You can't just say free speech is a right. Every country including the US has restrictions on speech to varying degrees.

The US draws the line at true threats, and inciting imminent lawless action, among others.

New Zealand now draws the line at simply sharing a manifesto along with anything else decreed by the Chief Censor.

China is much more strict, but who's to say where the line should be drawn? Not even western governments agree.

If you ask ten different cartographers to create a map of the world, you'll get ten different maps. That hardly proves that the world doesn't exist.

We decide where the line should be drawn through argument and public debate, and by refusing to comply with weaker definitions from anyone who can't convince us using reason that where they want to draw the line is actually in the interest of the people.

I think that this distinction isn't widely understood as the definition of privilege. If you look it up in a dictionary privileges you'll see a lot of definitions where privileges are defined as a special case of rights so they are most definitely not mutually exclusive

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/privilege

That's just reinforcing the point. Privilege is a special "right" rather than a universal one that should be held by everyone, something like the right to be called doctor (held only by someone with a doctorate) as opposed to the right to due process (which should be held by everyone).

Due process is a human right in a way that having a title is not.

Due process should be accessible to everyone but until that's actually the case it's still a privilege of the people who have it. The fact that other people should have it doesn't mean it's not a privilege to the people that do.

(It's still a right by the way, as I said it can be both)

Edit: Anyway, I don't feel the need to argue this since it's just a semantic argument but the general thesis is that I found your narrow definition of privilege to be surprising compared to how I've experienced people using it but English differs over geography so idk.

I think the heart of this is the is/ought distinction.

When you have a right to free speech and then someone puts you in jail for exercising it, it isn't that you don't have the right, it's that your right is being infringed.

Calling it a privilege that you don't have any time someone is infringing on your rights would mean that nobody's rights could ever be infringed, since any time they were infringed it would merely mean that you didn't have them to begin with. But you do. People have human rights even when someone is violating them.

Being able to afford a Lexus is a privilege, but it is not an example of capital-P "Privilege" [1]. Not every lower-case p privilege (perk) is an example of capital-P Privilege.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege

The point is the opposite -- not every right is a privilege. Some are inalienable and their denial is a human rights violation rather than merely an instance of economic disparity.

That a right is "inalienable" is a construction such as any other right or privilege. A social construction enforced by solid institutions. You only have the "right to life" (however inalienable you think it to be) because there is a whole system of laws, courts, government, law enforcement, that grants you that right in practice.

Everything is a social construction. Does that mean we should descend into relativistic nihilism, or that authoritarianism is acceptable merely because it exists?

Human rights are defended when we as humans refuse to stand idly by while they are violated. Which is why it's still important to identify the lines that are not to be crossed.

Muddling the fundamental safeguards that allow a free society to exist with the petty jealousy of who has a bigger house is only a boon to the despots who would tear those safeguards down.

You're conflating the existence of a right, with the freedom to exercise that right. Just because a government/society/group/etc infringes upon your ability to exercise your natural right does not mean it doesn't exist. The concept that the rights of the individual are derived from the individual is the basis for a lot of classical liberalism/enlightenment thinking, which in turn is the basis for most of today's modern governments.

You speak of privilege as an absolute category; I was thinking in more relative terms. If you take two people, of whom one has access to clean water and the other doesn’t — wouldn't you say that the first is in a more privileged position than the second?

So I'll tell you why I really hate the term in this context.

The common usage is to describe an unfair inequality. One person is feeding steak to their dog while another is starving. The spirit of the accusation is that the better off person is too well off and we need to even it out by knocking them down -- since we can't feed steak to every dog, since we can't give everyone a private jet and a mansion and a harem, the people who have those things are contemptible for not giving them up to help the less fortunate.

Human rights don't work like that. It isn't the case that people in free countries could help out people in authoritarian countries by giving up some of their free speech if only they weren't so greedy and selfish. They're not using up all the free speech so that nobody else can have any.

It's possible for more people to have free speech, and due process, and clean water, without taking any of it away from anybody who currently has it already.

Which makes the relativistic comparison counterproductive. It isn't a zero sum game. China should have it independent of whether or not New Zealand or America does, and they could all fully have it at the same time.

> The common usage is to describe an unfair inequality.

> The spirit of the accusation

Yes, this is indeed the common usage, which I find extremely puzzling. The word "privilege" has become somewhat of a pejorative term — an accusation rather than a statement of fact. It seems to have a stronger negative connotation than the word "luck", or the word "advantage", although it has a very similar semantics. I wonder how long this has been the case. Has this bundle of negative connotations come to be associated with this word during the latest culture wars (and if so, I would like to push back against this automatic "spirit of accusation" against those who happen to be in the privileged position), or is there a much longer tradition of such usage?

> It's possible for more people to have free speech, and due process, and clean water, without taking any of it away from anybody who currently has it already.

Of course it is. I am surprised that the presupposition is that a privileged person is necessarily taking something away from an unprivileged one.