In the public domain, can we trust the government to censor "harmful" speech? — Purple Pond

There is no censorship in the US. In the UK there are circumstances under which censorship is legal. In the US, you can publish all you want, but you may face material penalties for doing so. That is, in the US the question as to censorship is almost completely irrelevant.

The system is a complex one that scholars spend their lives trying to understand. Its not something you're going to get clear answers from by just brushing over someones Top 10 cherry picked quotes from islam. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

So basically you are saying that I need to be a Muslim dedicated student of Islamic teachings to really understand what the texts might mean.

Do you apply the same critical approach to all books? Because I wonder what must be written in a volume to make you think that is not really ok for children to read and memorize and think that is God´s sacred word.

There should be no right of recovery and no right for me to stop this behavior? — Hanover

Correct. What there should be instead is a culture that doesn't believe things just because someone claims them. When you're officially prohibited from saying such things, then people tend to believe claims like that whether they're true or not. When we instead have a milieu where anyone is allowed to say whatever they like, then people don't believe things when all there is to them is a claim. That's bad news for religions, sleazy salespeople, con men, slanderers, false accusers, politicians, etc.--and even for people claiming what's essentially nonsense in the name of philosophy, science, etc. (which happens all the time, including right here in River City), and that's good news for us as a culture.

Just to add to Hanover's examples, what about a sustained written and verbal campaign of intimidation aimed at psychologically torturing a vulnerable target? Fine and dandy? — Baden

Yes. Fine and dandy. How is speech going to intimidate you? Not that intimidation should be illegal in any event. But if speech is intimidating you, you need to reassess how you're parsing speech.

Abusive speech can cause heart attacks. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Haha. Let's see the empirical data on that. (Notice how much power a mere claim has? You're just claiming nonsense.)

Re the old lady, why would speech intimidate her? It's just sounds.

I'll let @Mr Phil O'Sophy take my place because it seems like he knows much more about Islam than I do.

There are loads of examples of how speech can be intimidating. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

And let's not forget the effects of bullying. https://www.stopbullying.gov/at-risk/effects/index.html

Not to speak for @Terrapin Station, but sticks and stones...

and I think its common knowledge that high stress environments can cause heart attacks in the elderly. You're welcome to search the material on that. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

You're the one making the claim. If you want me to think it's not just bullshit, you need to present the evidence for it, at which point I'll examine the evidence . . .and tell you the problems with it, because it's not actually possible (partially due to the ethics of it) to do the sorts of experiments that would be required to establish causality for these things--not to mention that you're on a philosophy board and you're apparently unfamiliar with the problem of establishing causality in general a la Hume.

The psychological abuse study, for one says from the start that it includes "harsh nonphysical punishments." I'm not sure how they're defining that, and I can give you all of the details re the problems with the study re why it doesn't at all support what you want it to support when I have more time, but I'm also not going to waste my time with that if you're not interested in learning what the issues would be in this regard. If you want to learn and you demonstrate that, then I'll spend the time on it.

Is there any text that you would find totally inappropriate for school and for the education of children?

actually looked into the subject could hold the position that words can never cause anyone any harm ever. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Are you being unwillfully ignorant? I said from the start "I don't agree that any speech can be harmful, at least not in a manner that suggests control of speech."

So I didn't say that speech can't be harmful unqualified. How in the world are you supposed to be able to read a study (such as you referenced) and reach reasonable conclusions about it when you can't even get such a simple sentence right?

I don't frame any moral stances on "harm," because it's too vague of a term that potentially anyone could apply to anything, depending on their psychological status, their psychological fragility, etc. Hence why I qualified that statement in the way that I did. So I did not say that "words can never cause anyone any harm ever" unqualified.

We teach kids the basics of science in school. It does not infer from this that they are going to grow up and make atom bombs independently. Such conclusions are not reasonable. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

There´s a huge difference: we teach science with experiments and examples that allow children understand that what they are being taught is real, we don´t ask them to have faith or tell them that a place of eternal punishment exists for those who fail to understand how seeds grow or the heart keeps our blood moving.

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Is there any text that you would find inapropriate for school?
— DiegoT

Kama sutra probably isn't appropriate. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

I haven´t read it. Is there any call to kill infidels in that book? what makes it inadequate for children? I believe it was written by a monk and talks about sex and religion.

I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't agree that any speech can be harmful, at least not in a manner that suggests control of speech. — Terrapin Station

If anyone is unclear on what harmful speech is, it should be obvious that when anyone criticizes a group of people without any other reason than that they are different in ethnicity, gender or culture, it is hate speech. Any criticism against a group of people should be based on solid reasonable arguments that can't be disputed easily. — Christoffer

I am much closer to Terrapin Station's position than Christoffer's.

