Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
Just to play devil's advocate, why shouldn't there be limits on free speech?
Ever since humans started banding together into communities, whether it be tribes, towns, nations and countries; there is an intrinsic social contract where you don't do things that are detrimental to the good of the community.
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Because for the vast majority of this time, this social contract implicitly included restrictions on speech in order to protect the status, sensitivities, dogma or firmly-held beliefs of those in power, leading to dissidents being tortured, killed, and as a result intimidated into silence. This in turn ######ed the progress of the species as the search for new truths was hampered or prevented.
Basically, we have all of human history until about 200 years ago without free speech, and 200 years to present in Western society with it. The former involved a lot of killing people who said things one didn't like. The latter involved almost all of human progress. The latter hasn't been perfect, but I'll take it over the former.
And there are still restrictions on speech. They just require really strong reasons. You shouldn't be allowed to get on T.V. and give a speech detailing how to make genocide-enabling biological weapons from easily obtainable household materials, even if you've truly discovered a method for doing so that actually works. But minimizing those limits as much as possible and setting them at "really,
really bad consequences will result" - worse ones than what we had before we started this project - is the best way for us to progress as human beings.
That's my 2 minute case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
And this is why the word privilege gets tossed around. It's very easy to be in favour of unbridled free speech when you stand almost zero chance of being impacted by the negative aspects of it.
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I'd like to think you're smarter than this. The negative aspects simply outweigh the positive, for everyone in the long run. If the negative aspects are currently hurting peoples' feelings, the positive procured the civil rights movement, gay marriage and a policy of opposition to torture. The whole point is to prevent a tyranny of the majority. I know you think there were other factors involved in those social advances, but if the privileged, powerful class can just shut people whose ideas they think are immoral up, none of these things happen over time.
What you're really proposing here, it seems to me, is that your idea of what's right and moral and whose causes and values should be championed is unquestionably correct, and so anyone who stands in opposition to it can be silenced on moral grounds.