that the authority (state, society, laws) is chosen democratically by the people does not make it any less an authority. — BlueBanana

Of course it does, it means that any time they no longer represent the will of the people, they can be replaced. Moral laws resulting from democratic governments evolve, moral laws eminating from religions either do not evolve or are not what they claim to be (the word of God).

they have so much space for interpretation they actually leave a lot more freedom for moral decisions and the choices and preferences of the individuals than actual laws. — BlueBanana

This is just religious apologism. If having moral choice is a good thing then ditch religion, you have complete choice then. If moral authority is good then religious laws being widely open to interpretation is a bad thing. You can't have it both ways unless you're claiming that religion just happens to have exactly the right balance of authority to autonomy, in which case I'd love to hear your argument for that conclusion.

An authority is needed for morality in any society, because otherwise we're left with pretty much an anarchy or the state of nature with everyone following their own interests. — BlueBanana

And you know this how?

Let's shut down hospitals and schools as well because then there are less opportunities for child abusers. — BlueBanana

No, because hospitals and schools serve some demonstrable purpose without which the well-being of society would suffer (personally I don't believe this to be the case with schools, but that's another discussion). There is no reason to believe anyone would suffer if Sunday schools and faith schools were banned. Half the world are atheist, it doesn't seem to have done any demonstrable harm.

priests don't have a higher probability to be child abusers than other men. — BlueBanana

Yes they do. There are a greater proportion of child abusers in the priesthood than there are among farmers, or soldiers, or dentists. Just as there are among schoolteachers, paediatricians etc. Groups that have access to children, particularly where they have some significant authority and are implicitly trusted by parents tend to attract abusers. The priesthood is one such institution.

blocking a single way to do that won't stop the abusers, but instead they'll find another way. — BlueBanana

Again, it's fine just to hear your opinion on this, but an argument to support this conclusion would be more interesting. Personally I think that most people suppress their more base desires because they simply wouldn't get away with expressing them, they have a lack of facility. Therefore, the more facility we remove the less abuse will take place. If you followed your logic there would have been no child protection measures at all "why bother, they'll just find some other way".

It's fine in the faith school, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be tolerated here. — BlueBanana

Again, it's fine if you just want to voice your opinion, but without an argument I've got nothing to consider. Why do you think it's fine in faith schools? It seems like a rather problematic thing to teach our young children to me. It seems obvious to me that such teaching is not going to help social cohesion, teaching that an entire group of people are evil. If you think it's fine I'd like to hear why.

Religion does not discourage critical thinking. — BlueBanana

That's just your opinion, mine differs hence my inclusion of it on my list. If you read the posts this list derived from, they are all about personal moral responsibility and the need to choose even when evidence is scarce either way. Your response to this point is a prime example. You say it doesn't, I say it does, where do we go from there?

"Absolving of moral responsibility to an authority" is neither a strictly negative thing — BlueBanana

Again, I believe it is, so as far as my personal moral obligation is concerned, it is to act with the best will, based on what I believe to be true. If you'd care to actually present any arguments to back up your assertions I'd be interested to hear them. If not, that's fine, but you'd be crazy to expect me to act based on what you believe. I'm going to act based on what I believe, aren't I?

every state in the world does that with their legal systems. — BlueBanana

No, most states are democracies which means that each citizen has a part to play in devising and revising these moral decisions. Religion is not a democracy, it does not invite opinion on moral matters from its congregation. There was no vote on the ten commandments.

Wars exist without religions, which are just excuses. Child abuse happens outside religions as well — BlueBanana

This is a nonsensical argument. Racism exists outside of neo-nazi groups so we shouldn't act against neo-nazis? Sexism exists outside of men's clubs so we should not act to open up exclusive clubs? Corruption exists outside of secret lobbying interests so we shouldn't act to close that particular instance?

Religion gives people an excuse for war, restrict religion, that's one less excuse. Religion gives child abusers a way to access their victims and maintain their silence. Restrict religion, that's one less route for child abusers.

The human race right now does seem to be quite riddled with bad people. If we can't make progress by eliminating as many opportunities as we can for them to get away with doing bad things I don't see how we expect to make any progress at all.

Everyone, to one degree or another, twists the evidence to suit their conclusions. Some more than others, but we all do it. None of us are immune from such behavior. — Sam26

I'm not sure what relevance this has. We all get colds and flu from time to time too, that doesn't stop us referring to them as an illness. Depression and Anxiety are both metal conditions dealt with by medical intervention. The fact that they're experienced by over half the population hasn't had any impact on that approach.

I don't see any need to medicalise normal, run of the mill religious behaviour because it doesn't objectively get in the way of people's lives, but if a young adult was experiencing some mental pain at the conflict between their normal desire for a sexual relationship and the fear of punishment in the afterlife for having sex outside of marriage, then I'd say the intervention of a therapist would be helpful. The fact that thousands of people have the same delusion shouldn't have any bearing on deciding objectively how best we can help people.

It has occurred because we share the same underlying metaphysical presuppositions with regards to these matters. How come we do? That's largely a matter of practice and habit, that we have learned and been taught, and also because the metaphysical statements describe actual structures of reality and of our experience. — Agustino

There you go. You've just made a series of verifiable claims of fact to justify the shared meaning of the word "utility" which we have then used to justify an otherwise metaphysical statement. Exactly what the positivists were going on about.

