In a tolerant society, should we tolerate intolerance? I am genuinely interested to hear your thoughts.
An example: I'm gay and I have had friends that didn't agree with me in supporting gay marriage. One was an ultra-orthodox Jew that was my coworker, and we would disagree on just about everything politically, but we still managed to tolerate each other and even become friends. This is what should happen in a tolerant society.
Should we ban guys like him from Twitter if he decides to tweet against gay marriage? No, we shouldn't. We should tolerate his intolerance and have an open and honest debate.
You meet somebody that is adamantly homophobic. They use their speech to rally others and take political action against gay people. They make same-sex marriage illegal (or block it from becoming legal). Maybe, they're extra successful, and can even manage to make gay sex or just being gay illegal, forcing you to pretend to be straight.
Oh, this person also is your boss. They know you're gay, and they fire you from your job in the height of a pandemic where people are already having trouble finding work. When you get home, you find out their friend is your landlord and you're being evicted from your apartment in 30 days.
Admittedly, this is somewhat of an extreme example, at least in my country in modern times, but go back 100 years and this is close to reality - and there's no strong evidence I'm aware of that suggests progress in these types of social justice causes can only be made forwards.
You may argue that free speech may lead to intolerant laws and actions - but history suggests the direct opposite: free speech has mostly expanded tolerance.
And it makes sense: we have gay rights as a result of free expression. For the longest time the “offensive” idea being censored was that being gay was ok and not a result of mental illness. Without free speech we wouldn’t have gay marriage.
Also, again, what about speech that only indirectly affects you?
What if my speech is "I do not think gay people deserve the same human rights as straight people, and I want the government to deny them those rights"? I'm not saying it to you, I'm saying it to my elected representative(s) in the government. Should we tolerate that speech?
Additionally, I believe that history supports my position. Generally, increased tolerance seems to correlate with when society stops accepting and starts shaming people with 'bad opinions' (racism, sexism, etc).
If not you individually, maybe should select certain group of people to represent the people and create rules to enforce bad behavior is stopped?
Maybe we can call this body a government and call the rules laws.
In my opinion, society is more tolerant when we do not let the intolerant people hijack it to spread intolerance. In other words, intolerance is some of that "bad behavior" that should at least be softly prevented. I am expressing this opinion on this discussion board in the hope that other people will agree with me and maybe even change their minds slightly (or maybe I'll have my mind changed instead!).
For ideas - remove ideas by banning / censorship, or add ideas by promoting 'better' ideas - this seems like a possible avenue to improving society's mental health. The main objection is whoever controls what to ban / allow is given a lot of power, so how do we decide these things.
For people - I think it's fine to be intolerant individually, however our institutions should not be intolerant. For example I can hire a cleaner for my house and refuse certain people. However it should not be possible for a company to refuse certain people as cleaners. I'm not sure how to formalize this into a law though.
Physical or mental violence because of intolerance of people and ideas are bad because I don't want violence on me. However I am not certain how to define mental violence.
Maybe the problem is the media (and social media) which is the vast vast majority of where ideas are promoted, and neither is where positive ideas get promoted. I’m not quite sure why that is - must have something to do with human nature.
Today its hard to distinguish these people from scientists at the top of their fields. Maybe the issue isn't that we need to scilence people but rather we need different tools to distinguish who's worth listening to.
Censorship fails because its an impossible judgement to make and its impossible to find a fair judge. Modern social networks amplify the outrageous, not the thoughtful. The needs for clicks has ruined discourse more then freedom of speech. I think there is a lot of work that could be done to build systems that encourage dialog and promote thoughtfulness online that isn't done today because everyone focuses on banning.
No individual can be knowledgeable in all the areas of science, economics, medicine, technology, etc, that would be necessary to understand and filter even a tiny slice of the daily news. Any tool will necessarily be making judgment calls for it's users in some way, and once the tool becomes the standard, those judgments will (effectively if perhaps not literally) determine who gets banned.
Science isn't controlled by one body, but by a network of peers that reaffirms or disproves prior work. Over time consensus is built, without the need to silence.
Right now we use clicks as proxy for value. What if we structured it differently like, give people a limited pot of recommendation tokens they could use to show others what they value. If someone gives 3 months of tokens to a 10 page article, maybe that's worth reading?
I dont know if these are the right metrics but we need to experiment.
