I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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We should tabboo both "freedom of speech" and your proposed "Open Ideas." The contention in these debates is that we have an obligation to forebear from certain courses of action in response to certain speech acts by others. Almost all the discussion of interest is in: what actions? What speech acts? The First Amendment concerns certain actions and certain speech acts but once we go beyond it things rapidly become murky.
Imagine I have a friend A and one day A shared with me some opinion I consider repugnant. So much so it makes me rethink my friendship with A. I act cooler and more aloof in our interactions. I don't invite A to social events as I once would. Did I breach an obligation to A by these actions? Was I obliged to continue being A's friend? Does it depend on the details of what they said?
Go a step further. I accurately relay A's remark to other individuals who are mutual friends. They decide to end their friendship with A, similarly to me. Did our mutual friends have an obligation to remain friends with A? Did I have an obligation not to relate true information to my friends?
To the extent we may accurately portray A as being our feeling censored, that someone has breached a moral obligation, who did so and how did they do it?
I hate to make everything into an object level thing but, I think it really does depend on whether there is a broad social consensus that A's opinion really is repugnant.
There is a desire in the post-enlightenment liberal universalism to insist that everything to be resolved on the meta level -- that one has to adopt a rule without any concrete referents and then to accept every substitution into them.
And, quite frankly, this is in general a wonderful invention. Hoisting these things into a second order algebra is a powerful social technology. Here, however, it seems to be taken too far.
I think there’s a very big problem in people not understanding the difference between sharing an opinion and being an asshole about said opinion. I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics. You think abortion is baby murder, you are perfectly free to say that. But I think the very concept of politeness and tact and decorum is pretty lost at this point. It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.” And now we have people celebrating a murder with TikTok dances.
I keep thinking back to reading old etiquette books. There was a sense that you really should strive to think of the other person, or others around you as at least as important if not more than you. A society that frowned on being late to a show because walking in late would inconvenience other theater goers would absolutely have something very politely negative to say about the absolute shit show of political and social discourse— even if they do agree that all opinions are protected by free speech. There are lines of decency that just have to be protected and we just can’t seem to separate the idea of an opinion from the expression of that opinion.
It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
On the contrary, lots of things are dangerous., A foreign policy that increases the chance of nuclear war is dangerous. Not putting up a stop sign at a busy intersection is dangerous. It just is not true that "danger" means "should be defended against with violence".
Blurring together "is dangerous" and "should be met with violence" is exactly the issue.
That's a good point. "Dangerous" is meaningless unless it's a strong and direct effect. Perhaps "calls for something which is against my human rights". This has to actually be true, it's not enough to argue "It's an attack of my person that you don't give me special rights which suit my uniqueness".
How people interpret dangers is strongly influenced by propaganda, so if you convince group X that group Y is out to get them, group X will start attacking group Y in perceived (but non-existent) self-defense. I feel that this second part, the interpretation, is where most conflict happen. Actual value disagreements seem minor. Perhaps the value hierarchy (order of priority) is different, though.
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