I'm not asking why you think freedom of speech is a guiding principle and a human right. I get that and I agree that freedom of speech is incredibly important. I have spent a lot of mental time over the last few years thinking about that belief in relationship to my feeling that it's bad to cause pain.
This is not a simple problem.
However, it's also irrelevant to my question: why do you think that the admin of 8chan has a different moral obligation vis a vis free speech than the admin of Hacker News? You said that allowing people to set up their own communities was important, and I sincerely don't know why that makes a difference here.
It's OK with me if you misspoke, and you think that Hacker News should operate under the same principles as 8chan.
> I have spent a lot of mental time over the last few years thinking about that belief in relationship to my feeling that it's bad to cause pain.
I submit that the two are not in conflict. The first is a principle that all people should have this right. The second is moral guidance on the subjective application of that right.
People can use their rights for good or for ill. The key thing is that people have that right. It's not a right if someone else's subjective moral judgments can take it away.
> This is not a simple problem.
That depends. Why do you think there is complexity? At a guess, you think others should live by your principles, and so you are conflicted when they do not.
That is a poor guess. I think it's complex precisely because I don't think everyone should be forced to live by the same principles, and because I recognize that some principles conflict. People have been arguing about value pluralism for a while now, so I feel like I'm in pretty good company here.
If free speech wasn't fundamentally important to me, I wouldn't think it was a complex problem, I'd be happy to limit speech.
This is not a simple problem.
However, it's also irrelevant to my question: why do you think that the admin of 8chan has a different moral obligation vis a vis free speech than the admin of Hacker News? You said that allowing people to set up their own communities was important, and I sincerely don't know why that makes a difference here.
It's OK with me if you misspoke, and you think that Hacker News should operate under the same principles as 8chan.