There are many sentences I hear often and absolutely loathe. Some examples are “I just like you as a friend.” Or, “Val Kilmer was a good Batman.” And even, “I don’t even like you as a friend!” But the worst of them all has to be, “Well, that’s just your opinion.” and its sister variants such as ”I have a right to my opinion.” Wanna say it is just my opinion? Well, guess what champ? That is completely irrelevant.

There is a reason such statments were mocked in my Logic 101 class. Basically, it is a way of saying nothing or at least nothing relevant. You might as respond to challenges to your opinions by stating the legal nature of Section 2(b) or The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (I’m Canadian!). Allow me to illustrate:

“Hey, I think your wrong about tax policy, we should shift corporate income tax towards personal income tax because it encourages more investment and makes tax evasion more difficult.”

“I have a right to express my thoughts!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The moral of the story? You’re not saying anything of relevance. Just because you have the right to an opinion does not mean yours is right. Surprisingly enough, the legal framework of our society does not alter the universe on a meta-physical level rendering truth impossible. You know what else? Go figure. Basically the “just your opinion” phrases amount to nothing more than a lame defence mechanism. Sometimes its because people don’t want to admit their wrong, or sometimes they don’t know how to actually defend their positions. What it all amounts to is using free speech to offer a sloppy psudo-subjectivist defence. That is where it really gets frustrating.

Oscar Wilde once famously said, “Please don’t sentence me to hard labour for sucking cock you puritan assholes!” He also once said, “Morality is the attitude people take towards those they personally dislike.” That is, more or less, what you see going on here. None of these people are actually hard-line subjectivists who feel all opinions on the nature things are unassailable and there is no truth. They simply want to adopt that standard to protect their own interests when they can’t, or don’t feel like, arguing their points. An epistemology of 

convenience. I suppose as a man straddling the line between ethical and psychological egoist (just about the only thing available for me to straddle that doesn’t charge) I can respect that in a way, or at least I could if the people doing it did so with full awareness of their own hypocrisy. I guess we’re all rationalists until we start to loose a debate.

So where does the irony come from this? Well, since I’ve mostly been bitching about misused FoS to fill space and satisfy my angry boner it is time to move on to what freedom of speech was actually intended for because that is where the irony lies. Free speech’s chief purpose, at least according to some of the most influential writers on the topic, was to insure ideas were never unjustly dismissed. History is full of examples of ideas once thought, well, retarded that turned out to be pretty fucking true. It would be cliché to mention Galileo as an example…

So it is on these grounds, that we are not infallible and that we should give new ideas a chance, do we find our justification for free speech. In a way it creates an almost “survival of the fittest” for ideas. It removes some of the chief barrier to progress of thought and belief. In reality, it doesn’t always work so well, but on the whole it is a good idea. John Stuart Mill in particular offered 3 solid main points on this issue.

1)      We are not infallible so any idea, however unlikely, may be true and thus we must entertain the possibility it could be real. 

2)       That very rarely do our opinions contain the whole truth, and the places where we ere could be fixed and improved by understanding the opposing side of the issue, even with the best of our opinions, as it likely contains the portions we are missing.

3)      (And this is the ironic one) That it is important not just to have the correct opinion, but also the correct reasoning behind it. If we let our opinions decay in to dogma we loose part of our ability to implement them properly. Their value to us is diluted or worst if becomes worse than if we did not believe them at all. Thus by allowing opposing opinions to exist we must be constantly vigilant in understanding the virtues of our own so they won’t decay in to mere dogma.

So, one of the reasons for free speech? To prevent truth from becoming mere dogma and potentially loose its pragmatic value. What has happened? We don’t properly consider the reasons for free speech and have, in some ways, let free speech become mere dogma. The result? We misuse free speech, and thus it has befallen to a fate it was supposed to guard other ideas against. Isn’t it ironic.

*Irony side note: Oscar Wilde also once said, “Quotation is a suitable substitute for wit.”

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