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This really does seem to be the basic "it's ok when I do it, crazy when the enemy does it" statement. Not uncommon, but as a principled person who has fought against censorship from all directions I disagree with it.
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
No, not really. As I saw it, the question was more like whether moral principles like "don't persecute people for their speech" are instrumental or axiomatic. My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech will lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
Indeed, you can approach that premise just as easily from a consequentialist framework (ie you may be willing to trade some censorship against a greater good) as a deontological one (ie you will hold yourself to a rule of never, under any circumstance, suppressing speech). I will recognize it as a moral principle you hold in either case.
It is not impossible to justify short-term right-wing censorship based on a consequentialist pursuit of freedom of speech. For example, we have "culture war acceleriationists" mounting arguments of that kind elsewhere in the thread, talking about the need to demonstrate MAD to return to a stable equilibrium later down the line. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they hold free speech as a moral principle, even as they advocate to suppress it in one particular context. But this is not what @crushedoranges was saying. crushedoranges was saying that he'd abandoned his (so-called) principles because holding them had "amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades" for his political tribe. That's not an argument that suppressing some speech now is the best way to maximize free speech later. That's an admission that guaranteeing intellectual freedom was never a goal he believed in for its own sake, just a means to secure unrelated goods for his "side", who naturally ditched it when it failed in that task.
Fair enough, crushedorange's comment indicates pretty clearly that in his specific case, he abandoned his principles. An excessively charitable reading would be that he learned that his naive implementation of free speech principles actually harmed free speech and, as such, abandoned those principles and replaced them with ones that would increase free speech. But there's no way to actually figure out if he's upset that following his previous principles meant that free speech as a principle was being failed, or he's partisanly upset that following those meant that his side was losing, and though the former would be charitable, the latter seems far more likely.
But on this:
This seems like a straightforward way of restating what I said:
If a commitment to free speech doesn't count as a "moral principle" if you implement it by taking action that leads to more people being more free to express themselves instead of taking action that leads to any particular instance of someone you observe speaking being unpunished, then that's just straightforward supremacy of deontology over consequentialism as a way of doing morality.
But that's not what I was trying to say at all. Rather, I was saying that a commitment to free speech only counts as a moral principle in of itself if you place terminal, axiomatic value on free speech, and not merely instrumental value. If you undertake a course of action which is intended to "lead to more people being free to express themselves" in the long term at the cost of some censorship now, then you are indeed a consequentialist and motivated by a moral principle of commitment to free speech. The distinction I'm making is between that scenario, and an outwardly-similar one where the consequentialist is only judging expected outcomes based on non-freedom-related criteria; where he only defends or abandons free speech as a means to those unrelated ends, without assigning inherent moral value to it one way or the other.
Compare opinions on the sanctity of human life. You can be a consequentialist who believes that killing human beings is wrong; equally you can be a consequentialist who holds no such principle, but believes that causing suffering is wrong, and murder needs to be outlawed because permitting wanton killing leads to a societal breakdown and an increase in suffering for the living. Either consequentialist might support courses of actions which involve killing people in particular circumstances. It's just that one will consider the murders an evil which is only permissible if a greater good balances it out, while the other views killing as value-neutral, to be permitted or banned only as a matter of instrumental policy in the quest to prevent suffering.
Thanks for clarifying. Your comment makes sense. Your belief that crushedorange's comment above isn't a case of action which is intended to "lead to more people being free to express themselves" seems almost certain to be true based on humans in general and my vague, fuzzy memory of his comments in the past specifically.
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By this standard no one except dead martyrs have moral principles.
No, that doesn't follow. You can still exercise good faith, ie trust that people's stated moral principles as real unless proven otherwise, no martyrdom necessary.
To put it another way, it's fine to hold moral principles that do bring you material benefits as a bonus. It's just that if the benefits dry up, and you give up on the principles, then we can state pretty confidently that you never held them for moral reasons in the first place.
I overstated, then. I think your definition of moral principle requires a willingness to be martyred, literally or metaphorically (say, career, social life, tolerating being the acceptable target of hatred, etc), and exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly.
There's a significant gap between benefits drying up and 'costing you dear,' though.
Let's take two moral principles that I think we might agree the average "normie liberal" of 2008 could have been said to hold: free speech is good, and racism is bad. As it turns out, both of these were quite ideologically constrained for most people- only some free speech is good, and only some racism is bad.
