July 19, 2018

Richard Moon, Distinguished University Professor, University of Windsor, wants to to limit free speech



He has written a long article in which he canvasses a variety of views about "hate speech".  He clearly believes there is such a thing and deplores it.  That one person's hate speech might be someone else's plain truth he does not consider.  That does tend to display him as a bigot.  He knows what is hate and feels no need to discuss it:  Classic bigotry.

As an academic psychometrician, for instance, I think it is just the plain truth that African Americans on average have an IQ that is about one standard deviation lower than the white average.  And that is in fact the majority view among psychometricans.  The American Psychological Association has also accepted that as factual.

Yet in most public fora, anybody uttering that truth will be howled down and called a Nazi or the like.  It's definitely "hate speech" to many.

Does the moony man see no problem there?  What is hate speech can be very easily mistaken and any definition of it has, as far as I can see, insuperable difficulties.  Moony may say that he can arrive at a definition but he clearly needs to argue for it -- which he does not do despite the length of his article.  Even though he is an academic lawyer and should therefore be good at argumentation, I suspect that he just lacks the philosophical sophistication to consider the nature of truth and falsehood at any depth.

In the end, however he is sufficiently a product of his culture to allow that hate speech (however defined) should have free speech protections.  But he ends up as follows:

"Free speech may protect speech that is offensive or hurtful, including some forms of bigoted speech, but we degrade this central right when we see it as simply the right to offend or the right to say whatever we feel like saying, regardless of the impact on others."

His muddled thought shows itself there again.  We "degrade" a right if "we say whatever we feel like saying". But isn't saying  whatever we feel like saying what the right is?  Can a right exist if it can be "degraded?  Surely we have a right or we do not.

And if a right can be degraded there must surely be some metric of degradation to determine when and where the degradation occurs -- but he suggests no such metric, nothing for us to use to tell us when the degradation occurs.

In typical bigoted Leftist style he "just knows" things with no need for rational argument. Emotion is all.

UPDATE:

I sent a link to the above post to Prof.  Moon and he replied as follows:

"Hate speech is unlawful in Canada.  The article is not about that.  Since you have not understood the argument, there is nothing for me to say in response.  I wish you best if luck.  Please no more trolling messages"

His reply is a complete evasion.  I did not mention one word about the legality of hate speech in Canada or anywhere else.  In typical Leftist style he turns to some side issue rather than deal with an actual issue.  He invents something he can answer rather than what was actually said.

I replied as follows: "What is judged to be hate speech is the issue"

I doubt that he will answer.

I feel rather sorry for him.  He is regarded as something of an expert on free speech but he has probably never encountered a philosophically competent argument from a conservative before.  Like so many Leftists, he would seem to have lived in a safe little hermetically sealed intellectual bubble so far.  They appear to be unable to handle the full light of day. John 3:20.





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