- Question
- Should hate speech be illegal?
- Position1 of 3›
- Yes, hate speech should be illegal
Hate speech is a regular part of society even though it shouldn’t be. It often results in violence and has caused pain for many innocent people over the years. It would be best to make it illegal to stop hate fueled violence and help individuals become mentally stable.
The argument
Proponents of this position argue that the consequences of hate speech outweigh the benefits of free speech, and that the first of those consequences is violence. Hate speech causes violence because hatred is a form of extreme anger that often inhibits rational decision, resulting in physical harm and often murder. Speech of that kind does not reliably stay speech, on this account, since the state of mind it cultivates in its audience is the one least equipped to stop short of action. American history is offered as the demonstration. The Ku Klux Klan was able to get away with hate speech: whenever they went to trial for it, they were let go, because they claimed they were exercising their freedom of speech. Of course, they didn't always just voice their opinions — they killed people to make a statement, which is the point about where such speech was heading. A legal protection written for the expression of opinion was, in practice, shielding a campaign of violence. Nor is the pattern confined to the past. Unfortunately, murderous actions caused by hate speech happen in the modern era as well. In 2017, a mosque in Quebec that had been the target of slander for years was attacked, resulting in the death of six people. The sequence there is exactly the one the argument describes: sustained speech directed at an identifiable community, and then an attack upon it. The harm does not require violence to be real, either. Like bullying, hate speech affects the mind and can cause negative psychological effects like anxiety and depression in the people it targets — a cost borne continuously by those on the receiving end, whether or not anyone is ever physically hurt. Set against that, what unregulated hate speech protects is the freedom to say a narrow class of things whose principal effect is injury. With so many harmful results of hate speech, proponents conclude, it should be made illegal.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Although violence is sometimes a result of hate speech, hurtful words and physical harm are two very different things. Physical violence should be punished because someone’s well-being and life is being threatened. But words don’t pose a threat to someone’s well-being or life.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] Although physical violence is a crime that should be punished, hate speech shouldn’t be categorized with physical violence.