Brian Carey, a political theorist based at the Universities of Limerick and Manchester, has responded to my previous post that made a case against the banning of hate speech. I am publishing his response here (he has published it also on his website) together with my reply below. My thanks to Brian for engaging in the debate, and I hope that this exchange is useful in helping to clarify ideas.
Brian Carey
Why hate speech should be banned
1
Malik says: ’I believe that no speech should be banned solely because of its content; I would distinguish ‘content-based’ regulation from ‘effects-based’ regulation and permit the prohibition only of speech that creates imminent danger.’
Here is one worry with the above. Why should we want to prohibit only that speech which creates imminent danger? Strictly speaking, the only difference between imminent danger and other forms of danger is one of time. A pedestrian who is about to be hit by a car is in imminent danger. A person suffering from terminal cancer may not be. Presumably, neither harm is more significant than the other. If the ‘imminence’ of danger matters, surely it is only because we have less time in which to avert the potential harm. So – it seems arbitrary to think that we may seek to prohibit speech that creates imminent danger but not speech that creates ‘non-imminent’ danger.
Note also in the above quote that Malik explicitly concedes that speech can indeed create danger. It is important to bear this in mind, as Malik seems to contradict himself on this point later (see point 4, below).
2
Malik continues: ‘I oppose content-based bans both as a matter of principle and with a mind to the practical impact of such bans. Such laws are wrong in principle because free speech for everyone except bigots is not free speech at all. It is meaningless to defend the right of free expression for people with whose views we agree. The right to free speech only has political bite when we are forced to defend the rights of people with whose views we profoundly disagree.’
Malik is in danger of creating a straw man here. Those who argue in favour of restrictions on hate speech are not arguing for ‘free speech for everyone except bigots’. Rather, they are arguing for something like ‘free speech for everyone except people who express themselves in ways that are intended to incite hatred’. It is possible to express views which are bigoted yet which are not intended to (or likely to) incite hatred. Most anti-hate speech laws include these kinds of requirements.
So, a defender of anti-hate speech legislation is certainly not committed to the claim that we should only protect freedom of expression for those with whom we agree. They are committed to the more restricted claim that freedom of expression should not extend to those whom intend to incite hatred. This represents only a small subset of disagreeable expression more generally (as does speech intended to incite violence). It is hardly meaningless to support freedom of expression except when it comes to inciting violence (as Malik himself does), so it is difficult to see why it would be meaningless to modestly expand that subset of prohibited speech to include incitement to hatred.
3
On the practical point, Malik claims: ‘And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground.’
This may be true to an extent, but it misses the point – the aim of anti-hate speech legislation is not to reduce or eliminate bigotry, but rather to protect people from bigotry’s harmful effects. Furthermore, it is implausible to think that we cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry if we prohibit hate speech. Malik offers the case of Britain in the 70’s and 80’s, but all that this shows is that anti-hate speech legislation is not sufficient to stop bigotry (but nobody claims otherwise).
4
Malik argues: ‘In blurring the distinction between speech and action, what is really being blurred is the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility. Because lurking underneath the argument is the idea that people respond like automata to words or images. But people are not like robots. They think and reason and act on their thoughts and reasoning. Words certainly have an impact on the real world, but that impact is mediated through human agency.’
Malik has already accepted and goes on to reaffirm that people can be influenced by speech when that speech incites them to violence. To be consistent, then, Malik needs to reject prohibitions on incitement to violence (if he thinks this denies the agency of those who are incited) or to offer us a plausible reason for thinking that someone who we view as having been incited to violence does not have their agency undermined, but that someone who is incited to hatred does.
What we ought to do, I think, is to adopt the most sensible and straightforward position: People who incite (whether to violence or hatred) are performing acts which are intended to bring about certain kinds of harmful consequences. They are blameworthy to that extent. This does not require us to say that the person who is incited is blameless. If I supply you with a gun because I want you to use it to commit a crime and you do so, both of us are blameworthy.
