I’ve read several explanations, but I think I need it really dumbed down to grasp it.
In: 7
There are no such things as complete tolerance, because that also means you have to tolerate intolerance.
Here is an example. Imagine you are the government, and you say “freedom of speech”, and starts allowing any speech whatsoever. Now, someone (let’s say X) makes a statement that some other people hate, so they start sending death threat and tracking X’s locations, while calling on TV for people to kill X. Since you allowed all speech, you do nothing.
Eventually, some psycho listening to all these speech above decided to act and kill X. Now other people, seeing what happened, are now afraid to speak anything that people might hate. Effectively, you just killed free speech by allowing all speeches.
So next, you ban death threat. People can now speak freely, right? Well no, these people starts making up false rumor instead. Their employers see these false rumor and start firing people based on rumor. People who is the target of those malicious rumor have trouble finding jobs. So once again, people are afraid to speak.
So now you also ban defamation. Anyone who criticize anyone else would be required to give undeniable proof of their wrongdoings. But now look at what you have done, you make it so that people are afraid to criticize anyone.
In effect, to uphold freedom of speech, you have to ban speeches. That’s an example of the paradox. The challenge to find the balance.
Latest Answers