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Many people will be opposed to this move on Brazil's part, but for the wrong reasons, chief among which is national pride. As a free speech absolutist, I'm opposed to this move because I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted. This includes not just "wholesome" speech, but:
The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation. There is no such thing as non-physical pain, the kind people talk about when they talk about e.g. losing someone they love. That talk of 'pain' is merely a figure of speech. ". To which the reply may be: "but phantom limb pain is non-physical". To which the reply is: "no it's physical in my sense. For pain to be physical it's not necessary that it's triggered by a physical stimulus. It suffices that it's experienced as physical, i.e. it has the distinctive qualia associated with pain and is locatable in some specific part of the body or a generic region of the body. And phantom limb pain meets those conditions."
You can oppose this also from pro freedom of speech grounds without being a freedom of speech absolutist.
Personally I find the issue incoherent but I find coherent to have a situation with more vs less freedom of speech but you do need to suppress some organized pollitical comisar factions. For example, eastern european countries post communism that blacklisted communists, are freer countries than western countries today, or their own communist past.
How do you protect freedom of speech absolutism if you allow people whose idea is to suppress all who go against the globohomo "our democracy" faction.
Or take the Jewish supremacist authoritarian faction. These people use their powerful companies and organisations, and donations and plausible epstein type blackmail rings to get their way. Plus, civil rights law and the idea of antisemitism. Should the ADL and Disney have the freedom to coordinate to oppose freedom? What about the influence of people speaking advocating for censoring ideas that offend the "Jews, blacks, women" are wonderful effect? Is AIPAC donation efforts something that should be suppressed? What about journalists citing the ADL to character assassinate people? Now, obviously they utilize censorship constantly, and freedom of speech absolutism is something they oppose. But also they are a faction which there is a legitimate both pro freedom and pro the rights of the groups they have it out against, and pro truth interest in suppressing.
How do you have freedom by not taking away the freedom of political comisars? How do you avoid not losing against more ruthless factions that don't care for a universal freedom of speech and want to censor your group, and allow maximum freedom for theirs?
And is freedom of speech absolutism extending to the kind of people you select to run the pro freedom of speech institutions?
Or is their desire to act otherwise subject to restriction there, and institutions should be run by people willing to abide by certain rules and following a certain perspective? And absolutism would then be for the platforms? That would make more sense. But you do have restrictions based on ideology somewhere, even if not on the platform. Or take judges, to have freedom of speech absolutism you would need judges with your preferences to be selected and judges against freedom of speech (who might express such views) be restricted.
Another issue that ought to be considered is people abandoning their legitimate interests and supporting immoral and unreasonable and even lies, or not making legitimate negative critiques due to fear of coordinated slander and reputation destruction. That is being defamed. People being afraid to speak, that is to say. To be fair, "cancel culture" can include the claim of free de-association in an one sided manner. Although there is also a part of it that is about pressure and fear of losing ones job. I am not sure freedom of speech absolutism works and you have a better system, of people not being afraid if people are restrained from defaming others over nonsense. Although I am a freedom of speech absolutist when it comes to people who are telling a plausibly necessary truth and are whistleblowing.
I am for maximum freedom for people like Gareth Jones and prefer that people like Walter Duranty were fired for spreading lies. And in his time, Gareth Jones was outnumbered because he was attacked by the communists, and friendly travelers in the American establishment while the apologist for the Soviet genocides Walter Duranty won a pulitzer. People at the time lacked the nerve to share Gareth Jones truthtelling in the face of such tactics.
The problem of people who are cowardly in the face of other people using their freedom of speech to label them, as a means of shutting them up, is not something I have seen adequately addressed, by people talking about freedom of speech absolutism. Although, perhaps with less consequences for those whose speech goes against such organized groups, there might be more courage. In general, I think we need a more sophisticated model than freedom of speech absolutism that distinguishes between courageous truth telling and attempts to suppress the truth. While I acknowledge outright censorship is a key part of this, but an important component is drowning good speech, with delegitimizing it on frivolous grounds, lies, fallacies, denials, misdirections and character assassinations. Plus, using their freedom to organize and advocate for cancel culture, and directly threaten people to go along with it, or else.
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Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?
"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."
Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.
But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?
Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?
But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?
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Where do you fall on fraud?
And do you consider copyright violation or trademark infringement to be a form of "mere speech", or does it count as something else?
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So, suppose you're in the Ukrainian military, and one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians (or you can switch the nationalities if you want, doesn't really matter, whichever side you have more sympathy for). It's clear that what he's engaging in is "mere" speech - he's not causing any physical harm himself, he's merely communicating words and numerical coordinates to others. Should he face any consequences whatsoever for his actions? Would you say "well shucks, it's plain that what he's doing is materially hurting the war effort and is directly causing the deaths of our fellow soldiers, but because it is just speech, we can't legally do anything"?