I'm not in favor of banning hate speech. I am a member of a group which many people dislike, loathe, hate, disparage, ridicule, consider inherently disordered, sinful, etc. -- gay men. Gay men have come in for what Christoffer calls "hate speech" because we prefer to have sex with other men; often display our preference publicly, and sometimes parody women (drag). Some gay men are swishy. Not only do gay men like having sex with other men, we quite often have sex with many other men. We are also (sometimes) well organized.

Don't I want protection from hate speech? No, not particularly. I do not require that people must think homosexuality and homosexual activity equal, desirable, and deserving of respect. What I want is not to be physically attacked by someone who dislikes gays. Say what you want. Words won't hurt me but clubs and rocks are another matter.

Why should I tolerate hate speech? Banning hate speech isn't just a slippery slope on the way to widespread censorship and censorious policing of expression. It makes law out of some version of politeness. The rules of etiquette should not rule speech. Banning is a restriction on appropriate (as well as inappropriate) speech: There are groups who "are different in ethnicity, gender or culture" and who deserve criticism. For instance, gay men can be appropriately criticized for practicing promiscuous unsafe sex. Young black men - and perhaps urban black culture as a whole -- can be appropriately criticized for the amount of black-on-black violence. Very conservative white men can be criticized for their fondness for the Confederate Cause and for engaging in sometimes violent demonstrations. Young, privileged leftist white men and women (and other ethnicities) can also be criticized for sometimes violent demonstrations and for attacking people for having what are often rather innocuous opinions.

I want to be free to criticize people and their cultures whatever their ethnicity or sex. Promiscuous high risk sex among gay men, promiscuous high risk gun use resulting in deaths, beating up blacks and Jews, or shutting down discussion on campuses are all worthy of criticism. I want to be free to publicly criticize rich people, whether they are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, or atheists. A rich black woman is no more above criticism than a rich white man.

We either have free speech, or we don't.

Go back and read what I wrote. I never claimed that Nazis came to power ONLY by limiting free speech. They used violence against anyone who spoke negatively about the party. THAT is limiting free speech — Harry Hindu

What I thought you were suggesting was that this was what was done after they took power. That was my mistake.

That isn't what I was saying. I said the best way to combat Nazism is by letting them express their ideas and then expose their ideas to criticism. Not only that, but it's always nice to be able to know what your neighbors think and where they stand. — Harry Hindu

I think this is the main thing I found startling, and I'm not even advocating for further free speech restrictions on this basis. This makes a number of huge assumptions based on idealized notions of rationality. You seem to think that Nazis (or fascists and the extreme-right more generally) honestly present and articulate their views and people weigh those in a fairly unbiased manner. That's surely not true, just take even lesser right wingers like the standard GOP talking points on any number of issues. Illegal immigration is framed in terms of diseased immoral peasants and/or an invasion by a foreign army storming over the border to commit rape, theft, murder, drug sales and steal jobs, all supposedly more than the citizens of the country. And what does this do to so-called the typical conservative and their views (or even so-called independents, I suspect)? Do they think these claims through? Or do they instead swallow them more or less whole because they already agree with the conclusion that they don't want any more illegal immigrants? They've already started down the path to fascism, and even falling short of that they're made into a useful bloc to prop up those with extreme RW ideologies, arguments be damned. Arguments against them are immediately seen a the political machinations of liberals who hate America and want white people to be a minority.

This holds for any number of issues, people of every ideology don't really listen to the other side (not that this is always unwarranted). People have their views and generally hold to them pretty strongly, with change coming often for personal reasons, not rational arguments in a public forum or with the neighbors. I mean I ask you, how often have you changed a significant political view based just on an argument someone gave you? Or how often have you seen people you know change in this way? Maybe one thinks themself out of some things but I suspect that's because we value our own discovered insights over the arguments of others. This is why I think it's a mistake to found belief in very liberal free speech on the basis of the counterfactual idealizations to be off base. They aren't true and they make it too easy to argue against it. Why not just argue for the principle of the thing itself? (Not that I'm coming down on you here, just trying to explain why I find it weird).

A grown man, calling children the c word, the f word, the t word, etc etc, like the most foulest things you can think of, outside of the school through the fence on public property.

And the police not having the power to do anything. He is only using speech, and we either have free speech or we don't. Therefore we can't arrest him, and because he's on public property we can't do anything at all. We could ask him to move politely, but so long as he was only verbally abusive, he's protected by absolutest free speech laws and there is no crime being committed. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Your scenario may seem bizarre, wild, extreme... but actually it isn't all that far out. Some people will engage in this sort of behavior--not all that often, but not rarely either. Some of them are deranged, some of them are hateful bastards. Some of them are besides themselves with rage (over god knows what). What can the police do?

