I'm more of a free speech partisan that most people, but I don't understand the claim that it is a natural right in some sense. Is it more or less natural than the impulse of other people to suppress speech? I believe that protecting it is a better policy, but in what sense of the word is it more or less "natural" than suppressing it?
Free speech includes freedom of religion derivative of freedom of thought. If someone can compel you to believe something or say something / or prevent you / they ultimately control what you think and if you don’t have that you don’t have a republic or any true freedoms which is why it’s top of the list
I can go outside and shout whatever I want into the emptiness in front of me and involve nobody involuntarily. Suppressing speech necessarily requires coercion. That's as cut and dry of a natural/unnatural dichotomy as you can get.
I don't think that's a very strong argument since it applies to a lot of laws that are very much considered acceptable. From trespassing to the entire field of intellectual property.
Trespassing is really the only one I struggle with.
It is without a doubt true that land is a natural commons. Yet in order to make the most efficient use of it it has to be managed privately. When I walk across a field, I am not an aggressor, it is the man who erected the fence around it that is the aggressor. Yet without that fence nobody has any incentive to do anything useful with it. I suppose this emerges from the fact that might makes right and anyone with the capability of taking land without consequence will do so. But we are here to determine what is right, not what is simply true. This one is a difficult problem indeed.
As far as intellectual property, I don't think you can own information. Nobody truly does, we create this abstract framework to try to make it so but it is fundamentally impossible to simultaneously own information and make it useful in the world and ultimately everyone knows this. To truly own information you have to keep it to yourself, but keeping it to yourself is mostly useless. A machine necessarily contains the information on its design in it's entirety, to put the machine into the world is to tell the world how to build it.
I'd like to believe that there is a sense in which `voluntary` is more natural than `coercion`, but haven't found one. I'm a political extremist when it comes to preferring voluntary over coercion. But how is that more natural than the opposite?
A lack of coercion doesn't seem to be the pattern of human history or the non-human natural word. Freedom is more of an aspiration for nature than a description of it.
"Natural" here doesn't mean naturally occurring. Rape is naturally occurring. Natural here means that you could do it without any interference from another person or to another person. You're born with the ability and need no abstract systems to support your doing so, you need no unwilling participation, all that's required is for people to leave you be. Anything that derives from just your existence and form as a human being that requires no coercion whatsoever is a natural right.
Coercion is naturally occurring. The aspiration is to understand an objective set of ethics that all people, when only considering power over themselves and not power over others, would agree to. There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.
> There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.
And I probably broadly agree with you about that "should be". But when someone does not agree with us, it becomes just a personal value judgement. If someone makes the opposite value judgement -- for instance that our species is a blight on Gaia, and they prefer to identify with Gaia -- our preference has no more "natural" weight than preferring chocolate to vanilla. I wish it did.
I disagree. I think what it comes down to fundamentally is coercion. You can call anything subjective so long as a person is not involuntarily subjected to the desires of another. Once that occurs, objectively it is no longer a question of subjectivity, because there is an individual with their own subjective experience and opinion being subjected to something else. Someone thinking "our species is a blight on Gaia" is subjective, someone deciding to help solve that problem and kill themselves is their business, someone deciding to solve that problem by killing others is objectively wrong. Chocolate or vanilla involves no unwilling participants, the analogy is flawed. You have an objective right to a preference there, you have no objective right to decide whether I should live or die.
Again, when left to consider only sovereignty over themselves and not over others as a prerequisite, the set of natural rights will be arrived at unanimously, regardless of culture. The only time there are disagreements are when someone wants to seek control over other people, and OK, so you can say "the idea that coercing others is wrong is a value judgment and subjective" but then you have no fundamental reason why slavery is wrong, you only have a mishmash of arbitrary rules and no guiding principle whatsoever. If you agree that owning people is wrong on some fundamental, principled grounds, then you can't come to any other conclusion than coercion is the principle. If you think owning people should be disallowed not because of some fundamental principle, but because of some pragmatic reason like democracy says so or something, then you have to accept that enslaving people is acceptable if the culture or circumstances deem it OK. But you can't have both, it's doublethink. Either we have natural rights are slavery is acceptable if it is fashionable at the time.
It's a natural right because you have exclusive access to your vocal cords. If someone has hooked up your vocal cords to some sort of control device without your consent, then that's a criminal act. What recourse do those who want to suppress speech have other than illegal violence or further speech?
"Natural right" means a right with a sound fundamental philosophical justification behind it, it doesn't mean "natural" in the sense of "something people do naturally". People by nature are often savages; learning to respect the rights of other people, and not just see them as tools for us to impose our own will upon, is part of the challenge of human moral development.
I'm in favor of human moral development through means such as free speech. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meaning, or rather can mean anything to anyone. It can envelop humanity's destruction as easily as its flourishing, depending on where your identity lies.
I'd like to be able to deploy "natural" in defense of free speech, but I've found no substance to it. No premise beyond a personal value judgement, which I happen to share. So I default to appeals to utility.
There's no such thing as a natural right. The rights we have only exist because someone in power has granted them.
You can believe that everyone should have freedom of speech (and I'd agree with you), but one look around the world should show you that it is not a natural right, as clearly it is suppressed heavily in some places. And even in places that claim to guarantee from of speech usually still restrict it in some ways.
Someone stranded on a desert island, thousands of miles from all civilization, can say anything they want without repercussions. Their right to free expression is innate, part of being human.
Having the ability to do something under restricted circumstances doesn't make it a natural right. If something is truly a natural right, then they should be able to exercise that right under any circumstances, in any situation.
It is, but it is not the paramount human right. Other rights, like "life" trump "liberty".
One may argue that certain instances of "hate speech" encourage actions against "life" and that the "liberty" of exerting that speech is trumped by the need to protect that life.
If you extend "life" to mean "health" and "health" to include "mental health", than the right to be a raging racist seems pretty obviously below the right for other people to not be attacked or threatened. QED.
Exactly, then you can broaden the scope of "harm" to be whatever is politically convenient. For example, I could turn your same argument around and use it to suppress any discussion of abortion whatsoever because the life of the embryo has precedence over any speech that would jeopardize it
Not that I personally think that's the right thing, just there's a danger in making core principles this ambiguous
