Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times
by kibwen on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @08:48PM
(#30773527)
> at worst, what you're asking for is totally incoherent.
It was an eye-opening experience to realize that I was taken egalitarianism as a given. I, too, couldn't help but see people who were simultaneously demanding the right to speak while also demanding that others should be denied the right to speak out against their original speech. I dismissed these people as irrational hypocrites. But eventually I realized that they weren't hypocrites, their philosophy is entirely consistent. I was implicitly assuming that they valued egalitarianism, but this was a mistake on my part. When these people beat the drum of free speech, they're referring only to their own rights. They aren't interested in granting rights to others. With such people, any appeal to "natural rights" is not intended to be reciprocal: you should be obligated to give them rights, but they should not be obligated to give you rights. They have managed to solve the ethical dilemma of "if people have the freedom to swing their fist and the freedom to not be punched in the face, what happens when someone swings their fist into your face?"; rather than arriving at the egalitarian solution of making some freedoms subservient to other freedoms, they have arrived at the classist solution of making some people subservient to other people. It's entirely coherent. Terrible, but coherent.
It was an eye-opening experience to realize that I was taken egalitarianism as a given. I, too, couldn't help but see people who were simultaneously demanding the right to speak while also demanding that others should be denied the right to speak out against their original speech. I dismissed these people as irrational hypocrites. But eventually I realized that they weren't hypocrites, their philosophy is entirely consistent. I was implicitly assuming that they valued egalitarianism, but this was a mistake on my part. When these people beat the drum of free speech, they're referring only to their own rights. They aren't interested in granting rights to others. With such people, any appeal to "natural rights" is not intended to be reciprocal: you should be obligated to give them rights, but they should not be obligated to give you rights. They have managed to solve the ethical dilemma of "if people have the freedom to swing their fist and the freedom to not be punched in the face, what happens when someone swings their fist into your face?"; rather than arriving at the egalitarian solution of making some freedoms subservient to other freedoms, they have arrived at the classist solution of making some people subservient to other people. It's entirely coherent. Terrible, but coherent.