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by baobabKoodaa
2077 days ago
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Ok, so you accept that people do in fact have different interpretations about what constitutes free speech. But somehow you believe that your specific, personal interpretation is the absolutely correct one? Why? If you ask 100 people where the line is between harassment and legitimate criticism, you will get 100 different answers. What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widely accepted definition", as if a dictionary definition could somehow be applied to real world situations to judge whether an expression is harassment or not. Maybe it can be in _extreme_ cases, like if someone said "gays should be killed" we could easily judge that as harassment, or if someone says "i like cats" we could easily judge it as not harassment. But there's a huge gray area where expressions can be interpreted either way and it's up to each individual to assess whether they feel like an expression is harassment or not. |
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It's not correct, it's just "standard" in the context that I'm using it. But whether or not it's "standard" is largely irrelevant--the question is whether the concept that I'm labeling "free speech" is consistent in my framework with the other concepts (which I've labeled, "harassment" and "criticism"--which are also labeled according to standard definitions, for convenience). Let's stay away from semantic arguments--they're tedious, pointless, and boring.
> What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widely accepted definition", as if a dictionary definition could somehow be applied to real world situations to judge whether an expression is harassment or not. Maybe it can be in _extreme_ cases, like if someone said "gays should be killed" we could easily judge that as harassment
That's not harassment. It's an abhorrent idea, but "abhorrence" is different from "harassment". If you're shouting your abhorrent idea while burning a cross in someone's yard, that's harassment. If you're following someone around shouting your abhorrent idea, that's also harassment. Abhorrent ideas tend to be accompanied by harassment (and if you think about it, we consider these ideas abhorrent because they're very likely to lead to harassment and violence); however, they aren't equivalent to harassment. This is true even for a very broad definition of "harassment" like what you would find in a dictionary and even more so for very precise definitions such as a legal definition or probably all philosophical definitions.
> But there's a huge gray area where expressions can be interpreted either way and it's up to each individual to assess whether they feel like an expression is harassment or not.
I think we can reasonably define harassment as "an action based on an intent to intimidate or pressure someone". I think that definition is very precise and there isn't much gray area; however, litigating the intent to determine whether any given action is harassment is difficult. We can devise increasingly better tests for assessing intent (e.g., "we assume intent is to intimidate if a significant majority of people would feel intimidated under similar circumstances"), but difficulty of assessing intent is different than the precision of the definition.