Seems to me the elephant in the room here is the fact that we can presume almost everyone will apply whatever standard we adopt in a biased manner.
I think that's the argument to favor really crisp, harder to disagree over rules. And that's all anyone means when they make claims about defending free speech. We all make judgements about others based on their speech but I fear that the more we try to formalize such rules the less well we apply them.
For instance, consider microaggressions. I think we all know there is something in that area -- little verbal choices you can use to make someone feel unwelcome or not part of the group (tho it goes way beyond just the std political identities). And I think we all had a good grip on when they'd happened and reacted appropriately for the most part (most ppl don't like rudeness).
Then people tried to give rules for what counted as a microaggression to use as a basis for interventions (eg by DEI/HR/etc) and instead of a good grip on when people were being assholes we ended up with acrimony over stupid rules like don't say "land of opportunity".
And it's not an isolated problem. Anytime we try to move beyond our immediate personal reaction (not going to hang out with him) to more formal intervention some people will abuse the system and they'll be understandable pressure for fair warning about what draws punishment -- but language is too subtle for that to work.
It's the same problem schools have punishing bullying when they aren't willing to just defer to teacher judgement. You can bully someone just as effectively by telling them "I respect you and your differences" as you can calling them a faggot or nerd.
At the end of the day you have to rely on people's judgement and the more you try to formalize responses the more that becomes another place people can do hurtful things and you haven't made much progress.
But free speech is a necessary precondition to any even remotely free political system. And those who want a less free political system will always find ways to claim "harm" as an excuse for limiting speech so as to get their less free way.
Agreed. And that is where we have to push back, only allowing the limit to speech if there is a genuine harm (and the benefit of the limit is weightier than the costs).
Disagreed. There is no such thing as harming someone using words. You can harm someone physically and it can affect there emotions negatively. Or it can be a chick that’s like to be choked… it’s subjective. There are however people that are overly delusional, I said overly because I believe we are all mentally unhinged whether we would like to admit it or not, however these people are mentally unhinged in such a way there social composure is decimated when something is said that isnt fancied. Correlation isn’t causation obviously. Free speech is sacred, everything is sacred. Even harm. There have been sacrificial rituals since as far back as pre-writing. Blood was stamped on our letters once writing was establish which seems ritualized and sacred to me sure there could be a useful aspect of putting blood on paper, but correlation isn’t causation again. The majority of the earliest people, the first ones who knew a language were religious, and the majority of people didn’t say things that would jeopardize there after life relations, making speech sacred, but it’s never been free. It’s always been censored by our internal consciousness. Religious or not. Speech wasn’t censored for the harm it may due to someone’s consciousness, it was censored mentally for the harm the recipient may do to the messenger. This is especially true if you believe every action you take is selfish. As long as we continue as a society or individual speech will always be censored, we will censor it ourselves out of fear. There’s no such thing as a free system. Systems are systematical. I may believe china is more free because I have less responsibility on the decision making on how many babies I can have. What’s free mean, stress off your shoulders, or you not behind bars? There’s a subset of homeless people who feel more free in jail. “The greatest shackles we bear in this life are those forged by our own fears.” Hence your internal censorship will always be superseded if you have enough to say, Socrates is a great example of this. Censorship would be too much for anyone to bear right now that has enough to say. Information is power. Censorship is immutable. You were never free. What’s free even mean? If you’ll sacrifice you’ll life to say what you want to say, not be a coward, doesn’t that in some way make your speech sacred as-well?
There is a lot in there. 3 very quick comments: (1) Not everything is subjective. See other posts. (2) Not everything is sacred. I'm not sure why anyone would think that. Maybe panentheism? (3) Parents most definitely can harm their children with words. The effects are very clear; children faced with various sorts of "emotional abuse" suffer real long term physical affects. If that isn't harm, I don't know what is. More: I have defended a fairly technical definition of harm such that it does not have to be physical; I believe this definition makes the most sense out of common usage, but I don't appear to have convinced anyone, so there is a good chance I'm wrong. In any case the first part of this stands regardless.
Except that "we" don't have anything like a shared sense of what constitutes "genuine harm". In American academic culture these days, for example, it is widely accepted that particular words (spoken or written) by themselves cause harm, regardless of context or intent. Also, the "victim-oppressor" framing around race (and intersectionality) creates an entire ecosystem of permanent, ineradicable "harmfulness"—such that claiming harm is actually incentivized (as you note).
I think your arguments make sense for a society with a shared sense of values and fairness, where courts and academic committees would employ strict scrutiny that would overcome novel theories of "harm". For the society we actually live in, not so much.
I'm not as concerned with "shared senses" of terms as I am with accuracy or plausibility. My account of harm is, admittedly, not sufficient to provide all the details--but I think that is as it should be. The hard work, on my view, is precisely in figuring out what counts as a wrongful setback to interests--and I think we should be willing to engage in that debate. Almost all claims of harm by speech on campus turn out to not be defensible because not wrongful. But, again, we have to do the work to show why. Doing that work will allow people to see why they should stop making the mistaken claims. It will also encourage the sort of discourse we are interested in. In short, while I think there is a, at least among a large contingent on campus, a widely shared misunderstanding of how words and harm work, I am confident we can have the dialogue about it that will, in the long run, get us to a better place.
