Topic: The free speech poll - page 2. (Read 8494 times)

If you yell fire in a room full of cats and the cats panic, then you can claim innocence as its totally unexpected for the cats to understand you and respond. 

But human nature is what it is.  If you yell "Fire" as a prank knowing that it will cause panic and deaths, you have to take responsibility for those deaths.  Saying that its the fault of the people you scared is technically true but pointless.  People do get scared and if you know that and cause a panic, then you are responsible.

Perhaps you will never agree with me on this.  But I don't see how you offer anything better than our present system.  Even if your contract idea worked perfectly, it can only be as good as what we have now and it involves a lot of unnecessary faffing about with lawyers and contracts.

You're right in that I do favor the contract approach. The main difference is that breach of contract is a civil matter, between the owner of the theatre and the patron/prankster. As such, the prankster voluntarily agreed to pay the compensation beforehand; the question of justification does not arise. There is no violence involved, only the voluntary exchange of alienable property. It seems to me that an arbitrarily high contractual penalty, plus non-violent responses such as social ostracism, should prove a sufficient deterrent against these sorts of pranks.


I would argue against the idea that "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" can result in deaths. Even assuming that people have the right to assume the trust of such a statement, and hold the speaker accountable for the cost should it prove false, responsibility for the harm lies with those who caused the injuries. Fire or no fire, if people are injured during the rush to exit the building, they have the right to seek compensation, but only from those who injured them. The people who caused the injuries can't really transfer the blame onto the one who shouted "Fire!", as the injuries would be their fault even if the fire had been real. The fact that it was a prank changes nothing.

nybble41 - I misread you about the "responsible" vs victim thing.  My mistake - thanks for pointing it out in a civil manner.

My problem with your position is that I don't see how it improves on what we have now.  Right now, a prankster yelling fire in a crowded theatre resulting in deaths gets punished.  If you stop that, more people do it and lots more people die.  I'm sure you could think of some kind of contract arrangement that says "by entering this cinema I agree not to yell fire unless there is indeed a fire" but what the benefit?

I'm sorry you feel that way. Perhaps someone else will respond more constructively.


I think we can at least agree that the real victims are those who were injured in the rush to escape the "fire". I never said that they were responsible; I said that those who injured them were responsible. Even if they were acting on accurate information--if there really was a fire--they would still be responsible for causing those injuries. Panic is not an excuse.

The worst offense the one who shouted "Fire!" is guilty of is deliberately providing false information. Everything which comes after that point is due to the choices of others, and thus their responsibility. They could have chosen to ignore the warning, or check for an actual fire, or at least exit the theatre in an orderly manner. Instead, some of them panicked and trampled others in their rush to escape.

I think we are done here.  You can fantasise about your little utopia where the victims of crime are are "the responsible parties" but since there is no way it will ever be adopted I can't be bothered with you.

Sorry - you have no idea what "freedom of speech" means if you think that you can retain it while simultaneously being under threat of punishment simply for speaking.

There is no sense in which it is meaningful to say that you are free to do something while also arguing that the action justifies a violent response. Under that interpretation, you have unlimited "freedom" even if you're living under the most oppressive totalitarian regime imaginable--you can do whatever you want, you just have to accept the consequences. That would make "freedom" a null concept. No, freedom of speech means that you are free to speak; i.e., speech alone is never a justification for punishment.

The "fire in a crowded theatre" ruling is a particularly bad example. The responsible parties in that case are the ones who trampled others in their haste to escape, not whoever yelled "Fire!", whether or not there really was one. Ruling that the (presumed) prankster is responsible for others' actions is pure laziness on the part of the court, allowing them to punish the one person they could identify rather than actually hunt down those directly responsible for the harm.

Semantics aside, the real question remains: how can you justify violence as a proportional response to speech?

Sorry - you have no idea what "freedom of speech" means if you think it means that you are absolved of the consequences of your speech.  Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is not exercising the right to free speech and is justifiably penalised.

No, what I am saying is that ordering a killing does not justify actual killing in response. The topic of "forbidding" never came up.

That depends on the form of the retaliation. If the intended victim orders a reciprocal killing, this would be a proportional, defensive response. As such, they would be in a superior moral position, assuming one considers mere organization of a killing to be aggression in the first place. If they retaliate by personally killing whoever ordered their death, however, that would be a disproportionate response, and thus an inferior moral position.

Those who chose to accept either order would be morally equivalent; neither could claim to be acting defensively.

I'm not saying that you can't respond preemptively to an intended action. In this situation the speech can be taken as a declaration of imminent intent to shoot you; however, you're responding to the shooting, not the speech. It would be a different matter if he said "give me $200 or I'll hire someone to shoot you".