The police are usually not without recourse. He could be ordered to lower his voice. He could be told to move. He could be accused of being a public nuisance, disturbing the peace, blocking a public sidewalk, interfering with a government function (education) or some such thing. The police might act on their own, but more likely they would act on the basis of a complaint from the public.

His speech, per se, isn't the problem, here. It's the loud volume at that particular place. The same thing would probably happen to him if he were at the same location, screaming verses from the Koran or the Bible, Tropic of Cancer. or Paradise Lost. Behavior like this seems deranged.

Adults have, on a number of occasions, arrived at schools being integrated to scream epithets at the black children entering the school. They were protesting a change in policy to which they were very opposed. Were the children in those situations totally traumatized by hearing bad things screamed at them? Not too traumatized, because black parents had prepared their children for what would happen at the school. It's one thing to have people screaming at you and you don't know why, and quite another to know exactly why they are screaming at you.

We either have free speech, or we don't — Bitter Crank

thats a black and white fallacy right there buddy. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

If the principle of freedom of speech is not protected in its practice, then it will eventually be whittled back to "the principle of convenient, allowable speech" which is not free speech.

Although I am sympathetic to the sentiment you put forward, I think it overlooks circumstances that would clearly need restricting when it comes to overtly aggressive speech that deems to threaten an individual. Such as the elderly, the disabled, children. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

There are limitations on speech: "The Court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment, though it protects freedom of expression, does not protect dangerous speech. In the decision, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that no free speech safeguard would cover someone "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Aggressive speech is not the same as dangerous speech (at least as I understand "aggressive" and "dangerous".) It's quite possible that a Neo-Nazi might yell at some people ""You old Jews should've been made into soap." Or "Hitler knew what to do with cripples!" yelled at someone in a wheel chair. Very offensive and provocative, certainly. But probably protected.

In 1977 The American Civil Liberties Union defended the American National Socialist (Nazi) Party in its bid to hold a march in Skokie, IL, a Jewish suburb of Chicago where many Holocaust survivors lived. It is a celebrated First Amendment case, which the National Socialists won -- in a decision by the Supreme Court.

[caption] Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, holds a rally in Marquette Park at 71st Street and Sacramento Avenue on Aug. 27, 1972, in Chicago. The Tribune reported Collin telling the crowd of 300, “The black revolution has taken over in all of the large cities in this country except Chicago and it’s up to the white, Aryan people of this city to keep white ethnic neighborhoods like this one together!” (Walter Kale / Chicago Tribune)

The Nazis were a very small group. There was also a black-and-white racial issue lurking in the background (the National Socialists said they were protecting white communities from encroaching blacks).

So, should a group of Moslems wish to march through a gay community carrying signs that homosexuals were doomed to hell, you would have that right.

So, it's fine and dandy to psychologically torture vulnerable targets with threats and intimidation and that shouldn't be controlled. It's their own fault because they should just... what? Toughen up? You don't understand psychology and you don't understand humans. Typical of an ideological absolutist stuck in their favourite meme.

Look, if you're going to consider legally controlling anything, you look at intention and effect. So, for example, if the intention of a man who regularly calls a young woman living alone and threatens to come to her apartment and torture her to death is to destroy her mental health and cause her suffering, and the result is her mental health is damaged and she suffers, why would we not legally protect the victim? What advantage would occrue to society in not allowing the law to step in in extreme cases? The point here is that your hand waving cannot make the reality that speech can seriously harm and is often intended to seriously harm go away. You need to deal with that and then justify why these cases—where the level of malicious intent and potential harm is high—do not merit attention by the law when even minor physical assaults that cause no lasting harm do. You haven't done that and so as yet you have no case.

If the intimidation involves threats, revealing personal information, slandering, or making impossible for you to communicate (like hacking attacks to your website) this is punishable by law. — DiegoT

I know. And that's how it should be, which is what I'm arguing in contrast to the absolutist position.

Freedom of speech is a control issue. Whether it's control via the government/laws or simply social pressure doesn't matter. Control is control. — Terrapin Station

So how is it any different from your attempt now to control people by social pressure? You're a free speech absolutist and you're arguing on a public forum with the obvious intent of convincing others so that there will be more free speech in society. If a option to increase free speech arose in some manner, I presume you'd use what power you have to bring it about, right? I don't understand why you think controlling what other people say is a bad thing, but controlling what they do isn't.

When you're officially prohibited from saying such things, then people tend to believe claims like that whether they're true or not. When we instead have a milieu where anyone is allowed to say whatever they like, then people don't believe things when all there is to them is a claim. — Terrapin Station

Do you have any evidence for this at all? You seem to be hanging quite a lot on this empirical claim without any support being advanced for it.

