this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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"Should I Be Banned For Quoting the Bible?" Debating Free Speech on the BBC (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What’s the alternative to the will of the majority, though?

The legislature is meant to be ≈ representative, but that ranges from 1:1 in places like Switzerland (direct votation on everything) to indirect representation such as a bicameral system where the higher chamber (typically, the senate) is supposed to embrace the long view and provide some degree of perennial wisdom that the masses sometimes lack (especially in reaction to current events).

I agree that the mean has regressed toward populism and reactionary sentiment toward social progress (e.g., LGBTQ rights) among Western democracies in the last couple of decades. But I also look at this as history (with a lowercase h) ebbing and flowing, while History (with an uppercase H) trends unidirectionally toward more open and progressive societies. In other words, one step back, two steps forward. Every generation seems to be more tolerant than the previous, and holistically there’s been steady progress (in the “progressive” acceptance of the word) on societal matters over the 19th and 20th century to date.

I also feel that an absolutist free speech position, while dogmatically progressive and permissive on the surface, is actually regressive in its byproducts (cf. Popper’s paradox of intolerance). I also feel that most Western democracies, through their imperfect but somewhat representative legislatures, have struck a nuanced position on free speech that wisely forbids advocating for discriminatory speed (all the way to handing down hefty fines and prison sentences for neonazi speech in Europe, for instance).

That makes me not in favor of naively experimenting with relaxing those rules and risking hate speech (however thinly disguised) become banal once again.