Seems to me the elephant in the room here is the fact that we can presume almost everyone will apply whatever standard we adopt in a biased manner.
I think that's the argument to favor really crisp, harder to disagree over rules. And that's all anyone means when they make claims about defending free speech. We all make judgements about others based on their speech but I fear that the more we try to formalize such rules the less well we apply them.
For instance, consider microaggressions. I think we all know there is something in that area -- little verbal choices you can use to make someone feel unwelcome or not part of the group (tho it goes way beyond just the std political identities). And I think we all had a good grip on when they'd happened and reacted appropriately for the most part (most ppl don't like rudeness).
Then people tried to give rules for what counted as a microaggression to use as a basis for interventions (eg by DEI/HR/etc) and instead of a good grip on when people were being assholes we ended up with acrimony over stupid rules like don't say "land of opportunity".
And it's not an isolated problem. Anytime we try to move beyond our immediate personal reaction (not going to hang out with him) to more formal intervention some people will abuse the system and they'll be understandable pressure for fair warning about what draws punishment -- but language is too subtle for that to work.
It's the same problem schools have punishing bullying when they aren't willing to just defer to teacher judgement. You can bully someone just as effectively by telling them "I respect you and your differences" as you can calling them a faggot or nerd.
At the end of the day you have to rely on people's judgement and the more you try to formalize responses the more that becomes another place people can do hurtful things and you haven't made much progress.
"Sacred?" I don't really do "sacred."
But free speech is a necessary precondition to any even remotely free political system. And those who want a less free political system will always find ways to claim "harm" as an excuse for limiting speech so as to get their less free way.
Agreed. And that is where we have to push back, only allowing the limit to speech if there is a genuine harm (and the benefit of the limit is weightier than the costs).
Disagreed. There is no such thing as harming someone using words. You can harm someone physically and it can affect there emotions negatively. Or it can be a chick that’s like to be choked… it’s subjective. There are however people that are overly delusional, I said overly because I believe we are all mentally unhinged whether we would like to admit it or not, however these people are mentally unhinged in such a way there social composure is decimated when something is said that isnt fancied. Correlation isn’t causation obviously. Free speech is sacred, everything is sacred. Even harm. There have been sacrificial rituals since as far back as pre-writing. Blood was stamped on our letters once writing was establish which seems ritualized and sacred to me sure there could be a useful aspect of putting blood on paper, but correlation isn’t causation again. The majority of the earliest people, the first ones who knew a language were religious, and the majority of people didn’t say things that would jeopardize there after life relations, making speech sacred, but it’s never been free. It’s always been censored by our internal consciousness. Religious or not. Speech wasn’t censored for the harm it may due to someone’s consciousness, it was censored mentally for the harm the recipient may do to the messenger. This is especially true if you believe every action you take is selfish. As long as we continue as a society or individual speech will always be censored, we will censor it ourselves out of fear. There’s no such thing as a free system. Systems are systematical. I may believe china is more free because I have less responsibility on the decision making on how many babies I can have. What’s free mean, stress off your shoulders, or you not behind bars? There’s a subset of homeless people who feel more free in jail. “The greatest shackles we bear in this life are those forged by our own fears.” Hence your internal censorship will always be superseded if you have enough to say, Socrates is a great example of this. Censorship would be too much for anyone to bear right now that has enough to say. Information is power. Censorship is immutable. You were never free. What’s free even mean? If you’ll sacrifice you’ll life to say what you want to say, not be a coward, doesn’t that in some way make your speech sacred as-well?
There is a lot in there. 3 very quick comments: (1) Not everything is subjective. See other posts. (2) Not everything is sacred. I'm not sure why anyone would think that. Maybe panentheism? (3) Parents most definitely can harm their children with words. The effects are very clear; children faced with various sorts of "emotional abuse" suffer real long term physical affects. If that isn't harm, I don't know what is. More: I have defended a fairly technical definition of harm such that it does not have to be physical; I believe this definition makes the most sense out of common usage, but I don't appear to have convinced anyone, so there is a good chance I'm wrong. In any case the first part of this stands regardless.
Except that "we" don't have anything like a shared sense of what constitutes "genuine harm". In American academic culture these days, for example, it is widely accepted that particular words (spoken or written) by themselves cause harm, regardless of context or intent. Also, the "victim-oppressor" framing around race (and intersectionality) creates an entire ecosystem of permanent, ineradicable "harmfulness"—such that claiming harm is actually incentivized (as you note).
I think your arguments make sense for a society with a shared sense of values and fairness, where courts and academic committees would employ strict scrutiny that would overcome novel theories of "harm". For the society we actually live in, not so much.
I'm not as concerned with "shared senses" of terms as I am with accuracy or plausibility. My account of harm is, admittedly, not sufficient to provide all the details--but I think that is as it should be. The hard work, on my view, is precisely in figuring out what counts as a wrongful setback to interests--and I think we should be willing to engage in that debate. Almost all claims of harm by speech on campus turn out to not be defensible because not wrongful. But, again, we have to do the work to show why. Doing that work will allow people to see why they should stop making the mistaken claims. It will also encourage the sort of discourse we are interested in. In short, while I think there is a, at least among a large contingent on campus, a widely shared misunderstanding of how words and harm work, I am confident we can have the dialogue about it that will, in the long run, get us to a better place.