My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional rights. The principles of free speech are universal, much more important and much broader than the US constitution. There are many ways to foster and promote free speech that has nothing to do with US law. Yes, we're often discussing US companies when this topic comes up, but you should realise that people outside the United States are not covered by US constitutional guarantees, and US companies don't treat us like we are. We must foster a discussion where the principles of free speech are seen to be important outside of this narrow, legalistic, US-centered sense.
There are fundamental rights of man. Government can recognize or abrogate those rights, but cannot invent those rights.
For example, if rights were invented by the government, there would be nothing about slavery that was wrong. If we say slavery violates the right to liberty, then we are saying that the right to liberty is inherent.
>Liberty, free speech, facts, etc. are apparently just nice theories from a more enlightened time.
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This is ascribing some sort of mythical quality to rights. Rights are simply what a society decides should be conveyed to its people. A country could decide that their people have a right to receiving a free hoodie every November and as long as the country supports that right, those people have that right. There is nothing inherently moral about rights. Countries have many times supported the immoral rights of their people. And people's rights are only as good as the society's support for those rights. There is nothing inherent or inalienable about them.
This is exactly the root of the “atheists can’t be moral” argument. Not that any individual atheist can’t be moral for the time being, but that a godless society inevitably falls into relativism where the only good is the consensus and the only morality is what you can argue.
This is one of those cases. I think we’d all be better off with an absolute basis for rights than a relativistic one.
There is no absolute basis for rights and the good being the consensus happens on religious societies as well. What is good is constantly being argued over and over in all societies.
Believing in an absolute basis for rights ignores the reality that every single right people have was usually fought for during a time when people did not have that right. You can lose rights and you can gain them.
It’s also how you get people arguing that the rights people have in some places (e.g. healthcare, higher education) aren’t legitimate rights even though they most certainly are.
Believing in a relative basis for rights means that slavery is ok as long as the consensus agrees on it. So slavery in the US was completely moral right up until the start of the Civil War and it's moral anywhere in the world it is fine today (as long as it is legal / consensus). I don't think that's moral at all. An absolute basis for rights is above law or human discourse - slavery was appallingly evil exactly because it was an stain against the enslaved peoples' human rights to liberty (regardless of whether the law allowed it or not).
African Americans didn't earn the right to not be enslaved. They always had the innate human right to liberty regardless of what the law said, abolitionists defeated the oppressors that suppressed their innate rights to liberty.
I can see now why we’re talking past one another. I am making a statement about the usage of the word “rights”. When I say “you have a right to due process” it is not a statement about an abstract concept but a matter of fact statement about the legal protections you have, which depends on the jurisdiction in which you are physically located.
You’re talking about the philosophical basis for how we come to our individual beliefs about what rights we should have. Note that the conversation is teetering on the edge of an appeal to the law fallacy: what the law currently says is entirely irrelevant when considering what it should say. To say that slavery is legal is not to say that it is moral, it’s just a question of fact.
In any case, if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it. I’m not an expert and I’m curious about people’s theories about these things.
> if you have an absolute basis for rights I’d like to hear it
Societies based on free men do far better than societies based on slaves. Armies of volunteers are much more formidable than armies based on conscripts. Economies based on free markets are much more prosperous than command economies.
I don't know what you'd find compelling, but I see a consistent pattern there. It's almost as if being free confers an inherent advantage. :-/
Anyhow, if you had a job where you are paid to work and could leave any time to get a better job, would you say you'd perform better at the job than if you were forced to work there and whipped if the overseer didn't like your work?
I certainly don't think we are always in accordance with our absolute human rights.
In a relativistic basis for rights, there is not "reviewing what we consider immoral", because morality is just "what every we consider moral". Slavery is moral (at least in 1850s America) because the consensus was that it is ok. Under an absolute basis for rights, it's clear that slavery was wrong then, and wrong now, and will always be wrong (regardless of what the law or consensus says).
I can personally believe slavery is morally wrong but still accept that a different culture may universally consider that there is a right to own other humans as slaves.
And the fact that there's no known good examples of slaves being happy with such an arrangement is a very strong argument in favour of any sort of right to own slaves being a unlikely sort of right that a society would ever successfully and sustainably adopt. I just wouldn't rule it out on principle - if there's anything like a "universal truth" I would accept it's that other societies/cultures need to determine their own rights for themselves, and they can't be imposed.
I'm not sure the union and the confederacy saw themselves as separate cultures though? And either way, I'm not convinced that it was an acceptable use of force (granted, it's not a subject I have any great depth of knowledge in). There are parts of the world today where certain members of society live in conditions not far from slavery, and while I very much hope those societies can in time see the advantages of agreeing on and adopting a more free and equal set of human rights, I don't believe it's justified to use force to impose them just because we're so certain of their "unalienable" nature.
