Words are just words. One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence or other negative behavior but blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react in a negative way.
"I order you to kill this person." Just a combination of words, and yet....
I think there is a continuum between this and non-violent+non-inciting speech and your comment does little to tangle with the difference.
In our average, every-day life, it's quite possible to illegitimately harm people and escape retribution by using "I was just following orders" as a defense.
It's not selfish if you have a stronger need to keep the job for a non-selfish reason, and therefore you need to keep a good enough working relationship with the boss, by doing what they ask.
An example of a non-selfish reason to keep the job anyway would be you having a job being essential to the wellbeing of people you care for. Food, shelter, medicine etc. In some situations, someone might die if you refuse to do as told at work, because your income and benefits are paying for their surgery or something.
There's going to be a ethical line beyond which "no" is the right answer, but for many people "put a dark pattern in the sign-up page" doesn't cross the line into selfishness, it only crosses into an ethical dilemma, a balancing act.
I hope you don't take the truth of that statement to mean that the leaders who ordered the Holocaust weren't morally culpable for the deaths of 11 million if they didn't personally kill someone themselves.
If private citizen Hitler had just put an op-ed in a national newspaper calling for a Holocaust and Germany had done it on that basis, the whole of the blame would fall on Germany, who took the action, and not Hitler, who wrote an editorial.
And this is really where the "but you I just told him to kill that man, I didn't pull the trigger" argument falls apart. Because it's not the telling them which is inducing them to do it, it's that doing it is the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves. And it's the payment, or the expected retaliation, which makes the crime. Not the speech.
That's not necessarily even true of many killings by order, nor is it the morally relevant part.
If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words. Your claim is that if the person I threaten kills the other person, I am not morally culpable because I didn't actually engage in the retaliation I threatened and the threatening was just speech. Absolutely asinine.
I have better things to do than argue with libertarians all day, but honestly, all of these objections have been incredibly weak - it's as if you're taking the hardest possible route to defend freedom of speech.
No you're not, you're using violence. The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action. If there was no expectation on the part of the recipient of any negative consequences from not following your order, the order itself wouldn't cause them to do it and there would be no harm.
Compare the scenario where you threaten to kill someone if they don't kill someone else while enacting a play. The threat of violence isn't really there, even though the words are identical. Clearly the words aren't the source of the crime.
So in order to defend your interpretation of free speech, I am now morally culpable for actions that "travel back in time"? If it never occurs how can it travel back in time?
What is it that causes the violence to travel back in time? If I had planned to kill the speaker if they didn't do the action, but didn't tell them (and they don't have an expectation that I would kill them) - then they killed the person, would I not be responsible?
It seems that the key action here that causes this "travel back in time" effect is speech and the expectations it produces.
Telling someone to commit murder, with the knowledge that they will carry out this act, legally fulfills the requirements of mens rea and actus reus for the crime of murder. It isn't a speech crime per se. We don't need a new law regulating anyone's speech to punish people in these events.
Convicting someone for "inciting violence" should require the same standards as any other case supposedly tying someone to a murder. For one thing you need an actual victim and make the case they caused it beyond a reasonable doubt. It gets messy (law always does) but I think that's because many people argue in bad faith, really trying to twist definitions to punish people for opinions they disapprove of.
This is the entire premise of the law taking into account intent. If you shoot at someone in an attempt to kill them but miss, you're still going to jail.
> If I had planned to kill the speaker if they didn't do the action, but didn't tell them (and they don't have an expectation that I would kill them) - then they killed the person, would I not be responsible
In that case your intention to kill them if they didn't do it wouldn't have been the cause of them doing it (they did it without even knowing about it), so why would you be?
Their being aware of it is necessary to cause them to do it, but it isn't the part which is the root cause of the harm. It's like calling a prohibition on knowingly transferring weapons to terrorists a free speech violation because you have to call the weapons depot and tell them to ship the weapons in order to cause it to happen. The speech isn't the thing being prohibited, it's the action. The fact that the speech is necessary to cause it to happen isn't a restriction on speech, because the speech isn't sufficient to cause it to happen -- it has to be combined with some business arrangement with the weapons depot in which you e.g. pay them for the weapons they're shipping, or it doesn't happen. And it's that part which is the crime.
