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Konkvistador comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong
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It wouldn't be dumb to argue for the moral acceptability of freeing slaves (even by force) however.
It wouldn't be dumb for an organization to decide that society at large might be willing to listen to them argue for the moral acceptability of freeing slaves, even by force. It would be dumb for an organization to allow its individual members to make this decision independently because that substantially increases the probability that someone gets the timing wrong.
Beware selective application of your standards. If the members can't be trusted with one type of independent decision, why they can be trusted with other sorts of decisions?
Because the decision to initiate a particular kind of public discussion entails everyone else in the organization taking on a certain level of risk, and an organization should be able to determine what kinds of communal risk it's willing to allow its individual members to force on everyone else. There are jurisdictions where criminal incitement is itself a crime.
I can't say whether I agree or disagree until you precise the meaning of the qualifiers "particular" and "certain". But my question was in any case probably directed a bit elsewhere: if the members shouldn't be free to write about certain class of topics because they may misjudge how the society at large would react, doesn't it imply that they shouldn't be free to write about anything because they may misjudge what the society at large might think? If the rationale is that which you say, returning back from abolitionists to LW, shouldn't the policy be "any post that is in conflict with LW interest can be deleted" rather than the overly specific rule concerning violence and only violence?
"Criminal incitement" and "the risk of being arrested," then. In other time periods, substitute "blasphemy" and "the risk of being burned at the stake."
They shouldn't be free to write about certain topics with the name of their organization attached to that writing, which is the case here. They can write about anything they want anonymously and with no organization's name attached because that doesn't entail the other members of the organization taking on any risk.
Sure.
How does an organization make decisions independently of the members of the organization?
It doesn't. The distinction is between decisions that individual members make independently and decisions that individual members make communally.
If it helps, the underlying moral principle I'm working from here is "try to avoid making decisions that entail other people taking on risks without their consent."
Did they take on the risks when they entered the conspiracy, or do they only take on those risks when events beyond their control happen? It would be foolish to conspire with foolish or rash people, which is one reason why I don't.