So, it's fine and dandy to psychologically torture vulnerable targets with threats and intimidation and that shouldn't be controlled. It's their own fault because they should just... what? Toughen up? You don't understand psychology and you don't understand humans. Typical of an ideological absolutist stuck in their favourite meme. — Baden

First off, if S says, "It should be legal to murder others*," that doesn't imply that S doesn't understand anything. You're concluding that just in case x is understood by any arbitrary S, then S will reach moral conclusion y about x. That's false, however.

(*Ignoring the Aspieish counter that murder is conventionally defined as illegal killing.)

It's really the second half of my post that's most important. I see you hand waving on the issue of potential harm through verbal means. Speech acts are nonetheless acts and acts (wrt legal responsibility) need to be assessed in terms of harm and intention to harm, no?

Do you have any evidence for this at all? You seem to be hanging quite a lot on this empirical claim without any support being advanced for it. — Isaac

We've had a ton of evidence of it lately with all of the sexual assault/rape claims that have no evidence other than a claim, but where accusers are believed by virtue of making an accusation, and where people have commented that if the claims weren't true, the accusers would be in hot water themselves legally.

It's really the second half of my post that's most important. I see you hand waving on the issue of potential harm through verbal means. Speech acts are nonetheless acts and acts (wrt legal responsibility) need to be assessed in terms of harm and intention to harm, no? — Baden

I don't frame any moral stance simply on the notions of harm or suffering. They're way too vague, and people can feel harmed or feel that they're suffering in response to any arbitrary thing, which would wind up making everything illegal. (If one feels that it's sufficient to make something morally problematic and to suggest it should be prohibited if someone feels harmed or feels they're suffering because of it.)

Additionally, speech can't be shown to be causal to any particular harm, because regardless of the speech in question, we could take two different people and expose them to the same speech and they'd react completely differently. That's not how causality works. If hitting one billiard ball in manner x "causes" another billiard ball to smoothly roll into pocket y, but hitting another billiard ball in manner x "causes" a third similarly positioned billiard ball to bounce in the opposite direction, then hitting a billiard ball in manner x isn't the cause of the subsequent actions after all--something else is the cause.

With speech, how someone parses it, the meaning they assign, etc. (and you have to have a correct ontology of meaning for this) are all far more important factors.

also, doesn't your previous argument rely on the idea of causality? for example: — Mr Phil O'Sophy

No, that's not about causality. Holy moly must you have problems understanding logic if you're reading conditionals as causal statements.

Not that I'm endorsing Hume's views, by the way, which is another reading comprehension fail on your part. I'm just saying that you're on a philosophy board and you're apparently unfamiliar with those issues.

where is this evidence then? — Mr Phil O'Sophy

In people saying what I just noted. I couldn't care less if you're familiar with that or believe it, so I'm not going to go searching for quotes online.

when your own response deflects from every single point I make, focuses on one particular part of the argument, and then make an absolutely absurd statement in response as what I can only assume is a deflection tactic. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Should anyone be surprised that your response here has nothing to do with understanding logic?

How are conditional statements not completely reliant upon causality? — Mr Phil O'Sophy

If it snows tomorrow, then Tom will do a painting of Bozo the Clown.

You think that's claiming that the snow will cause Tom to do a painting of Bozo the Clown, so that Tom couldn't choose to do otherwise?

Dude you literally ignored everything that came before that which included the logical refutation of your statement. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Logical refutation of what statement?

You can't understand five-word sentences I type. I'm not going to type longer things that you won't understand just because you typed more.

You're the one making the claim. If you want me to think it's not just bullshit, you need to present the evidence for it, at which point I'll examine the evidence . . .and tell you the problems with it, — Terrapin Station

And as I just said, I couldn't care less what you believe.

I said, "If you want me to think it's not just bullshit"--well, maybe you don't care what I think.

As I noted after that, it was a set-up anyway, because it's not possible to causally demonstrate that speech is causal to such things. There are a number of reasons for that, including both ethical and logistical problems with executing the sorts of experiments that would be necessary.

speech can't be shown to be causal to any particular harm, because regardless of the speech in question, we could take two different people and expose them to the same speech and they'd react completely differently. — Terrapin Station

"physical assault can't be shown to be causal to any particular harm, because regardless of the assault in question, we could take two different people and expose them to the same assault and they'd react completely differently."

Your idea as expressed above seems to the core of your case, but can you see now how the argument fails to make any clear distinction between harmful speech acts and other types of harmful acts which I presume you are not calling to be legalized? Also, you seem to reject the general principle that the complement of the accordance of rights is the burden of responsibilities including legal responsibilities. Where do you stand on that? If you think rights in the case of speech acts should be accorded without any legal responsibilities at all, you've again made no case for that except the failed argument above.