Standing on principle

It's never difficult to defend the free expression of ideas we agree with.  Waxing indignant about censorship comes easy when it's opinions close to our own that are being silenced.  Principles, as such, aren't necessary to do that.  Even Hitler and Stalin and Mao were fine with dissemination of views that supported their own propaganda.

It's expression of beliefs we dislike that tests whether we truly have principles or not.  And there are always many who do not, of one stripe or another.  Some find "blasphemy" against the one true religion (whichever religion that may be in a given country or century) to be intolerable, others declare "hate speech" worthy of being forbidden.  It makes little difference which types of opinions they believe should not be covered by free-speech protections -- the mentality is the same.

I recently ran across the following example of a type of rhetoric the enemy often uses in this arena:

The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance, not as a moral standard but as a social contract.  If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.  In other words:  The intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.  Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.

I'm sure it does make a lot of difference "if you look at tolerance, not as a moral standard but as a social contract", just as, for example, our laws would become very different if we "looked at" the Constitution not as a written document but as a basketball or a hedgehog -- but let that pass.  The real problem with gnawing these kinds of holes in the principle of free speech is that once "intolerance" or "hate speech" or whatever is deemed an "exception" to which the right of free expression does not extend, would-be censors will just re-define whatever views they don't like as being "intolerant", "hate speech", etc.

We already see this with people who declare that Nazis are so evil that they deserve to be "punched" just for being Nazis -- and then call pretty much anybody whose opinions they don't like a Nazi.  Religionists eagerly deem any views hostile to their own religion as intolerant.  An argument in favor of banning guns, alcohol, pornography, abortion, child marriage, or anything else could easily be framed as intolerant toward all who choose to indulge in those things.  It would then be a short step to invoke the above-quoted argument to claim that such views, being intolerant, should not be tolerated.

This objection is not just hypothetical.  Looking at European countries which have laws against "hate speech", we see that in practice those laws are used almost exclusively to harass or even prosecute people who tell the truth about Islam or trans ideology, even when their views are expressed in ways that no sane person could possibly interpret as hateful or intolerant.  Numerous examples have appeared in my link round-ups over the years.

One could even argue that the quoted argument is self-canceling since its author is declaring himself intolerant of a certain range of views (those of the undefined "intolerant"), and therefore he himself is not abiding by the terms of that "social contract" which he has magically re-defined the principle of free expression to be -- meaning that the very argument he is making here should not be tolerated.

Another meme popular with the enemy is "calling bigotry an opinion is like calling arsenic a flavor".  Again, in plain English, "any opinion that I personally define as bigotry should not be tolerated".  To the jihadist or the Christian fundamentalist, any criticism or mockery of their own religion constitutes bigotry.  And so it goes.  The crux of the thing is who gets to define "bigotry" or whatever category of opinions is deemed intolerable and thus not protected free speech.

The people who make these kinds of assertions always assume that it is they, or people like them, who would have the power to define what is intolerant and thus intolerable.  Don't forget that in the near future it could be president DeSantis and a passel of legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene who will be empowered to make that decision.  The principle of free expression of opinion as an inviolable and seamless, yes, moral standard would stand robustly against them, because it would stand equally against any such attack regardless of which views are being suppressed.  Once you decide certain opinions are worthy of suppression on whatever grounds, you have no principle to stand on when your opponents turn on you and try to suppress yours.

As a blogger, I have no choice but to be a free-speech absolutist.  Every call for the suppression of "intolerable" opinions is a gun pointed at my head, because there are plenty of people out there who would insist that this or that viewpoint I myself have expressed is intolerable on one basis or another.  Free speech must be for everybody -- right-wingers, left-wingers, religious fundamentalists, militant atheists, racists, blasphemy, "hate speech", radical feminists, pro-transgender activists, communists, Nazis, everybody -- because the seamless principle demands it.  And if I didn't uphold and defend that principle, I'd be implicitly granting the enemy a basis to silence me.

Needless to say, this applies even to anti-free-speech arguments such as the one quoted above.  I do not support preventing people from expressing such intolerant views.  The proper response to evil ideas is not to prohibit their expression but to reply to them and argue against them, as I'm doing here.  (This does not, of course, mean that I'm obligated to let my own blog be used as a platform for views I find abhorrent.  There are plenty of other forums available.)

Sorry, but on this issue Noam Chomsky was right.  "If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all."