Thread by @AkivaMCohen

There is & can be no meaningful "philosophical" commitment to free speech distinct from the legal notion of free speech as "freedom from government consequence". (You can argue about what the appropriate limits of that freedom should be, that's not what I'm talking about)

Why do I say there can't be any such philosophical commitment distinct from the legal? Because once you're talking about non-governmental consequences, you're focused on *competing* speech and associations - any private boycott or deplatforming is just private also-free speech

I don't have any moral obligation to actively or tacitly support speech with which I disagree. Of course, we need a modus vivendi to deal with both the mutually-assured-destruction version of "boycott anything I disagree with" and the actual harm of epistemic closure; life in a

bubble is impoverished; we gain immeasurably from the clash of ideas. But the way we deal with that is the recognition that there's a range of ideas within which we accept disagreement without imposing social consequences and ideas on the outside of that range where we don't

For example, if you see someone standing on a street corner loudly advocating for gerrymandering reform, you probably aren't going to spend much time listening to them but even if you disagree with them you aren't going to shun them. If you see the same guy advocating for

bringing back slavery, or rape as an appropriate punishment for curfew violations, you're never going to willingly spend time with that person; they've got an absolute right to spout those ideas without government repression and YOU have an absolute right to not support them

And if you see the NYT or WSJ or whatever media company give "rape them for their own good" dude a column to argue for his pro-rape views, you'd probably wonder what the fuck was happening behind the scenes there, maybe even cancel your subscription.

You might even suggest to other people that they should spend their media dollars on newspapers that don't publish pro-rape opinion pieces, or advocate for social media companies to decide that they don't want to enable the pro-rape community to coordinate discussions of how to

spread their pro-rape message.

And yeah, I'm choosing a deliberately absurd and outrageous example, because that's the fucking point. At the level of private responses to speech, we're already "only talking about the price"

Want to have a debate about where society should appropriately set the line, how tolerant we should be of dissenting views and under what circumstances social consequences of various levels should be imposed for "bad" speech? Good, that's an important fucking conversation

But we can't have *that* conversation, with all the nuance and consideration of tradeoffs and incentives and negative externalities and applications that it involves, if we're stuck debating whether the very idea of social consequences for any speech is somehow immoral.