Comment by 74B5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 74B5 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think many US americans despise the german approach to censorship of speech. Here in germany, we have not freedom speech but freedom of opinion, which makes a very crucial distinction.

There are two kinds of statements, descriptive and normative ones.

Descriptive statements explain "as is" relationships like "this door is blue" or "2 + 2 = 5". It does not matter if the statement is false or not.

Normative statements cover subjective "should be" relationships. These are opinions like "it should be 3 years parental leave" and thus protected in german law as beeing unrestricted. This is, what is needed for free public discourse and not the right to claim falsehoods.

In germany, you cant freely say that "jews are all criminals" and "the holocaust never happend". Over here, you can get penalized for public statements like these because (a) they are not opinions but wrong descriptive statements and (b) explicitly noted as beeing illegal. Whereas in the Us all speech is free (insults and such excluded ofc).

The question is, where do you draw the line. To which point can wrong descriptive public statements still be tolerated and where might they harm society or individuals? From the german perspective, this question is easy to answer and i am considering the storm of the capitol here :)

First of all, "insults" are not excluded from free speech protections in the US, except in very narrow circumstances.

Second, the distinction between normative and descriptive statements, as you define them, is not always clear-cut. As a simple example, is which bucket is "I think these doors are the same color" when said about a red and green door? What about (to use your example, but with a slight tweak), "I think all <insert group> are criminals"? Note that the "I think" was implicit in your phrasing, though maybe the implicit vs explicit distinction matters.

Third, even for statements everyone agrees are descriptive there may be widespread disagreement as to whether they are true. Example: "Donald Trump is a criminal." The US approach to this is to generally try to avoid having the government be the arbiter of truth, with some narrow exceptions for libel and the like. The German approach, as you note is different, not least due to different historical experiences. Which approach is better depends a _lot_ on circumstances and culture and norms and so forth. The German one places a lot more trust in the government not abusing it's truth-determination power than the US one does.

>Second, the distinction between normative and descriptive statements, as you define them, is not always clear-cut.

True but does not matter. Those statements, that fit into the descriptive/normative categories are the key ones of any text, the rest is either allusion or up for the courts to decide. IMO phrasing like "looks like there might be voter fraud" would not have let to the storm of the capitol.

>"I think all <insert group> are criminals"? Note that the "I think" was implicit in your phrasing

The difference of normative/descriptive statements is the same as subjective/objective ones. "I think ..." already started subjectively and can only have a descriptive component, if its backed up with a statement like "because X is ...".

>"Donald Trump is a criminal."

>The US approach to this is to generally try to avoid having the government be the arbiter of truth

But courts decide who is a criminal or not. And when such a decision is made, you could legally call Trump a criminal. Experts are frequently heard in court to distinguish it, so why not extend it? It does not have to the ministry of truth (political) but we all require the authority, that tells us the way things are, hopefully in an unbiased way.

> "I think ..." already started subjectively

But fundamentally me saying "I think the sky is blue" and "the sky is blue" are the same thing: the latter just has the "I think" implicit but clear to anyone who stops to think for a moment about what it means that _I_ am saying it. Maybe most people don't think, of course.

> But courts decide who is a criminal or not.

Sort of. The courts decided OJ Simpson is not a criminal by the legal definition. The descriptive statement "OJ Simpson committed a crime" has fairly contested truth value.

> hopefully in an unbiased way.

I guess the key is that the US approach starts out by admitting that the "unbiased way" is an unattainable fantasy and then works on routing around that problem. The real discussion here is whether the cure is worse than the disease in this case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com