be trusted to form their own rational assessment based on the evidence". That is why we have representative democracy, not direct democracy. We do not ask the public what they think the tax rate should be, we ask them which expert they would like to decide on their behalf. I believe the evidence is overwhelming that people do not make rational decisions the vast majority of the time, they are easily lead by charismatic or powerful speakers, regardless of the logic behind their rhetoric, and are not persuaded at all by calm rational disabusing of powerful emotional propositions. The powerful, emotional propositions win every time.
The only way to protect society from harming itself in the long run seems, no matter how unpleasant, to be to put some restraint on the ability of powerful charismatic speakers to say certain things which, those who have been elected to make such decisions, feel would be harmful were they adopted. I think trusting to a largely emotionally driven general public to resist the temptation of a powerful speaker like Hitler is taking an excessive risk, just to uphold a principle. It would be like starving to death in the wild, just to maintain one's vegetarianism. I admire your faith in the enlightenment, I do not share it.
I do participate in unmoderated sites, but that isn't to say those are the only sites I participate in and that this site doesn't have productive conversations at all.
Again, what you would be validating is free speech. What people espouse using their free speech isn't what you would be validating. This is a philosophy forum with many conflicting viewpoints engaging each other. It would be nonsensical for someone to come along and claim that your site is validating just one of those viewpoints. It would only appear that you are validating a particular viewpoint if you delete or edit posts of another viewpoint that is trying to show how that other viewpoint is faulty.
The major point of contention between us is posissibly to do with the intended versus the practical reality of "democracy".
Democracy, as I understand and define it, is any form of government which directly or indirectly represents the "will of the people" as a moral foundation and praxis of social organization and cohesion that entails a system of political participation. The "will of the people" as I understand and define it can be a bit ambiguous if scrutinized, but in general it is the uncoerced (in the compatibilist sense) political choices, leanings, and desires of individuals and the various degrees of consensus which emerge from the overall interactions of individual minds. Our various systems of voting, be they representative or direct, a republic of free states or inherently collectivist, are all "democratic" by definition because they allow for the voices of many individuals who seek to represent their own interests through some kind of vote, with the end goal of producing equitable and utility-laden directions for our society to take in short and long terms.
I don't expect you to take umbrage with how I have defined democracy, but I do expect you to maintain that this vision of democracy fails in practice, and is not how our own societies operate. As far as I can tell your ostensible objection to free speech in the cases we have outlined relies on whether not the voices of average people play a significant role in guiding politics, and therefore do not need to be well informed. I'm not sure if you might take the position that it is of net utility to ban controversial speakers in order to prevent the very rise of their ideology (which on it's own is a logical ouroboros given the lack of real influence that the beliefs of average people have), but you do take the position that it is of net utility to ban some controversial speakers and speech ("banning" in which degree you may clarify) to prevent the negative utility of emotional offense taking and the additional negative utility that emotional offense taking can lead to.
My understanding of your position: Charismatic leaders are in-fact the main locus through which democratic decision making actually flows. It is not the ideas held by individuals of a group that determines which ideas rise in political popularity, it is instead the persuasiveness of whichever speaker is the most charismatic that is the best predictor of political trends. Contrary to the beliefs of laymen and most contemporary political philosophers alike, the average individual is not capable of forming reasonable opinions concerning complex political ideas and must therefore be guided by the technocratic elite who happen to actually understand the world and are in a position to know [i]what's best and what should be forbidden. Ideas such as Nazism and other such controversies cause some individuals emotional turmoil, and since no possible utility can come from discussing these ideas, there's net utility to be gained by disallowing the communication of some controversial political ideas in some contexts.[/i]
I'm fairly certain that this is an accurate portrayal of your position, but before offering specific rebukes I'd like you to offer corrections to the above portrayal.
There is an additional discussion that we might have concerning utilitarianism and it's theoretical and real role in justifying contemporary politics, and I'm not sure if it should precede or follow the conversation on democracy yet at hand.
I will say that while it's true a utilitarian approach has had broad influence on the moral directions of, and which found, our societies, ultimately it's functional role is a kind of last-resort heuristic when our other moral systems cannot solve a given dilemma. The foremost moral idea in the foundation and practice of ethics and law in modern society is the notion of "individual rights". Per this notion, utilitarian analysis becomes objectionable when utility for the many comes at the cost of utility for the few (in a way which violates the equitable minimum requirements of safety and freedom that society must offer to every individual for it to be desirable to participate in and maintain). This idea perhaps began with the Magna Carta, which chartered the rights (of some) to not be unfairly taxed, persecuted (religiously and otherwise; habeus corpus), and disinherited by a central governing force, who in all these cases deemed it "for the greater good" that individuals be disabused of these liberties.
