This post follows on from here.
Jeremy Waldron in his recent book The Harm in Hate Speech1 suggests that there are kinds of hate speech that are justifiably regulated. He concentrates his arguments on a particular kind of harm; harm to the ‘dignity’ of individuals. ‘Dignity’ in this context has a special meaning; it reflects the social standing of an individual, and “entitle[s] them to be treated as equals in the ordinary operations of society.”2. Unless otherwise stated, I will use the term ‘dignity’ in the same way. What sort of ‘hate speech’ are we talking about? Waldron is primarily concerned with the visible environment that any individual must live their lives in. By ‘visible environment’ Waldron means the sort of society in which there are cross burnings by members of the Ku Klux Klan, leaflets handed out containing racist propaganda (which we might call ‘defamatory’), neo-Nazi parades through Jewish neighbourhoods, and so on3. It is this kind of outward expression of hateful views that has the most significant impact on the dignity of a member of a (say) racial minority. A member of a minority ends up going about their lives in such an environment, is put into a position of having to explain the hate speech to their children, and so on. This, according to Waldron, justifies the existence of hate speech regulation; we ought to protect these minorities from having their dignity impacted in this way.
This might at first seem similar to Feinberg’s offence principle. However Waldron argues that the two concepts (i.e. offence and dignity) are meaningfully distinct. Offence as a subjective emotion, his argument goes, is not something that the law should analyse and base its legislations on. It is not usually possible to assess the effects of certain kinds of expression on the basis of what sort of emotions it would invoke4. While the dignity of individuals might be affected by the giving of offence, Waldron means something much stronger when he talks about harm done to the standing in society of individuals and groups affected by hate speech5. Consider a neo-Nazi march through a Jewish neighbourhood. This does not have the effect of merely offending the Jewish inhabitants of that neighbourhood, but it also sends out a message; that many people do not consider them to be equal citizens, that they should be afraid, that they are hated because of who they are, and so on. In other words, their ‘rights’ are harmed by the outward display of hostility; we might call it their ‘right to dignity’. We must consider this ‘right to dignity’ against the idea of a right to freedom of expression that I laid out in the first section.
We have then an outline of why it is we might want to consider having restrictions on hate speech. Hate speech as in Malema’s case might increase the likelihood of physical harm coming to certain groups. It may also affect the dignity of members of the targeted minorities, which might be considered a negative impact on their rights. I must now consider whether the arguments I raised in the first section in favour of freedom of expression apply to hate-speech. The next section will concentrate primarily on Jeremy Waldron’s idea of dignity, and whether that is enough to justify hate speech legislation. I will try to answer this question by trying to discover what it is about certain acts that means that we want the state to prohibit them. Finally, I will consider whether that is enough reason to think that freedom of expression should also cover hate speech.
1 Waldron, J. (2012) The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
2 Ibid. pp. 5
3 Ibid. pp. 12
4 Ibid. pp. 113-4
5 Ibid. pp. 138-9
