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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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