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NotThamesWater in reply to @The_Seldom_Killer

This is from the perspective that if you don't have a right not to be insulted by someone then we, as a society, consider racist, facist or otherwise bigoted abuse to be both acceptable and reasonable behaviour and should held as normal.

This is a false dichotomy. It's not binary, and you can't draw that conlusion from that premise.

If we do take that as a truism, that bigoted abuse of people is acceptable and normal, when does the line get drawn?

You're conflating abuse & insult, irrespective of the fact that it is not a truism.

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The_Seldom_Killer in reply to @NotThamesWater

This is a false dichotomy. It's not binary, and you can't draw that conlusion from that premise.

So what is it then? Because I can't see how not having a right to not be insulted doesn't essentially condone and normalise abuse. How exactly are you reconciling that this isn't the case?

And yes, I am conflating abuse and insult. I accept that my opinion is probably very biased on that though. Working in domestic abuse it's, perhaps, difficult not to see how insults are a form of abuse. If you want to expand on why you think they aren't then I would be quite interested to hear what you have to say.

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NotThamesWater in reply to @The_Seldom_Killer

Billions of people could be insulted by single sentence. Nobody is being abused. We may not even know that they are insulted. Even if we did, the insult is their inference, and contextualised by them.

Let's take religion as an example.

Say someone declares their opinion that belief in a sky wizard is idiotic.

Billions may be offended by that.

They don't have a right not to be insulted (either actively or passively) by that.

That neither condones nor normalises that person's opinion on sky wizards.
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Gndlf in reply to @The_Seldom_Killer

I have always thought that the social and political theory of John Mill (whose ideas were hugely influential in the US Constitution amendments) to be very useful in these cases (emphasis mine):

" He concluded that, except for speech that is immediately physically harmful to others (like the classic example of the false cry of "fire" in a crowded theater, or the incitement of violence towards others, lynching and so forth), no expression of opinion, written or oral, ought to be prohibited. Truth can only emerge from the clash of contrary opinions; therefore, robust debate must be permitted. This "adversarial" theory of the necessary nature of the search for truth and this insistence on the free marketplace of ideas have become central elements of U.S. free speech theory."

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