I kind of agree but you can't be absolutist either. If a mob boss says "kill this guy" to one of his hitmen, and the guy kills him. Only the hitman goes to jail? The mob boss just used his freedom of speech but didn't act?

In actual crime, those who participated, either physically or not, go to jail.

But we should not ban speech when there has not been any crime.

So what about the threat of violence then. If the mob boss tells the shop keeper “it’s a nice shop you have there, it would be a shame…” and the shop keeper gives him money. Is that still free speech? The mob boss didn’t act on the threat. What about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, it is just speech? The muslims who decide to act on it aren’t coerced, remunerated or affiliated to the Iranian regime. So it’s a threat of violence but you can make the case the authors aren’t involved themselves in any crime.

Those are good points! But let's consider them in a practical light.

For the mob boss, he is committing an actual crime of extortion. If a shopkeeper goes to police, the mob defense would not be "we were in our rights to threaten", but "we never said this; no idea what the shopkeeper is saying". A prosecutor would have to prove that it was indeed an extortion, but if he proves this to a jury the specific words said would be irrelevant and a first amendment claim would fail.

The same way if an insider is telling a friend about a stock merger during a quiet period, it is an actual crime. The specific words and methods do not matter.

It is tempting to restrict the speech in an attempt to minimize the evil. But giving state this power sooner or later vests it in some political clique that will use it for political suppression; original noble goals be damned. And this is almost impossible to undo.

Implied extortion.

1. Free speech generally implies speech in the public discourse, not in private. 2. Giving an order to or threatening someone is not “speech” in the sense that you are disseminating a questionable opinion: it is an action. You are quite literally _doing_ something, not just communicating e.g. don corleone’s offer one can’t refuse.

Well depends, do you want to get the mob boss on ‘hate/prohibited’ speech or for ordering a Hit?

He could just go ‘i really don’t like this guy’ and that would be understood at ‘kill him’ without him saying. Would that be ok or you still would want to prosecute him?

What if someone (person A) directly conspires with another person (person B), through dialogue and speech, to commit murder against person C, but doesn't actually commit the murder themselves? Yet they caused the murder to occur via their speech. That is an example of speech that we probably both believe should be made illegal.

The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.

The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.

Too often the speech compels the action though. If you can prevent the action in the first place maybe the loss of freedom is warranted? I don't think there's an easy answer, but I don't have to follow the thought exercise too far from purely theoretical before absolute free speech falls apart.

I agree that there is no easy answer; certainly my proposal is not perfect.

But almost any action is compelled by speech. I think allowing the state to control the speech to guide actions always leads to misuse. My 2c.

So if someone quite literally takes a picture of themselves holding a gun and sends it to someone with the message that they are going to kill them at a specific time, how is that not something that should be banned? What if it's a group of people? The negative emotions (read: human suffering) caused by other humans' words is real, and when the suffering is something society understands to be a natural and common reaction, why should society not curtail that speech?

I was tempted to make a finger gun at this post and take a photo to show how ridiculous this is, but I'm afraid to (deservedly) get hammered by dang for this.

The end result of this is that the only people who have real free speech are those who can't be threatened into silence.

Even the US has histories of this happening, plenty of hated minorities were silenced, threatened and punished if they spoke up.

Let me guess: you've never actually been credibly threatened with serious violence?

You're basically thinking like a "crunchy mom" anti-vaxxer who thinks that measles are harmless because she doesn't know anyone who's died from it.

Imagine for a moment that you're a black person living in 1920s Mississippi. You personally know people who were hanged by lynch mobs. You've read about Mary Turner who was burned alive while 8 months pregnant for daring to speak out against the lynching of her husband. And now white people tell you they'll kill you if you register to vote.

You seriously argue that banning those threats would be a worse infraction on people's freedom than allowing them?

If you don't see a way of defining hate speech in a way that won't be misused any worse that free speech is, it just means you haven't thought very hard about it, and suffer from status quo bias.