Referring to someone by the pronouns of their choosing is the respectful course of action, but there's no law that says I have to be respectful. I will in fact happily use he, she, or they when asked, but I will not use quay/xey/zey or any other made up pronoun. I won't use made up pronouns because I refuse to accept an obligation to learn and remember an ever growing list of made-up words that are required to secure the emotions of people who have been trained to have an emotional breakdown when they don't get their way (if being referred to as quay is required for your happiness, I actually think you may need to be committed to a mental institution). — VagabondSpectre

Very well said.

Thank you for your thoughtful response, I understand that the direction of these discussions in not in the hands of any one person and that if people want to simply talk about their gut feeling, or political opinion that's up to them, but I do miss chance to explore the difficulties of a real-world ethical issue with a wider group, and so I appreciate your direct use of actual cases.

I get rather confused then when you keep asking, in principle, at what point an individual's right to not be offended becomes more important than another individual's right to free speech. The only example you gave is that causing emotional offense can lead to suicide. If these are your chosen hills though, so be it. — VagabondSpectre

Any ethical decision must be based on evidence, otherwise we simply have rule-by-guesswork and that does not help anyone. Most ethical decisions made by institutions are made on the basis of utilitarianism. Most boards of ethics will have a religious representative, but the only degree to which their actual religious tenets are taken into account is the extent to which people may be grossly offended, which is considered a harm. You may well disagree with utilitarianism (I don't know), but very few other ethical systems are actually defensible in democratic institutions, so I'm presuming it is the default system here. So, in order to make these decisions, we need a list of harms (with evidence) and a list of benefits (with evidence). All the evidence gathering is time consuming, and as early empiricism showed us, is prone to selection bias. So what we generally do first is set the parameters. Would an increase in suicides of transgenders linked to the misuse of personal pronouns be a significant enough harm for the government to intervene in enforcing/encouraging their proper use? Because if it wouldn't, we do not need to waste our time looking for any evidence that this is happening. The same is true of any other parameter. We establish first what would be the value of any harm whereat it would outweigh the benefit, and then we look for evidence to see if it is at that value. That is why I'm asking for the values first, it's just the way I normally work. If it's unsuitable for this format, then I apologise, I'm still getting used to using such a platform as this, not entirely sure it's suitable for me.

I won't use made up pronouns because I refuse to accept an obligation to learn and remember an ever growing list of made-up words that are required to secure the emotions of people who have been trained to have an emotional breakdown when they don't get their way — VagabondSpectre

You've missed a few important ifs in your argument here. If the list were ever-growing, then it would indeed be a burden that might well outweigh the harms, and if the individuals had been simply 'trained' to have an emotional breakdown when they don't get their way, then the harms would indeed be too trivial to be of concern. So there is the first requirement for evidence. Personally, on this issue I am of the opinion that the greater harm is done to the transgender person by the therapist/transgender movement encouraging them to consider their gender and their pronouns to be a vital part of who they are. I believe that such an attitude is actually manufacturing excessively fragile individuals who place too much of their self-worth on the successful presentation of their image and we shouldn't be encouraging this by the use of special pronouns. But that opinion would need to be backed up by some evidence (which I don't yet have). Even then, it would not be that we should not restrict language use to protect people's emotional state. It would be that, in this case, restricting language use would be further harming people's emotional state and should not be done. solely on utilitarian grounds.

But the main reason is that the upward limit on possible emotional harm caused by allowing certain ideas to exist is far more insignificant than the amount of physical and all other forms of harm which history has demonstrated can easily be inflicted upon a population, by it's own government, when free speech is forbidden. — VagabondSpectre

Again this is rather taking a polemic view which I don't think the evidence has shown is warranted. It is perfectly possible (though difficult to prove outright) that much of what we take for granted as 'civilised' society is held together by our day-to-day levels of politeness and the thousands of acts of small polite acquiescence we all engage in on a daily basis to live peaceably with one another. Likewise, restrictions on certain freedoms to speak (inciting hatred, defamation, harassment, racial and sexually abusive terms, etc.) have all shown themselves to be very useful in stabilising society and none of these interventions, so far, have been any kind of 'slippery-slope' to Orwellian thought-policing. So no, I do not accept your argument that it is simply a given that people taking offence is automatically shown by history to be of less harm than the restriction of free speech. It is still about weighing the harms in each individual case, there are no absolute positions on this that I can see.

