Not if it's an absolute. How's about something along the lines of "you can say whatever you like, but there will be consequences", which may include exclusion from teaching jobs or serving the public jobs, or broadcasting jobs, or entry to football matches, or being sued, or arrested for harassment, or being called an alt right apologist, or some such?

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. — unenlightened

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.

Your rights cannot override someone else's. — Harry Hindu

Nonsense. My right not to be murdered overrides your freedom to murder me. You don't have that right.

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. — 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.

You seem to have an unfounded confidence in understanding other people's positions before they speak. — Roke

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.

To clarify, let me put it in terms of numbers. Suppose we assign the harm that will result from denying the person a platform to speak a value of 10.

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.

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? — Harry Hindu

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 think this exchange is a good example to use as a segue into a more nuanced point.

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.

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, — JustSomeGuy

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?

I see an important distinction to be drawn between 1) expressing or clarifying an idea vs 2) repeating a fully communicated idea ad nauseam. — Roke

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?

"Only" is overly strong language, a tendency towards being less offended should we respond with our felt valid counter argument is closer to the mark, and that might only be should we consider there has been a compromise of original position as a result. We do n`t require examples, do we? - If somebody, perhaps through the media, accused you of having regular sex with kids you could of course,offer up a counter defense should the media still be interested, your version might not prevail however, but even should it, you would have done unnaturally well not to have been offended at all at any point, do n`t you think. Do you still want to use this term of yours "only"? Things are set up just right the way they are, generally when you move just one brick of a social political construct many others work loose, and tamper much more than this and a significant part of that wall can come crumbling down. If we were to make alterations merely out of not entirely understanding why the particular construct that we have already arrived at is working just about as well as it is possible for it to work, all those millions of human interactions which had arrived us there would have been trashed.

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.

Yes, but should they question those ideas without actually questioning them without a subject change where else can one go?

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. — Pseudonym

I haven't moved the goal post, I'm clarifying where it actually rests. To be additionally clear, we're talking about "protecting people from the harm caused by mere exposure to communications containing views they find offensive", we're not talking about, for instance, the permittance of an ideology which itself advocates harm, but very specifically, the permittance of ideologies that causes one or more individuals emotional trauma with mere exposure to it.

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...

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. — 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.

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? — 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.

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. — 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.

Yes, but you've still failed to demonstrate an advantage to that process which outweighs the harms it might cause — 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).
.

"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?" — 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.

Are we really going to gain anything by inviting the far-right speaker to the table to air his racism? — 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.

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. — Pseudonym

The important position of banning racist thoughts and statements to emotionally coddle everyone at all times?

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. — Pseudonym

When do we reach that point (politically)?

How harmful is the offence taken? And; how much benefit is likely to accrue from the ideas being expressed? — 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.

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). — Roke

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?"

the censorship of potentially everyone else — VagabondSpectre

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?

we're talking about situations where a singular indirect exposure to an offensive idea and the emotional harm that renders, not instances of legitimate harassment. — 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.

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. — 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.

If we start banning ideas or the right to express them then we're not going to have all the information. — 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.

Anti-harassment laws clearly cover the example situations you brought up (i.e: being emotionally badgered to the point of suicide). — 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.

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, — 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?

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. — 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.

The important position of banning racist thoughts and statements to emotionally coddle everyone at all times? — 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?

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. — 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.

Your rights cannot override someone else's. — Harry Hindu

Nonsense. My right not to be murdered overrides your freedom to murder me. You don't have that right. — unenlightened

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.

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. — 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.

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. — 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.

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. — Harry Hindu

Have you tried an unmoderated site? If they were more productive, why wouldn't we be there?

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... — Pseudonym

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.

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? — Pseudonym

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.

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. — 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...

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. — 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.

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. — 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.

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? — 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...

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? — 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?

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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. — 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.

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. — 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?

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. — 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").

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? — 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...

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. — 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.

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 behavior, 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. — 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...