It is. And it ought to be.
The version being espoused here is conditional or contingent free expression.
It doesn't mean much.
In this form, expression is permitted only to the extent it is “enlarging understanding and uncovering truth.”
Is this the (sole) purpose of expression?
Would you suggest that things like murder threats or libel should be legal? Otherwise you're advocating for conditional or contingent free expression too.
Have you encountered situations where ethicists and absolutist free speech advocates have encountered any legal problems for exploring concepts such as this?
You can make slippery slope arguments if you like, but they're somewhat analogous to the very idea you're defending. You're allowed to make meta arguments about curtailing absolute free speech being dangerous, why would someone else not be able to make a meta argument about allowing death threats? They're both equally removed from reality.
I asked, “Are you advocating a system where giving airtime to certain ideas, but not including incitement, would be punishable?”
They answered in the affirmative.
The justification being that entertaining certain ideas itself constitutes harm (because entertaining ideas may be proximate to harm or “increases the likelihood of harm”).
We also got into definitions of “harm”, which, in my view, were expansive. (In the sense that nearly anything could be rationalized as resulting in harm.)
Death threats are considered to be an intent to act so there is probable harm and the person is usually charged criminally to prevent them from doing what they said they would.
However, saying you hope someone dies is not a crime and as much as I think it incites some bad emotions is considered free speech. Hopefully we can live in a society where people just act like normal adults and the ones saying outlandish things are not given a lot of attention.
Also I'm pretty sure that when a court finds that something is libellous it's deemed to have always been libellous from the moment it was done (may depend on what country you're in)
Usually when someone is found guilty of libel they are ordered to stop doing the action as well which means they can be held in contempt if they don't.
threats of violence, up to and including death threats, are completely legal.
What's not legal is threats of violence with both the intent and the means to follow through.
If an 80 year old man walks up to and tells me they're going to kick the shit out of me, it's perfectly legal. Not only is it legal, no one is going to do anything about it until that man actually attacks me.
If The Rock walks up to me and tells me he's going to kick the shit out of me, it's very clearly illegal (assuming we know intent, of course) and he will go to jail for it.
This is why things like repeating can also be illegal. If you never have the intent or the means to follow through with a threat, but do it repeatedly to affect mental state, that too is illegal for a different reason.
But the presumption that this speech is de facto not legal is absolutely incorrect, in the US at least.
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Libel is not criminal in any way, shape, or form, and is a bad example as a result.
(that's a general question; in the particular context of MIT I'd assume the bar would be a useful academic conversation)
Which questions are fair game for academic inquiry?
Which are not?
How do we know ahead of time what will be useful and what won't be?
Is the question above this line academically useful?
(I would like to provide an example, but I attempted and can't think of any)
> What topics are academic? Which are not?
Topics which discuss general ideas which are logically (or at least rhetorically) decidable are academic. Topics which discuss particular individuals and are matters of taste are not.
> Which questions are fair game for academic inquiry?
cf supra
> Which are not?
cf supra
> How do we know ahead of time what will be useful and what won't be?
If a topic falls under an existing academic discipline, it will likely be useful. As stated above, matters of taste are unlikely to be useful. (possibly, if one has reason to believe one can capture a global distribution of tastes? or provide a theory of changes in distributions of tastes, etc.)
> Is the question above this line academically useful?
Useful for a "philosophy of academics" discipline, probably not so useful for any non-meta discipline. Note, however, that discipline's core questions will change over time, as one subfield gets overworked and new subfields are discovered.
Is taste arbitrary?
Do human preferences have a basis?
Do human preferences have constraints?
If so, are these bases or constraints available for academic study?
Can you suggest bases and/or constraints? If you can make a coherent theory of it, then sure, that'd* be worthy of inquiry. (cf gp)
* similar to how stat mech. and quantum have very little to say about any individual transition, but can discriminate over the macro-states available to a whole collection of micro-states?
"wanna fuck?"
Now I get to watch you and others try to backpedal "enlarging understanding" to simply mean communicate so that the above expression can fall into it, otherwise you're clearly wrong.
But no human is going to use the phrase "enlarging understanding" to simply mean communication, so I'm not going to buy it.
However (assuming the context is not harassment) it is "uncovering truth": the presence or absence of consent.
(resolved: that we should turn conversation into action?
Come on, baby, I'm tired of talking
Grab your coat and let's start walking
)They went for the other one, that sure showed me! No mental gymnastics here folks, just good ole fashioned awesome-sauceness.
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or how about no, I reject it just as I said I would.
"expression is always about stuff".
Now go on, try to show that I'm wrong. I've both said something irrefutable and said nothing at all.
* Speech that benefits me but does not necessarily benefit you.
When I think of persuasive speech, I think of A intending to convince B that C is proper policy — but this benefits both A and B, insofar as it should involve enlarging B's understanding of C, and is an attempt by A to uncover the truth of whether or not C is desirable. That is clearly protectable.
If benefits A but does not necessarily benefit B means "A is trolling"[0], then that speech, while possibly entertaining[1], does not sound at all useful. Protection of trolls would have to rest under some other heading than "enlarging understanding" and "uncovering truth", as neither are true of them.
Does that distinction make sense? Is it at all related to what you had in mind?
[0] indeed, at this point the notion of "persuasive" becomes arguable, if A is the only person who might possibly defend their argument as plausible.
[1] depending upon how it uncovers the truth that A is a jerk?