I will not quote sections of your approach to the de-platforming of racists, because I think the issue we have here is one of fundamental axioms. If you would reconsider the rough list of harms I outlined when I first tried to talk about the weighing exercise, the idea that denying these people a platform makes their ideas more attractive was in the list of harms, as was the idea that opportunities might be missed to counter their ideas with good arguments. But also on that list was the idea that providing any official sounding platform might give their ideas legitimacy, and that arguing with them as if we believed they had a point to make might encourage more extreme views (as many of these people simply enjoy being the maverick). So I understand you consider the evidence to be in favour of the harms caused by making their views more attractive and not countering them. I tend more towards the evidence being in favour of the greater harm being legitimising their views and inviting them to become more extreme (in trying to get banned, simply for the kudos).
Given the difficulty in trying to find conclusive evidence in this area (we can't simply run our future both ways and see what happens), I think we may simply have to agree to differ on this one. History is littered with examples of views given open platforms that have not been challenged, but instead grew out of control (Nazi Germany), as it is with ideas driven underground that grew by virtue of being repressed (Arab Spring). At the end of the day, this one will be a judgement call, from a utilitarian perspective. From a virtue ethical perspective, however, progress I think can be made. I would not tolerate that kind of language in my house simply as an expression of the virtues I hold to be important to my character, I don't see why YouTube should tolerate it on their website, nor why a university should tolerate it within their buildings, nor why, by extension, the democratic will of a population should tolerate it within their country. Sometimes our actions are expressions of our fundamental virtues and institutions like universities and democratic governments have just as much right to express their virtues by their actions as any person does.

The rest of your argument seems to centre on another area where I feel we will simply have to agree to differ on axiomatic grounds. Yes, I absolutely do think that "the voting public cannot be trusted to form their own rational assessment based on the evidence". That is why we have representative democracy, not direct democracy. We do not ask the public what they think the tax rate should be, we ask them which expert they would like to decide on their behalf. I believe the evidence is overwhelming that people do not make rational decisions the vast majority of the time, they are easily lead by charismatic or powerful speakers, regardless of the logic behind their rhetoric, and are not persuaded at all by calm rational disabusing of powerful emotional propositions. The powerful, emotional propositions win every time.
The only way to protect society from harming itself in the long run seems, no matter how unpleasant, to be to put some restraint on the ability of powerful charismatic speakers to say certain things which, those who have been elected to make such decisions, feel would be harmful were they adopted. I think trusting to a largely emotionally driven general public to resist the temptation of a powerful speaker like Hitler is taking an excessive risk, just to uphold a principle. It would be like starving to death in the wild, just to maintain one's vegetarianism. I admire your faith in the enlightenment, I do not share it.

Have you tried an unmoderated site? If they were more productive, why wouldn't we be there? — unenlightened

I do participate in unmoderated sites, but that isn't to say those are the only sites I participate in and that this site doesn't have productive conversations at all.

Again, what you would be validating is free speech. What people espouse using their free speech isn't what you would be validating. This is a philosophy forum with many conflicting viewpoints engaging each other. It would be nonsensical for someone to come along and claim that your site is validating just one of those viewpoints. It would only appear that you are validating a particular viewpoint if you delete or edit posts of another viewpoint that is trying to show how that other viewpoint is faulty.

Sorry for the relatively late response. I have actually written several very large tome-like responses, but invariably I kept repeating myself, so I took some time to consider the major points of our disagreement and have tried to simplify.

The major point of contention between us is posissibly to do with the intended versus the practical reality of "democracy".

Democracy, as I understand and define it, is any form of government which directly or indirectly represents the "will of the people" as a moral foundation and praxis of social organization and cohesion that entails a system of political participation. The "will of the people" as I understand and define it can be a bit ambiguous if scrutinized, but in general it is the uncoerced (in the compatibilist sense) political choices, leanings, and desires of individuals and the various degrees of consensus which emerge from the overall interactions of individual minds. Our various systems of voting, be they representative or direct, a republic of free states or inherently collectivist, are all "democratic" by definition because they allow for the voices of many individuals who seek to represent their own interests through some kind of vote, with the end goal of producing equitable and utility-laden directions for our society to take in short and long terms.

