Free speech and hate speech

by Chris Bertram on December 16, 2004

I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.

So what was wrong with the SBC?

(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.

What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where “the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002969.html , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).

But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not _a priori_ ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.

Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.

(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious _identity_ may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.

SBCers have asked why _religion_ should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. _If_ is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a _prima facie_ justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.

Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as _The Satanic Verses_ has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.

{ 51 comments }

1

dsquared 12.16.04 at 12:41 pm

Almost relevant to which, check it out from the thinking man’s Julie Burchill.

“As for his bizarre affair with a most unsuitable married woman, it is a private matter of no relevance to his office. But through Britain’s lack of privacy laws and grossly prurient press, aided by unfettered chequebook journalism buying up nannies to spill beans, we know far more than we ought to. Once it’s known, we can’t unknow it. Like it or not, it undermines a home secretary’s dignity. It shouldn’t – which is why the press should be reined in – but inevitably it does. “

Apparently the Toynbee line is that while religion isn’t deserving of special protection, the dignity of Home Secretaries is.

2

Brendan 12.16.04 at 12:47 pm

I know what you mean. But on the other hand, look at those who are supporting this legislation.

Take Seamus Milne’s current article in the Guardian for example. He argues:

‘But many of the conditions that gave rise to earlier leftwing hostility to religion have eroded, …the radical strands within religion – have grown stronger, typified by the egalitarian Christian liberation theology movement.’

But this is nonsense. The ‘liberation theologians’ were crushed, by, amongst others the current Pope, who Milne praises elsewhere in the article.

‘Religion cannot but find itself in conflict with the demands of an ever more voracious capitalism to dominate social and personal life, which religion has traditionally seen as its own sphere of influence. ‘

But again this is nonsense, as again Milne points out later on in his article. Extremists in the Bible Belt in the States amongst others see no problem with bringing together their Christian beliefs and squaring them with capitalism. Rupert Murdoch is a born again Christian. So is George Bush.

Milne continues…’Of course, shifts within religion have not only been in one direction… there have also been negative trends.’

But again, the idea that there have been positive trends is a myth. The current Pope, for example, is notorious in Catholic circles for being one of the most authoritarian in history. There has always been a strain of Christianity that disapproves of Capitalism, but only to contrast it with an idealised middle ages. Fascism (well some strains) did the same: there were plenty of fascists who criticised capitalism from what we might now term a ‘left wing’ perspective.

The fact is that fundamentalist religion, amongst Catholics, evangelicals, hindus jews and muslims is everywhere on the rise. There are no ‘progressive’ forces in the sense that that word is normally used. To repeat; the fact that these people attack capitalism is irrelevant: so did fascism. It’s what would you replace it with?

‘Across western Europe, Muslims are the target of an unprecedented level of hostility and attacks’.

I think Milne should check the word ‘unprecedented’ up in a dictionary. It doesn’t mean what i think he thinks it means.

Milne ends up
‘The crucial struggle is now within religion rather than against it. ‘

In other words, he admits that the secular left is dead.

This is defeatist nonsense. The fact is that many (perhaps most) religious statements are not in fact true, which is the salient fact about them. It does not incite religious hatred to point this out, although it should be done, aggressively if necessary.

Moreover, Milne seems to act as if no one in their right mind has ever stirred up religious hatred. But look at Niezsche’s ‘The Antichrist’: if ever a work was to stir up hatred of Christianity it was this one. Milne must, by the logic of his argument want it banned: or is this law to apply only to Muslims?

As we have seen in Australia, a similar law has been a disaster.

Finally: does Milne realise that undoubtedly what will happen is prosecutions of Muslims by Jews, who argue that Muslim criticism (some would put it more strongly than that) of Israel is an ‘incitement to religious hatred’?

3

jet 12.16.04 at 12:50 pm

“…or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view”. This is the kind of thought which sends chills down my spine. It would imply some sort of right of the film-maker on how to spend other people’s money to make his films. Do I get to chose how to spend other people’s money to write the software I’ve always wanted to?

A scary line from an otherwise reasonable and thought provoking post.

4

Pollie Anon 12.16.04 at 12:53 pm

“The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them.”

