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Comment by zorpner | Hacker News Reader

The question you have to ask yourself is, what would be necessary to eliminate that potential for consequences?

Unfortunately for your argument, the answer is inevitably a hypocritical restriction of speech. You cannot wish for both free speech and immunity from consequences, since all that is required for those consequences to take place is more speech.

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Yes, to "guarantee" the elimination of all consequences you'd have to restrict others from speaking them. I think there's still something to be said for wishing people would voluntarily be more tolerant, and noting that excessively suppressing and/or destroying the life of anyone you disagree with as a private citizen is still going against the spirit of a right to free speech.

There is nothing to be said for it. People in aggregate do not respond to wishes -- they respond to incentives. Wishing that people would behave in a particular way without examining why they aren't is an absurdity, particularly when that wish explicitly preserves the status quo at the expense of people who have only speech.

It seems a bit bleak to imply nobody will ever do anything moral unless they have an incentive. Isn't morality worth pursuing even if it's not systematically enforceable?

I'll examine why people aren't more tolerant: because it feels good to mob together and knock someone down a peg when they annoy you; show them who's boss. White girl joking about AIDs? Someone pretending to be disrespectful at a patriotic gravesite?[0] Bury them, then we'll feel better. Is that kind of ugly speech really something that should ideally be preserved? Is it the best way to minimize the (also non-ideal) speech it was retaliating against? Who are the people "who have only speech", whose best or only option to protect themselves is to use their smartphone to connect to the internet and gloat "We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time."? What actual threat was there to protect against? Sure, leave the retaliation protected by law, but I think the level they're taking it to is morally reprehensible.

For what it's worth, my original comment was written with those two cases in mind more than, say, posting a Klansman-oriented art installation in public without warning or explanation. That might actually approach "shouting fire in the theater" territory. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the "speaker" was treated as badly as the other cases, so I think I'm justified in not addressing it for now.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

It's not speech but coercion that forces people to lose their jobs. Threats of boycotts and premanent brand destruction involve speech but it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech.

> it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech.

The Constitutional protections in the first amendment of free speech, press, assembly, and petition are all largely motivated by the desire to protect political action, because restrictions on any of those things inhibit political action.

Its an overly restrictive definition of speech that excludes political action.

There are multiple definitions of the word speech and I'm drawing a distinction between expression and action.

I think there's enough of a difference between mob-mentality and artistic expression that we can deal with them separately.

Yeah, but the sense of free speech that was important to the founders and has become ingrained in American culture and which motivated the protection in the Bill of Rights was not primarily about "artistic expression", it was about the means to rally political action -- to motivate the mob, so to speak.

You can talk about different kinds of speech separately, but if you are talking about the entrenched American value of free speech, you ought not to separate from "speech" the kind of speech -- that directed at motivating political action -- that that value is first and foremost concerned with.

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