> It seems that the key action here that causes this "travel back in time" effect is speech and the expectations it produces.
Separate them into two different parties and see what happens.
Osama bin Laden offers a million dollars to anyone who kills a US soldier. CNN reports this fact. Someone hears it from CNN and commits the murder in order to collect the money. Is it CNN or Osama bin Laden who is guilty of the crime?
> One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence
At least you acknowledge that words can lead to violence. If such violence occurs, we will certainly blame both the perpetrator and the person who incited them. But the most effective way of stopping such violence isn't catching perpetrators after the fact, it's preventing the incitement in the first place.
But I don't want to censor the internet. There are 1.3m death from traffic accidents and 0 deaths from Twitter.
You think bullying on twitter has caused 0 deaths?
https://ourworldindata.org/suicide
There might be other issues like depression that doesn't end in suicide that could be induced. But the overall political situation is far more relevant than some utterances of people on the net.
You owe me.
To be clear, I don't necessarily advocate policing Twitter to weed out trolls and I recognize some people who are emotionally unstable are more at risk and can not be considered the norm for basing policy on.
There has to be a line doesn't there? Is outright racism, or encouraging others to kill or do other bad things OK, because it's just words?
“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” -- Idi Amin (the murderous dictator)
Honestly, that phrase is just a way adults explain bullying victims that they should shut up and that adults actually dont know what to do. Or dont care. I don't mean to say that this or that words should be illegal. But, ignoring verbal bullying never ever made it go away. You gotta respond, really and for that you need to acknowledge to yourself that harm is going on.
> Words are just words.
You can use words to destroy people. You can lie about people and harm their reputation. You can do it in their presence and still cause plenty of problems in their work or life or relationships. If you live in autocratic regime, you can "tell on them". Or, domestic violence victims do sometimes say that the insults and humiliations were worst then actual violent events.
> One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence or other negative behavior but blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react in a negative way.
Not saying speach should be illegal, but if you go out of way to convince people that they should be violent, yes you have moral responsibility and share quilt for their actions.
This expression feels good and sounds smart. But, it is not how real world works which is the reason many people are rejecting that argument.
I regard that as a harm.
Note that "cause harm" does not always imply "blame".
It does imply cause and effect though, suggesting "responsibility".
If you want to push back at that meaning on a technicality, is there anything called harm that is not, ultimately, dependent on how a mind engages with it?
Yet in the real world we can see what Citizend United actualy did.
Citizens United was about campaigning for them independently. Something that was already legal for individuals to do.
I agree second order effects are a problem, but this is widespread in govt (e.g. they buy votes with some narrowly-defined program like govt employee pensions or local pork spending). Maybe the problem is that the power and wealth that comes with being elected is too attractive, and is what we need to somehow fix.
A: “You just killed him!”
B: “I didn’t kill him, the bullets and the fall killed him.”
Me? I don’t have any easy answers. The reason I value freedom of speech is the exact same reason I consider it dangerous: that it can effect change.
> blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react
How many people grok — really grok — that they have a choice to not react to their feelings? How many can really go against the tide of a mob when inside one? Can you genuinely compensate for the availability heuristic, or any of the other cognitive biases that a skilled propagandist knows how to manipulate?
Since this was even uttered by a judge, there's been a lot of discussion as to why this is neither absolute, nor nearly as clear cut, nor does it speak for everyone. Words hurt me (and they likely hurt you too), but the question is not only of hurt but actual harms. The idea that words categorically cannot be harms in themselves rests upon a foundation supported neither by materialist philosophy, nor by what we know of human biology[0].
>Words are just words
In a similar way, aren't actions just actions? Why stop at words? There is no fundamental metaphysical difference between expression and other actions.
[0] http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...