- Question
- Should hate speech be illegal?
- Position1 of 3›
- Yes, hate speech should be illegal
Discrimination has been present in human history for years. Even now, racial, gender, and religious differences keep people from being treated like human beings. This is unacceptable in a world where differences make up every individual.
The argument
The argument works by classification. Discrimination is understood as treating a person unfairly because of who they are — not because of anything they have done, but because of an identity they did not choose and cannot set aside. Societies that prohibit discrimination do so on the basis that this kind of treatment is a distinct wrong, one that denies a person equal standing rather than merely disadvantaging them. Hate speech, on this account, meets that description. It expresses extreme hostility toward people on the basis of gender, sexuality, religion or race. Its object is not an individual's conduct or opinions but the group they belong to, and it reaches every member of that group regardless of what any of them has done. That is the same structure as any other act of discrimination; the difference lies only in the medium. Refusing someone work because of their religion and declaring publicly that people of that religion are contemptible proceed from the same judgment about their worth, and both tell the person that their standing is conditional on an identity they cannot change. The legal conclusion follows from consistency. A society that has already decided that discrimination on these grounds infringes individual human rights, and has acted against it in law, has accepted the principle that identity-based mistreatment is not merely distasteful but a harm the law should address. Treating hate speech differently then requires an argument for why this particular form of the same wrong should be exempt. Proponents of this position hold that no such argument succeeds, and that hate speech should be illegal for the same reason the other forms of discrimination already are.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Discriminating against someone requires action that infringes on someone's rights as a person. Hate speech is just words - it doesn't physically harm anyone or take anything away from them.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Discrimination is an action to hurt someone’s livelihood, hate speech is just voicing an opinion.