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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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

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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