Unpopular opinion: PC policing is going WAY TOO far.

[alcibiades_mystery]

9. Many people claim to be free speech absolutists...very few are in practice

For Mill, even, speech that produced (consequentially, that is) physical harm could be prohibited, while everything else was fair game for argument. This is the liberal theory of "free speech" that we live under today. Of course, the question of consequential harm can be parsed out any number of ways, which is, as they say, what the fighting's all about. There is certainly a problem in the execution of the theory in many of these cases. But it is symptomatic of a problem in the liberal theory of free speech itself, which is bound to a narrow version of harm that no longer comports with the way we view harm more generally. Mill, for example, simply could not have conceived of the extension of "trauma" that we understand today - psychology as we know it did not even exist when our major notions of free speech were developed. Mill would not recognize verbal bullying - even relentless - as a speech-produced harm. The theory simply doesn't account for it.

In part, our understanding of free speech's inability to accept these sorts of harms as harms is historical: those who invented it didn't have the data, even the forms of knowledge that we have today. It can also be argued that its limitations are specific to a majority position: it explicitly excludes harms that affect minority and disempowered populations. The liberal understanding of free speech, it might be said, is precisely the theory of speech that bullies would develop. OK, maybe that's overstating, but the point should be clear: it may not be simple historical accident that the theory can't account for harms that don't tend to affect those in power (but accounts for all those that do!). We can certainly yuck it up at these wacky college kids and academics with their trigger warnings and safe spaces, and insist on a Millean marketplace of ideas. Yes, fine, it's worked this long, so...

But that's really just talking past one another. The problem is that there's a complete mismatch between an Enlightenment and 19th century theory of speech/harm (on the one hand) and a post Enlightenment theory of speech/harm on the other. To simply insist on one or the other is not particularly helpful. The liberal theory of free speech, after all, didn't fall from the heavens. It was invented, and fairly recently at that.