I would imagine not a few slaves would have been killed in the process!
Either way, that on its own doesn't justify the bloodshed that occurred, and arguably the divisions in the US that don't appear to have fully healed yet.
And from what I do know about it, I wouldn't say the US civil war was a good example of an unprovoked party forcibly trying to impose their own "rights" on another society anyway.
One thing I'm willing to agree with you on is that the justifications used by those who believed in slavery were "wrong" - they made assumptions about the biological characteristics of people based on their skin colour or country of origin that weren't justified on any scientific or humane basis. There's really no excusing any sort of belief that people who are clearly capable of the full range of human emotions and thought processes were somehow subhuman and not deserving of free man status. Perhaps there's never been an example of slavery in society that wasn't accompanied by such beliefs, and on that basis I'd accept that all existing examples of slavery that I know of, past or present, are "wrong".
The Janissary elite drawn from the devşirme system of child levy would be the obvious example, particularly toward the end when they controlled many of the state assets and staged palace coups to get the sultan they wanted.
This is inane. I explicitly said that rights are orthogonal to morals. Why are you trying to claim I said the opposite? Do you understand what words mean?
How could rights be orthogonal to morals? Do you have any examples, either real or theoretical, of a right that came to be without an argument based on morality? In fact it's right there in the name. "Rights" refer to things it would be wrong to take away from people, making them right.
Out of curiosity, where do you propose such rights stem from?
And would you argue that those same rights were still "natural"/unalienable etc. even in a society that universally didn't accept them?
If they came about as the result of "natural evolution" then they can't be truly universal in the sense that evolution could very well have taken different paths that led to a species recognisably similar to us but whose nature and genetic make up would lead to adoption of a quite different set of rights than those you believe to be unalienable.
As it is, I suspect you'd have a hard time getting many groups of humans from millennia ago to agree with you on exactly what such rights are. Or are they all wrong too?
Bees followed a different evolutionary path, and human rights are not applicable to them.
> Or are they all wrong too?
Humans are full of false beliefs. If they believe that man does not have a right to liberty, then they are wrong, just as wrong as believing that throwing virgins into volcanoes assures a good harvest.
I don't believe that man has an intrinsic right to liberty - just that societies where basic human rights (including various freedoms) are protected by the state are more likely to flourish and grant their citizens more meaningful and fairer existence. I don't believe we've come close yet to perfecting exactly what those rights should be and how they should be protected however.
Well there are plenty of injustices in the world, most of them we can do little about. If my owners gave me the ability the live a decent and meaningful life, that potentially included the opportunities to do things that would be unrealistic if I had to fend entirely for myself, then I wouldn't necessarily complain, no.
But if the state failed to protect me against mistreatment by said owners, then I would absolutely have reason to protest and demand better.
I believe having slaves is wrong, that doesn't make it a fact. I have no reason to believe there is any natural law dictating that, it's nothing but a social construct we have agreed to.
> For example, if rights were invented by the government, there would be nothing about slavery that was wrong.
Slavery (or it's near equivalent: peasantry) was not considered unnatural for the vast majority of human history, really up until modern era. As horrible as it was, it was also the basis of many feudal economies the world over, and it probably powered societies through the dawn of agriculture, so at least 10k years. Prior to that, hunter gatherer groups also raised other groups and took slaves.
Industrialization had more to do with slavery's eventual decline than any idea that it was unnatural.
This is reflected in the areas where it ended earlier due to earlier industrialization (England, the Northern States of the US) vs where it ended later due to a persistent preindustrial agrarian society (Russia and the American South).
What is inherent in humans is the capacity for empathy and the ability to mentalize about another human's experience. That can lead to a belief that slavery is wrong, but that belief is in battle with the desire to exploit other humans for your own gain.
When slave societies were faced with free societies, the free societies tend to bury them. Free societies have an inherent advantage, as they better fit human nature.
Human societies across history and prehistory have always believed in destructive and wrong things of all sorts.
> When slave societies were faced with free societies, the free societies tend to bury them.
> Free societies have an inherent advantage, as they better fit human nature.
What are the examples of that which are not also essentially industrial vs feudal or technologically primitive societies?
That history seems pretty thin.
What's more likely is that freer societies are better able to harness the abilities of their inhabitants, and unlike slavery/serfdom based states, they don't have to deploy as many resources to defend against their own enslaved inhabitants. It's a triumph of a better organizational structure, not something inherent to human nature.
Otherwise free societies would have become the norm far earlier in history than they did.
> What's more likely is that freer societies are better able to harness the abilities of their inhabitants, and unlike slavery/serfdom based states, they don't have to deploy as many resources to defend against their own enslaved inhabitants. It's a triumph of a better organizational structure, not something inherent to human nature.
