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Freedom of Speech
Dec. 9th, 2016 08:30 amPreamble
I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about freedom of speech lately, and would like to tease apart some thoughts. Before I start, I would like to comment that I am not particularly interested in a conversation about what the law is currently, and how that should be applied, but about what both the law and social norms ought to be in an ideal world. As such “your argument is wrong because that’s not what the Public Order Act 1986/the First Amendment to the US Constitution/Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says” is missing the point.
Freedom of speech is complicated, and it would be better if people at all points on the political spectrum acknowledged this. This complexity means that it’s very easy to look at the behaviour of your political opponents and see hypocrisy - that they are espousing support of the principle of freedom of speech, and are very quick to complain when they see theirs being restricted, but all too happy to overlook it when it comes to speech they disagree with. It is much harder to look at your political allies and see the same thing - suddenly the arguments for why the restrictions being placed on you are clearly insupportable, whereas the ones you seek to place on others are perfectly reasonable start to make a lot more sense. The lesson here is not that your opponents are hypocrites, it’s that people are hypocrites.
I think the complication manifests in a variety of different ways, and part of the reason it’s easy to convince yourself that this restriction is draconian and this other is completely reasonable is that any given act of speech falls in a different place on multiple dimensions, so it becomes tempting to weight the area which points towards your viewpoint more heavily, without realising that that’s what you’re doing. I enumerate five of them below, but there may be others which I’ve overlooked.
( Read more... )
I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about freedom of speech lately, and would like to tease apart some thoughts. Before I start, I would like to comment that I am not particularly interested in a conversation about what the law is currently, and how that should be applied, but about what both the law and social norms ought to be in an ideal world. As such “your argument is wrong because that’s not what the Public Order Act 1986/the First Amendment to the US Constitution/Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says” is missing the point.
Freedom of speech is complicated, and it would be better if people at all points on the political spectrum acknowledged this. This complexity means that it’s very easy to look at the behaviour of your political opponents and see hypocrisy - that they are espousing support of the principle of freedom of speech, and are very quick to complain when they see theirs being restricted, but all too happy to overlook it when it comes to speech they disagree with. It is much harder to look at your political allies and see the same thing - suddenly the arguments for why the restrictions being placed on you are clearly insupportable, whereas the ones you seek to place on others are perfectly reasonable start to make a lot more sense. The lesson here is not that your opponents are hypocrites, it’s that people are hypocrites.
I think the complication manifests in a variety of different ways, and part of the reason it’s easy to convince yourself that this restriction is draconian and this other is completely reasonable is that any given act of speech falls in a different place on multiple dimensions, so it becomes tempting to weight the area which points towards your viewpoint more heavily, without realising that that’s what you’re doing. I enumerate five of them below, but there may be others which I’ve overlooked.
( Read more... )
