this seems to place a monumental weight (the "value" of humanity itself) on the (rather elusive) pin-head of "free-will"
Reason and choice have monumental weight. Whether it is truly unique to humanity or not is besides the point.
[3RU7AL:] at what point did you reason-and-choose to avoid pain and discomfort
at what point exactly did you reason-and-choose to enjoy your favorite food and drink
Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure is an old system solved many millions of years ago. The uniqueness of man and the proper focus of his conscious thought is not in his pain/pleasure or even in his suffering/satisfaction (the emotional evolution of pain/pleasure) but in his reason and choice of actions and values.
A bee can prefer sweet over biter. A dog can prefer happiness over suffering... but man can abstract values, choose amongst them with reason, and use reason and creativity to achieve them.
My favorite food was not chosen by an objective/rational process, but choosing my favorite food isn't really the problem facing us. Building societies and technology which give me a wide selection to choose my favorite food and to actually enjoy it at will is the problem. Our ancestors have done an awesome job tackling the problem with reason and choice.
Choice in values also effects satisfaction and suffering. We can think ourselves into misery or to enlightenment given the same environmental factors.
Pleasure and pain aren't irrelevant, but they aren't primary; acting like they are is throwing away 200 million years of progress. Not sure how this conversation got here but *shrug*.
[Athias:] Case in point: Let's for a moment consider that I described
"voluntarism" as the principle in which man ought to act and organize
without being subjected to or being the initiator of violence,
aggression, coercion, and/or duress. If I were to include "shame" among
this list of qualifiers, what then would my description of the
principle suggest?
It would suggest that coercion (the rest were synonymous in context) is not the only thing that threatens the value the principle is meant to achieve for shame also threatens it.
[Athias:] Why would the principle be wider than "rejection of violence, fines, or threats thereof"?
because that's what the value implies.
Hardly, it was clearly an example of other principles which are do not
strictly exist along the lines of objective social rights.
[Athias:] So
if something as presumably "shameful" as "racist speech" should not be
precluded by the principle of free speech, then I ask once again, why is
"shame" included in free speech's purview?
because, man being a rational animal (remember what I said), shaming him for his beliefs is not the appropriate way to deal with beliefs even if they are shameful according to the values and inferences of others. Reasoning (debate) is the proper response because shaming has no bias towards truth while debate does.
Perhaps a man doesn't respond to reason but only to shame, then perhaps shame should be resorted to, but that isn't a flaw in the principle but the man. If the man doesn't respond to shame and violates the rights of others then he must be attacked, but that does not mean non-aggression is a flawed principle.
To be clear there isn't exactly a "right to free speech", there is a right to not be attacked for speech.
[Double_R:] This
conversion is not about physical retaliation, so “attacked” in this
sense is just an overhyped word being used to mean “criticized”.
When I say "attacked" I mean physical attack, or threats of physical attack, or malicious deception. If you don't believe that's relevant to this conversation then you don't believe the objective "right to free speech" is relevant, the principle of free speech I gave was not a definition of a right. It was an algorithm to achieve a value (as all principles are). Depending on if the value is objective and universal that principle could be fully expressed by a right but it need not be, nor does a principle need to relate to a right to have validity.
[Double_R:] Therefore
your statement is that in principal we have a right to not be
criticized for our speech. But the right to criticize someone else is
literally what free speech means, so this statement is self refuting.
At no time did I state that.