On one hand, I still think both are good principles to have. On the other, holding them in the social climate of the last 15 years makes one into something of a punching bag. If saying "free speech is good" plays a role in making it so academics and journalists have no repercussions for calling people that look like me cancerous goblins that made deals with the devil, my willingness to think free speech is good dwindles rapidly.
Does this mean that my thought of "free speech is good" is not a true moral principle? So be it, it's not a moral principle. I think it is good in theory but the tradeoff cost can and has been reached.
I think many people intellectually hold principles that strongly. Perhaps, under duress, they would break. But they would recognize themselves to be acting in an immoral manner. They would feel guilty. They would continue to believe that it would have been more ethical of them to stick to their guns, even if they made excuses for why it wasn't that bad of them to have fallen short of that ideal. All of which I find to be very different from openly saying "holding this belief became inconvenient for me, so I gave it up". The former is flawed human nature failing to live up to its genuinely-held moral principles; the latter is giving up on the idea of having moral principles at all.
I can imagine scenarios where I could be coerced into taking actions that clash against my moral principle that e.g. torture is wrong; but I cannot imagine any scenario where the pressure would result in me surrendering my belief that torture is wrong at the abstract level. I would still consider my actions to have been wrong, and someone who had resisted the pressure to be morally superior to me.
This is an excellent explanation and example of its application ... though, as an aside, my opinions are 180 degrees off from yours on the specific example.
At the abstract level, torture might be fine. History is full of war criminals and psychopaths who pretty clearly deserved to be tortured, and if extra suffering for them were also to elicit information that could save innocents or even just potentially deter others who would otherwise someday do as much damage to innocents, that's a win-win.
It's in the realistic messy practical scenarios that all the reasons for an absolute ban on torture take precedence. An absolute ban is a Schelling point in a way that "except when it's really okay" can't be; the risk of mistakenly torturing innocents may outweigh the benefits of mostly torturing the deserving; the damage done to the torturer's psyche makes them a dangerous person to have in a position of that much authority even if selection bias didn't make them too dangerous to begin with; the damage done to the torturers' culture may erode the rule of law or imperil peaceful future coexistence with an offenders' community; etc. etc.
Oh, I don't think we disagree as much as you think; when I spoke about coercion/pressure to commit torture, I was very much picturing something unglamorous and "selfish", not a "torture a terrorist into releasing vital information" trolley problem, or even judicial arguments about deterrence. I'm talking about a scenario where even by cold hard utilitarian analysis, refusing would still be the moral thing to do - but where many ordinary, well-intentioned people would probably give in, and even you or I cannot be entirely sure what we would do. Say, some Saw-style thing where a sadist kidnaps you, tortures you a bit, then pushes you into a locked room with a bound victim and orders you to torture them even more severely, or else he'll torture you some more instead - though still not quite as badly as what he's asking you to do to the other guy.
That being said, we still disagree around the edges, insofar that I don't think anyone ever deserves to be tortured in a vacuum, even the worst POS you can imagine. I'll only go as far as saying that if you need to torture information out of someone to save more lives/prevent more suffering, then it is more acceptable to torture an evil man than an innocent; but we're talking about a spectrum of necessary evils.
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Okay, this is much more clear on the distinction and I'm glad we stuck through the conversation to reach this point. Thank you.
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Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
lol, lmao even like, you can have that self-narrative for yourself, and that's cool but where were you in the past twenty years? you haven't done anything. Now the right has the stick of power and you retreat to principled liberalism? I don't buy it for a second. Show me your scars. Your medals. Your badges of honor that would have made you a pariah for twenty years. You don't get to claim stolen valor to defend the parasites of academia. You haven't fought for shit.
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal? You are going on these highly emotional and extremely militant rants and assuming that this person is retreating to liberalism for tactical reasons rather than, you know, just being a liberal.
Leftists have, indeed, done some real damage. For example, by supporting soft-on-crime policies. I'm no fan of such delusional ideas. But it seems to me that you are just lashing out blindly. You might do better if you describe specific leftist policies that have damaged you, and if you also do not automatically assume that people who criticize you are part of what to you is the enemy tribe.
Sure. Principled liberals have battle scars from running into reality, and magicalkittycat is neither indicating or claiming any, while repeatedly rejecting other people's observations on sophistic grounds in ways that classical liberals aren't exactly known for, even as he denies or ignores historical dynamics that principled liberals were publicly conceding for decades.