I don't expect you to take umbrage with how I have defined democracy, but I do expect you to maintain that this vision of democracy fails in practice, and is not how our own societies operate. As far as I can tell your ostensible objection to free speech in the cases we have outlined relies on whether not the voices of average people play a significant role in guiding politics, and therefore do not need to be well informed. I'm not sure if you might take the position that it is of net utility to ban controversial speakers in order to prevent the very rise of their ideology (which on it's own is a logical ouroboros given the lack of real influence that the beliefs of average people have), but you do take the position that it is of net utility to ban some controversial speakers and speech ("banning" in which degree you may clarify) to prevent the negative utility of emotional offense taking and the additional negative utility that emotional offense taking can lead to.

My understanding of your position: Charismatic leaders are in-fact the main locus through which democratic decision making actually flows. It is not the ideas held by individuals of a group that determines which ideas rise in political popularity, it is instead the persuasiveness of whichever speaker is the most charismatic that is the best predictor of political trends. Contrary to the beliefs of laymen and most contemporary political philosophers alike, the average individual is not capable of forming reasonable opinions concerning complex political ideas and must therefore be guided by the technocratic elite who happen to actually understand the world and are in a position to know what's best and what should be forbidden. Ideas such as Nazism and other such controversies cause some individuals emotional turmoil, and since no possible utility can come from discussing these ideas, there's net utility to be gained by disallowing the communication of some controversial political ideas in some contexts.

I'm fairly certain that this is an accurate portrayal of your position, but before offering specific rebukes I'd like you to offer corrections to the above portrayal.

There is an additional discussion that we might have concerning utilitarianism and it's theoretical and real role in justifying contemporary politics, and I'm not sure if it should precede or follow the conversation on democracy yet at hand.

I will say that while it's true a utilitarian approach has had broad influence on the moral directions of, and which found, our societies, ultimately it's functional role is a kind of last-resort heuristic when our other moral systems cannot solve a given dilemma. The foremost moral idea in the foundation and practice of ethics and law in modern society is the notion of "individual rights". Per this notion, utilitarian analysis becomes objectionable when utility for the many comes at the cost of utility for the few (in a way which violates the equitable minimum requirements of safety and freedom that society must offer to every individual for it to be desirable to participate in and maintain). This idea perhaps began with the Magna Carta, which chartered the rights (of some) to not be unfairly taxed, persecuted (religiously and otherwise; habeus corpus), and disinherited by a central governing force, who in all these cases deemed it "for the greater good" that individuals be disabused of these liberties.

The enlightenment utterly cemented this basic thrust, (a constitution of inalienable rights) and added the idea that leaving things to one perhaps charismatic leader (a monarch) is actually unreliable and unacceptable. When we first took the main political reigns away from royalty did we instantly hand them over to charismatic rabble-rousers?

Well the French certainly did if Napoleon lives up to his name, but America didn't. A Congress was genuinely formed with the intention of having democratically elected officials represent the interests of their constituents, and indeed those officials do seem genuinely beholden to the political preferences of their constituents (or at worst, campaign donors).

You suggest that there is net utility in banning some charismatic speakers from some private platforms while allowing some other charismatic speakers (on the basis of the utility of the ideas themselves vs the negative utility of causing emotional harm via controversy). The sheeple-esque portrait of the average individual as enthralled to the nearest charismatic speaker aside, do we not need access to as much information as possible, even information in the form of bad ideas, in order to develop critical thinking skills and robust ideas, which are the very requirements of resisting charismatic leaders in the first place? In other words, aren't you conjuring a self-fulfilling prophecy by assuming average people are too stupid to engage in rational political participation and then suggesting that we therefore restrict access to certain ideas (in whatever form) for their own benefit? A analogy comes to mind: clipping the wings of a caged bird seems moral if you assume it's nature is to be caged.