I have to take issue with this proposition. Most people I know who are worried about free speech are more worried about their idealogical opponents using non-government institutions and the courts to try and shut them up. they’re a lot less worried about the government.

5

des von bladet 12.16.04 at 1:28 pm

Dsquared: The thinking man’s Julie Birchill is of course Julie Birchill. The point of Polly Toynbee was an open question, last time I checked.

6

Brett Bellmore 12.16.04 at 1:33 pm

Where to start?

Ok, first, we libertarians tend to be either deontologists, or some species of rule utilitarian, so this initial dismissal of the idea of individual rights is a big problem in itself. But I’m glad you did at least make it explicit, in as much as so many liberals attempt to sneak it in by the back door, while retaining the language of rights.

Second, we see here the rather remarkable assumption that drives the liberal effort to increase the power of government: That that power will be used by nice people. Sorry, but governments ARE “nasty”. Look across the globe: Most of them are run by sociopaths, and even the better governments tend to be run by folks you wouldn’t trust to babysit your kids. And the better sort of government is only one or two elections away from becoming the worse sort. At which point it’s too late to decide that you don’t want THAT guy to have the power to punish speach.

So we’re talking about a principle, that governments may ban speach, which has limited upside potential, and HUGE downside potential. I don’t see the point of the gamble.

7

Ray 12.16.04 at 1:34 pm

“The thinking man’s Julie Burchill is of course Julie Burchill”

And what the man thinks is “Shut up you squeaky lunatic”.

8

Ray 12.16.04 at 1:35 pm

“The thinking man’s Julie Burchill is of course Julie Burchill”

And what the man thinks is “Shut up you squeaky lunatic”.

9

dsquared 12.16.04 at 1:53 pm

Boy are you lot going to be surprised when I reveal the identity of our new guestblogger (winner of “BIRDSEARCH ’05”).

10

David Velleman 12.16.04 at 2:04 pm

There is a gap in your argument at the point where you claim that speech silences, by “cow[ing] its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and … creat[ing] a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves.”

First, there is a wide spectrum of possible cases, from one in which the target is merely discouraged from speaking, at one extreme; to one in which the target is coerced into silence by implied threats, at the other. You need to say at what point in the spectrum we can legitimately force the speaker to “shut up”. I am inclined to doubt whether the speech that is typically classified as hate speech falls far enough along the spectrum to qualify for sanctions.

Second, the “silencing” argument is open to the objection that other remedies are preferable. We can positively promote a climate in which the targets of offensive speech are encouraged to speak up for themselves, and are applauded for doing so. Shutting people up is not the only way of encouraging others to speak, and it ought to be the last resort.

Finally, I think that you fail to take into account the ways in which sanctions against hate speech can disadvantage their intended beneficiaries, by lending color to suspicions that they have something to hide, cannot defend themselves, and so on. Holocaust revisionism has received a tremendous shot in the arm from efforts to silence it as hate speech. Measures regulating hate speech against Muslims will only feed folk suspicions about evil doctrines lurking in the Koran, where we are forbidden to criticize them.

11

PT 12.16.04 at 2:22 pm

Shorter Chris: Multiculturalism trumps free speech.

12

Ray 12.16.04 at 2:24 pm

If you’re getting Julie Burchill in to raise the tone then things are much worse than I thought..

13

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 2:31 pm

Thanks David. You are right to say that there’s a gap in the argument. It is a gap where some facts need to be, and I don’t know, with a sufficient degree of precision, what those facts are.

So I can respond by saying that we can legitimately force the hate speaker to shut up at whatever point it is that their speech is denying others a fair opportunity to participate etc, whilst leaving open the possibility that that point may never arrive in the actual world. My belief, and I don’t think it an unreasonable one, is that hate speech can create a “climate of fear” with such silencing effects – but I can’t specify the exact point at which it might do so.

As for alternative remedies. Sure, absolutely. Though given that I don’t believe that hate speakers have the right to silence others, I don’t think there’s an in-principle presumption in favour of other remedies. Alternatives may, after all be more costly.

As for the possible counterproductive effects of such laws, I agree with you. (Indeed I make the point at the end of my penultimate paragraph). In deciding whether to legislate or not such effects and unintended consequences should always be considered. Are laws against Holocaust revisionism always counterproductive, by the way? I think I might favour them for some jurisdictions (Germany, Israel) and not for others.