I.e. a structure that fits human nature better, making it inherent.
Rome's army consisted of free men, and they conquered everyone else. Slave armies have a poor track record when they come up against free men.
> Rome's army consisted of free men, and they conquered everyone else.
Rome relied heavily on slavery. Slaves were 20-30% of the population [1]. The slaves did the labor that allowed the free men to go fight and conquer others. It's not an example of a free society in the slightest.
Historically, some conceptions of them absolutely do.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I'm not sure if many people realize the the UNHCR has the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[0], ratified by ~180 countries. Unlike the First Amendment, the preamble the the ICCPR makes it clear that it is concerned with the responsibilities of States and citizens:
Recognizing that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying civil and political freedom and freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights, as well as his economic, social and cultural rights,
Considering the obligation of States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedoms
Realizing that the individual, having duties to other individuals and to the community to which he belongs, is under a responsibility to strive for the promotion and observance of the rights recognized in the present Covenant
Article 19 of the ICCPR deals with freedom of expression, and states:
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
This frames freedom of expression as a positive right, whereas the First Amendment is about negative rights. Also in contrast to the First Amendment, the power to curtail these rights is explicitly given to law-makers, in a limited fashion. Non-legal restrictions on free expression constitute a violation of rights.
Freedom of speech as defined by the ICCPR is so limited as to be effectively meaningless (which is why ~180 countries have ratified it). It wouldn't protect your ability to report on military misconduct, not wear a hijab, or criticize politicians, for example.
The "public health or morals" clause certainly leaves the door open for abuse. But it's still more useful than talking about the First Amendment as if it applies to the whole world.
I also think it's useful to frame rights both positively and negatively, and to focus on more than just the government's responsibilities.
This is a fish don't know they are wet phenomena. Government protected free speech is taken for granted here that people cannot contemplate what it means for the rest of the world.
Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China, India, Africa, the Pacific and so on give one iota of a damn about US law is completely absurd. Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.
> Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.
They don't have to. Popular culture is saturated with a low res version of 1st amendment.
What is more annoying about parochialism is every thing turning into mud slinging on the US.
The assertion of the US' founders is that such rights are inherent to all people, natural rights, and inalienable.
The fact that it was codified into law in a specific country is an implementation detail. The concepts of liberty in the US documents are philosophical assertions and not related to any nation.
They also happen to be law in the US, but even there they don't really hold force; such "rights" are violated constantly.
Nothing of the ideology seemingly professed by the famous US founding set were ever actually implemented. Slavery is just the big obvious one but there are a million other examples of their failure to actually implement their espoused philosophy.
It seems like more of an aspirational/marketing meme than anything.
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” -Lincoln
The framework applies equally turn on US country so I'm not sure what you are objecting to. If you read the link they provided it provides definitions for different types of free speech ranging from those that are legally enshrined (or not depending on your country), to how individuals socially react and common custom.
The reason is because the audience is likely majority US-based, US-adjacent, or their work focuses on compliance with US laws and customers more than other laws.
Unless you mean the source piece by Ken White itself, which is a specifically about the first amendment and not human rights in general.
This is a fair point but any discussion of free speech should be grounded with examples of systems that help maintain it, of which the US constitutional regime is one. Not all such regimes have worked, as the French Revolution demonstrated starting 2 months after the adoption of the US constitution. [0, 1]
So my question would be, what other practical examples would you introduce to the discussion?
Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view. To take one facet of the question, consider the World Press Freedom Index:
The country I live in (New Zealand) has no constitutional free speech guarantees, and ranks 11th. The US ranks 42nd, behind East Timor, Jamaica, Slovakia, South Africa, and many other places I imagine your average American would not associate with free speech. Now, I have quibbles with the way the Press Freedom Index is assembled, and it only captures one narrow (but important) aspect of what we care about when we speak about free speech. That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?
I lived in Russia, New Zealand, Canada, and US. Of the four, US undoubtedly is the best at protecting controversial political speech, which to me feels like exactly what you want to prioritize if you want to maintain a free society.
The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately apparent when you ask if people functionally have the ability to speak freely from within US institutions of academia, journalism, or large corporations. I work with colleagues in all of these from all over the world, and nobody is more afraid of saying the wrong thing and having their lives ruined than Americans. The fear is palpable and ever-present. So again, how successful has the first amendment really been here? The frequent response to this is "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", which is exactly the kind of legalistic attitude we have to get away from. Real freedom of speech means exactly the ability to say controversial things without suffering disproportionate harm, and I just don't think the US is doing markedly better than the rest of the free world on this front.
