Free Speech Posturing

https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/106270959/faith-in-taranaki-hate-speech-or-free-speech

Another article from the seemingly endless annals of "I'm all for free speech but ...". It seems fashionable amongst the media at the moment to make a case for how important free speech is only to then completely destroy that position by putting their own set of constraints on free speech that essentially amount to "I support free speech as long as that speech does not contain anything that I object to". In other words free speech for me, but not for you.

Of course this is justified under the virtuous banner of altrusitc consideration for others, resulting in the nebulous term "hate speech" to suggest anything which potentially upsets someone else, or might 'incite' others to action.

This ostensibly well-meaning attempt at management of the feelings of others betrays the muddy pools of confused collectivist thinking. Firstly the emotional response of others to stimulus is subjective and is unique to them as individuals. Offence is always taken, never given, regardless of intent. Having to moderate what may or may not be publicly discussed, or even potentially criminalised, based on the subective emotional responses of others is not only a dangerous societal path to choose but is also unethical as it violates the consent of the speaker and denies their self-owneership in their own bodies in deference to a potential future subjective response from someone else.

The corollory here is the novel concept that the responsibility for action is always upon the actor (with obvious caveats for those who cannot be considered able to assume responsibility). People always have a choice of action, one of which could simply be to ignore the speech they find disagreeable. To say that speech 'incites' others is to remove agency from those others as if they were mindless automatons, and to place the responsibility for the subjective responses of those who are unable to control their emotional state onto the speaker.

While the presumptuously paternalistic desire to protect the feelings of some preferred group may seem laudable at first sight, it disrespects their individuality by assuming lack of agency - the soft bigotry of low expectations. And therein lies the core of the issue. Until we are prepared to understand and respect the rights of each other as individuals with moral agency, we are destined to assume that the perceived consequences of the collective biases of others justifies our use of coercion to bend those others to our will. Hence the labelling of any speech which does not match our own values as "hate speech", requiring the coercion of prohibition.

Only when we recognise and respect the individual rights of others rather than imposing our own values upon them through coercive force can we really start to say that we are civilised. And only then will 'hate speech' lose its power to seduce those who have an over-inflated opinion of their position on the moral high ground.