You are asserting a series of very controversial points here:
1) Some rights are more important than others.
2) Positive rights can override negative rights.
3) 'Living freely without undue influence from others' is more important than 'the right to free speech'.
Which philosophical or moral framework are you using? This may be compatible with utlitarianism and Rawlsianism (though you'd have to do the numbers on the long-term impacts, not just your short-term goals), but I'm not sure how other ethics would support it.
Now take the example of promotion of terrorism - it's possible to argue that by allowing someone to post certain types of messages to a group on Facebook, they are creating an undue influence on the people in that group. For example by asking his followers to reject the views of outsiders (a common tactic in many religions, cults and conspiracy groups) a terrorist could be argued to have taken the freedom to hear other viewpoints away from his followers.
Now you can of course say that any terrorist or religious or cult leader is acting within a system of free speech - no one has technically had their freedom taken from them. That is true, but the reality of how humans choose who and what they listen to create the same effect as if they had lost those faculties.
I am not sure how you would define your 'undue influence' test, as it seems internally inconsistent:
>"For example by asking his followers to reject the views of outsiders (a common tactic in many religions, cults and conspiracy groups) a terrorist could be argued to have taken the freedom to hear other viewpoints away from his followers."
Do you see the inconsistency here? You are looking to forcibly silence one group, so they can listen to 'outsiders'. From the other side, it would look like you're the one advocating in favor of an even more extreme 'undue influence'.
I can see why you think there is an inconsistency here but I don't think there is.
Most people would say that the right to free speech includes two parts. Firstly we have the right to say what we want, to express those ideas to others and to be able to reach others without being censored. Secondly we have the right to hear the ideas of others without them being censored by the government. The first part of this right allows us to change and hopefully improve the world around us. The second part of this right allows us to use the best information available in order to lead the best life that we can. Free speech is the best tool that we know of to achieve these outcomes but it is still simply a means to an end.
When I give the example of a terrorist leader influencing his followers, I am trying to give an example of someone who uses the first part of the freedom of speech to improve the world around him (in his opinion) but who takes away the second part of the freedom of speech from his followers. That of course depends strongly on whether or not those followers would be able to lead better lives outside of his influence. It's a very fair argument to make that we as a society cannot know for certain whose ideas are right or wrong and therefore there is no kind of censorship of ideas can be justified. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter etc.
As another example, imagine a scientist who is interested in the genetic differences between races. He may decide based on years of research to conclude that one race has a genetic advantage over another and present the evidence that formed his conclusion. However, being a scientist, he would be open to different interpretations of that evidence and accept new evidence that may alter his conclusion.
Alternatively a racist keen to promote his race as superior to others may present the same conclusion, but present it in a way that discourages critical thinking or alternative interpretations. He may encourage those who listen to reject the views of others as biased. His followers would become closed to the new evidence. This doctrine could be considered a violation of his follower's free speech right to use the best information available in order to improve their lives.
As with other freedoms we often decide to restrict them as soon as they limit the freedoms of those around us - for example, you are perfectly free to sing loudly in your own house during the day, but as soon as you start to disrupt the sleep of your neighbours when you practice your songs at 3am then you should have that freedom limited.
In the same way, it could be argued that we should allow people the freedom of speech only in so far as it doesn't limit the freedom of others to benefit from that same freedom. In a world where people can be deceived or oppressed purely by speech alone, you have to consider when and how it should be limited. In an absolutely ideal world, we would make no topic of speech off limits - we would simply rely on people's education and critical thinking abilities to allow them to make the correct choices. However, in the real world, many individuals such as children cannot be trusted to think critically, or not to be deceived by misinformation.
To bring this back to the original query - what are your thoughts on the UK and German government approaches to free speech - my view is that our governments have absolutely no way to control how ideas are presented - they cannot ensure that ideas such as differences between races are considered in purely scientific context. They cannot control how someone may use that information to cause harm. Their ultimate goal is to prevent people from being harmed by these bad ideas but since they have no ability to control how someone presents their ideas, they fall back to censoring the ideas themselves. That is not to say I necessarily agree with this policy - but if you consider how simply limiting certain ideas can increase the freedom of those who might hear them, it's possible to see some kind of justification.
My view is that government authority is at its perigee when it comes to free speech, and that any regulation is both problematic and suspect. This stems from Huemer's convincing arguments in "The Problem of Political Authority".
If you've been found not guilty of a crime in the US and admit to it afterward, you cannot be prosecuted again by protection of Double Jeopardy, correct?
Is that not the same thing as saying some rights are more important than others?
And is (2) and (3) not just variations on (1)?
I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).
I was thinking, for example, one person's right to freedom from violent crime over another person's right to not be put on trail again for the same crime.
> I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).
Agreed.
I would say there is a moral duty not to commit violence against others, and there is a moral right to defend one's self, but I don't see how you really guarantee "right to freedom from violent crime", so it really seems more like a dubious promise. This may be a consequence of my general skepticism of positive rights.
The US version of freedom of speech was created based on personal experience with the British model. The American version is broad and almost absolute. The British model was a document that said you had it and a crown that would execute you or take your property for your words (usually when those words were against the crown).
Freedom of speech is fundamental to freedom of conscious, which is different than "live freely without undue influence from others". I'm very happy with American style freedom of speech, where the cure to speech you don't like is more speech instead of jail and violence.
However, if you're a communist or an ISIS sympathizer or want to publicly display some nipples you won't necessarily have more free speech in the US than in Germany.
Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to round up all propagandists, science deniers, and white supremacists and throw them in jail based on hard evidence of purposeful misinformation or credible threat -- regardless of how those things are defined and by whom -- I think I would respond, "k"
I acknowledge that I would be resolute in lazily ruining people's lives based on a perceived threat to the greater good out of some longing to be bored again. That's scary to me.
I'm a nerd, wholly driven by logic (to this point), and I can feel the boundaries of its apogee being prodded. It's not just the country that's sick -- my ideologies are also under the weather.
The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.
That is, unless someone decided to attack me with false or shaky accusations. Therein lies the problem, eh? But what's the alternative? There's no winning.
"Neither of those bans would ever apply to me" is a pretty revealing statement. In fact, it's almost so perfectly comical that I would give way better than even odds that your post was a parody if someone just read it to me out loud randomly.
This term itself is bunk. Part of science--science being imperfect and reliant on experimentation--is arriving at contradictory results. It is a natural part of the scientific process and is codified in the scientific method.
What is the lesser evil here? Are some scientist so beyond reproach that any incongruent findings are illegal? What if they're right? What if they're wrong but there was no intent to mislead. What if the authority that anoints untouchable scientists is compromised or otherwise acting in bad faith?
Nothing good is going to come from giving credence to a ridiculous notion like "science denier."
I think it's important to think about what the actual purpose is of the rights that we value. The right to free speech is simply a shortcut to a more fundamental right to allow people to live freely without undue influence from others. It may be that the absolute right to free speech might not be the best way to achieve that.