Is it a matter of practice and habit? We can test that with twin studies, feral child studies, isolated cultures, anthropology etc.. The answer's definitely not there yet, but it's a verifiable statement.

Do metaphysical statements describe underlying realities? If they do we'd expect them to be remarkably similar. If we had a theory that they did, one way to verify that theory would be to see if they were indeed similar across cultures. Again, a verifiable statement of fact.

We have gone directly from requiring a verifiable definition of utility to making verifiable statements about why its meaning should be so universal. At no point so far have we had to rely on a non verifiable statements of fact to derive our meaningful propositions.

first-principles cannot be deduced from something more general than themselves. — Agustino

We do not need to deduce them. That's not a requirement of positivism, only that they can be verified. "all people seem to act as if they believe in the confluence of logic and truth" is a verifiable statement. From that we can theorise in a pragmatic sense, that there is a confluence of logic and truth. We cannot know this of course, but it is a verifiable theory.

Saying that "utility" cannot be verified itself is the reason why I introduced argument 2. You are taking a Wittgensteinian ambiguity over terms and using it to suggest that metaphysical statements are required for their resolution. We may not be certain what "utility" exactly refers to, but we seem nonetheless to be able to use the word in normal conversation and still understand each other. How has this miraculous confluence occurred? Have we both coincidentally come to very similar (if not exactly the same) answers to the (unverifiable) metaphysical question you claim is at the heart of this definition? With suitable translation, I could use the word "utility" with virtually every human on the planet and we would agree with each other about the definition at least sufficiently to use the word. Are you suggesting that the meaning of the word "utility" is an open metaphysical question, whose answer cannot in any way be verified, but to which nonetheless, the entire human population that has ever lived has reached a remarkably similar answer?

Why does the statement of the positivists make an exception to the general rule? — Agustino

Finally, the actual philosophical question.

Firstly, let's clear up Wayfarer's prejudiced summary. The actual Ayer quote we're talking about is

"The criteria which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability".

So why should this statement be allowed to stand when it itself cannot be verified? There are several lines of argument of which I am most familiar with two.

1. Michael Friedman's primarily utilitarian approach which essentially argues that as a performative statement it can be at least falsified, as can its opposite. Consider that no statements of metaphysics can be verified. In that case, all statements in performative truth become statements of oughts. One "ought" to act as if X were the case (where X is the metaphysical statement in question). Having done this transformation, however, metaphysical statements become verifiable by their utility. The statement then becomes "there is no utility in...". This can be falsified easily by demonstrating some utility to non-verifiable metaphysical statements other than this one. If this one is the only statement that has any verifiable utility, then it justifies its own exception, by its own rule.
You may of course disagree with the assessment of utility, but that is not a metaphysical argument, but an empirical one. Utility can be demonstrated.

2. There is also an ordinary language argument, that the statement becomes insightful if we treat metaphysical propositions as questions of language use. Metaphysical propositions all then become propositions about how a term is used and so verifiable by reference to some assessment of language. This is more an argument in defence of using positivism on metaphysical statements than it is a defence of the statement itself, but it highlights the utility of allowing cases of special pleading as premises.

But if you use it as a premise for any other purpose, it is not begging the question. — Agustino

Exactly, but by the same token you can use statements containing special pleading as premises, because the justification does not have to be contained within the statement if it is a premise to further analysis.

You're repeatedly judging the single metaphysical statement of positivists by different standards to its exact opposite statement.

I agree that the statement would better have read "all metaphysical statements except this one...", but that is a point of refinement, not a resounding argument in its own right.

Yes, I read your post the first time, there's no need to repeat it. Naming the philosophical term for a thing doesn't affect its truth value in some way. I have nearly 20 years in professional philosophy. Long enough to have picked up a little of the terminology, thanks, and long enough to to be wiser than to think that because someone named a thing it must be true.

I take it you haven't actually read Habermans because if you had you would have noted that fairly early on in his definition of performative contradiction he describes it as a paradox.

You would also have understood point (4) much better, which you have conveniently ignored, that if metaphysical statements about metaphysics are to be analysed by their own conclusions then every such statement becomes meaningless. The statement "metaphysical statements are meaningful" is also meaningless by this standard because it begs the question (you have to already believe metaphysical statements are meaningful in order to believe the conclusion).

So we either allow a kind of suggestive metaphysical proposition, even though we might have to suspend some analytical principles temporarily in order to explore the implications, or we must dismiss entirely our ability to say anything about metaphysics as all such statements would themselves be metaphysical and cannot be assessed until we have judged the value of metaphysical statements. There is your performative contradiction - acting in such a way as if metaphysics could be analysed, but making statements implying that it can't.

Furthermore, none of this says the least thing about positivism, this is entirely about the analyticy of one statement. Positivism is a concept, not the degree to which that concept is successfully expressed.

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.

This statement itself cannot be considered meaningful since it cannot be verified with respect to scientific evidence. — Agustino

Only if you accept the premise within the statement, which you can't do without accepting the statement. Ergo, the statement is either a paradox, or an exception to its own conclusion.