14

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 2:39 pm

PT: Shorter Chris: Multiculturalism trumps free speech.

No, I’m afraid your basic comprehension skills are wanting.

Shorter Chris by Chris:

Assuring all of a fair opportunity to speak can trump unrestricted freedom of expression.

15

Deb Frisch 12.16.04 at 2:56 pm

As the various strands of the abrahamic religions (judaism, christianity, islam) blow each other and the world up, it becomes more and more tempting to speak the truth about how illogical all the guy in the sky religions are.

After Darwin, any religion that posits the existence of a male/humanlike deity is infinitely less likely than a religion that posits the existence of a deity that is beyond species and gender.

If there’s a god, it’s not a human and it’s not a guy. It certainly did not have a son named Hey seuss who died for my sins.

We have coddled the kooky judeo-christians for way too long.

The hypothesis that there are little green men from another planet is much more likely than the hypothesis that there’s a guy god, who lives in the sky. At least we know that other planets exist. We don’t know that heaven exists.

Jesus is dead. Get over it.
Lord, save me from your followers.

16

digamma 12.16.04 at 3:08 pm

Assuring all of a fair opportunity to speak can trump unrestricted freedom of expression.

I think the only reasonable response I can make to that is “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

17

digamma 12.16.04 at 3:16 pm

Assuring all of a fair opportunity to speak can trump unrestricted freedom of expression.

Once you put it that way, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.

18

digamma 12.16.04 at 3:20 pm

Whoops.

19

Liam 12.16.04 at 3:23 pm

But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.

And (in principle) if my grandmother had wheels…

20

Ophelia Benson 12.16.04 at 4:45 pm

“But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question”

Good point, but I have a couple of questions. One, isn’t there some difference between degrees of choice here – between internal identity and external identity? We can’t choose how other people choose to identify us (George Bush for instance for all I know thinks of me and all my fellow Murkans as Christians, whether we like it or not), but we can (and do) choose how we think of our own selves. As in the Balkans: many people insisted that they were Yugoslavian, not Bosnian or Serbian, despite the insistence of other people that they were the latter not the former. So if I’m right (big if in your book, I realize) that the religious hatred law would tend to reinforce that already existing tendency to conflate and even confuse religion with identity…do you see that as a problem, as unfortunate? Perhaps as unfortunate but worth the cost all the same? Or not unfortunate at all. The way it looks to me, the law would tend to give reinforcement to the wrong side (‘wrong’ in ways I can elaborate on if they’re not obvious) in the disagreement between Sarajevan internationalists and Serbian & Croatian and other nationalists, and all other similar disagreements.

21

Hugo 12.16.04 at 5:02 pm

Religious hatred itself is not illegal, and I’m assuming no one wants to legislate to make it so. Isn’t there a logical problem with making it illegal to incite people to do something that is perfectly legal? Is there any other law which criminalises incitement to a legal action?

With his analogy to debating etiquette, Chris also implies that free speech is some sort of zero sum game, and that if one side gets too much of it, the other side is deprived of it. I don’t think that applies at all to pluralistic, democratic societies in the West, and in any case is a notion that is way too vague to legislate on.

22

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 5:05 pm

Very good questions Ophelia.

I wouldn’t want any law to impose a particular identity on anyone. And I quite see the danger that you are pointing to.

But there’s a broader, non-law, question about what the reaction of people should be to attempts by bigots to foist an identity on them, and what the reaction of those wish to show solidarity with them should also be.

I’m in danger of straying into territory here where’s I’m ignorant (as well as being in danger of violating Godwin’s law), but there may be instructive lessons in the formation of modern Jewish identity. Many assimilated Jews did not identify as Jewish in any strong sense, were hostile to militant Zionism, thought of themselves as primarily German or French or, perhaps, as socialist internationalists. But the fact of
anti-semitism changed their self-perception: not being Jewish
wasn’t an option any more, and Zionist rejection of assimilation
became more attractive as did gestures like Schoenberg’s adoption of Judaism at the end of his life.

Rejecting the labels and boxes that bigots foist on you is probably usually the right thing to do, but sometimes it can be right to accept the labels and try to force a revaluation of them.

