Presenters
Ashutosh Bhagwat
Kristian Ekeli
Eric Heinze

Jorge Nunez/Tom Herrenberg (chair)
This workshop examines hate speech bans in the context of political and legal theory. Controversies surrounding provocative expression date back over millennia, even if the phrase “hate speech” entered the legal lexicon only in recent decades. Today, the rise of online media, along with global surges in populist political and social movements, have turned hate speech into one of the world’s most bitterly disputed social problems. Electronic platforms are now dominated by powerful yet opaque multinational corporations, meaning that questions about the extent of free expression no longer arise primarily between individual citizens and their national governments.
These rapid changes have le our current regimes of transnational legal regulation looking murky and unpredictable. Experts overwhelmingly agree about the immorality of hate speech, yet disputes persist about its content, about the political and ethical legitimacy of legal limits, and about the practical efficacy of regulating speech. In our world of instant and incessant global communications, are bans on hate speech politically or ethically desirable, and, even if they are, do bans work in practice? Can they end up fanning the flames they were designed to extinguish? Our Special Workshops devoted to discussing (draft) chapters of the Oxford Handbook of Hate Speech, an interdisciplinary project that examines the most pressing issues surrounding hate speech, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2025.

Ashutosh Bhagwat
Hate speech bans undermine liberal values
Abstract: I will argue that legal prohibitions on hate speech are inconsistent with liberal values, as properly defined. Liberalism must possess two characteristics in the context of modern, western democracies. The first is a strong emphasis on what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty, which is to say restrictions on the state’s power to interfere with specific types of individual choices. The second is pluralism, which is a recognition that in diverse societies, individuals and groups will not share basic values and goals, or a common understanding of the good. In those circumstances, popular sovereignty requires that states permit individuals, within the associations and communities that they belong to or form, to define and develop their own values and beliefs free of state coercion— including, illiberal values that are inconsistent with the equality norms that undergird democracy. Of course, the state can enforce laws requiring equal treatment of all, but it must permit individuals and groups to hold on to, and articulate, beliefs inconsistent with equality. Otherwise, a democratic state fails in its basic duty to permit all individuals to participate in public discourse and decisionmaking as full and equal citizens, and so undermines its own legitimacy

Krisan Skagen Ekeli
Libertarianism and hate speech
Abstract: Libertarianism is a political philosophy that in different ways defends what can be called a Lockean right to freedom. This is a negative right to use or dispose of our own person and possessions as we see fit free from interference by other persons and the state – as long as we do not violate the rights of others. The aim of this chapter is twofold. The first is to present and develop a libertarian theory of the right to freedom of expression. The second is to explain why and how a libertarian right to free speech is incompatible with state-imposed bans on hate speech – including hate-based incitement to violence. The version of libertarianism that will be the primary focus of this chapter is often called natural rights libertarianism, and this is presumably the most influential version, especially in political and legal theory. Natural rights libertarianism regards the right to freedom of expression as a property right – a right to determine how we will use and dispose of our person and external resources to communicate with others in the pursuit of our ends.

Eric Heinze
Hate speech bans undermine democratic values
Abstract: Contemporary concepts of political legitimacy – insofar as they can be distinguished from concepts of justice, fairness, utility, and other political norms – can be ascribed only to democracy. As Ronald Dworkin, Robert Post, James Weinstein, and other writers have argued, democratic legitimacy is therefore negated when citizens are excluded from participation solely on grounds of their political, religious, philosophical, or other worldviews. This will be described as the principle of “viewpoint absolutism within the public sphere,” which can and must be distinguished from conceptions of “free speech absolutism” (which, as is explained, is a legal impossibility). Drawing upon Wesley Hohfeld’s and Hans Kelsen’s conceptions of legal rights, this chapter further develops the theory of viewpoint absolutism by providing further arguments for its status as a necessary pre-condition for democratic legitimacy.