This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
Should hate speech be outlawed?
Use of the n words, say, in the US, extensive free speech is said to be guaranteed by the First Amendment.
But in Europe, there are laws that restrict speech targeting particular groups.
Racist speech, for example.
Should America be more like Europe?
Yes, says Ray Langton of MIT.
The mistake made by free speech fundamentalists is to regard speech as nothing but harmless words.
Ray Langton, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
Thanks for inviting me.
The topic we're going to focus on today is hate speech.
Could you say what hate speech is?
I don't have any special definition, but when you see how people have talked about hate speech, you can see that one important idea is that of words or pictures that do something distinctive to a certain class or group of people.
So, for instance, the UN describes hate speech as incitement to hatred, or promotion of hatred, or incitement to violence against members of certain groups, or hatred towards members of certain groups.
And it asks its member states to have legislation that will penalise that sort of speech.
So that's one idea which I'll put together under the idea of propaganda.