23

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 5:16 pm

Hugo, I didn’t reason analogically from debating etiquette. I cited as a general principle that speech can be restricted for the sake of speech and mentioned formal debates as one exemplification of that principle in action.

Nor was my thought that speech is a zero-sum game. Rather, the suggestion was that certain uses of speech might sometimes create a climate where others are silenced. I think a failure to take that possibility seriously betrays a lack of imagination.

24

Ophelia Benson 12.16.04 at 5:29 pm

Chris, I know, I know. I’ve been musing on that whole Jewish-assimilation-or-identity thing for years. I have so many friends and relatives who’ve lived it – who were raised by thoroughly ‘assimilated’ Jews and ended up feeling deprived and sort of vanilla-ized; who didn’t want to be white-bread Americans, thanks, who wanted to remember Poland and Russia and their furrin-sounding names that had been changed to Smith or Miller or Porter. I used to know exactly what they meant and I still do, but I also have more sympathy for the other view than I once did. If their parents simply wanted to be secular, or cosmopolitan, or interested in things other than their Jewishness…it seems hard to fault them. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that? But then along comes the next generation and they want to be Jewish, dammit. Or Muslim or Québecois or Cherokee or whatever it is. So I never come up with any conclusion to all this. It just seems to be a standing tension.

But I agree about the solidarity question. (But then the tension comes right back, because the people who want to escape that identity could also use some solidarity. So back to nail-biting…)

25

Brett Bellmore 12.16.04 at 5:32 pm

“Rather, the suggestion was that certain uses of speech might sometimes create a climate where others are silenced.”

Except that the law in question has nothing to do with shouting every time somebody tries to say something. Nor with formal debates having rules agreed to in advance. While there might be occasions where the physical process of speech could be used to interfere with another person’s freedom of speech, we are so far from that circumstance that we can’t even see it from here.

And hate speech laws, which restrict the content of speech, have nothing to do with those unusual circumstances.

26

George 12.16.04 at 5:37 pm

Speaking of Darwin, it would be interesting to chart everyone’s opinions on a given topic — like freedom of speech — on a massive tree, with the base being some essential concept held universally (or nearly so):

[I]n a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms.

Refinements on the basic tenet would then branch in different directions, differentiating further with more branches, thus illustrating graphically what the “mainstream” position on the topic is. For instance, Chris departs from the mainstream (or at least from me) pretty quickly when he says:

States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films, are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view.

Most certainly not! “Money people” (assuming they are spending their own money) can put any damn restriction they want on the content of the speech that they are paying to publicize. That’s their free speech. As I said regarding the post in question, if the filmmakers want to distribute their product as-is, let them find another distributor; there are plenty who would be up to the job. Or pay for it themselves.

27

nic 12.16.04 at 5:58 pm

That’s some good food for thought on a difficult issue. In principle, I too dislike the potential of ambiguity in deciding over what is hate and what is not hate speech (ideally we should all be able to recognise the difference, but ideal world is not real world). But in practice, I don’t see how different this is from what is already in place in terms of incitement to hatred and violence in general. There is already a framework balancing free speech with public responsibility in that sense.

Mostly I agree with Chris but I don’t see it so much as a matter of fair participation in public debate or media (which is subject to such a variety of factors, that cannot, and probably should not, be affected directly by laws). To me the reason behind this seems more clearly to do with violence and extremism, to reduce that margin of “luxury” extremist groups have when getting away with incitement not already covered by existing laws.

I think it’s a bit of a straw man to speculate that it would apply to anyone else, or that it would make religious groups and religions themselves immune from any sort of criticism including the fiercest kind. That requires pretending people like the BNP supporters don’t even exist and everyone is simply engaging in intellectual debate or satire. If only it was like that, there wouldn’t be any reason to consider these laws in the first place.

28

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 5:58 pm

Brett, we aren’t discussing any actual law but the principles that ought to regulate free speech in a just society.

It is very misleading for you to say that hate speech laws are about _content_ , if, by that you mean the propositions expressed. The same content can be unexceptional in one context and highly offensive, threatening and intimidatory in another. Same words: different speech acts.