Whether or not the enlightenment ideals of democracy (and it's founding notion of inalienable rights) is actually the modus operendai of society, it is in still the modus operendai to which we are currently striving to adhere. To suggest undercutting one of the very freedoms required to try and engage politically as we should per the values of democracy is no small request. You will need to undo the whole moral and ideological basis for our current society and supplant it with what essentially sounds like central ideological planning.

I realize there is a laundry list of other issues we still need to discuss, but it doesn't make sense to hash out disagreements in specific cases before clarifying our ideological differences.
The laundry list:

- Would censorship have stopped Hitler
- Did censorship incite the Arab spring?
- Should the public expression of Nazi ideas be tolerated?
- Does the harm of not using preferred pronouns outweigh the harm of making it a criminal offense?
- How do existing speech laws and proposed and allegedly "anti-free speech" laws differ?


I'll end it here rather than perhaps laying out my own moral platform (you seem to have arbitrarily chosen utilitarianism as the most suitable medium for out moral disagreement), as for the purposes of this thread I can more or less adhere to the position of enlightenment ideals which I have already laid out. Rhetorically speaking, the reduction in free speech you are proposing makes me revoke my signature from the social contract, because I deem the risk of the worst case scenario that it might bring about (which entails harm to myself) too great a risk to be accepted. As your position is presently framed you might say that the chance of the worst case scenario happening is very low and so statistically choosing to restrict free speech in some cases will net greater utility, but strategically I am of the mind to avoid the worst possible end results rather than risk it all in favor of a good chance at more utility.

Can you convince me that avoiding the worst possible case scenario in life is a worse strategy than accepting higher risks for a chance at a better best case scenario?

My reply is above. Feel free to take your time (or not) in responding, and don't worry about style and format (i'm fine with a brief reply, indepth replies to chunked quotations, or a lengthy response without quotations such as my last reply.

Your characterisation of my position is relatively accurate, with one exception "... the average individual ... must therefore be guided by [a group] who happen to actually understand the world and are in a position to know what's best and what should be forbidden.". In the long-term, I don't actually think democracy works at all, but that's definitely for another discussion. In the short-term, given the society we're in, I believe in representative democracy (just). That means that I do not think that the technocratic elite "just happen" to know what's best, they have been elected exactly for that purpose, to decide what's best. They have been chosen, by the population as the people who they would like to make those decisions on their behalf. That is what gives them the authority to do so, not some technocratic qualification.

Obviously there are also a few stray polemics ("contrary to the beliefs of ... most contemporary political philosophers" I would dispute, but I think that's probably too trivial a point to bog down the discussion with). Basically, it is correct apart from the point made above.

Obviously I don't expect anyone to automatically take an interest in every philosophical position proposed, but If you were interested in exploring this idea further, the anthropologist Clive Finlayson outlines the concept of 'Conservatives' (followers) and 'Innovators' (leaders) best I think. His ideas would be the place to start (if you were interested). It's not as simple as it sounds. The easy stereotype is of poor meek followers waiting for instruction from powerful luxuriating leaders, but for most innovators (according to Finlayson) it's not like that. Most are rejected from society and live at the outskirts, barely benefiting from it's products until their innovation happens to solve a problem caused by a changing environment, then they become leaders, briefly, before being rejected again once their ideas have become the norm. Anyway, that's probably too much of an aside, I just didn't want you to get the idea that I was in favour of rule by elite, it's not like that.

So, with regards to the use of Utilitarianism.

I agree that the social contract is founded on inalienable human rights, but I think that these are a meta-ethical position, not a normative one. This is best expressed by the example of free-speech (since that's the topic here). We have a 'right' to free speech, but that 'right' is commonly imposed upon. We may not incite hatred, we may not defame, we may not harass verbally, we may not swear or use sexual language in broadcasts before the watershed. Socially, we impose even stricter restrictions on free-speech. So rights are not actually inalienable after all, they are a definition ( and quite a lose one) of the sort of thing we class as 'good' - a meta-ethical position. Utilitarianism, as you know, is a strictly normative ethic, it does not seek to define 'utility', only provide a framework for how to achieve it. So when I say that utilitarianism is the default position for the ethical decisions of authorities, I'm talking about it in a normative sense, with the preservation of human rights being (a significant part of) the meta-ethical definition of utility. Balancing all these rights is where utilitarianism come in. Hence the lists of harms from either option are harms against human rights.