Therefore it either says nothing at all about statements which cannot be verified by scientific evidence, or it has made a justifiable claim. In neither case had the statement itself disproven positivism. It is either meaningless paradox or true. There's no logical position where it is false, just by its own declaration.

Which is why I raised option (3). If we accept that metaphysical statements are neither universally meaningless nor universally meaningful, we must accept that there is some finite number only that are meaningful. So what logic prevents that number from being 1?

individual people, regardless of who they are, no longer really have control. — Agustino

That's what I'm scared of. At least individuals are human. God's knows what new movement the random chaos of billions of social media users all trying to influence each other is going to come up with.

I have no illusions that mainstream media aren't playing exactly the same game, and I've no respect whatsoever for Soros and his ilk, but he does just happen to be right here I think. Social media platforms are doing just what the media has been doing and for years only they're doing it better. The media and the corporations that own them have already fucked society up enough, I'm frankly terrified of what an even more efficient version could do.

Which part of "... social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections." Do you disagree with?

I don't think that would be a case of misdiagnosis. I wouldn't want you to think that I considered virtue signalling to be a universally bad thing. It think it often derives from genuine passion. It's just not a very efficient way to get ethical decisions made, especially in a discussion where pretty much everyone already shares those passions. I haven't heard anyone here say that free speech is rubbish and can be discarded at the drop of a hat for no good reason. Nor have I heard anyone say there should be no restrictions at all on free speech. So where does all the virtue-signalling get us? We still, it seems to me, just have a list of harms from restricting free expression and a list of harms from not which will be somewhat different in each case. Very little discussion has focused on comparing the two lists, and even then hardly going beyond personal opinion as to why one harm trumps the other.

Obviously we're not all utilitarians, but I've yet to hear a deontological or virtue-based argument either.

But this is exactly what I'm trying to say in my post to V above. I don't think people do understand the phenomenon. They think they do, which I why we've heard such vitriolic defences of the right to think and express ideas privately, the right to have meaningful, reasonable political debate to promote the well-being of society, but when looking at concrete examples, the whole argument is a fight against something that isn't there. That's why your failure to give specific examples was such an oversight, it allowed this kind of flag-waiving narcissistic exercise without any actual progress having been made on any real-world moral dilemmas.

no concrete evidence from history, anthropology, biology or any other authority has been presented in support of this "race signifies biology and culture" assertion. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't understand what you are saying here. Are you suggesting that there is literally no evidence that different races have had, on the whole, different cultural experiences? Are you saying that the cultural history of, say, Polynesian Islanders, has not been unique, or that Polynesian Islanders do not have any shared genetic traits?

You could either answer that question from a utilitarian perspective or a deontological/virtue ethic (they would amount to the same thing here).

Essentially, if we're agreed that maximising the well-being of current and future society is our goal, we then have the task of dealing with the huge amount of uncertainty in our predictions. One way to do this is with virtue ethics, trusting to an instinct or intuition for the types of behaviour that generally lead to beneficial consequences. In that case you might well feel that indulging someone's trivial needs now at the expense of fundamental needs in the future 'feels' wrong and is not the sort of thing a virtuous person would do.

It is common in modern ethics to treat individual morality as best resolved by virtue ethics and the decisions of governments and authorities as best resolved with utilitarian approaches. So for government to allocate resources to helping individuals now at the expense of those in the future one might expect a more detailed weighing excersice with evidence brought and some acknowledgement of the hyperbolic discounting values being used.

In simplest terms then yes, this is true of non-renewable resources which is why people consider it unethical to make excessive use of them. It's not true of renewable resources though which are only denuded if they are used at a rate that is greater than their production, nor of recyclable resources.

The more complex issue is one of diminishing responsibility to future generations the further into the future they are. This is usually argued on the grounds you've already alluded to, that our knowledge of the needs of future generations becomes increasingly uncertain the further into the future they are and so the net risk (harm X certainty) is smaller even for relatively large harms, like resource depletion. How far into the future you place this will depend on how certain you are about humanity's needs.

I think you're being overly generous to young people. Most simply don't care. Consumerism has created a society stupid enough to buy products they neither need nor want just to keep the system propped up. The result of nearly a hundred years of this process is the generation you see. One which cares more about what level they're on in some computer game than they do about people starving in their own country. It's not considered withdrawal, it's a complete lack of compassion, driven into them so they continue to buy product.

The American philosopher Michael Friedman has written an excellent refutation of the popular story of the collapse of positivism called "Reconsidering logical positivism". He charts the way in which the collapse has as much to do with rise of anti-semitism in Europe as it has to do with the actual philosophy, but that kind of data just means that you'd actually have to come up with a convincing argument against it rather than just trot out the same old Ayer quotes as if the matter were settled.