What you won’t accept, I suspect, is my contention that the use of hate speech might so raise the costs of speech to its targets, that we can say they are deprived of an opportunity to participate in the political community on fair terms. You won’t accept that because you think that only physically preventing them from speaking, or threatening them with a gun, or shouting them down (or similar) would amount to interference with their (the targets of hate speech) freedom of speech.

But in the end, I’m not sure whether your disagreement is one of fact or principle. So let me stipulate some facts and see how you react. Suppose group A can utter sentences S with the effect that members of group B, whilst remaining physically able to speak, will be effectively psychologically deterred from doing so. And suppose, further that A know that this is the case and utter their sentences S with the intention of making it the case that members of B are deterred from speaking. Would you agree that the As have stopped the Bs from speaking? And if they do it all the time are the Bs denied an opportunity to participate in discussion on fair terms? Or not?

29

nic 12.16.04 at 6:14 pm

Maybe in that respect there are some parallels with laws on “mobbing” and intimidation in the workplace?

30

Sebastian Holsclaw 12.16.04 at 6:43 pm

So I can respond by saying that we can legitimately force the hate speaker to shut up at whatever point it is that their speech is denying others a fair opportunity to participate etc, whilst leaving open the possibility that that point may never arrive in the actual world. My belief, and I don’t think it an unreasonable one, is that hate speech can create a “climate of fear” with such silencing effects – but I can’t specify the exact point at which it might do so.

This is one of those statements that I want to agree with in principle, but which worries me in practice. I think I can agree with it if we have a fairly strict view of “denying others a fair opportunity to participate”. If we are talking about threats and putting someones life in danger, I agree. If we are talking about things that make people uncomfortable and not interested in participating, I don’t.

31

Brett Bellmore 12.16.04 at 7:00 pm

“You won’t accept that because you think that only physically preventing them from speaking, or threatening them with a gun, or shouting them down (or similar) would amount to interference with their (the targets of hate speech) freedom of speech.”

Got it in one. People who are that easily intimidated don’t need hate speech laws, they need psychiatric treatment. You simply can’t have a free society, if you licence people to walk around all bare nerve endings, poised to be offended or intimidated at the slightest excuse. And empower that hypersensitivity with legal force.

Free societies require people who have thick skins.

32

nic 12.16.04 at 7:18 pm

People who are that easily intimidated don’t need hate speech laws, they need psychiatric treatment.

Well, that must be why Jews invented psychoanalysis…

(sarcasm, in case anyone misunderstands)

33

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 7:23 pm

People who are that easily intimidated don’t need hate speech laws, they need psychiatric treatment.

Brett (but Sebastian, your point is the same), I was just trying to establish what your committments are.

Of course I agree with you that it would be ridiculous to pander to the hypersensitive. But you surely need an argument for being as restrictive as you are. Judges, employment tribunals, and so on, don’t seem to have a problem recognizing that psychologically normal people can suffer serious harm from sustained bullying, verbal harrassment etc. So I don’t see that there’s a big major difficulty with allowing that some such behaviour in the political realm may be exclusionary or silencing with respect to such normal people (as opposed to the pathologically oversensitive).

[Interesting, by the way, that whereas in this thread there’s a refusal to accept that such conduct might count as exclusionary, in the identity-politics one there’s been a working assumption that the atmosphere on CT is so antagonistic as to drive women away!]

34

George 12.16.04 at 8:14 pm

Chris, I’d think you’d take the contrariness of your commentors (with CT or with themselves, same diff) as a point of pride.

But seriously, can I take a crack at your challenge? You said:

Suppose group A can utter sentences S with the effect that members of group B, whilst remaining physically able to speak, will be effectively psychologically deterred from doing so. And suppose, further that A know that this is the case and utter their sentences S with the intention of making it the case that members of B are deterred from speaking.

If it actually happened that way, I think you’re right that we’d have to consider whether speech such as group A’s should be allowed. But I’m having a hard time imagining such a case in the real world where (1) some rather basic provision of existing law such as the prohibition of libel did not already apply, and (2) the speech involved is not trivial. So I can’t figure out if you’re providing intellectual support for existing law, or advocating new law. Generally, unless there’s a real world basis for any new law, no new law should be made. (Though I’ve never researched it, I strongly suspect that anti-libel laws weren’t enacted out of pure principle, but because people were libeling each other and the effects were observed to be bad.)