I'm not sure where this perverted view on the freedom of speech comes from. It has never meant freedom of consequences or criticism which is what "free speech absolutists" of today are seeking. To say otherwise would be to force people to associate with others. You're going to force a business to keep an employee who is damaging their reputation or hurting team morale. You're elevating the rights of trolls to the point where it infringes on the rights of others specifically the freedom of association. Free speech absolutists want a captive audiences who cannot disassociate with them and force companies to host content that is damaging to their brand. They have no respect for the speech of others in the form of protests which they label as "cancelling" and rail against despite it also being free speech.
I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people against each other, where every conversation that strays outside of narrow doctrinaire bounds, however innocuous or well-intentioned, might be reported on by a remorseless army of cruel snitches ever hungry to find some way to elevate themselves by destroying others. It's the very opposite of being kind or considerate, and, having seen its effects on colleagues, I can't imagine anything more damaging to "team morale". Freddie De Boer has a pungent phrase for this - "planet of cops" - and his essay is worth reading:
I feel focus on the first amendment gives people of this bent cover: it lets them exert incredible power over speech in every practical way, while claiming that free speech is intact because there's no violation of the constitution. The fact that we need to clearly rebut people like this is exactly one of the reasons why I feel over-indexing on the constitution is unhelpful.
Businesses don't have freedom of association. For example, in California, the "ban the box" law means that FANG must hire convicted domestic abusers even if it is bad for morale. This of course pertains only to past actions of the applicant though.
This is very interesting! How did the FANG in your hypothetical find out about the person being a convicted domestic abuser? The law says they are not allowed to ask about prior criminal history which is not relevant to the job itself, so it would be interesting to know how these pieces of information come to light.
I'll leave the question of "should a person be branded for life even if they've done everything they can to make things right" for the reader.
> Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view.
Overall quite successful, especially measured by longevity. It has not always been pretty. Politics in the US is a blood sport--sometimes quite literally. And the right to free speech has not been evenly distributed. But there aren't a lot of nations that have offered the level of protection from government suppression offered by the US since the late 1700s. Many of the nations you cite have not enjoyed these freedoms for very long. Nations like Japan and many in Europe also developed their current rights regime under the protection of the US during the post-war period. It's premature to conclude they have done better.
> That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?
Of course. Just as one example I'm impressed that many European nations do a better job of balancing free speech vs. harms than the US does. For example Germany does not permit Nazi speech, which seems reasonable. They also did a vastly better job of maintaining a civil dialogue about COVID at least early on. [0]
I'm not in any way arguing the US is perfect. You would have to be pretty blind to do that.
I always find it instructive to view these reports at the source. I developed this habit in 2018, when Reporters Without Borders (who maintain the Press Freedom Index you linked) published a report of the six most dangerous countries for journalists: India, Yemen, Mexico, Syria, Afghanistan, and of course the United States. When I read the report, it described how in Mexico journalists are executed by cartels and organized crime, how journalists in Yemen die in prison due to mistreatment, how in Syria journalists were killed in airstrikes and taken hostage by Islamic militants, how in India Hindu nationalist mobs would run down journalists with trucks… and how in the US, six journalists were killed in one year: four murdered by a stalker angry at a 2011 story the newspaper had published (subsequently tried and found guilty of mass murder), and two killed by a falling tree.
Being the midst of Donald Trump’s presidency, of course, there were headlines all over the United States: “Reporters Without Borders ranks US among most dangerous countries for journalists!”. The story was perfect clickbait, especially in that political environment.
I’m not saying Reporters Without Borders is untrustworthy. But I’m skeptical of their rankings by default, because being overly pessimistic about the US is an easy way to get lots of attention.
Here’s their report on the US’s ranking in the Press Freedom Index:
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker lists nearly 300 journalist arrests, nearly 1,000 assaults, 160 court orders, 80 cases of equipment seizure, nearly 50 instances of chilling effects and hundreds of other types of suppression of journalists since 2017[1].
That’s a much more interesting source since it aggregates objective facts and statistics. Do you know of a comparative analysis of these stats with equivalents in other countries?
> But what he didn't do was suppress the press, jail the reporters, etc.
See "Four more journalists get felony charges after covering inauguration unrest"[1]. PEN America, Protect Democracy and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Clinic also sued the government because of press suppression[2][3].
I don’t think any of those bullets are strictly untrue. The question is whether in combination they actually demonstrate a serious threat to press freedom relative to other countries.
The parent post that you're objecting to is advocating exactly what you are. Talking about different measures of free speech and how it relates to society. There are both legal and social Dimensions to the issue
US companies power to enable free speech culture is strongly proscribed by the laws of the countries where the content is being accessed. I don't see how US tech companies could over come China's Great Firewall, for example, without the cooperation of the Chinese government.