Regarding the single, clichéd argument you have put forward -

There are only four logical propositions regarding the meaningfulness of metaphysical statements;

1. All metaphysical statements are meaningless - In this case the positivists are right anyway.
2. All Metaphysical statements are meaningful - In this case the statement "only statements that can be verified with respect to scientific evidence ought to be considered meaningful" must itself be meaningful, being as you point out a metaphysical statement itself.
3. Some metaphysical statements are meaningful, others are not - In this case, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the metaphysical statement "only statements that can be verified with respect to scientific evidence ought to be considered meaningful" is meaningful and all others are not.
4. The making of metaphysical statements about metaphysical statements is an illogical circularity - In this case the statement of the positivists is meaningless, not wrong, but so would the statement "metaphysical statements are meaningful/useful" be meaningless by the same logic.

If you can see a logical position where the statement itself is meaningless but the remainder of metaphysics remains untouched I'd dearly love to hear it.

the censorship of potentially everyone else — VagabondSpectre

Who's argued for the censorship of potentially everyone else?

When we make structures in society to assist the disabled, do we abandon them because now everyone with a limp will get special treatment? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.
When we make laws to restrict people's freedom of movement do we abandon them because now the government can keep us chained to our beds if they want? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.
When we have laws to protect people from slander and defamation do we abandon them because now everyone who thinks they've been in the least bit criticised can sue? No, we have a sense of proportion and weigh cases on their merit.

So why, when people propose laws, or social trends, towards restricting the use of certain language and the platforming of certain ideas do you consistently create this straw man of a world gone mad with every slight offence being policed and virtually all debate shut down? What on earth makes you think we wouldn't be just as capable of applying exactly the same sense of proportion to claims of offence, exactly the same ability to weigh each case on its merits when people claim to be offended?

we're talking about situations where a singular indirect exposure to an offensive idea and the emotional harm that renders, not instances of legitimate harassment. — VagabondSpectre

No, we're not, no-one is talking about that. Despite the clandestine beginning, the topics that have been mentioned are; the repeated use of a personal pronoun opposite to the one a transgender person prefers, the banning of certain speakers with known racist or politically unsavoury views from university speaking institutions, and the offence taken at unwanted sexual advances within the MeToo movement. Absolutely no-one has suggested that a single indirect exposure to an offensive idea requires intervention. These are all repeated uses by society (or particular sections of it), of language that many people (virtually half the population in one case), find offensive in the expression of ideas which have been talked about since civilisation began. No-one is suggesting that the expression of ideas be banned off the cuff because one person is offended by them.

Banning an idea forever because we all agree it's a bad idea only works for about half a generation because young people are never made aware of why the ideas are actually bad. — VagabondSpectre

Again, no-one has mentioned banning an idea, the public debate has been entirely about denying platforms to speak at the very extreme, but mainly about restricting language use.

If we start banning ideas or the right to express them then we're not going to have all the information. — VagabondSpectre

For a start, this goes down exactly the same straw man as you've used before, no-one is suggesting banning ideas. But to take the point itself, it is not automatically true that a free ability to speak raises the amount of information in the debate. People who get up and propagate lies, for example, are not adding information to the debate, they are removing it, making it actually harder for people to see what the real issues are. Denying such people a platform assists proper rational decision making, not hinders it.

Anti-harassment laws clearly cover the example situations you brought up (i.e: being emotionally badgered to the point of suicide). — VagabondSpectre

Some people clearly think they do not, that's why I was asking you for your reason why you think they do. People are claiming that the lives of, for example, transgender people, are being harmed significantly by the repeated use of the opposite personal pronoun to the one they prefer. Where this activity is carried out by society as a whole, it is not covered by anti-harassment laws, yet (the argument goes) it is causing significant psychological harm for very little public benefit.

Democracy is the system that I want to live in because it's the least worst system we've yet come up with according to the historical evidence, — VagabondSpectre

Not relevant to the debate, but actually historical evidence has shown that small-group egalitarianism is the the least worst system, creating stable societies for several hundred thousand years before agriculture. But I'm not sure what this has got to do with the debate, is it another straw man for you to valiantly knock down, are we suggesting that the evil transgenders and anti-racists are calling for the dismantling of democracy now?

How about disabusing them of their racism? How about showing them and audiences just how weak racist ideas and ideals really are when reason is applied to them. There are people out there who aren't yet "alt-right", and they're looking at your desire to censor "the alt-right" like you're terrified of their ideas, and that makes them more attractive. By not allowing racists to express their opinions and be debated in broad daylight (especially if a bunch of students invites them to speak on a stage rented from a university), people won't then get exposed to the ideals which naturally immunize them against those particular brands of ignorance. That actually makes them more vulnerable to those ideas in the long run. — VagabondSpectre

Are you really that naive to believe that people adopt ideas on the basis of a rational assessment, what world have you been living on for the last 200 years? People adopt ideas because they are part of the Zeitgeist, they're the "talked-about" idea of the moment, they're the idea their parents had and they're too lazy to think of anything else, it's the idea shared by someone they fancy and they want to get laid. Pretty much everything but actually thinking about it rationally. If you honestly think that ideas get accepted and rejected on their merit, then explain why ideas have consistently gone in waves of fashion. Have people's brains changed over time? Have people changed the way they reason? Or is it more likely that people have just got swept along by the latest craze - free-love, communism, anti-communism, the American dream, fascism... They're all just trends people follow for social reasons. If we want to have any influence of direction such trends go, then making a clear statement about how we tolerate them is an extremely effective way.