35

Sebastian Holsclaw 12.16.04 at 8:16 pm

But you surely need an argument for being as restrictive as you are. Judges, employment tribunals, and so on, don’t seem to have a problem recognizing that psychologically normal people can suffer serious harm from sustained bullying, verbal harrassment etc. So I don’t see that there’s a big major difficulty with allowing that some such behaviour in the political realm may be exclusionary or silencing with respect to such normal people (as opposed to the pathologically oversensitive).

Sure, but I think that is why I have practical objections instead of philosophical objections to your response. I think that in practice trying to draw that line is trying to draw a line that can’t be enforced without shutting down a lot of important speech. Once again the defining words are going to be a problem. My definitions of ‘verbal harassment’ and ‘sustained bullying’ are fairly stringent. I would be fine with a law that viewed it that way. But I know that ‘verbal harassment’ has gained a meaning which I would define as much closer to ‘annoying’ or ‘obnoxious’ and I’m not not comfortable with banning any speech anywhere near the merely annoying zone.

36

Chris Bertram 12.16.04 at 8:22 pm

George, I was just trying to work out what Brett’s views were by confronting him with an imaginary case, rather than suggesting that was a typical one.

Sebastian, I’d want to be pretty stringent too. Speech that is merely annoying, or even highly offensive, should be protected. We agree about that.

37

George 12.16.04 at 8:35 pm

So in the end we’re arguing about nothing, which is what all good blog arguments should be about. (Chris actually telegraphed this at the very beginning, in saying that he agreed with the death of the proposed law.) Let’s try this again when there is something to argue about.

(Though I do think there is a substantive argument to be had about the film case, posted by Henry earlier and linked by Chris above. I’ve said why this is a pretty feeble case for outrage, to no apparent response from either. Not that anyone is compelled to respond, of course.)

38

Brett Bellmore 12.16.04 at 10:05 pm

I was the subject of sustained bullying myself, in elementary school. It left bruises, where it didn’t shed blood, so I tend to sneer at verbal bullying; I should have been so lucky to have had nasty things said about me.

39

Shai 12.16.04 at 10:26 pm

I’m reading a new book by L.W. Sumner titled “The Hateful and the Obscene: Studies in the Limits of Free Expression“. It’s a very good philosophical introduction to the topic. It is about Canadian law but some non-canadians will find it interesting insofar as it’s a means to discuss the philosophical issues.

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Deb Frisch 12.16.04 at 10:32 pm

God, you guys are wordy.

The question is whether it makes sense to make it a crime to incite violence against a subset of the population.

If the violence is imminent, I think this makes sense. You don’t want gangs of men going down the street saying things that might incite other men to rape women or attack a subset of men they deem “other.” (Black men, gay men, etc.)

So I am all for laws making it a crime to say hateful things to women or sexual or racial minorities in public. What people say in writing is their own business.

What about a law making it a crime to say hateful things about a religious majority?

I was living in d.c., working for Uncle Sam on 9.11.01 (DRMS PO @ NSF). I felt that p(I would die) on that day was not high, but noticeable.

But the horror of that day pales in comparison with the horror at the USA’s behavior since then. I hate Uncle Sam much more than I hate Osaddama.

I think the war in Iraq is evil. I think that part of the reason Sam is so evil is because he’s so Christian.

I am full of rage, disgust, fury, shame, guilt, anger and contempt for the old white capitalist Christian men who dominate the U.S. government.

I think Jesus was an enlightened human, like the Buddha. I have no doubt that he does not consider faux-Christians like Bush, Cheney and most of the other sleazebags who control the US to be true Christians.

Aside from worshiping an alleged old white guy in the sky, Sam’s other problem is that he drastically overestimates the extent to which economics is a science. He has blind faith in an invisible hand, just like he has blind faith in an invisible guy in the sky. The combination of the two delusions is dangerous.

Speaking of which, this is the most disgusting example of how the christians and capitalists are in bed together I’ve seen.

http://www.reason.com/hod/ww121304.shtml

So fuck Blunkett, Ashcroft and other assholes who want to make it a crime to say kristians are kooky.

