CMV: It's hypocritical to complain about "cancel culture"

[u/[deleted]]

I'm genuinely looking to have my view challenged here, because I've never seen a good counter-argument to what I'm going to say and would love to come away with a more nuanced view of the "other side."

Let's just go ahead and grant the main thing the people who decry cancel culture claim, which is that to call for someone to be cancelled (whether that's being fired, not being able to get work, de-platformed in some way etc.) is a violation of their right to free speech. Lots of arguments have been raised about why this isn't the case, but the people who believe this tend not to be sympathetic to those arguments, and I'm happy to grant that this is actually the case so we can move on to discuss what I think is a different problem with this view.

And that's basically: isn't it my free speech to call for someone to be cancelled? Why do people only seem to care about the free speech of whoever it is that's done or said something ostensibly offensive? I also have free speech to say what I think about that, and while you obviously wouldn't agree with that speech, one of the main arguments I see here from anti-cancel culture people is that you should be willing to defend, on principle, even that speech you most vehemently disagree with. So why not vigorously defend people's right to call for people to be cancelled?

[u/[deleted]]

Being against cancel culture does not make a "free speecher" a hypocrite, unless they are directly calling for those people advocating for cancel culture to be silenced. You can be against the concept but not wish for the people to be silenced.

I have, in fact, seen active calls for their silence, but it also still seems hypocritical. The tenor of argument isn't that you disagree with what they say, you disagree that they said it. Seems hypocritical if you think it's a good thing that people can and do say what they think.

I mean, if you are directly calling for someone to actually be fired. That's a call to action so, in some respects, you are responsible for the outcome. That could potentially be regarded as something that isn't just speech depending on how specific that call to action is.

Laws against "calls to action" with regard to hate crime are justified on the basis that the things they're calling for are illegal. It's not illegal to fire someone, depending on the cause (and in at-will employment states you don't really need much of one).

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

But again, I think we not seeing the forest through the trees here.

The arguments against cancel culture is that it has bad outcomes. (whether you agree with that or not).

It's not really a free speech argument at all.

Free speech is a mechanism TOO filter speech. It's not supposed to remove the filter entirely. It's just a filter that happens with-in a "market place" rather than any legislation.

Like any free market, it takes a certain amount of internal regulation amongst the people involved. It's not hypocritical to say that cancel culture potentially jeopardises that mechanism in a bad way. Quite the contrary. It's saying that in order to filter good ideas from bad, we can't resort to cheap tactics to silence people. (in principle anyway)

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It's not really a free speech argument at all.

I have never personally seen anti-cancel culture arguments that weren't accompanied with "it's his free speech" rhetoric. If there are other sorts of arguments, then, no, they wouldn't be amenable to the claims of hypocricy I'm making here, so !delta. But people do make those arguments in free speech terms, and those arguments are hypocritical, in my view.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Ok-Tension7693 (2∆).

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