We also learned about “First Amendment values” in law school. This idea that there is no moral component associated with the First Amendment is a new and weird one.
One of the first things the founders did was to pass the Sedition Act of 1798, so whatever the moral component of the First Amendment is, it wasn't as clear as it's made out to be today.
It was the Alien and Sedition act and closely tied to a fear of foreigners, and of national collapse in general, before the country had had time to gel. You can squint and hold it up to the light and see it as a principled diagreement over free expression, but that's pretty ahistorical.
The important point here is that limits on speech and free expression in American discourse have traditionally gone hand in hand with a fear of foreign influence. If anything, that gives more of a moral edge to the argument over free speech, not less.
Yeah, I'm referring specifically to the Sedition Act of 1798 (one of 4 "A&S" acts), which was not principally used against foreigners --- and, in fact, was exploited by its opponents (notably Jefferson) to persecute political adversaries.
"Are we bound hand and foot that we must be witnesses to these deadly thrusts at our liberty?" (The thrusts were words on paper.) "Are these approaches to revolution and Jacobinic domination to be observed with the eye of meek submission? No, sir, they are indeed terrible; they are calculated to freeze the very blood in our veins. Such liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man."
The target of this speech, by a proponent of the Sedition act, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a printer and native son of Pennsylvania.
My point is just that I'm deeply skeptical of moral principles encoded in the Constitution. I think it's a good system, a set of functional and useful institutions, not something I would want to fuck with, &c. Maybe not my moral north star, though.
I don't understand that you're trying to say, but of course my point is that the authors and ratifiers of the bill of rights immediately turned around and abrogated them.
Free speech is at it's core dangerous speech. It's speech in favor of trans rights when nobody supports it. It's speech calling attention to inequality nobody wants to hear. It's speech that's unfavorable to the government and our neighbors.
Safe speech isn't free speech. Free speech is the engine of change for things like trans rights, same sex marriage, equal protection under the law and even evolution being taught in schools.
If you do not hold free speech as a moral value, if you don't feel a moral duty to use speech that may be censored or unfavored, then you don't agree with using speech to fix social problems.
Dangerous because of what? Because of government action? That's regular free speech. Because of the actions of powerful persons? We have other actions covering their possible retribution.
Why exactly is free speech something important in the private arena?
I still don't think it's a moral value on its own.