5
Malik says: ‘Whether in London, New York, Berlin, or Kigali, speech should only be curtailed if such speech directly incites an act that causes or could cause physical harm to others and if individuals are in imminent danger of such harm because of those words.’
It is worth highlighting this quote to show that Malik’s view is extremely restrictive in terms of the kinds of harms that count, when it comes to legal prohibitions. For example:
(a) As mentioned previously, Malik’s view limits us to protecting only against imminent danger (and this seems arbitrary).
(b) Malik’s view is limited to physical harm. It takes no account of psychological harm.
(c) Malik’s view is limited to discrete interactions between individual agents at particular (and limited) moments in time. It takes no account of long-term structural harms that can be created by a climate of bigotry, and which might manifest themselves in all sorts of complicated ways beyond the highly restricted cases Malik seems to have in mind.
Kenan Malik
Why hate speech should not be banned
1
Why should we want to prohibit only that speech which creates imminent danger? Strictly speaking, the only difference between imminent danger and other forms of danger is one of time. A pedestrian who is about to be hit by a car is in imminent danger. A person suffering from terminal cancer may not be. Presumably, neither harm is more significant than the other. If the “imminence” of danger matters, surely it is only because we have less time in which to avert the potential harm. So – it seems arbitrary to think that we may seek to prohibit speech that creates imminent danger but not speech that creates “non-imminent” danger.
Carey’s argument seems to be that any speech or text that may cause someone to commit a violent act or to perpetrate some form of harm at some time in the future should be banned. Let us pursue the logic of such an argument.
Many jihadi groups quote the Qur’an to justify their violence; many Christian homophobes or violent anti-abortion activists similarly find justification for their actions or beliefs. Should we then ban the Qur’an and the Bible? If not, why not, given that there can be few clearer cases of ‘non-imminent’ harm?
Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, cited writers such as Melanie Phillips and Bruce Bawer as central to shaping his murderous hatred of Muslims and of ‘cultural Marxists’. Again, this seems a clear case of ‘non-imminent’ harm. Should we ban the writings of authors such as Phillips and Bawer? If not, why not?
The writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao have again inspired many who have clearly caused harm. Should they be banned? If not, why not?
Nigel Farage’s insistence that foreigners are to blame for everything from the crisis in the NHS to overcrowding on the M4 is clearly harmful, and help create a climate of hostility towards migrants. Should his views be banned? And if not, why not?
It won’t do, incidentally, to suggest that many of these texts or speeches are not intended to cause danger or do harm. What seems important to Carey’s argument is the fact of speech causing harm or danger.
What Carey’s argument exposes is the elasticity of the notion not just of ‘danger’ but of ‘hatred’ and ‘incitement’, too. Governments have in recent decades used the law both to expand the concept of ‘hatred’ and to loosen the meaning of ‘incitement’. Not just free speech has suffered in this process, but minority communities, too.
Consider Britain. The first person convicted under Britain’s first incitement to racial hatred law – which was among the provisions of the 1965 Race Relations Act – was not a member of the National Front or the Racial Preservation Society but the Trinidadian Black Power activist Michael X, who was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment in 1967. Four members of the Universal Coloured Peoples’ Association were also convicted that year for stirring up hatred against white people at Speakers’ Corner.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the government used incitement laws to target black activists whose views were regarded as unacceptable or dangerous; today those with unacceptable Muslim or Islamist views are more likely to be targets. Over the past decade the British government has exploited looser notions of danger, hatred and incitement to target Muslim extremists such as Samina Malik (the so-called ‘lyrical terrorist’) and or protestors against the Danish cartoons. In France, hate speech laws have been used to silence the likes of the comedian Dieudonné. And in Canada, Stephen Harper’s government is considering using hate speech laws to outlaw support for the anti-Israel BDS movement.
