Good. Free speech is a natural human right. Most act like it was invented by the US constitution instead of acknowledged by it.
I'd like to be able to deploy "natural" in defense of free speech, but I've found no substance to it. No premise beyond a personal value judgement, which I happen to share. So I default to appeals to utility.
You're saying the entirety of moral philosophy has no meaning so people should just do whatever they feels like, that's a pretty barbaric position.
>So I default to appeals to utility
Utility also relies on a philosophical justification; if you throw out all philosophy, you also throw out utilitarianism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
A lack of coercion doesn't seem to be the pattern of human history or the non-human natural word. Freedom is more of an aspiration for nature than a description of it.
Coercion is naturally occurring. The aspiration is to understand an objective set of ethics that all people, when only considering power over themselves and not power over others, would agree to. There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.
And I probably broadly agree with you about that "should be". But when someone does not agree with us, it becomes just a personal value judgement. If someone makes the opposite value judgement -- for instance that our species is a blight on Gaia, and they prefer to identify with Gaia -- our preference has no more "natural" weight than preferring chocolate to vanilla. I wish it did.
Again, when left to consider only sovereignty over themselves and not over others as a prerequisite, the set of natural rights will be arrived at unanimously, regardless of culture. The only time there are disagreements are when someone wants to seek control over other people, and OK, so you can say "the idea that coercing others is wrong is a value judgment and subjective" but then you have no fundamental reason why slavery is wrong, you only have a mishmash of arbitrary rules and no guiding principle whatsoever. If you agree that owning people is wrong on some fundamental, principled grounds, then you can't come to any other conclusion than coercion is the principle. If you think owning people should be disallowed not because of some fundamental principle, but because of some pragmatic reason like democracy says so or something, then you have to accept that enslaving people is acceptable if the culture or circumstances deem it OK. But you can't have both, it's doublethink. Either we have natural rights are slavery is acceptable if it is fashionable at the time.
It is without a doubt true that land is a natural commons. Yet in order to make the most efficient use of it it has to be managed privately. When I walk across a field, I am not an aggressor, it is the man who erected the fence around it that is the aggressor. Yet without that fence nobody has any incentive to do anything useful with it. I suppose this emerges from the fact that might makes right and anyone with the capability of taking land without consequence will do so. But we are here to determine what is right, not what is simply true. This one is a difficult problem indeed.
As far as intellectual property, I don't think you can own information. Nobody truly does, we create this abstract framework to try to make it so but it is fundamentally impossible to simultaneously own information and make it useful in the world and ultimately everyone knows this. To truly own information you have to keep it to yourself, but keeping it to yourself is mostly useless. A machine necessarily contains the information on its design in it's entirety, to put the machine into the world is to tell the world how to build it.
You can believe that everyone should have freedom of speech (and I'd agree with you), but one look around the world should show you that it is not a natural right, as clearly it is suppressed heavily in some places. And even in places that claim to guarantee from of speech usually still restrict it in some ways.
- It must be something any human can exercise in the absence of outside interference by other humans;
- Any such interference must be presumptively immoral.
Freedom of expression meets both the empirical and moral requirements for being a natural right.
It is, but it is not the paramount human right. Other rights, like "life" trump "liberty".
One may argue that certain instances of "hate speech" encourage actions against "life" and that the "liberty" of exerting that speech is trumped by the need to protect that life.
If you extend "life" to mean "health" and "health" to include "mental health", than the right to be a raging racist seems pretty obviously below the right for other people to not be attacked or threatened. QED.
Not that I personally think that's the right thing, just there's a danger in making core principles this ambiguous