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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.