Those who want to expand incitement laws to challenge racism all too often find that it is minorities and activists that are often targeted. Some of the recent convictions of Muslim activists and Islamist sympathisers have been met with cries of ‘islamophobia’. In fact, what has helped legitimise such actions is the way that anti-racists themselves have both demanded the criminalisation of hate and helped expand the meanings of ‘hatred’, ‘incitement’ and ‘danger’. In many of these cases there may not be much to admire in the speech being criminalised. But that is to miss the point. When the state gets to criminalise dissenting speech, even if it is bigoted, all of us suffer.
2
Malik is in danger of creating a straw man here. Those who argue in favour of restrictions on hate speech are not arguing for ‘free speech for everyone except bigots’. Rather, they are arguing for something like ‘free speech for everyone except people who express themselves in ways that are intended to incite hatred’. It is possible to express views which are bigoted yet which are not intended to (or likely to) incite hatred. Most anti-hate speech laws include these kinds of requirements.
Let us accept that bigotry does not imply some form of hatred (I think the distinction is fine, and it is not me but Carey who may be in danger of creating a ‘straw man’.) Even if the distinction between bigotry and hatred makes sense in the abstract, given the looseness with which terms such as ‘hate’, ‘bigotry’ and ‘incitement’ are interpreted, it is a distinction that in practice it carries little weight.
Neither the distinction between incitement to hatred and incitement to violence, nor the extension of any prohibition from the first to the second, is ‘modest’, as Carey suggests. It is the distinction between prohibiting a specific act of harm and prohibiting a thought or a belief or an idea. In inciting an act of violence, one plays a direct role in that act. In inciting hatred, one is expressing an idea or belief. That distinction is not modest but crucial.
3
The aim of anti-hate speech legislation is not to reduce or eliminate bigotry, but rather to protect people from bigotry’s harmful effects. Furthermore, it is implausible to think that we cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry if we prohibit hate speech. Malik offers the case of Britain in the 70’s and 80’s, but all that this shows is that anti-hate speech legislation is not sufficient to stop bigotry (but nobody claims otherwise).
Does hate speech legislation ‘protect people from bigotry’s harmful effects’? I certainly did not think as I was growing up in Britain in the 70s and 80s that the incitement to hatred provisions of the 1965 Act afforded me any protection. Nor did most blacks or Asians at that time. Only in retrospect have people been able to claim a vital role for the incitement law in the changing the character of British society
Carey argues both that ‘the aim of anti-hate speech legislation is not to reduce or eliminate bigotry’ and that it does actually reduce bigotry (though not by itself). What evidence is there to suggest that it is ‘implausible to think that we cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry if we prohibit hate speech’? Carey provides none. The work of Sheffield University social geographer Gill Valentine suggests, to the contrary, that hate speech restrictions do not reduce bigotry but merely ‘privatise’ it. The consequence, as the journalist Paul Mason has put it, is to ‘put anti-racists into a false comfort zone, where it feels like the basic arguments against prejudice no longer need to be put’ while also ‘feed[ing] the politics of the far right with the thrill of a shared defiance that all subcultures generate.’
I suspect that it feels ‘implausible’ that hate speech legislation does not reduce bigotry not because of any evidence but because of the moral commitment of many people to such legislation as a means of reducing bigotry. In fact what hate speech legislation really does is make politicians and wider society feel good by providing a sense of doing something.
