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On Free Speech
Sep. 23rd, 2025 10:33 amPosting this here so I can find it later: Free Speech Culture is Killing Free Speech.
A few highlights from the original post:
1) The First Speaker Problem: “Free speech culture” suffers from what I call the First Speaker Problem: it picks a speaker, treats that person’s speech as the speech that should concern us, and then applies a set of cultural norms and questions only to the responses to that speech.
2) The Interests of Dissenters: The flip side of irrationally preferring the First Speaker is irrationally diminishing the speech interests of dissenters.
3) Preferring The Powerful To The Powerless: The multi-millionaire pundit with a column and podcast and network who comes to a university and says some students don’t belong there is the free speech hero; the students in question who protest the pundit and say he or she shouldn’t be there are villains.
4) Moral Sociopathy: In short, “free speech culture” is bad and unserious to the extent it tells us that speech is morally neutral and that we should not make value judgments against it, and that there is no moral component to promoting it. ... Giving [speaker X] a platform to be a bigot is morally distinguishable from saying they should be free to be a bigot.
A few highlights from the original post:
1) The First Speaker Problem: “Free speech culture” suffers from what I call the First Speaker Problem: it picks a speaker, treats that person’s speech as the speech that should concern us, and then applies a set of cultural norms and questions only to the responses to that speech.
2) The Interests of Dissenters: The flip side of irrationally preferring the First Speaker is irrationally diminishing the speech interests of dissenters.
3) Preferring The Powerful To The Powerless: The multi-millionaire pundit with a column and podcast and network who comes to a university and says some students don’t belong there is the free speech hero; the students in question who protest the pundit and say he or she shouldn’t be there are villains.
4) Moral Sociopathy: In short, “free speech culture” is bad and unserious to the extent it tells us that speech is morally neutral and that we should not make value judgments against it, and that there is no moral component to promoting it. ... Giving [speaker X] a platform to be a bigot is morally distinguishable from saying they should be free to be a bigot.
