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What if someone (person A) directly conspires with another person (person B), through dialogue and speech, to commit murder against person C, but doesn't actually commit the murder themselves? Yet they caused the murder to occur via their speech. That is an example of speech that we probably both believe should be made illegal.

The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.

The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.




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