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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Notes -
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?
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
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