If I'm following you correctly, you're implying that in order to debate with others to determine what truth is, you must have the freedom to say things without being bound by how the act of saying them would affect other people, right?
And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.
Your conflating harming people with causing them anger is very much part of the problem. 'Harm' used to mean something much more severe; now it basically means anything at or above pissing someone off.
The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'.
It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.
Truth is harmful and people need to be shielded from it? If we hold the speakers responsible, rather the people who take up their words and turn them into actions? Then isn't that incompatible with democracy which relies on informed citizens that aren't easily captured?
> And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say
I think this is the crux of the issue. The internet (including social media/the internet/blogosphere) originated in academia and was first populated by academics. People like PG (and myself) who grew up in that environment still feel like the internet is-and-ought-to-be a free marketplace of ideas, where academically-minded people can dispassionately debate on any topic. In our view, the Internet's virtues are the age-old virtues of the liberal arts, and that it would be a liberalizing and liberating force as it spread to the public.
But the internet has grown organically. It has been September for almost three decades now.
The internet is more representative of the population at large, and we are being reminded why academia is described as an ivory tower and concepts like tenure exist. Fundamentally, not everyone can be an academic, nor can they tolerate the existence of academics. The "towers" and "tenure" exist as a two way shield: it both mitigates self-censorship among academics by protecting them from mob backlash, and it prevents the "think with our gut" mob from getting indigestion and hurting themselves.
So I think both that you're right, and that it is a shame. The internet has not changed the public's unworthiness to engage in academic conversation despite the oceans of information it has made available. The public will misunderstand and misconstrue and mistrust and misuse academic ideas in ways that harm people, and that harm will be the fault of the academics for not knowing better than to keep their ideas to themselves. Just like it is the witches fault for admitting that they thought differently than their community.
Academia has never been dispassionate. The very idea of an academic conference started because academics hated each other so much that they needed a mechanism for them to see each other as people.
Further, a marketplace of ideas is a marketplace. Marketplaces are not emotionless voids where consumers dispassionately select the product that will provide them with precisely the best utility-to-cost ratio. They are emotional places where concepts like marketing and signaling are extremely important. Similarly, we'd expect a "marketplace of ideas" to be an emotional place and for human emotion to be a consideration when adopting ideas.
This is carte blanche to silence any opinion you (or your mob) doesn't like and its absurd that people think its valid. Completely flies in the face of the spirit of freedom of expression.
There are arguments that need to be expressed even though ideologues may think that they are harmful. That's the point of open discussion. There are questions that need to be asked even if others believe they may have inconvenient answers. That's the point of objective science. Because of sentiment like yours, we increasingly have neither, and we are all worse off for it.
I'd just note here that 'truth through debate' is an ancient concept (Socrates - Aristotle - Plato etc.) that has been replaced with 'truth through experiment and observation' (Galileo - Newton - Maxwell - Einstein etc.). Of course many have attempted to use science to justify their behavior or to justify some arbitray human social organizations (i.e. Francis Galton and Social Darwinism, or Lysenko in the USSR and Phenotypic Modification, or more simply, nature vs. nurture).
However, science isn't the final arbiter for marking out the optimal societal norms, whatever those may be, although this seems to be the meaning of 'truth' as you use it in this context. An authoriarian state with zero personal freedom might be just as capable of feeding its human population as a libertarian state with a minimal set of legal restrictions, for example.
The courts, to this day, still believe in 'truth through debate.'
Science does too, although the debaters are generally expected to be working towards developing empirical ways of settling their disagreements. I believe it was Gell-Mann who famously tells a story of holding on to his theory because of its beauty despite several experiments indicating it was wrong, and eventually being vindicated.
Suffering is itself bad, but may be an acceptable cost for some greater good, sure.
> One can live a full life in the midst of hurting.
Sure, it's possible to do one despite the other, but that doesn't negate that the latter is bad compared to it's absence, all other things being equal.
Exercising is painful, yet it is not harm. There is “good pain” (ie, muscles being stretched out and hurting after a good workout) and “bad pain” (ie, popping a joint out of socket causing an injury).
Not all pain is harmful.
Emotionally, grief is painful, but it’s sometimes necessary and helpful to grieve over a loss.
And I'm disagreeing and saying that, unless you have some sort of prior agreement with the people involved (which social media/the internet/readers of your blog don't have), you don't get to avoid consequences for the potential harm saying something might cause. Ultimately you are always talking to be heard by someone else, and all human interaction involves the risk of harming/angering someone else, but every day we control for that risk in how we say things and who we say them to.