YouTube did the opposit when they wanted to reach 1 billion hours a day: they promoted anyone who had a channel that produced 1h of content a day. That meant that all the alternative news/facts talk-shows got a huge boost and that lead to a lot of bad things.
Stripping away all real-world specifics, take this as a thought experiment:
You have a community (of whatever size) that starts out containing (among others) groups A and B. Group B is defined by their desire to remove group A from the community, and their outspoken proclamation of such and attempts to persuade others to their point of view.
If the community remains "tolerant" of all, that will, over time, almost inevitably result in the size of group A within the community shrinking, due to group B's efforts being both successful and tolerated, and due to group A not wishing to remain in a place where their very right to existence is constantly questioned.
In effect, what this means is that a community that claims to tolerate both groups is actually intolerant of group A. Tolerating any group-directed intolerance is, in effect, espousing it.
Thus, in order to be tolerant to the greatest number, any community must not tolerate intolerance.
It is also well worth noting that the types of intolerance we are generally discussing whether or not to tolerate are intolerances of intrinsic characteristics, while being intolerant of them is intolerance of a behavior.
People can change their behavior. They cannot change their intrinsic characteristics. Thus, in the thought experiment above, if the community refuses to tolerate Group B's intolerance, no member of group B needs to leave. They only need to stop expressing their intolerance.
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal ...
Similarly, would you tolerate hate speech that could put your life in jeopardy just because you believe in free speech?
The point I believe is not taking the ideal to its maximum blindly, but clearly defining boundaries you can't cross, even if it meant behaving intolerantly.
I don't think it's desirable to prohibit individuals from gathering in private and exchanging intolerant thought, though. Something like this falls under that IMO.
What if in a society once tolerant to gaybashing, and other things (not so long ago), should one not tolerate "intolerance" to this? I think your question needs re-phrased.
That is just not being tolerant to intolerance. The question stands
Which explains why you should probably re-phrase. And also because not all societies on this planet are the same in terms of "tolerance".
This is what you meant. It fits in the question. You are just phrasing it differently and calling it fundamentally different, when it is just a rearrangement and expansion of words. You can do this indefinitely, but the meaning won't change.
Allowing people to manifest mistaken, stupid or repulsive opinions is a basic tenet of free society.
And that raises an absurd but still interesting thought experiment: if by some process, someone is able to create a statement that is intolerable to every single person on Earth, would it be okay to censor it?
Surely you agree we have to draw the line _somewhere_, even if you disagree with where we currently draw it?
It seems bizarre to include in this list.
(3) obviously requires very different technical solutions (like: no private encryption, ever) than (1).
As in "we (as a tolerant society) can tolerate free speech up and to the point that someone else is harmed."
It's amusing how frequently this comes up. If someone distributes child pornography, arrest them using the existing laws of the land.
"But what if it spreads from there?" I hear someone saying. Well, they're still posting illegal content, so arrest them too.
It's silly to assume that the freedom of speech implies some kind of inherent free pass from consequences of your speech.
It's not that "there are laws against child pornography, which are completely separate from the debate about free speech."
Laws against the production of (actual) child pornography are irrelevant to the debate about free speech.
Laws against its distribution are absolutely relevant, because "distribution of child pornography" is just a kind of speech.
(To be clear, I oppose free-speech maximalism in general, and have no trouble with the idea of laws criminalizing the distribution of child pornography.)
I was merely pointing out that, if we want to have a discussion about what types of speech should and shouldn't be allowed, we need to be clear with ourselves and each other about what actually constitutes speech, and restrictions thereupon.
I'm having a hard time telling where you're reading in my post a suggestion that (e.g.), because criticism of the Thai monarchy is strictly prohibited in Thailand, we should technologically restrict such speech in the US.
I believe that just because some forms of speech has consequences, that doesn't inherently restrict speech.
What I'm reading of your stance is that since there are consequences for some forms of speech, this forms an implied and mandatory restriction on speech.
The difference is subtle, but it's leading to us talking past each other, particularly when it comes to discussing technology that enables free speech.
Unfortunately, this difference is not something I feel I can resolve on this forum.
Good luck!
Natural consequences are things like if I say "I hate people who wear hats," and I get an internet mob coming after me to defend hats.
Legal consequences would be if I happen to wander into a jurisdiction that has outlawed badmouthing hat-wearers, and I get arrested.
Legal consequences of speech are restrictions on free speech, because they are something humans specifically and deliberately chose and could un-choose. Natural consequences are just that: natural.