Consider, for instance, the current debate about immigration. When Sun columnist, and professional contrarian, Katie Hopkins published an article recently calling migrants in the Mediterranean ‘cockroaches’ and demanding the use of gunboats to stop them from landing in Europe, there was outrage, with calls for her to be sacked, banned and even referred to the International Criminal Court. Yet, except for the inflammatory language, EU politicians’ response to the migrant crisis (bomb the smugglers’ boats so that migrants can’t cross the Mediterranean, return the majority of migrants to point of origin, etc) is not that different to Hopkins’. One could argue that the sobriety of the politicians’ language is far more likely to create a climate of hostility than the inflammatory rhetoric of a tabloid journalist, and, indeed, that it is the politicians who create the context that provides legitimacy to Hopkins’ rhetoric. As I pointed out in my original interview with Peter Molnar
What often legitimizes bigotry are the arguments not of the bigots but of mainstream politicians and intellectuals who denounce bigotry and yet accept bigoted claims. Throughout Europe, mainstream politicians have denounced the rise of the far right. And throughout Europe, mainstream politicians have adapted to far-right arguments, clamping down on immigration, pursuing anti-Muslim measures, and so on. They have sometimes even adopted the language. In his first speech at the Labour Party conference after gaining the top office, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown talked of ensuring ‘British jobs for British workers’, a slogan first popularized by the neofascist National Front.
So should we ban the mainstream politicians’ immigration rhetoric? Or should we just ban those who use inflammatory rhetoric and ignore those who are more sober in their presentation but also bear more responsibility for creating an anti-immigrant mood? Or, should we, as I believe, ban neither, but rather challenge the anti-immigrant ideas, in particular of mainstream politicians, instead of taking the easy option of making a moral gesture by banning hateful rhetoric?
4
Malik has already accepted and goes on to reaffirm that people can be influenced by speech when that speech incites them to violence. To be consistent, then, Malik needs to reject prohibitions on incitement to violence (if he thinks this denies the agency of those who are incited) or to offer us a plausible reason for thinking that someone who we view as having been incited to violence does not have their agency undermined, but that someone who is incited to hatred does.
Incitement to hatred is the encouragement of others to hold certain ideas or beliefs, or to have certain feelings, that might be described as hateful. It is not incitement to commit a specific act. Incitement to violence is incitement to commit a specific act.
Of course those who hold hateful ideas or beliefs, or have hateful feelings, may well be led by those ideas or beliefs or feelings to commit harmful acts. In so so doing they are acting upon how they have interpreted those ideas or beliefs or feelings, not being directly encouraged to do so by another.
The distinction is important. Consider Anders Breivik. He was self-consciously influenced by the ideas of writers such as Melanie Phillips and Bruce Bawers in a way that led him to commit mass murder. I am not sure that even Carey would suggest that, therefore, the writings of Phillips or Bawers should be banned for inciting hate, or that they should be held responsible for Breivik’s actions.
5
Malik’s view is limited to discrete interactions between individual agents at particular (and limited) moments in time. It takes no account of long-term structural harms that can be created by a climate of bigotry, and which might manifest themselves in all sorts of complicated ways beyond the highly restricted cases Malik seems to have in mind.
In fact the opposite is the case. It is precisely because I do recognize ‘long-term structural harms that can be created by a climate of bigotry’ that I oppose bans on hate speech.
Carey seems to think that the difference between us is that he wants to challenge hatred and and that I don’t. That, I’m afraid, is more moral hand waving. As I argued in my original interview, it is, in my view, ‘morally incumbent on those who argue for free speech to stand up to racism and bigotry.’ It is because I want to challenge bigotry that I am an advocate of free speech.
The difference between us is not that one recognizes the ‘long-term structural harms’ of bigotry and the other does not. The debate, rather, is about how we should tackle bigotry. It is because I recognize the social rootedness of hatred that I recognize, too, that hate speech bans cannot tackle such hate but often makes matters worse both by putting anti-racists into a ‘false comfort zone’, in Paul Mason’s words, and by creating a backlash among those who feel unfairly silenced. At the same time I also recognize the ‘long term structural harm’ created by such restrictions. It is for these reasons – reasons that emerge from a life of activism against bigotry and injustice – I am opposed hate speech bans.
