It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not.
No easy answers. In this case, maybe there is a relatively simple rule: Supporting democracy must not in itself be regarded as offensive...
replies(8):
No easy answers. In this case, maybe there is a relatively simple rule: Supporting democracy must not in itself be regarded as offensive...
That’s why language policing, hate speech laws, Twitter mobs, and bully-the-bully efforts are abominations. So really, the answer is easy: everyone has the right to offend, and has no right not to be offended. Your simple rule doesn’t go far enough.
Try and tell me your opinions are your own and the books and media you consume do not own some portion of them.
Hate-speech laws exist to prevent the programming of people to systematically hate and exterminate other people, a lesson that has been learned many times over in history.
This particular cynicism justifies far too much. A liberal (as in liberty) society must trust the super-majority of its population to agree on and uphold its ethical foundations. Policing hate speech weakens one of those foundations no matter how you justify it, but if you justify it by saying "people are programmable and so can't be trusted to hear what hateful people have to say," it weakens it enormously.
A huge percentage of our speech is attempted "programming." Political debate, religious preaching, even mathematical models of the universe are attempts to get others to think about something a certain way. But it would be unethical to ban any of those things, because people aren't "programmable," they're suggestible.
I absolutely agree. I'm not saying ban hate speech because its programming -- I'm saying ban it because it's evil and effective.
It's morally reprehensible to defend the existence of advocating for racial superiority when we have witnessed hundreds of times where that leads to genocide.
> It's morally reprehensible to defend the existence of advocating for racial superiority...
This really is a slippery slope. Let's agree that it's morally reprehensible to advocate for racial superiority. Let's not argue that it's morally reprehensible to defend the right of somebody else to advocate for racial superiority. When we are faced with assailing what is supposed to be as close as possible to an unassailable right for pragmatic reasons, neither side of the argument is clearly moral or immoral. Or, rather, both sides are somewhat immoral. If we as a society come to the conclusion that hate speech is so dangerous that it is worth reducing the right to free speech to prevent it, then let's at least do so with a heavy heart. Political decisions that pit a great good against another great good are terrible. Don't make them more terrible by accusing those on either side of being morally reprehensible.
A small limitation on an 'unassailable' right (where is that status derived from?) is actually the solution that maximizes liberalism by limiting genocide.
True, if we collectively foster it. Let's definitely not do that.
> where is that status derived from?
It's just agreed upon, or not. The extent to which free speech is unassailable is the extent to which free speech is unassailable. Every society has restricted it in some way or other; many (even western) societies have restricted it much too far, in my opinion. We can go as far as we choose.
Personally, I wish we wouldn't choose speech policing in the US at this point in time. The implications are far reaching. Policing something doesn't just affect the people who break the law, it affects anybody who could theoretically break it. Mechanisms to monitor and silence speech get another great justification. And the people doing the policing will of course err on the side of caution at times. Look at the recent stack overflow kerfuffle. Since intent is so difficult to judge, there is no way that the only thing hate speech laws are applied to will be speech with hateful intent. Some arguments in support of Israel are considered by some to be hate speech, as supporting the Hong Kong protests is by others. Both of those platforms are deeply offensive to a particular demographic. And the argument that these are just "bad applications" of the law is insufficient, because laws at their very best are applied badly sometimes, and at their worst applied badly _most_ of the time.
Saying that a limitation on this particular right for this particular reason "is actually the solution that maximizes liberalism by limiting genocide," is not a good argument. Genocide has some probability of occurring in a country with the policies in place today, and some other probability of occurring with different policies in place. If we just applied any policy that reduced the probability, there would be no freedoms at all. And even hundreds of examples in history don't work very well as evidence unless you can demonstrate an inverse correlation in history between the degree to which countries restricted hate speech and the extend to which they engaged in genocide, and I wouldn't be surprised if you found exactly the opposite.