If your desire to censor something is due to an assessment of how much harm it does
Isn’t that basically always what’s claimed, yet rarely the case? It’s likely either because people cannot tell the difference between their dislikes and what’s harmful to society, or because the correct answer is unintuitive. In either case, as long as a topic is taboo, one is banned from figuring out what the real answer is.
It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing porn was the way to go if you wanted a society with less sexual crimes. It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing alcohol was the way to go. It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing drugs somehow reduced drug-related problems, it wasn’t intuitive in the past that making mental health issues taboo wasn’t a good solution, etc.
“X is bad, we should ban it so that it goes away” is a naive way of thinking. An extremely open-minded person with low intelligence might arrive at such a conclusion if he believes it to be correct, though, but he won’t have all those negative emotions which are associated with pro-censorship viewpoints, and these mentalities are more of a problem than the actual censorship.
we’d remove the post and ban them
I believe there’s a murky border between “speech” and “action” which is not obvious. I’m for free speech in an absolute sense, but if somebody yelled into my ear and caused hearing damage, I wouldn’t consider that “speech” but “assault”. It’s not enough to name concrete examples like “slander”, “threatening” , and “yelling fire in a theatre”, there’s bound to be a simple explanation which separates speech and malicious actions clearly. I believe that such a clear definition will reveal censorship to be objectively nonoptimal
Isn’t that basically always what’s claimed, yet rarely the case? It’s likely either because people cannot tell the difference between their dislikes and what’s harmful to society, or because the correct answer is unintuitive. In either case, as long as a topic is taboo, one is banned from figuring out what the real answer is.
It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing porn was the way to go if you wanted a society with less sexual crimes. It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing alcohol was the way to go. It wasn’t intuitive that legalizing drugs somehow reduced drug-related problems, it wasn’t intuitive in the past that making mental health issues taboo wasn’t a good solution, etc.
“X is bad, we should ban it so that it goes away” is a naive way of thinking. An extremely open-minded person with low intelligence might arrive at such a conclusion if he believes it to be correct, though, but he won’t have all those negative emotions which are associated with pro-censorship viewpoints, and these mentalities are more of a problem than the actual censorship.
I believe there’s a murky border between “speech” and “action” which is not obvious. I’m for free speech in an absolute sense, but if somebody yelled into my ear and caused hearing damage, I wouldn’t consider that “speech” but “assault”. It’s not enough to name concrete examples like “slander”, “threatening” , and “yelling fire in a theatre”, there’s bound to be a simple explanation which separates speech and malicious actions clearly. I believe that such a clear definition will reveal censorship to be objectively nonoptimal