True, but your castigation of people claiming it is a legal restriction is based on a contextual error on your part as far as I can tell.
They are correct. There is no free speech issue. I don’t get why you don’t understand this. There is no expectation that anyone has to provide another person with a forum for them to speak.
That said, how about you provide a concrete example of this issue so we are not just discussing hypotheticals?
Okay? So what? Such restrictions have nothing to do with rights as you suggested earlier.
It’s a distinction that doesn’t really need to be pointed out. What exactly is your point? No one would argue that some people and places value or allow unfettered speech more than others. Your error came when you insisted that such restrictions somehow violate some right. They don’t.
No, I am saying the general trend is toward openness and permissiveness, so your fear that society is becoming more restrictive writ large is baseless.
Perhaps in theory, but not in practice in most open democracies.
I didn’t attribute it to you. I am saying the context for which this debate almost always occurs these days is someone, usually a public figure, saying something “un-PC”, getting whacked, then a backlash occurs about how we should be more tolerant of intolerance. IME, it’s almost always conservatives doing the botching and moaning, and the comments are usually slurs or offensive comments that the marketplace of ideas deems worthy of punishment.
I think the main thing you’re missing is that I’m not positing a legal doctrine that in every situation either is or isn’t over the line, either guilty or innocent. I’m suggesting that it’s an *ideal *that is embraced to a greater or lesser degree in various situations; rarely completely accepted or rejected.
If I were to create a definition, it would be something like that people are able to express themselves without punitive actions for said expression.
So, in your list, the first two are pretty clearcut cases of us just disgreeing; by the third one, you’re looking like a guy who seems a little paranoid and thin-skinned; by the fourth and fifth, you’re clearly a guy that seems pretty deeply intolerant of dissenting opinions. You’re legally free to do all that … but I’m suggesting that that behavior is a bad thing, and something people should disapprove of, and indicates you have a problem with other people’s free expression (Assuming, of course that my anti-cat opinions were rendered nonaggressively, etc.).
You are merely asserting the contrary of the OP. Forgive me if I’m disinclined to play “Yes, it is/No, it isn’t.”
I just did, in discussing the way it comes up on the SDMB. A sentence very close to the one I wrote was recently posted in a thread here. I’m disinclined to link to it, lest the Mods move the thread to the pit.
Clearly, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I expressed no such fear.
Agree to disagree.
And again – you’re bringing your assumptions to the discussion. I agree that’s one one possible application of the principle, but it isn’t the only one.
I would also add to that that “free speech” does not free you from the consequences of what you say. For example, if a representative from a company uses his right to free speech to makes racist and homophobic statements, their customer base may exercise their free speech to boycott their products.
Interestingly a lot of people on the right seem like they are all for their right to act like a jerk, but not the right of other people tell them they are acting like a jerk.
But that’s another way of saying you don’t have freedom of speech. If it were free, it would come without consequences. So in the private realm, we have a certain level of free speech, but not the (more or less) absolute freedom that we enjoy from governmental consequences, per the First Amendment.
If you are fired from your job for saying racist things, that means you don’t have free speech at work. Which is fine. You don’t. Your employer may choose to grant it to you, of course, but it’s not a RIGHT to free speech.
There’s a Scylla and Charybdis fallacy here. Yes, freedom should not entail comebacks. But freedom still has responsibilities. Your actions always have consequences: that’s what’s meant by a moral universe.
You do have the “freedom” to utter libel – but you can get sued for it. That’s a consequence, but not a prohibition. You have the freedom to boo the home team – and people are going to boo you. That’s a consequence. You still have the right; you just have to take what follows.
Some freedoms have to be fought for. They aren’t “without consequences.” It doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
No, I get that. What I’m not clear about is what the ideal you’re advocating is. However, you explain it somewhat:
That’s a little clearer, and I appreciate your responses to my hypotheticals. But now let’s make it a little more complicated.
Instead of saying “cats are assholes,” what if you’re saying, “We should remove the right to vote for black people, c’mon, who’s with me, let’s pass an amendment”? Now the speech itself is advocating exactly the sort of thing you’re treating as a “punitive measure.” What responses to such speech do you consider acceptable?
