The Slippery Slope Fallacy Defense Of Free Speech

The last refuge--if not the first refuge--of the irrational when putting forth their positions on matters of morality or law is the hypothetical consequences of something rather than its actual nature.  The moment someone uses the slippery slope fallacy, they have exposed a philosophical weakness that touches upon their intellectual and moral incompetencies.  Although anything could be argued for using slippery slopes, which appeal to uncertain outcomes as justification for philosophical beliefs and actions in the present, some particular stances are more publicly defended with them, such as the current legal-moral conception of freedom of speech.  Future tyranny is one of the first and only defenses conservatives put forth.

Indeed, it almost always comes down to its adherents defending freedom of speech in a universal or near-universal scope simply because they fear that they might be eventually ostracized for their words in the future, as if conservatism as a moral and legal philosophy isn't asinine and worthy of refutation and condemnation as it is.  It is as if they think opposing freedom of speech on valid philosophical grounds is almost synonymous with legally punishing people for saying unpopular things.  Never is the focus of someone who defends freedom of speech (whether or not they have arbitrary exceptions) on truth, or else they would abandon the madness of thinking that lack of freedom of speech means that legal penalties accompany every fallacious or unintelligent thought someone articulates.

Conservatives who emphasize their love of freedom of speech--and liberals too, although conservatives are the ones who tend to emotionalistically appeal to the supposed moral authority of a political document in favor of freedom of speech--often must stir up anxiety about the future in order to defend the idea.  This kind of person is always worried about some hypothetical, unprovable future time when certain worldviews or individuals will be "censored" or punished on a mass scale.  Slippery slopes and broader appeals to future events are both fallacies on their own, and the former is, in fact, just a subcategory of the latter, but there is a deeper irrationality than this kind of assumption.

Another thing they overlook, if they even understand it on any level, is that truth itself is by nature in opposition to any legal freedom to embrace irrationality or evil.  Freedom of speech goes beyond merely not punishing people for making miscellaneous asinine or inflammatory claims; all that would be necessary to ensure that is not having laws allowing for the prosecution of people just for being irrational.  The concept of freedom of speech stands on the myth that people have a right to believe and say whatever they want out of sheer preference.  The very notion that people are morally free to do such a thing is inherently at odds with logic and truth themselves.

Since the entire point of freedom of speech is that people have a right to believe (implicitly) and a right to say whatever they want regardless of what is true, it is incoherent to even pretend like freedom of truth is about protecting or furthering the truth in any way.  Conservatives (or liberals, perhaps) who believe freedom of speech--in the contemporary sense meant by the phrase--is a right have only preference to look to.  Preference is an inherently arbitrary and unstable basis for law, and legal structures can only have validity if morality both exists and matches the content of the laws.  Conservatives, for all their usual talk about wanting to make sure they do the right thing regardless of cultural norms, fail to be consistent with some of their own tenets.