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john c. halasz 12.16.04 at 11:09 pm

I appreciate the (Rousseauian?) emphasis on the integrity and fairness of access to the public sphere and participation in the deliberations concerning the disposition of collective power. But I would have two sorts of objection to the argument. 1) Speech is such a complicated, protean, and context dependent thing that I think it virtually impossible to formally regulate it in a generalized way. (Rules for a formal debate, for example, are precisely a context-specific, indeed, context-engendering, sort of thing.) Only if it is tied to a specific context from which specific material consequences result, amounting to intentional acts, such as laws concerning incitement to riot, does legal prohibition and sanction strike me as a reasonable approach. Here legal prohibition would contrast with political contestation aimed at delegitimating rather than repressing hate speech. 2) The public sphere is not necessarily a pacific and harmonious realm, (as fantasized in some classical liberal conceptions of politics as an optimization and harmonization of individual interests), nor can it be guaranteed as such by law. To the contrary, it is precisely the prime place where appeals, conflicts and contests for power are joined. And these will all but inevitably bring forth exclusionary, other-denying and incitefully hateful articulations and strategies. I would much rather that hatefully bigoted attitudes be openly expressed as part of the political process and dealt with openly there than repressed and manipulated in coded language, accompanied by resentment accruing to (paranoiacally projective) fantasies of persecution. If, for example, British Muslims are subject to hateful incitements by xenophobes or racists, then that also is a signal to British Muslims to organize their communities politically to assert their rights as citizens. By the same token, that would involve acknowledgement on their part of the basic norms of such citizenship. Incitements to murder Salman Rushdie are obviously no more legitimate than the machinations of the BNP. But it is the political process transacted in the public sphere that should establish and enforce such norms and the harm caused by the short-circuiting of that process needs to be weighed in the balance. Finally, I would add that I think it is real material impediments to fair access to and the effective functioning of the public sphere, such as poverty, educational neglect and the concentration of control and ownership in media, far more than the purported contents of what is expressed there, that call for remedy. Such merely formal proscriptions amount to little more than the self-congratulation of a status quo that is all too complacent about its defects.

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Jean-Marc 12.16.04 at 11:14 pm

Or Muslim or Québecois or Cherokee or whatever it is.

You’re mixing categories, Ophelia. Muslim is a religious identification (depite Chris’ fudging of the issue); the other two are not. Jews are a different case. My wife is Jewish and atheist. She grew up as “Cone” but decided to revert to her father’s original “Cohen”. She is Jewish in the secular way Einstein and Schoenberg were and she finds it an honour to be so identified. I agree. Myself, I was born a Catholic Québécois/Canadien. In the space of my lifetime French-Canadian society has gone from being one of the most religiously conservative and cleric-ridden in the western hemisphere (certainly in North America) to one of the most liberal. What remains of Catholicism in Québec is largely cultural nostalgia. And not too different from what Judaism (as opposed to Jewishness) is for my wife.

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Ophelia Benson 12.17.04 at 1:36 am

Jean-Marc, I know I was mixing categories. I’ve been droning away about exactly that for months – as a couple of people on this very blog could confirm, because they’re more than a little tired of it. But the point of that particular post was how people think of identities: people generally do mix categories when thinking and talking about identity. Identity itself is a pretty woolly category.

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Tracy 12.17.04 at 8:14 am

Chris, don’t get too upset about Hollywood toning down anti-religious sentiment in films. The same forces also mean that since I’ve started keeping up with the movies (about 1990) I haven’t seen any clearly sexist or racist movies. (There is a fair bit of implicit sexism or racism, e.g. the habit the heroine has of being useless at the climax so the hero can rescue her, the low-frequency of inter-racial romantic relationships, etc. However Christains tend to find a fair bit of anti-Christainity in Hollywood’s outputtings).

The moral horror of being forced to fund through taxes, or, if I ever happen to become a money person, directly, a movie say presenting slaves in the Southern USA as happy, simple people lovingly watched over and guided by the caring whites, or defending violence as a way of keeping women in line I think far outweigh any restriction in debate arising from expensive movies having to appeal to as large an audience as possible. And yet, these are attitudes held by a non-zero proportion of the population.