Because that’s the sort of thing that happens in the real world all the time. People use speech to organize a boycott; they’re doing so in response to others who are using speech to organize a campaign to deny gay folks the right to vote. Who here is a foe of free speech?
I’m not sure that your definition of free speech holds together.
“Responsibility” and “consequences” are pretty much the same thing. Either your actions have consequences/responsibility, or they don’t.
But then you don’t have the “right.” If you did, there would be no consequences. Just like if you go to jail for saying something the government doesn’t like, it means you don’t have a legal free speech right.
Take libel again - you don’t have the legal right to utter libel. Just because you can doesn’t mean you have a “right” to.
Your distinction holds up better with booing a team. When the consequences are nothing more than being booed in turn, that’s just others using their speech. If you were thrown out of the stadium for it, you really couldn’t say you have a right to boo the home team, or more precisely, you couldn’t say that the home team respects your right to boo, even if you say you have one.
I disagree. The consequences only matter if they’re a matter of physical force, including imprisonment or theft. If my boss can fire me for what I say on the job, that doesn’t mean I don’t have free speech, it means my boss also has the freedom to fire me for any reason including saying things he finds offensive. But if my boss can shoot me, lock me up or confiscate my house then I don’t have free speech.
A job is a voluntary contract on both sides. And we voluntarily take those jobs knowing that you can get fired at any time for any reason, including saying something the boss doesn’t like. That doesn’t mean you’re not free to speak your mind. It means you’re free to break the voluntary contract and move onto other opportunities. It means you’re free to piss off the boss and accept the consequences. But you can’t just accept the consequences of physical harm, imprisonment or theft. They are not voluntary. No one voluntarily enters into a contract that says “I can beat you to a pulp if I don’t like what you say”.
The point is that the government is the only party with a legal right to use force. So when others threaten you with violence and harm over what you say, they are acting illegally regardless of your right to free speech. So in the US at least, the only legal area where free speech is relevant is when dealing with government coercion. Because private coercion is illegal whether it is infringing on your speech rights or not. Firing someone for what they say is not coercion, it’s simply ending a voluntary contract that is no longer beneficial to both sides.
So the government could, say, take away your right to vote based on something you said and it wouldn’t be a violation of your First Amendment rights?
That’s absurd.
Same thing!
Part of the contract is that you don’t have freedom of speech.
And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with simply calling it that.
Now you’re throwing the word “coercion” into the mix. Again, it doesn’t matter whether you use that word or not. It’s no big deal to say you don’t have freedom of speech at work, even if you have voluntarily given it up by working there.
Yes, ultimately you have “freedom of speech” no matter what, if you accept the consequences. We all know that. But it doesn’t really matter.
Call it free speech or lack of it in both cases, I don’t care, but the distinction is important. It’s no big deal if your speech causes another person to renege on a voluntary agreement you both made. It is unacceptable and should not be tolerated for your physical well being to be threatened as a consequence of your speech, whether the government made the threat or a private party.
Apologies for disappearing from the thread, life intervened.
I’m not really advocating any ideal. My points boil down to:
“Free speech” as an ideal is distinct from any specific legal codification of it (just as all the other enlightenment ideals are).
Just because you’re equally committed to one specific codification of that ideal doesn’t mean you’re equally committed to the ideal itself (by analogy: just because two people agree about the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not mean they are equally committed to the ideals of “anti-racism,” “non-discrimination,” etc.)
There’s nothing inherently wrong with limiting free speech at various times and places: I personally wouldn’t want to attend a church where people stood up in the middle of a sermon and started airing their disagreements, or attend a very large meeting that wasn’t well-moderated. Free speech is an ideal, but it isn’t the only one: it’s a competing good that different people value more or less on different occasions.
We should acknowledge that different people/groups value it more or less on different occasions, and not pretend that since we all agree on the specific legal codification, we therefore all place the same value on the underlying ideal. We don’t.
Again: lumping it into a binary “freind or foe,” “acceptable/unacceptable” misses the point.