The important position of banning racist thoughts and statements to emotionally coddle everyone at all times? — VagabondSpectre

What? I thought your suggestion that people were denying the right to express ideas was crazy enough, who the hell said anything about banning thoughts?

Nobody can know for certain what the impact of ideas will be, both in terms of emotional harm and real world benefit accrued. You cannot decide before hand what the impact of an idea is and how useful it will be; you're not all knowing-god. Which is why we need the right to free speech, to as you say, decide for ourselves what is right and wrong. — VagabondSpectre

This is the non-sequitur at the heart of this problem. Stating that no-one can predict the harm or the benefit from the expression of an idea is a cop out. Someone has to nonetheless, we still have to decide whether to give someone a platform (if it is ours to give), we can't just equivocate and say we don't know. A decision has to be made.

You're talking as if language was the only means of communication, that some-one's right to express how they feel in speech is somehow the only defence against extremism. We have many ways of displaying and teaching our children how to be moral citizens, not least of which is by our behaviour, the moral decisions we actually make about who we want to talk too, whose ideas we find worth discussing, who we consider to have reached the level of politeness we expect of anyone wishing to take part in public discourse.

it's really the 1st type (ability to express ideas) that's important to me. Suppressing speech is not quite the same thing as suppressing ideas and it's occurred to me that equivocation, on my part, might have us bogged down a bit (granted, it doesn't fully account for our disagreement). — Roke

You started this thread in a deliberately clandestine way, referring to a 'movement', but would not say which, that was raising the right not to be offended, but hat's not what's got us bogged down though, as I've had many ethical discussions that have started out trying to define a general trend, they've generally sought to first define that trend and then move on to discussing the ethics without too much trouble.

What's got us bogged down here is that your failure to specify any particular movements has invited people to jump on an opportunity to signal how virtuous they are by speaking out in defence of free-speech, against some Orwellian nightmare of the Thought Police stamping out alternative ideas when no-one, and I mean absolutely no-one, in the public debate is suggesting anything of the sort.

The trouble with these internet forums is that only a small minority of posters are actually interested in practical ethics, the nitty-gritty of how to decide what a government or authority should do for the best in a particular situation. The rest see it as nothing more than a public declaration of their own values, a preening exercise, and what's worse, they presume others do as well and read that intention into everything they write.

I've sat on several ethics committees in my career and to be honest, I'm here because I miss the cut and thrust of the debate, but having to wade through this sea of virtue signalling to get to any actual practical issue is tiring to say the least.

If I might be forward enough to provide some advice on starting another debate about an ethical issue, First avoid stating that there's a general trend but not specifying any examples, then avoid asking "what do you think?", when the only relevant question in practical ethics is "what should we do?"

I see an important distinction to be drawn between 1) expressing or clarifying an idea vs 2) repeating a fully communicated idea ad nauseam. — Roke

Perhaps you could furnish us with an example of these two approaches in this thread because they sound entirely subjective to me. The only distinction I can see would be that 'clarifying' an idea might involve changing it slightly as the discussion progresses. Can you identify anyone's position that has changed, even slightly, as the discussion has progressed?

I and others have tried to explain to you what the problems are with this way of thinking, but you are very set in it and don't seem to even consider the counter-arguments, — JustSomeGuy

This is a very sloppy bit of philosophy. "...don't seem to even consider the counter-arguments" is a classic ad hominen. I don't agree with you, you think you simply must be right, so the only logical conclusion you can reach is that I must have not considered you counter arguments. What about the option that I've considered your counter arguments, countered them in turn but that you did not understand the argument? Is that so impossible for you to conceive?

What do you mean 'decide for myself and let others do the same'? That doesn't make any sense. You are deciding for yourself, for who else would you be deciding? It doesn't change the nature of the decision you have to make. You are arguing here that the administrator should not deny the person a platform. That was one of the two options available. To decide this you have concluded that the harms from denying them speech outweigh the harms from not. You still had to weigh up the harms to make that decision, which means you still had to answer the question that required you to speculate on what they might say. You haven't escaped having to use your best guess, you haven't successfully sat on the fence, you've decided.

What you've not done is justify your decision by reference to the full set of harms on both sides because you've tried to avoid the question of predicting the utility of what the person might say.

To clarify, let me put it in terms of numbers. Suppose we assign the harm that will result from denying the person a platform to speak a value of 10.

Our moral duty now is to guess whether the harms from allowing them to speak (the only other option) would be greater than 10. The only way to do this is to make some speculation about what sort of thing they might say, how useful it may be, and how insulting it may be.

There is no option where we get to throw our hands in the air and say "well how could we possibly know what he's going to say before he says it?" because that does not advance our weighing excersice any and such an excersice must be carried out.

Consider the scenario in the real world. Someone owns and controls a platform for speech, could be a broadcaster, a university campus, a news programme... A person who they believe, based on what they already know about them, is a racist (by their definition) asks to speak. They then have a moral choice, either allow the person to speak, or not. Like any moral choice, they must weight the harms;

To speak -
Lots of people might be offended.
Some impressionable people might be persuaded by them to act in a harmful way.
They might be encouraged by the legitimacy of the right to speak and take further harmful action or allow their views to become more extreme.

