Rationale

The problem: the modern equivocation

In today’s debates, freedom of speech is often conflated with the First Amendment, and treated as if they were identical. This conflation commits a subtle but destructive equivocation: it reduces a broad philosophical principle to a narrow legal guarantee. The First Amendment protects individuals from government censorship, but it says nothing about the social forces that punish expression.

By collapsing the two, we inherit the worst of both worlds. Defenders of speech retreat into legalism — arguing only what government may or may not do — while ignoring the larger purpose that made freedom of speech worth defending in the first place: the free contest of ideas as the engine of progress. Meanwhile, opponents dismiss free expression as a mere individual right that comes with “consequences”, overlooking that those consequences — ostracism, ruin, intimidation — can silence ideas as effectively as government censorship.

This equivocation has hollowed out the debate. Instead of asking whether society is keeping its marketplace of ideas open, we ask only whether government has crossed a legal line. The result is a culture where free speech is protected in form but stifled in practice, leaving progress itself in jeopardy.

The solution: create a new term

Rather than argue over a term that has become muddied, we propose a new one: Open Ideas.

Open Ideas doesn’t carry all the baggage of freedom of speech. It goes back to the foundations of it, and uses the arguments from thinkers of the past, especially John Stuart Mill.

Open Ideas does mean freedom from consequences, at least when those consequences are precisely what causes the silencing of ideas: ostracism, firings, cancellations, deplatforming, etc.

We don’t need an entirely new philosophical foundation for Open Ideas, because it has already been laid by great thinkers of the past, except it was for the true freedom of speech (as engine of progress).