To address your hypotheicals: if A is advocating that blacks/gays be denied the right to vote, and B denounces/criticizes/insults A, then the exchange tells us nothing about what value either places on free speech. If, OTOH – and to take it to an extreme – B responds to A’s casual mention of his views in conversation by starting up a public campaign denouncing the company that employs A as a low-level employee, and then goes door-to-door in A’s neighborhood attempting to publically shame him, well then clearly he’s not merely registering his disagreement and meeting speech with speech; he’s trying to intimidate A (and anyone else) from speaking further, and to drive A’s ideas outside the public arena. I think it’s quite safe to say that B places a higher priority on black/gay voting rights than on A’s freedom to express himself.
That is not necessarily an indefensible preference, nor are the actions necessarily indefensible. Opinions will vary, and different people will draw the lines different places. A CEO expressing a controversial opinion on TV is different from a janitor making a facebook post; something said while drunk and angry is different from something written in op-ed, and on and on, and different people have different ideas that they think others shouldn’t express.
What I do not accept are asinine formulations along the line of
“I am completely committed to free speech, but you can’t insult the prophet here.”
“I am completely committed to free speech, but you can’t burn the flag here.”
“I am completely committed to free speech, but you can’t use racial epithets here.”
In all of those, the second part contradicts the first, as it explains precisely where the speaker’s committment to free speech stops, and this is true whether the “here” refers to a country, a private organization, or even a household. And to belabor the point: that’s not necessarily a good or bad thing. But it is something we should acknowledge and be aware of.
If I understand what you’re saying, you think that a commitment to free speech means a commitment to ensuring that people suffer no consequences, social or economic or coercive, for expressing their beliefs. Is that a fair summary of what you’re saying?
Because I don’t think that’s a widely-accepted definition of “free speech.” Most people are more-or-less comfortable with social or economic consequences, but not comfortable with coercive consequences, for expressing thoughts. That is, whatever measures I may use in my life to function, including engaging in speech or in free market decisions, are acceptable.
The normal formulation of the free speech ideal, as I understand it, is something like this: A use of force against a person, which is not otherwise justified, may not be justified by the content of that person’s speech.
That is a perfectly consistent ideal, and it’s not one that depends on the government. It appears to depend on the government because the government generally maintains a monopoly on the use of force; but it applies across the board.
It’s only asinine according to your formulation. If the point is that speech may not be responded to with otherwise unjustified force, it’s perfectly consistent. It means something like, “I’m not going to punch you in the nose for insulting the prophet, since I don’t believe that’s okay, but if you keep doing it I’ll ask you to leave, since I think it’s okay for me to ask you to leave for any or no reason.”
No, that works fine for me. But I would point out that the word “force” is not identical with “violence,” and that social, economic and coercive consequences are often not easily separated, and can be powerful enough to rise to the effective level of “force.”
You gave me hypotheticals, let me throw out a few:
A lives in an area with shitty public schools, so he sends his kid to a religious school, even though he thinks all religion is BS and tells people so. His next-door neighbor, B, is religious and offended, so she tells A to shut up about it or she will pass his comments along to the school administration, getting A’s kid ostracized or expelled. Completely legal; arguably fair; but to my mind B’s actions show she doesn’t much value the principle of free speech; she’s not countering A’s speech, she’s trying to silence him.
C is a closeted homosexual who posts her conservative political opinions under a pseudonym. D, an liberal online debate opponent, publically outs C with the goal of discrediting her opinions and spreading discord between C and her (overwhelmingly liberal) social circle. Completely legal; arguably fair; but to my mind D’s actions show he doesn’t much value the principle of free speech; he’s not countering C’s speech, he’s trying to silence her.
Or to repeat what I asked Roderick Femm, consider two non-governmental groups; they could be churches, HOAs, clubs, whatever. Assume that both groups support the First Amendment.
[ul]
[li]Group A allows and even encourages open discussion by members of its goals and processes. Members are allowed to publicly question the decisions of leadership. [/li][li]Group B forbids criticism of its leaders, and has a large body of rules and regulations limiting the expression of its members. Violators are expelled.[/li][/ul]
Do you see no meaningful distinction to be made between the two groups? If you don’t, then we’ll have to agree to disagree. If you do, what terminology would you apply to make the distinction?