The enlightenment utterly cemented this basic thrust, (a constitution of inalienable rights) and added the idea that leaving things to one perhaps charismatic leader (a monarch) is actually unreliable and unacceptable. When we first took the main political reigns away from royalty did we instantly hand them over to charismatic rabble-rousers?
Well the French certainly did if Napoleon lives up to his name, but America didn't. A Congress was genuinely formed with the intention of having democratically elected officials represent the interests of their constituents, and indeed those officials do seem genuinely beholden to the political preferences of their constituents (or at worst, campaign donors).
You suggest that there is net utility in banning some charismatic speakers from some private platforms while allowing some other charismatic speakers (on the basis of the utility of the ideas themselves vs the negative utility of causing emotional harm via controversy). The sheeple-esque portrait of the average individual as enthralled to the nearest charismatic speaker aside, do we not need access to as much information as possible, even information in the form of bad ideas, in order to develop critical thinking skills and robust ideas, which are the very requirements of resisting charismatic leaders in the first place? In other words, aren't you conjuring a self-fulfilling prophecy by assuming average people are too stupid to engage in rational political participation and then suggesting that we therefore restrict access to certain ideas (in whatever form) for their own benefit? A analogy comes to mind: clipping the wings of a caged bird seems moral if you assume it's nature is to be caged.
Whether or not the enlightenment ideals of democracy (and it's founding notion of inalienable rights) is actually the modus operendai of society, it is in still the modus operendai to which we are currently striving to adhere. To suggest undercutting one of the very freedoms required to try and engage politically as we should per the values of democracy is no small request. You will need to undo the whole moral and ideological basis for our current society and supplant it with what essentially sounds like central ideological planning.
I realize there is a laundry list of other issues we still need to discuss, but it doesn't make sense to hash out disagreements in specific cases before clarifying our ideological differences.
The laundry list:
- Would censorship have stopped Hitler
- Did censorship incite the Arab spring?
- Should the public expression of Nazi ideas be tolerated?
- Does the harm of not using preferred pronouns outweigh the harm of making it a criminal offense?
- How do existing speech laws and proposed and allegedly "anti-free speech" laws differ?
I'll end it here rather than perhaps laying out my own moral platform (you seem to have arbitrarily chosen utilitarianism as the most suitable medium for out moral disagreement), as for the purposes of this thread I can more or less adhere to the position of enlightenment ideals which I have already laid out. Rhetorically speaking, the reduction in free speech you are proposing makes me revoke my signature from the social contract, because I deem the risk of the worst case scenario that it might bring about (which entails harm to myself) too great a risk to be accepted. As your position is presently framed you might say that the chance of the worst case scenario happening is very low and so statistically choosing to restrict free speech in some cases will net greater utility, but strategically I am of the mind to avoid the worst possible end results rather than risk it all in favor of a good chance at more utility.
Can you convince me that avoiding the worst possible case scenario in life is a worse strategy than accepting higher risks for a chance at a better best case scenario?
Your characterisation of my position is relatively accurate, with one exception "... the average individual ... must therefore be guided by [a group] who happen to actually understand the world and are in a position to know what's best and what should be forbidden.". In the long-term, I don't actually think democracy works at all, but that's definitely for another discussion. In the short-term, given the society we're in, I believe in representative democracy (just). That means that I do not think that the technocratic elite "just happen" to know what's best, they have been elected exactly for that purpose, to decide what's best. They have been chosen, by the population as the people who they would like to make those decisions on their behalf. That is what gives them the authority to do so, not some technocratic qualification.
Obviously there are also a few stray polemics ("contrary to the beliefs of ... most contemporary political philosophers" I would dispute, but I think that's probably too trivial a point to bog down the discussion with). Basically, it is correct apart from the point made above.
Obviously I don't expect anyone to automatically take an interest in every philosophical position proposed, but If you were interested in exploring this idea further, the anthropologist Clive Finlayson outlines the concept of 'Conservatives' (followers) and 'Innovators' (leaders) best I think. His ideas would be the place to start (if you were interested). It's not as simple as it sounds. The easy stereotype is of poor meek followers waiting for instruction from powerful luxuriating leaders, but for most innovators (according to Finlayson) it's not like that. Most are rejected from society and live at the outskirts, barely benefiting from it's products until their innovation happens to solve a problem caused by a changing environment, then they become leaders, briefly, before being rejected again once their ideas have become the norm. Anyway, that's probably too much of an aside, I just didn't want you to get the idea that I was in favour of rule by elite, it's not like that.
So, with regards to the use of Utilitarianism.
