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.