Anti-Climacus

WELL: One last set of thoughts (provisionally) on my brush with authoritarianism:

You can't, it seems, offer up utility-based objections to laws that would indirectly restrict certain outside-the-bounds forms of speech, because none of them can survive the counterfactual other world in which everyone is in agreement on the particular issue. That is to say, if you believe that restricting some speech acts would cause, e.g., people who have the beliefs being targeted to simply move their activities (potentially dangerously) further off the radar and make them harder to convert, so to speak, you can't use that objection in the world I'm imagining where no one has racist beliefs, etc: there's simply no one on whom the negative effects can do anything.

But maybe you let that objection pass, because you think the counterfactual world I'm imagining doesn't look anything like our world. But it's not clear, if you follow Mill, that our world gets around the utility-based objection Bill Wallo raised, even if the government never takes any action. You might think that as the number of people who have repudiated a view through normal means increases, the people who continue to hold it will do so with both increasing intensity and increasing invisibility. If that's the case, there's always going to be a remnant of people who refuse to be converted in their beliefs, regardless of who it is who's doing the acting. So you might, maybe, very narrowly be able to argue that all governmental action might do in such cases is limit the spread of such beliefs beyond the people who have them at any given time. Of course, there are still massive problems that would prevent any positive legislative program going forth (such as how you can limit speech without limiting speech as such), but I'm not sure the authoritarian argument comes off any worse than the non-authoritarian one.

Oh, and at least I haven't gotten this far yet.