Are you even permitted to fire him from his post in the military? If you are, that already seems like a step down from "absolutism" to me - it may not be jail time, but it's still a consequence of some sort.
You raise a good point. It's tricky to come up with a foolproof way of drawing the speech versus act ("words speak louder than actions", "practice what you preach") distinction.
Here's another example. Let's say someone is gifted with a thunderous voice and that when he shouts, he shatters the eardrums of people in a 10 feet radius. Should he be free to shoot in public? Presumably not. But that's because clearly this scenario has more in common with typical cases of physical violence. Here the physical quality of sound (rather than the meaning of sound) is what is playing a decisive causal role. So it's no longer pure speech, but something one might call a "sonic act".
Notice that the fact a shout is not per se meaningful speech is not the decisive consideration here. After all, imagine that our protagonist instead of letting out a meaningless shout, choose instead to recite the Constitution in public at the top of his volume. Then the sounds he make are meaningful, but still even a free speech absolutist shouldn't want to allow that. Why? Because by reciting the constitution he's simultaneously doing two things. The first is exercising his free speech. The second is an act of sonic terrorism. If due to the peculiar constitution of his physiology, these two things cannot be cleanly separated unfortunately (at least when he chooses to speak at the top of his volume), then he should not be allowed to perform the one because he can't help but also perform the other as well.
In your scenario ("one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians") I'm inclined to say even a free speech absolutist shouldn't allow that. But I will need to find a different basis (than "sonic terrorism") on which to exclude that kind of speech from protection. It seems that this is clearly an action and no longer just speech, in the same way that, say, taking money out of someone's pocket is action rather than speech (even though no one is directly hurt in the process intrinsically speaking). But it can be tricky to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that give the correct verdict in all cases.
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From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest. In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them. So you are on the hook. Is it ok to write someone's name in a death note would have been a much more interesting situation.
It's not a gotcha. It's an argument.
OP said "I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted". If he wants to amend his position to "any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted, except for speech that materially aids the enemy in a time of war", or perhaps "except for any speech that violates your previously agreed upon duties", then he's certainly welcome to do so. But that does, prima facie, appear to be an amendment of the original position.
I don't see contradiction in speech being legal and you being punished for violations of duties contracts etc. Those are orthogonal concepts. You get shot for treason. Since your speech didn't incur other penalties on you on top of the death sentence, you are not being punished for it.
At that point you can limit speech in absolutely any way you see fit. "Well, a citizen of $country is duty bound not to incite hatred. We didn't punish you for your speech on top of your jail sentence for inciting hatred!"
Not quite because the only way to incite hatred it trough speech, but there are many ways to commit treason.. The punishment for robbing a bank silently and robbing a bank shouting give me all your money should be the same
But in this particular example, the treason is entirely through speech. If that counts, so should inciting hatred entirely through speech. I don't really see the relevance that treason can in theory be committed differently.
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Interesting. What do you do if a resourseful enemy defames you, suck it up? What do you do if a bunch of people openly conspire to kill you? It appears that you cannot legally defend yourself until they act, which they're free to do at the moment they pick.
If you're physically struck but not hurt, have you been assaulted?
Presumably conspiracy is a crime because planning crimes is also a crime.
I could see the argument that a threat to commit a crime is not a plan. A threat is usually contingent on some condition.
If the threat is to be believed (presumably threats are punished because we think they are credible) then there's no stated plan as long as the condition isn't fulfilled.
I suppose as soon as the victim ignores the threat, then perhaps the threat can be assumed to be a plan.
I'd presume so, yes, but they're claiming they're a free speech absolutist and that any speech act is just speech. Planning to inflict pain doesn't inflict pain itself.
Even if speech is not a crime it can be compelling evidence of another crime. If I confess to the cops that I committed a murder, that can put me away for murder ... unless I was actually on video with a dozen witnesses at the time of the murder, in which case my exact same speech would not get me convicted, because the speech itself isn't the murder.
(Though I'd say it should get me convicted of making a false police report, but I assume this is where @reconnaissent and I differ)
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(Not OP, but will try and steelman the position as best I can)
Were such norms in place re: speech, defamation would be "priced in", so to speak, i.e., people would have ingrained defenses against believing defamatory remarks to be true, inculcated over a lifetime of experiencing free speech absolutism first-hand.
So, they'd believe nothing?
What is the mechanism by which you can separate defamatory remarks from genuine ones, which you'd likely want to do in order to retain basic communication ability?
A newspaper (for example) which regularly published untrue defamation would be equally-regularly corrected by competing newspapers, eager to siphon savvy newsreaders away from a competitor. Then the defamatory paper's paying subscribers would vote with their wallets and switch to other papers with better records of truth-telling.
Or so the theory goes.
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