To deny speech -
They might actually have something useful or interesting to say and our judgement that they are racist was actually wrong.
Denying them a platform might make them or their sympathisers more angry and promote further harm.
They might have their views changed by others in the debate.

At no point would the person deciding that the harms from allowing them to speak outweigh those from not, suffer either of the incorrect assumptions you're accusing them of.

At no point have they had to presume they 'know' what a person has to say before they say it. At no point do they have to claim they 'know' what is morally right. But they must act nonetheless. They must either allow them a platform or not. There is no position where their 'knowing' anything for sure has any relevance. They are forced by circumstance to guess what the consequences might be, part of making that guess requires that they guess something about the person's character and what they're likely to say. There's no avoiding making such a guess.

The reality is that a decision must be made and decisions often require us to use our best guess. It's not hubris, just pragmatism.

You seem to have an unfounded confidence in understanding other people's positions before they speak. — Roke

Why is deciding on a person's liklihood to bring something useful to the debate based on their actions 'unfounded confidence' but deciding whether to believe them after they've spoken is not.

People lie, misrepresent and misunderstand all the time, it is you, I think, who has the 'unfounded confidence' in the power of language.

At some point in our interactions with a racist we have to decide that their opinions are not in any way useful to us. Why not decide early on and avoid the offence of having to listen to them?

But these definitions are not a problem so far as refusing to discuss certain political opinions is concerned. When you're comparing a theoretical "racists opinion" with a real-world need to discuss, of course the real-world example is going to appear more complicated, but comparing like with like, we very rarely encounter a person wishing to speak whose opinion we are not already vaguely aware of.

Racists, and there's no ambiguity about it, have shown absolutely no reasonable contribution to a discussion about the direction society should head in order to maximise well-being.

To those still considering the need to "include" all speakers in 'the debate', I'd ask why they are not including children in that. If you think a racist should not be banned from speaking on university campuses, then why are we not also inviting the opinion of three-year-olds, the clinically insane, the mentally retarded? We dismiss the involvement of huge sections of the community in 'the debate' all the time and we do so on the perfectly reasonable grounds that we can tell before they even start to speak that they will not have anything particularly constructive or useful to say. The same is true of people we can identify by their actions as being racist, more so, in fact. I'd rather hear more of the opinion of children and the mentally ill than from racists.

I'm not following your argument that a "discussion" is automatically necessary before arriving at a moral decision. I already know racism is bad, I don't need to discuss it beforehand, nor did I need to be taught it by discussion. I was taught it by example. So I'm failing to see why a racist need be allowed to publicly voice his political views (knowing as I do that many people will be deeply offended by them). We live in a society in which racism is routinely frowned upon. Unless this person has grown up in isolation somewhere, he will know full well that society considers racism wrong, he's not waiting for a good argument against it, he knows them all already and doesn't care.

I'm not sure what your line of argument is here. You seem to be just writing the opposite of what I suggested, but without providing an argument as to why you think that. Science only leaves out firstness and thirdness if and only if you've already committed to a belief that they are not features of existence which can be talked about scientifically. You can no more disprove a presumption of physicalism than you can prove one. That was the simple point I was making.

Free speech is a pre-requisite to reasonably evaluate and uphold other rights. It's the mechanism by which we achieve the other social goods. — Roke

I don't think this is true, within the statement you've already made a couple of presumptions.

Firstly, that we should 'reasonably evaluate' rights. How are we going to enforce a 'reasonable' evaluation without preventing people from making claims which are unreasonable?

Second, that this is "the mechanism by which we achieve the other social goods". What cause do you have to believe that all discussions on rights are necessary to achieve social goods. It seems empirically the case that only those discussions likely to lead to an improvement in social goods are necessary. The others can be discarded without impacting on the benefits of the necessary discussions. Since we are, presumably, measuring 'social goods' by some metric, there will clearly be cases where all options brought to the table by some political opinions will fall short of that metric. How then is having the discussion necessary to bring about the social good?

scientism is very likely the number one cause of nihilism. — Agustino

And that's a classic example of why people like you hate it so much, just in case it stops you from making ridiculously unfounded propositions like that one by asking that you actually come up with some empirical evidence to back them up before we all nod sagely in agreement.

I don't object to the conclusion you draw about those that do not give, but only expect, I object to the implication (by your descriptions of such people) that you could identify them by their behaviour with regards to making themselves sexually attractive, by the standards of the latest cultural preferences.

I don't see anything about wanting other people to find you sexually attractive, even in a superficial way, that automatically means you have nothing to give to society. Nor, conversely, do I see anything automatically moral in giving to others by not engaging in such rituals but focussing instead on something like teaching. Teaching can be as narcissistic an exercise as any other, relishing the adoration of those who hang on your every word etc.. Equally, dressing up in full, conventional make-up just to attract a partner for a one night stand, can be nothing more than a fun distraction for someone otherwise committed to making the world a better place.

If we are to draw conclusions about people's moral demeanour from their behaviours (and I believe we can) then we should do so by virtue of some evidence that such behaviour actually causes harms intrinsically. Attempting to divine their motives is overreaching our abilities.