On the contrary, that's pretty much exactly what it means: that speech, per se, has no legal consequences. (There may be other, extra-legal, non-violent consequences, but they are not relevant here.) Intent can have legal consequences, and certain speech can be taken as evidence of intent, but that's not the same as being punished purely for the content of the speech.

Why are they different? If that's the only way to save your life from the aggression, isn't it pretty much the same thing?

If it is a matter of self-defense, then it is. Of course you must have no other alternative. But provided that you're being threatened and that you really don't have alternatives, then it is legitimate self-defense.

A classical example is that of a madman who attaches a baby to his chest and start shooting towards you. You cannot cover, your only option is to shoot back before he hits you. In this case, if the baby gets killed, the responsible for his death is not you, but the madman.
Another example is that of an elite shooter who, to stop a madman shooting innocents, ends up also hitting a person behind him (those long range bullets can easily pass through a human body).


Of course I'm not saying it is OK to kill innocent people. What I'm saying is that the responsibility for the murder should be attributed to the correct person, and in some cases, the person criminally responsible is the one who initiates the threat, not the one that actually does the killing.

If everyone felt like this, then what makes you think "The Police" wouldn't take up the bounty? After all, they already have guns and know how to use them.

I agree with you, in the sense that I don't think I would voluntary finance police to go after the guy making the last statement (the actual threat), if it targeted me in a generic manner like the color or my eyes. But if the threat target me directly, or someone close to me, I probably would, as you say.

But even for the generic threat, maybe some blue-eyed person would go as far as paying police to go after the guy proposing the criminal contract.

I guess the poll is more about ethics (what justifies the use of force? In other words, which statement is a violation of the non aggression principle?) than to practicability (is the use of force the best approach to deal with this?)
That's why I voted for the last statement to be "banned".

Are you serious?
Any sane person would prefer to take the life of an unknown over his own or that of a loved one. Just change the situation to something more inevitable, like your car lost breaks, and either you run over an unknown person or you run over your son/daughter, no other option. Any normal person would run over the unknown person.

Saying "You should kill a blue-eyed person right now or I will kill (you|your daughter)" is a clear threat, and as such, unethical. The victim of such threat has all the right to respond with violence, but if he really can't (picture a situation where the one doing the threat is much stronger than the victim, or even a "Saw movie scenario" thing), I don't think it's him that should be liable for the killing of the blue-eyed, but the one who was threatening him to do it.

Is a 50-year correlation really enough to prove a statement as general and profound as "the more laws ban killing, the more killing takes place"? Let's look at a different graph:



And:



from http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/monkkonen.html

There are plenty of ways to explain that blip in the 1960-1990s - the war on drugs was a very large factor, some blame elements of the civil rights movement for the increase and some praise legalization of abortion for the decrease.

I would personally argue that the long-term decrease in violence in general is largely attributable to the increase in societal complexity and the reduction of importance of material goods - there's really not much valuable that you can actually steal these days. 2000 years ago, if you conquered a country or attacked a ship as a pirate you could take all the wealth and even capture much of the value of the people through slavery. Nowadays, all the wealth is more and more in personalized (ie. non-commodity) goods, human capital and social relationships, which can't be easily stolen. There's just no point to violence any more.

As we moved from hunter gatherer to farms to cities to modern states, violence fell.  Right now, humanity is in a golden age in terms of people being able to live their lives free from violence.

http://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

I have no idea what statistics you looked at but its a matter of fact that the more criminal law developed, the safer things got. 

Just doing simple statistics you can easily proove: The more laws ban killing, the more killing takes place.
Take this assumption and without any logical foundation invert it, you easily find ... anything stupid or so. 
The primary assumption is wrong!

In a society people need each other. So they should not kill each other.
Get it more precisely from Hans Jonas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas

Um no.  You don't need to theorise about this.  Look what happened in London last year when the police lost control, or Baghdad in 2003.  The state monopoly on violence means that its use is generally predictable and controlled.  Once its a free for all, the strong band together and prey on the weak.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102149/London-riots-Ashraf-Rossli-mugged-Malaysian-students-attacker-identified.html

Probably at least the last two statements are immoral, but I'm not sure that it would be more moral to react to them with violence. In my ideal anarcho-capitalist system, you'd pay protection agencies to protect you from violence and enforce other "laws". I would not spend extra money to punish people for making threats like this against groups, even groups that I am a part of. I only consider more specific threats to be dangerous enough to react to. I would use a protection agency that prohibited the last statement (and maybe a few other statements in the poll), since I won't ever make threats like that.

I voted "All should be legal".

Everybody can kill or be killed, so there would always be a threat of punishment. The question is if it should be monopolized by state. Why would the riots happen in a stable wealthy country?

Of course.  Remove the threat of punishment and riots follow immediately.