Are you appealing to the desires of the crowd (bandwagon fallacy), or to a moral principle? I'm talking about moral principles, which the laws and the government ought to uphold.
If they don't, the law and/or government is in the wrong. The right to speak your mind is a moral right; arguably, the right to defend yourself with an attourney is a subset of this. The law is not the arbiter of what is right, or what rights humans possess "inalienably". The law only enforces and protects those rights (since it's inefficient for each person to defend their own rights against everyone else: "I will have my attourney at my trial, I challenge you to duel if you disagree").
If freedom of speech is impinged, then a human right has been trampled upon. If a private individual forces someone else to be silent, they are morally in the wrong, even though there's no law against it. If the US government did it, then the US acted against its constitution and broke a moral principle, if not the laws on the books.
Do you believe it should be legal to make death threats, print libel and slander that harm a man's reputation, spread around pictures taken of others in the shower without their consent, and publish stolen personal information?
If not, then you do not believe in absolute freedom of speech, but only freedom of speech within the confines of the law.
> If not, then you do not believe in absolute freedom of speech, but only freedom of speech within the confines of the law.
It's a cute 'gotcha', but you're not actually saying anything that relates to what I said. I said 'moral principle', not 'absolute', and you continue to refer to 'the law'. You're not distinguishing between the laws the government decides upon, and the moral principles we use to evaluate good laws and bad ones.
From the outset, I said that there is a difference between saying that freedom of speech is something the government allocates to us, and something which the government ought to allow. Do you think the government gets to decide what we are, and are not, allowed to say?
Where freedom of speech falls in the hierarchy of rights is not my concern. What is my concern, is who gets to choose what that hierarchy is and where freedom of speech exists on it.
I'm arguing that the government is not who gets to determine what that hierarchy is, and thereby determine what gets to superceed freedom of speech.
> Not the government. And why should anyone inflict their view of morality on anyone else?
To be clear, are you taking the position of the anarchist here? I mean no disrespect, I only wish to understand your position. I think most people would say, with various exemplars, that the government can legitimately have a blacklist maintained over certain speech, very much in the same way it can have one over certain actions.
This is not an appeal to popularity, it is a statement of the non-anarchist position. You may think it is invalid, but by the same token, I think that consistently you'd have to see laws against murder or child rape to be invalid.
Not anarchist. There's another way, as I see it. If you put a liberal, a conservative, a Christian, a follower of radical Islam, an atheist, a Buddhist and a paganist on a desert island together, they could find a way to work things out, and not step on each others toes.
Each does whatever they like, so long as they do no harm to anyone else. Where the least common ground exists, interactions are polite and restrained (to the mathematical extreme of minimizing any information transfer at all, if zero common ground exists); where greater common ground exists, speech and action can be more unrestrained.
If harm is done, then the harm itself is the issue. Hyperbolic example, to make it super clear: it's perfectly fine to shout 'fire' in a crowded building; however, if you cause harm you're on the hook. Not because you shouted "fire", but because you (one way or another, the means is irrelevant) caused people to be trampled.
The difference between that and the similiar position stated earlier is small, but I think there's a bright line: whether the speech is restricted, or the doing of harm is restricted. It's a trivial difference at face value, but the logical derivations are very different.
If one of the desert island castaways attempts to do harm to another, the rest of them might naturally band together to prevent and reconcile it. That's where I see government involved: the banding together, to prevent and reconcile harm done.
In that way, morality is untouched. No one inflicts their views on anyone else. Total ignorance of all moral hierarchies is preserved. Government says nothing about what may or may not be said. The only view inflicted on anyone is the minimum precept, 'do no harm to others'.
ok well when you say X does not get to determine Y it implies that there is someone who gets to determine Y. I had difficulty imagining anyone who should be allowed to determine Y in this case, unless it was some theological concept, so I wanted some clarification of your position.
Are you appealing to the desires of the crowd (bandwagon fallacy), or to a moral principle? I'm talking about moral principles, which the laws and the government ought to uphold.
If they don't, the law and/or government is in the wrong. The right to speak your mind is a moral right; arguably, the right to defend yourself with an attourney is a subset of this. The law is not the arbiter of what is right, or what rights humans possess "inalienably". The law only enforces and protects those rights (since it's inefficient for each person to defend their own rights against everyone else: "I will have my attourney at my trial, I challenge you to duel if you disagree").
If freedom of speech is impinged, then a human right has been trampled upon. If a private individual forces someone else to be silent, they are morally in the wrong, even though there's no law against it. If the US government did it, then the US acted against its constitution and broke a moral principle, if not the laws on the books.