Firstly, I did give a reason as to why freedom of speech (and of thought) might be more important than other rights: because it's required to guarantee that we're able to even talk about other rights, let alone fight for them in a democratic system.

Secondly, we're not talking about freedom of speech trumping any other right, we're talking about it trumping "the right to not be offended". — VagabondSpectre

Right, so you've still not provided an argument for this. All you've done is move the objective. Now you need to provide an argument to show how "guarantee[ing] that we're able to even talk about other rights," and is a more important necessity then ensuring people are protected from the harm theoretically caused by views they find offensive. Do you have some evidence that the well-being of society will be more harmed by having some political speech restricted than by having it freely expressed, but potentially causing widespread offence? This is what I'm saying about the polemics, one side seems to be saying only that freedom of speech is really important, the other that insults can be harmful. Both of these are pretty well established facts, what's needed in this debate is some measure of the extent to which one outweighs the other.

I'm defending political speech, not all possible speech. — VagabondSpectre

That's a very subtle distinction to draw. Do you have a definition for what constitutes "political speech"?

Driving a car comes with the risk of accidentally killing pedestrians or one's self, and we could sit around debating whether we should even be given the freedom to drive cars or walk on sidewalks, but it's not pragmatically feasible: we need to drive cars even though it kills people every single day, and we need to express our political opinions even though doing so may indirectly kill people every single day. — VagabondSpectre

This is exactly the point of the discussion. We do recognise that driving is dangerous but necessary, but we do not respond to this state of affairs by simply saying that people should be free to drive wherever they want in whatever manner they want to. Restrictions are placed on people's ability to drive freely, because of the severity of the potential consequences. This is an exact mimic of the argument being had here. Everyone seems to agree that restrictions on freedom of speech need to be in place (the harassment laws as you point out), so the argument is whether the existing restrictions are sufficient. We have had the same debate about driving and the result has been that the restrictions on driving freely were not sever enough and we have subsequently reduced the speed limit further in urban areas. We're having exactly the same debate now, and the same two questions are relevant - What are the actual harms caused, and how much do we value avoiding them relative to the freedom we're considering restricting?

So you will get to decide for everyone else what beliefs they are allowed to hold and express, for everyone's own good, because you know best... What happens when someone disagrees? — VagabondSpectre

I didn't say I get to decide 'for everyone else', just that we must each accept our moral duty to decide what is right and act on it if necessary, not to equivocate and expect someone else to decide for us (the existing law, the judiciary, the bible... whatever). If you think the law is adequate, then state why you think that, just saying it must be moral because the law says it is is absolving your own moral responsibility.

Perhaps we should all be free to think for ourselves and communicate what we think is right in order to ensure that we can come to un-coerced decisions? That's free speech. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, but you've still failed to demonstrate an advantage to that process which outweighs the harms it might cause. Is there evidence that we actually, as a society, come to decisions this way which increase our well-being sufficiently to outweigh the offence that having such open discussions may cause? Are we really going to gain anything by inviting the far-right speaker to the table to air his racism? Lots of people would be deeply offended by his political opinions, history shows us that we're very unlikely to come to any usefully different conclusions after hearing from him, so where's the benefit?

I'm generally in agreement that we should not legislate against offending people, what I dislike are the sloppy arguments used to defend this principle, they risk undermining an important position.

The freedom to express one's opinions (political or otherwise) has to be restricted because at some point in time, the benefits to society from having those opinions aired simply outweighs the harms from the offence.

Therefore, the only relevant questions to establish where this point is are;

How harmful is the offence taken? And; how much benefit is likely to accrue from the ideas being expressed?

I don't see either of these questions being addressed with evidence.

Except for being no longer subjective, i.e. no longer what it actually is. Which is the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in a nutshell, and another topic altogether. — Wayfarer

Yes, but only if you have already rejected physicalism before you start the investigation. Our experience is what it is, it's just that we don't know 'what it is' yet. If 'what it is' is nothing more than the firing of neurons, then scientific investigation reveals the whole of it, there is nothing more to investigate. If we reject this possibility by saying that scientific investigation is inevitably missing something, then we have simply prejudiced the investigation. Without prejudice, it remains a possibility that science is actually investigating all there is to be investigated.

Because if you don't have freedom of speech then you might not be able to acquire new or guarantee pre-existing rights. Russia or Uganda will send you to prison for publishing anything construable as pro-gay-propaganda because it suits the feelings of the people (people too stupid to afford democracy the respect it requires), and this is likely setting back acceptance of gays markedly. — VagabondSpectre

You've given me a reason why freedom of speech is an incredibly important right, I asked for a reason why it might be considered more important than any other. Such an argument would require not just the presentation of the bad things that can happen when the right is removed, but a demonstration that they are somehow worse than what happens when any competing rights are removed. That's what I mean by adding some objectivity to this debate, at the moment it's too reliant on polemics.