The images are all taken from films that explore questions of racism and hatred; from the top down: Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ (1975); Geoffrey Wright’s ‘Romper Stomper’ (1992); Shane Meadows’ ‘This is England’ (2006); Jacques Audiard’s ‘Un Prophète’ (2009); Tony Kaye’s ‘American History X’ (1998); and Mathieu Kassovitz’s ‘La Haine'(1995).
Pandaemonium 
Kenan you are right, silencing people is never the right answer to hatred, lancing the boil is the way to go.
On an aside, I saw BB King live only once, with Peter Green and we took our daughter, then 15 years old, along too, she was not that keen at the time but now aged 30 she is so pleased she saw the great man live and Peter Green live, just one of BB’s many disciples and devotees of the Blues and a great talent in his own right.
I think you’re right on this. The problem with laws on “incitement to hatred” is, firstly, that the concept of “hatred”, and what threshold counts as “hatred” is simply too vague. It thus easily slides into criminalising speech that one merely dislikes. This is especially so if we include both speech that is “intended to” and also “likely to” incite hatred (as Brian Carey does).
The second problem is that if we cast the net broader than immediate incitement to violence then the concept “incitement” also becomes way too broad and vague. Your point that this could include the Bible and Koran is accurate.
All of this amounts to the authorities saying: “Yes, this a broad and vague law, but trust us, we’ll use it only when it is sensible to do so”.
The speech that we go to the lengths of actually criminalising needs to be tightly drawn and pretty clearly defined. The only sensible way to do this is to limit it to direct incitement to violence.
Strictly speaking, the only difference between imminent danger and other forms of danger is one of time.
He says this like it’s a trivial difference.
A pedestrian who steps out in front of a moving vehicle is responsible for any accident. The driver bears no responsibility.
If a pedestrian is wandering down the middle of the road he may be partly responsible for any accident but drivers are expected to look where they are going and will be legally responsible if they run him down.
That difference in ‘time’ is actually one of moral agency. Time to reflect, to consider, to make choices. To act like a whole human being and not just a reflex.
To address the most tedious anti-free speech argument you may be responsible for causing panic if you shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre but you are not responsible for causing panic if you wrote ‘Fire!’ in a cartoon which was subsequently forwarded to some batshit crazy Imam who put a price on your head.
Causing offence is not like tapping someone on the knee with a mallet. They are responsible for their response.
Malik’s view is limited to discrete interactions between individual agents at particular (and limited) moments in time. It takes no account of long-term structural harms that can be created by a climate of bigotry, and which might manifest themselves in all sorts of complicated ways beyond the highly restricted cases Malik seems to have in mind.
But by suppressing ‘hate speech’ Carey is dodging the issue of ‘structural’ harms by ‘limiting interactions between individual agents at particular (and limited) moments in time’
He wants to pretend he’s addressing ‘structural’ inequalities but he’s doing it at the level of the individual.
It’s like a socialist claiming she’s talking about ‘structures’ of exploitation but saying we have to address those structural inequalities by clamping down on bosses who are meanies.
Brian Carey makes a very poor case in my opinion. For a start, who is to judge what hate speech is?
To some people, Gordon Brown’s ”British jobs for British workers” was even dubious and encouraged backward thinking in society. So UKIP would definitely be deemed guilty of it if you took a very censorious view of things. Kenan himself regards Farage’s comments about the NHS and the M4 as ”clearly harmful”, when I just consider it to be fair comment, even if it’s wrong.
So there’s no way that I’d trust some liberal do-gooder to make judgement calls on what constitutes hate speech or not. The term itself is very politically loaded in the first place.
If you want to hear what curtailed free speech is and where the barrier for what is deemed to be hate speech is set very low, just listen to James O’Brien on his LBC radio programme. He will argue anyone who points out any of the failings of mass immigration and multiculturalism into the ground and denounce them all as hateful bigots. That’s just a radio show you can switch off, but I would fear that attitude being given more power in law. It would be judge and jury.
It is a delight to follow a discussion where opinions are stated in plain, unheated language and backed up by logical arguments.
