Possible reasons why a person might believe in freedom of speech but also believe that inflicting social consequences on offensive speech is acceptable, as a counterpoint to previous thoughts on this subject:
- A person does not trust a government to be able to correctly decide what speech should be punished, but does trust his or her own judgment for deciding what speech should be punished.
- Suppressing certain speech accomplishes social change whose positive benefits outweigh the harms of curtailing speech.
- The "free marketplace of ideas" within which free speech is supposed to work is in practice so broken that additional mechanisms are necessary to correct its market failures.
- Inflicting social consequences is mob rule in action, which is actually not so bad.
Inspired by xkcd 1357.
No comments :
Post a Comment