I see people using this argument very lightly, and they (you) really shouldn't. If you suspect someone might be a suicide risk, (for example, if them getting their feelings hurt could be their last straw), then serious intervention/assistance should be offered to that person. A part of being free means being responsible for one's self, and merely being offended because of a political opinion that someone else expressed falls well within the "deal with it" category. Democracy requires we tolerate the political opinions of others. — VagabondSpectre

If you read my argument carefully, I'm using this form of cause and consequence to indicate that actual harm can result from insult. It's a philosophical point, establishing the parameters of what it is reasonable to argue. This is something which is essential in any professional discussion on ethics, but for doing which I'm constantly being misrepresented on this site. I don't suppose many people here have actually sat on ethics committees, but establishing the parameters is pretty much the first job. I'm merely stating that it is a reasonable proposition that insults can lead to direct physical harm and so a utilitarian approach could reasonably argue that these harms need to be accounted for. I'm not giving psychological advice on how to approach suicide victims.

When it comes to outright harassment, we actually have anti-harassment laws which are more than adequate to deal with anyone who consistently emotionally badgers a particular individual. — VagabondSpectre

Again this is a misleading line of argument in ethics. What we have laws for and what is ethically right/wrong are two entirely different, and often unrelated, things. The argument ethically is whether we have a right to restrict freedom of speech in order to avoid offending people, not whether we have already done so and enshrined such a restriction in law. The law might be wrong, it might not go far enough, or go too far, such discussions are how laws are made/altered in the first place. The question for this debate is whether you agree that anti-harassment laws are morally acceptable. If you do then you have agreed that there are circumstances where someone's right to speak as they see fit is outweighed by the harm it is evidently doing a person. As I said explicitly above, the matter then is a practical one of establishing the harm caused, as we have already agreed on the principle that some harms justify a restriction on free-speech.

But even if we do try to determine which political opinions we should outright disallow, do you have any bright ideas? Would you be the one to accept the position of deciding what is o.k and not o.k to express politically? — VagabondSpectre

Yes, and yes. That's the duty of any moral agent, we cannot simply absolve responsibility because the question is hard, we have to decide, and it is each person's duty to do so and to do what they can to persuade others of their position (if they think some harm might come from the position others currently hold). I fail to see how our duty to avoid allowing others to suffer could possibly be outweighed by our duty to be humble in the face of our uncertainty on any complicated moral decision.

As to how to determine such things, as I have outlined above, we have some small objective measures which we can bring to bear. It is unlikely that failure to be politically correct actually increases suicide risk, for example, because if it did we would have seen a lowering of the suicide rate over the last few years and we have seen the opposite.

Taking your example;

The black lives matter movement takes the position that violence done to black men by cops is the worst problem facing the black community, — VagabondSpectre

this is an objectively verifiable fact, by some metric, they are either right or wrong about this.

For me to contradict their position is literally and emotionally interpreted by them as racism. — VagabondSpectre

this is surely their prerogative as much as it is yours to state your views, you haven't specified any extent to which they're using force to restrict your freedom of speech here.

I could choose to say nothing for fear of hurting too many feelings, but if I don't then I think there's a higher chance laws will be passed which are not only counter-productive to the general impoverished black community, but will be outright detrimental to everyone (including them). — VagabondSpectre

The key here is that you think there is a 'higher chance' of harm from not saying anything. You have made an assessment of the net value of your speech and acted accordingly. That's not the same as saying the people should be allowed to speak as they wish regardless of any such assessment.

If everyone had thicker skin we could have emotional discussions about controversial topics without everyone flying off the objective handle... — VagabondSpectre

This is a reasonable sentiment, but you've failed to demonstrate either that it is the case, or that 'coddling' as you put is is responsible for the lack of a 'thick skin'. We can approach both issues with psychological experiment and insight, but we cannot simply presume either is the case based on personal experience alone. It is an equally reasonable argument to say that if we lived in a society where people restricted their public expression to show respect for the feelings of others the resultant 'safe' environment would lead to more fruitful, less polemic debates.

It depends on the extent of both, which is why we need to at least attempt some objectivity in our assessment of each (which is why I objected to WPoMo's suggestion that we all just need to be empathetic).

If the expression of political opinion is (or had a justifiable chance) of causing actual harm then I cannot see any argument that it should be allowed. It is not inviolable and I don't see any reason why freedom of speech should be the top of our list of freedoms.

Hurt feelings can lead to actual harm by psychological trauma or suicide, so there's no question about the possibility.

That means the remaining question (unless you want to argue that freedom of speech is inviolable under all circumstances) is whether the expressions in question actually are causing genuine harm. I think this is something that can be approached objectively. Has the suicide rate gone down with increasing political correctness? - no. Has the rate of therapy admissions gone down with the rising intolerance of bawdy language in the workplace? - no. We could go on.

Its not that I think it's impossible for there to exist a situation where the harms from free speech outweigh the right to it, it's just that I don't think the examples that have been talked about recently objectively are such cases.

Only listening carefully and employing empathy will tell us if a social movement is the result of people's untold pain and suffering from verbal abuse or is simply people being extreme narcissists who believe that they are entitled to freedom from any words that they do not like or approve of. I don't sense that there is much of the latter going on, so I don't see what there is to be scared of. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I think you've missed the point of the question. Everyone has already done the calculation you've outlined (genuine suffering vs. narcissism), they've come up with different results so the question is where do we go from here? How do we now move forward when some people think those claiming offence are genuinely suffering but others think they're being overly narcissistic?