I think Brian Carey has a point, albeit a bit hypothetical: Yes, it would be good if the State could define what is good, and outlaw all things that are not. Unfortunately, history tells us we tend to be very bad at this. Look at the various attempts at a communist society, or the states where the Church was allowed to write the moral code into the law. Eventually the state will step over the line, and outlaw not only that which could be harmful, but also that which it simply disagrees with.
I see this issue as (like anything else in politics) not a clear-cut right/wrong scenario, but one in which different priorities, potential gains and risks must be weighed against each other. On one side: allowing the state to protect those who could be harmed. On the other side: giving the state a powerful tool of repression. My scales weigh heavily in Mr Malik’s favour, as I simply do not trust the state to keep itself from extensive intervention into people’s lives.
I think, by making the exception of ” imminent danger” and “incitement for specific violent act” ,Mr. Malik has created a slippery slope on which arguments by Brian Carey do carry weight. Exceptions can be interpreted different ways. One can argue that Charlie Hebdo’s work was a courageous and bold act in defense of freedom of speech, but others can argue that Charlie Hebdo knew that it will incite violent act, it will place their and other innocent civilians life in imminent danger, and work by Charlie Hebdo was a direct incitement for violence. I know Mr. Malik will further refine the definition of ” imminent danger and incitement for specific violent act”, but when you make one exception, it always leaves the room for next exception and in that sense arguments by Mr. Brian Carey do hold water.
Charlie Hebdo clearly didn’t encourage specific violence, and arguing even very likely retribution doesn’t imply creating an imminent danger. Your example is a rather twisted way to blame the victim, as well. But to address the spirit of your argument: perfectly proper exceptions in life and morality are quite common, as is hinted at by terms like Buddhism’s ‘the middle way’, and as you’ll see quite properly in statutes that govern behavior (this one, by the way, is no more an exception than saying ‘driving is great around here, all the way up to 120 kph’).
It’s not appropriate to assume Carey’s argument holds some water merely because there’s some muddiness to the concepts of danger or incitement.
I very much like Malik’s limit as a litmus test. But one way to sorta-kinda agree with you is to say that when one gets to a fork in the road, it doesn’t always look like a fork- there could be shades of meaning that confuse the issue of what constitutes incitement or imminent danger (or violence, for that matter). Language and the nature of life as a slippery place to pin down such things determines that even simple statements like “incitement for a specific violent act” have a plethora of potential what-if’s one must pin to its lapel. That, in fact, is a healthy chunk of enacting both law and morality- to determine, via precedent or scenario, what constitutes such concepts operationally. Finding, at the pertinent level of detail, those dreaded exceptions of yours. It’s a purposefully, gloriously messy business. You’re barking up more than one wrong tree asking for no ‘slippery slopes’ in morality on the basis of a need for interpretation or perspective (setting aside, perhaps incorrectly, the important task of determining whether a fellow should be sent to his room or burned at the stake). Even if we know all the facts, there’s room for disagreement on, say, incitement- perhaps even a wide field of reasonable disagreement. But this recognition of contingency, mitigants, unknowns, and controversy is almost always a characteristic of moral determinations of a specific scenario. Recognizing that is a far thing from trying to, say, opine that temporal or distal concerns regarding incitement are all-important in the argument for or against Malik’s point. They’re just considerations among others, ones which I suspect would usually be quite clear in a given scenario. In fact, Carey notwithstanding, focusing on speech’s relation to specific acts is as clear a moral distinction as this turning world provides, and gets us out of the great majority of the moral quagmire that is our lot when evaluating and prohibiting hate speech.
Yes, that’s all very grand in the abstract or may even possibly be operational if we lived in a different society than the one we actually inhabit. But here and now in the real world ,freedom of speech/expression and along with it other freedoms are under frequent and increasing attack, mostly by people who use as precedent or reason to be interpreted in the muddy waters of the judiciary the fact that they are harmed or under imminent threat from words. Do you not see the relevance of the necessity to have an absolutist position on this issue to help deny attacks on our freedoms.