MKC speaks as a leftist assuming the mantle of a liberal, which has been a standard dynamic for decades, not as a classical liberal.
Is there anyone here on The Motte whom you do consider a principled liberal? And beyond The Motte, is there an example of a public figure whom you consider to be a principled liberal?
Sure. Names will be withheld to protect the
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You can only be a principled liberal if you've been oblivious to the progress of the discourse of the past decade or so. (And indeed, I was right: they were just too young to have lived through the events of the oughts.)
And although their lack of exposure to these seminal events may give them a belief in liberal idealism, it doesn't incline me to take them seriously. When you start going on about 'we freedom fighters' there's a lot of 'who, whom' to be asked about.
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They're so rare, it's like finding a unicorn! Skepticism thereof may be wrong but certainly not surprising.
How do you define a "principled liberal"? Liberals typically have principles beyond "freedom of speech" and recognize that important principles sometimes conflict. Does being "principled" require a naive "Rank principles in order of importance and act based on that ranking." method of conflict resolution?
Mostly I was being cheeky and don't have a solid, well-thought-out definition of what it should mean.
I don't think it requires a naïve or writ-in-stone ranking, but one should, if trying to be principled, be able to articulate why they may rank principles a certain way and explain what may seem like unprincipled exceptions to someone else. In my experience not many liberals that claim to be principled are terribly effective at communicating reasoning behind their indifference to certain offenses or otherwise selectiveness of care.
That's fair. I do wonder how much of that is due to not being principled versus not being effective at communicating in general though? Effective communication skills aren't that common, particularly at the higher bar of being effective at communicating with an at least partially adversarial audience.
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Well, I more or less am one, and for obvious human emotional reasons I enjoy spending time around other ones, so subjectively to me, while I do find them unfortunately much much less common than I would wish, at least to me they don't seem so rare as finding a unicorn.
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Interesting enough, I get the same exact sort of thing from censoring leftists! I was constantly hated on and accused of secret hypocrisy and conservatism for pushing back on things like cracking down on protestors in colleges for saying that people who do crime while protesting should be arrested while people who don't do crime shouldn't be.
It's interesting I've held the same belief and had people on both sides get angry at me.
I've had the same experience with both types of militant *-wing people.
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20 years ago I was a young child, I'm not sure what I could have done. Too busy with stuff like Pokemon ya know, but I don't think I can blame kid me for not paying attention to the greater world much.
But if you're asking what I've done before about leftist censorship, it's the same thing I'm doing here. Encouraging my fellow Americans (assuming you are one) to embrace free speech and free expression even of ideas they don't like.
Censorship doesn't make dissent go away, it just makes it hide in the shadows. The leftist war on ideas didn't win, and if you have a right wing war on ideas you won't be winning in the long run either. The censors tried to silence heliocentrism, they tried to silence evolution, germ theory, genetics, atomic theory, etc, they lost. The books can burn yet ideas can always be reborn.
Well, good luck with that. It won't work. If you're young as you say, you haven't yet experienced the crushing disappointment of realizing that the institutions that ostensibly protected these things have all been hollowed out and taken over by illiberal enemies. There's no going back. It sucks.
Why not? Trump won two elections, this second one being the popular vote win and a majority in Congress so it seems like the backlash against woke/Covid lockdowns/etc did bring about a change.
But as polling suggests, this seems to be fading away pretty quickly as he makes the same mistakes Biden did last admin. A lot of your supporters as a politician aren't dedicated idealogues, they're moderates or have their focus on other issues especially ones like prices and economic security.
I think that's part of why we see such swings between parties, they get into power and see an idealogical mandate that they don't truly have and then get pushed for it.
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Yet! Growth mindset. (just a joke)
The shifts on this one over time are fascinating and not addressed well enough that the ostensibly pro-evolution side shifted to anti-genetics. The original ostensibly anti-evolution side hasn't really changed much though.
I appreciate your optimism and will try to adopt some of it as my own, rather than my knee jerk pessimism. Thank you for taking on the challengers and not getting irate in this thread.
I agree it is really interesting. The left generally accepts evolution while somehow being opposed to the idea that different races could differ in other ways and I know plenty of religious folk on the right who accept genetics as an explainer for differences but can't seem to accept that divergences could add up over long periods of time for evolution. The "micro evolution not macro evolution" crowd. One of my college friends was a Southern Baptist who believed that.
This is the internet, there are far far worse people I've dealt with.
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