Or does giving “everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum” actually mean giving “everyone who holds a position Chris approves of a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum”?

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nic 12.17.04 at 12:10 pm

I was the subject of sustained bullying myself, in elementary school. It left bruises, where it didn’t shed blood, so I tend to sneer at verbal bullying; I should have been so lucky to have had nasty things said about me.

Brett, that’s not to say verbal “bullying”, or in this case, incitement to hatred cannot be heavy in itself and is only a matter of oversensitivity on the receiving end. Someone who has been killed would have had it luckier if he had “only” been raped; someone who has been raped would have had it luckier if he had “only” been beaten up; and so on.

So even if it is about speech rather than acts, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss all the cases where incitement to hatred is dangerous and can and does fuel actual violence, also of a physical nature.

That said, legislative intervention can raise more problems than it purports to solve. The issues John C. Halasz raises highlight that. On the other hand, it does depend on the background and history, so this kind of laws can make more sense in certain contexts (that’s why I think it’s pointless to compare the approach in the US to that in Europe). I don’t think you have to have experience of being on the receiving end of such hatred to understand that, but it does change the perspective a lot.

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Urbina 12.17.04 at 1:38 pm

Or does giving “everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum” actually mean giving “everyone who holds a position Chris approves of a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum”?

Right, Tracy. But the irony in all this is that the group this law aims to help, the Muslims, don’t seem to have any problem getting their voice heard in the (British) public forum. Certainly the more militant of them. If anyone is being cowed into silence it is the moderate Muslims. So, is Chris proposing to apply his hate speech law against the MAB and Qaradawi (and his accessory, Livingstone)?

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Chris Bertram 12.17.04 at 1:46 pm

Tracy: “does giving “everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum” actually mean giving “everyone who holds a position Chris approves of a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum”?”

No.

Urbina: ” is Chris proposing to apply his hate speech law against the MAB and Qaradawi (and his accessory, Livingstone)?”

Puhleese….

1. Chris didn’t propose a hate speech law but suggested a way we might think about freedom of speech issues.

2. Chris stated his opposition to Blunkett’s proposed law.

3. Chris in his original post wrote:

bq.”The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious.”

Can’t you read?

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Urbina 12.17.04 at 2:03 pm

”The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious.”

Can’t you read?

Yes I can Chris. And my question remains: would the hypothetical (sorry, not “your”… and certainly not my) hate law be applicable in this case? And where would the MAB, Qaradawi and Livingstone figure in this scenario? This isn’t just a rhetorical question; I’m trying to understand exactly whom this law would help — and, especially, how — and what collateral damage it would inflict.

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Chris Bertram 12.17.04 at 2:14 pm

Sorry for getting grumpy…

I guess my answer is that if extremists Muslims engage in speech the aim of which is to deny others, such as apostates, the opportunity to participate in public life, to express their views etc, by creating a climate of fear, then the speech of those Muslim extremists isn’t entitled to protection.

But whether there should actually be a law against such speech, and whether there should be prosecutions under any such law, are further questions. Since there’s some reason to believe that these further steps would be counterproductive, then we shouldn’t take them.

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Urbina 12.17.04 at 8:51 pm

Sorry for getting grumpy…

I guess my answer is that if extremists Muslims engage in speech the aim of which is to deny others, such as apostates, the opportunity to participate in public life, to express their views etc, by creating a climate of fear, then the speech of those Muslim extremists isn’t entitled to protection.

Ok — continuing in the seasonal spirit — it would be nice if we could pick and choose whose voices needed getting heard — and we seem to agree about some of the more obvious ones — but my objection to any law drafted to accomplish this, um, affirmative action, is based on its inevitable consequences. I can see a flood of complaints, and by all the wrong people. They’re doing their damnedest already, and hardly need the encouragement this law would bring.

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james 12.18.04 at 5:23 pm

Does anyone else find Chris’s position ironic? How can anyone reasonably propose that freedom of speech can be protected by limiting the right to use it? How can we be sure that those purposing this are not simply asking for the right to exclude speech they do not want spoken? With laws like this, one must be prepared for those holding ideas contrary to yours to be the final arbitrators of what is considered acceptable speech. If one is unwilling to give the bigots this power, one should not ask for the creation of such laws.

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