I accept that in a free society most issues are indeed messy it’s part of the wonder of humanity’s struggle for the truth etc, but at this moment in this society there are some fundamental issues for which it is necessary to demand no compromise ,this is such an issue upon which many other freedoms or potential freedoms are built indeed cannot be built without.
The question is, “Would the violence have a chance of happening if the specific speaker did not say X?” If you yell fire in a crowded theater (that’s not on fire), that’s on you.
In the initial interview and also in replies to Carey i believe Malik is more consistent, logical and correct. However he makes one fundamental mistake and the same weakness is to be found in the First Amendment.
Why as defenders of free speech should any ground be given that allows the likes of Carey – and others who may have much more sinister motives – an opening to question the defence of free speech regarding the distinction between an act and speech?
This is fundamental, clearly there is no point in trying to wriggle out of the fact that any speech could incite others to act, after all the whole point of speech in any form is to convince others one is correct and possibly act on that belief, yes this can result in violence, but that will depend on the autonomous act of the person(s) carrying out the act, the consequences of which must be fully played out.
To suggest that there should be a tight restriction on the level of incitement is impractical, open to interpretation and as Carey points out the question of time comes into play especially as interpretation is required.
The only resolute defence of free speech surely is absolute and non contextual which will separate the different categories of speech and acting and defends not only free speech but the autonomy of the individual and along with it the responsibility and consequences of our actions, as Malik rightly says we are far from been Robots.
The pictures used to illustrate this article are clichéd, and are probably meant to be so.
But whatever did happen to all those skinhead type racists? In London anyway.
The people who Kenan and his political comrades used to organise against in East London etc.
They aren’t there anymore and those same streets and housing estates now are home to ethnic minority gangs and street toughs. They moved away I presume. You hear some of them ringing up radio stations now and again complaining that they were ethnically cleansed. Which is silly of course, but the transformation has been quite stark and noticeable.
I very much appreciated Malik’s mention (finally!) of how a PM’s mild phrasing can/will have a much greater impact than even very explicit, illegal hate speech among crowds of the unwashed. Comparing the two statements morally via their effect is a key to understanding how goofy it is to play whack-a-mole with hate speech. Legislation of hate speech is a built-in way to encourage inequality, transmute artifice and meaning, and encourage the kind of sneaky, lulling duplicity we see on the far right. Limiting legislation against hate speech makes the morally desirable responses to dumb ideas even possible, by allowing them to be fully expressed, and yes, potentially acted upon. Such is the threshing floor of freedom.
Reblogged this on maxichimaximind and commented:
Thought provoking
bans, absolutes, are awful. so is bullying and intimidation.
You are right Kenan. You have a good instinct for balance and cause and effect on this issue that Brian Carey lacks.
His argument that there is a false distinction between imminent and more removed danger is a particilarly poor. This distinction exists for the perfectly good reason that cause and effect are more easily established in the case of imminent danger. That is why we are able to class it as imminent. When we know that there is almost certainly going to be imminent danger then we have justification for taking stronger measures to protect ourselves and others. No-one – seeing a vehicle hurtle towards them, will feel their liberty curtailed if someone pulls them out of the way. On the other hand, they would have good reason to feel that their liberty was being curtailed if you pulled them off a road thinking they were going to cross to get to a shop for cigarettes that may increase their chances of developing cancer in future years.
I just finished reading an interview Flemming Rose of Jylands Posten gave to the New York Times in February this year and in it he talks of the frequently enforced hate speech bans in the Weimar Republic. These did nothing to protect Jewish people from anti-semitism at the time and gave martyr status to nazi activists, allowing them to propogate their hate even more effectively. I had no idea of this and it stunned me. Any lingering doubts I’ve had about the counterproductive nature of hate speech bans have completely evaporated.