I agree that the social contract is founded on inalienable human rights, but I think that these are a meta-ethical position, not a normative one. This is best expressed by the example of free-speech (since that's the topic here). We have a 'right' to free speech, but that 'right' is commonly imposed upon. We may not incite hatred, we may not defame, we may not harass verbally, we may not swear or use sexual language in broadcasts before the watershed. Socially, we impose even stricter restrictions on free-speech. So rights are not actually inalienable after all, they are a definition ( and quite a lose one) of the sort of thing we class as 'good' - a meta-ethical position. Utilitarianism, as you know, is a strictly normative ethic, it does not seek to define 'utility', only provide a framework for how to achieve it. So when I say that utilitarianism is the default position for the ethical decisions of authorities, I'm talking about it in a normative sense, with the preservation of human rights being (a significant part of) the meta-ethical definition of utility. Balancing all these rights is where utilitarianism come in. Hence the lists of harms from either option are harms against human rights.
The point I'm making with the 'will of the people', if I could return to that briefly, is that I think the old paradigm of the oppressed (but ulitmately united) populous keeping in check the tyrannical monarch is outdated and no longer applies. Again a massive diversion, but to understand my position (should you wish to) you would have to also understand a considerable amount of related thought, maybe that's why this format doesn't really work, I don't know. Briefly then I think that advertising and media influence does have an affect on people, I think that since the 1920s, that effect has been to suppress critical thinking in order to overcome the economic problems of a stalled technological progress (we already had most of what we actually needed), and the result of nearly a century of this attrition is a population who are (to put it bluntly), by and large easily led and satisfied almost entirely with superficial commodity acquisition. Entirely unlike the population at the time of the Magna Carta. This is a long argument and not easily made in a few brief paragraphs, but I just wanted to outline the fact that there is a difference, in my mind, between the situation we have to deal with today, and the situation a few hundred years ago.
It is therefore slightly missing the point to say that democratic congressmen in America, do indeed reflect the will of their constituents. They certainly do, but the 'will of their constituents' has
been almost entirely manufactured by a few charismatic people, not necessarily the actual leaders themselves. Again, as another long and complicated aside, but necessary just to mention. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think the 'few charismatic people' are the same few in each case, nor that they actually know what they're doing. Often, the few charismatic people don't even know who they are and certainly are not leading society in one direction consciously, but that doesn't prevent them from doing so nonetheless.
Notwithstanding the above, I actually think that the virtue ethical argument for restriction (de-platforming) of racists views is actually stronger then the utilitarian one, so I don't think we need to be committed to a utilitarian framework to reach this conclusion. I don't tolerate racist language in my house as an expression of an objective I hold to be a virtue (non-discrimination). I don't see why any community should not be allowed to similarly express it's collective virtues by their actions.
I think a central part of our disagreement seems to stem from some fundamental axioms which I'm not sure we can surmount;
1. It seems you think all data counts as 'information' and all people are essentially rational (or at least should be treated as such). I think that the rhetoric of racists does not count as 'information', as it is almost entirely lies, and that people are not rational and treating them as such is dangerous. In my defence - ask yourself why we do not extend the vote to children or allow them to be exposed to violent or sexual images, and then try to apply that same logic to the population of adults, given the sense they have demonstrated themselves to have.
2. You think that the right to free-speech and to be allowed to take part in the democratic process by expressing ideas is more important an objective than allowing society as a whole to express it's virtues by their actions. I think that the collective expression of virtue is more important than the inclusion of fringe ideas which are unlikely to be of any utility. In my defence here, if I have a right to say what sort of talk I will accept in my house, why does a University not have a right to say what sort of talk they will accept in their buildings, or democratic community not have the right to say what sort of talk they will accept in their country?
3. I think perhaps you require less of a person to entitle them to a right than I do. I'm guessing that we both agree that rights are not automatic in that they can be infringed upon, (we deny murderers the right to freedom, for example). If one wishes the right to free-speech, one has a responsibility to ensure that such speech meets that standards of the rights that provide one with the facility. I don't think it makes logical sense to say that someone has the right to speak out against human rights. It is a self-defeating right. We must either say that human rights are inalienable or not. If they are inalienable then there are no circumstances under which we would consider their abandonment. If there are no such circumstances, then there is no argument to be heard from those wishing to do so. If there is such an argument to be heard, the rights are clearly not inalienable, they are up for debate, on the basis of their merits, including the right to free speech.
As to your final question. I'm afraid I don't think it's answerable in one simple way. It depends on the risks in either case, it depends how bad the worst case scenario is, how high the risks of striving for the best are and how likely the best is to happen.
Basically, in summary of your point about utilitarianism, I don't think one can have a purely deontological ethical system where duties conflict with one another. They must either be universal, or conflicts need to be resolved, which then requires some other form of normative ethic to decide which is more important. If rights are truly inalienable (meaning they must be worded in such a way as to not conflict with one another) then there is literally no point in hearing from anyone who advocates their restriction because their position has been ruled out as an option by the very rights we're using to allow them to have their say.