The point I'm making with the 'will of the people', if I could return to that briefly, is that I think the old paradigm of the oppressed (but ulitmately united) populous keeping in check the tyrannical monarch is outdated and no longer applies. Again a massive diversion, but to understand my position (should you wish to) you would have to also understand a considerable amount of related thought, maybe that's why this format doesn't really work, I don't know. Briefly then I think that advertising and media influence does have an affect on people, I think that since the 1920s, that effect has been to suppress critical thinking in order to overcome the economic problems of a stalled technological progress (we already had most of what we actually needed), and the result of nearly a century of this attrition is a population who are (to put it bluntly), by and large easily led and satisfied almost entirely with superficial commodity acquisition. Entirely unlike the population at the time of the Magna Carta. This is a long argument and not easily made in a few brief paragraphs, but I just wanted to outline the fact that there is a difference, in my mind, between the situation we have to deal with today, and the situation a few hundred years ago.

It is therefore slightly missing the point to say that democratic congressmen in America, do indeed reflect the will of their constituents. They certainly do, but the 'will of their constituents' has
been almost entirely manufactured by a few charismatic people, not necessarily the actual leaders themselves. Again, as another long and complicated aside, but necessary just to mention. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think the 'few charismatic people' are the same few in each case, nor that they actually know what they're doing. Often, the few charismatic people don't even know who they are and certainly are not leading society in one direction consciously, but that doesn't prevent them from doing so nonetheless.

Notwithstanding the above, I actually think that the virtue ethical argument for restriction (de-platforming) of racists views is actually stronger then the utilitarian one, so I don't think we need to be committed to a utilitarian framework to reach this conclusion. I don't tolerate racist language in my house as an expression of an objective I hold to be a virtue (non-discrimination). I don't see why any community should not be allowed to similarly express it's collective virtues by their actions.

I think a central part of our disagreement seems to stem from some fundamental axioms which I'm not sure we can surmount;

1. It seems you think all data counts as 'information' and all people are essentially rational (or at least should be treated as such). I think that the rhetoric of racists does not count as 'information', as it is almost entirely lies, and that people are not rational and treating them as such is dangerous. In my defence - ask yourself why we do not extend the vote to children or allow them to be exposed to violent or sexual images, and then try to apply that same logic to the population of adults, given the sense they have demonstrated themselves to have.

2. You think that the right to free-speech and to be allowed to take part in the democratic process by expressing ideas is more important an objective than allowing society as a whole to express it's virtues by their actions. I think that the collective expression of virtue is more important than the inclusion of fringe ideas which are unlikely to be of any utility. In my defence here, if I have a right to say what sort of talk I will accept in my house, why does a University not have a right to say what sort of talk they will accept in their buildings, or democratic community not have the right to say what sort of talk they will accept in their country?

3. I think perhaps you require less of a person to entitle them to a right than I do. I'm guessing that we both agree that rights are not automatic in that they can be infringed upon, (we deny murderers the right to freedom, for example). If one wishes the right to free-speech, one has a responsibility to ensure that such speech meets that standards of the rights that provide one with the facility. I don't think it makes logical sense to say that someone has the right to speak out against human rights. It is a self-defeating right. We must either say that human rights are inalienable or not. If they are inalienable then there are no circumstances under which we would consider their abandonment. If there are no such circumstances, then there is no argument to be heard from those wishing to do so. If there is such an argument to be heard, the rights are clearly not inalienable, they are up for debate, on the basis of their merits, including the right to free speech.

As to your final question. I'm afraid I don't think it's answerable in one simple way. It depends on the risks in either case, it depends how bad the worst case scenario is, how high the risks of striving for the best are and how likely the best is to happen.

Basically, in summary of your point about utilitarianism, I don't think one can have a purely deontological ethical system where duties conflict with one another. They must either be universal, or conflicts need to be resolved, which then requires some other form of normative ethic to decide which is more important. If rights are truly inalienable (meaning they must be worded in such a way as to not conflict with one another) then there is literally no point in hearing from anyone who advocates their restriction because their position has been ruled out as an option by the very rights we're using to allow them to have their say.