ALEXANDER BROWN*

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? PART 1: THE MYTH OF HATE

(Accepted 28 February 2017)

ABSTRACT. The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal
scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been
focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate
speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term ‘hate
speech’ itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond
legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt
to understand the general concept hate speech. And it does so using a range of well-
known methods of conceptual analysis that are distinctive of analytic philosophy.
One of its main aims is to explode the myth that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech. It also argues that
hate speech is best conceived as a family resemblances concept. One important
implication is that when looking at the full range of ways of combating hate
speech, including but not limited to the use of criminal law, there is every reason
to embrace an understanding of hate speech as a heterogeneous collection of
expressive phenomena. Another is that it would be unsound to reject hate speech
laws on the premise that they are effectively in the business of criminalising
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred.

I. INTRODUCTION

What does the state, acting on behalf of society as a whole, owe to
citizens when it comes to regulating speech or other modes of
expression? Some people believe that in answering this question it
makes a positive difference whether or not the speech in question is
insulting, degrading, defaming, negatively stereotyping or inciting
hatred, discrimination or violence against people in virtue of their

* Alexander Brown is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Social and Political Theory at the University
of East Anglia (UEA). He joined UEA in 2009 prior to which he was a lecturer in legal and political
theory at University College London (UCL) (2005–2009). He is the author of Hate Speech Law: A
Philosophical Examination (Routledge, 2015), Ronald Dworkin’s Theory of Equality: Domestic and Global
Perspectives (Palgrave, 2009), and Personal Responsibility: Why it Matters (Continuum, 2009).

Law and Philosophy (2017) 36: 419–468 � The Author(s) The article is an open access publication 2017
DOI 10.1007/s10982-017-9297-1

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10982-017-9297-1&domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10982-017-9297-1&domain=pdf


race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability,
gender identity, for example; and that it makes a positive difference
because such speech implicates issues of harm, dignity, security,
healthy cultural dialogue, democracy, and legitimacy, to name just a
handful of relevant issues. They sometimes use the term ‘hate
speech’ to express that general view.1 (In what follows I use italics
for the concept hate speech and single speech marks for the term ‘hate
speech’.) Critics of hate speech regulations, by contrast, claim that
even though it has become ‘fashionable’ to defend such regulations
and even though defenders of such regulations are (according to
critics) ‘well-meaning’,2 in reality hate speech regulations are them-
selves harmful to self-realization and autonomy, ineffective at best
and often counterproductive, and damaging to democracy and
legitimacy, amongst other things.3 Indeed, to defend hate speech
regulations (critics maintain) belies an implicit wish to defend the
regulation of speech that quite plainly should not be regulated,
namely, merely offensive speech.4 Defenders of (some) hate speech
regulations could, I suspect, respond that the critics are being
patronising; that it is the critics who are adopting a fashionable and
well-meaning yet wrongheaded position. Defenders could even re-
tort that it is the critics who harbour a secret desire to deregulate all
speech even speech that quite plainly should not be deregulated. But
what exactly are the two sides arguing about here? What is hate
speech? Until we can sensibly answer that question it seems that the

1 See, e.g., Alexander Tsesis, Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social
Movements (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002); Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Hate Speech: Is There a
Case for Banning?’, Public Policy Research 12 (2005-2006): 213–223; Steven J. Heyman, Free Speech and
Human Dignity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Alexander Brown, Hate Speech Law: A
Philosophical Examination (London: Routledge, 2015).

2 See, e.g., Miklos Haraszti, ‘Forward’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of
Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Martha
C. Nussbaum, ‘Law for Bad Behavior’, The Indian Express, February 21, 2014. Available at
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/law-for-bad-behaviour/.

3 See, e.g., C. Edwin Baker, ‘Hate Speech’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of
Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ronald
Dworkin, ‘Reply to Jeremy Waldron’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of Hate
Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Robert Post,
‘Interview’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation
and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nadine Strossen, ‘Interview’, in M. Herz
and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Eric Heinze, Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

4 See, e.g., Robert Post, ‘Hate Speech’, in I. Hare and J. Weinstein (eds.) Extreme Speech and
Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Weinstein, ‘Hate Speech Bans, Democracy
and Political Legitimacy’, Constitutional Commentary, forthcoming.

ALEXANDER BROWN420

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/law-for-bad-behaviour/


debate about hate speech regulations has no chance of moving
forward, much less of being understood by bemused onlookers.
Since every country on the planet has probably witnessed at some
point in its history instances of what could be labelled ‘hate speech’,
and virtually every legal system in the world contains at least one
law that could be interpreted as a ‘hate speech law’, we are all of us
caught up in the aforementioned debate whether we like it or not,
and whether or not we know what the debate is actually about.

Numerous legal scholars have put forward putative definitions of
the term ‘hate speech’.5 Unsurprisingly, all of these legal scholars
have sought, explicitly or implicitly, to define a legal concept hate
speech, meaning a concept that refers to speech that is, or has been at
one time or could be in the future, treated as hate speech for the

5 See, e.g., Mari Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story’,
Michigan Law Review 87 (1989): 2320–2381, p. 2357; Suzanna Sherry, ‘Speaking of Virtue: A Republican
Approach to University Regulation of Hate Speech’, Minnesota Law Review 75 (1991): 933–944, p. 933;
Sandra Coliver, ‘Hate Speech Laws: Do They Work?’, in S. Coliver (ed.) Striking a Balance: Hate Speech,
Freedom of Expression and Non-Discrimination (London: Article 19 International Centre Against Censor-
ship/Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, 1992), p. 363; Frederick Schauer, ‘Uncoupling Free
Speech’, Columbia Law Review 92 (1992): 1321–1357, p. 1349; Rodney Smolla, Free Speech in an Open
Society (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 152; Charles Lawrence III et al., ‘Introduction’, in M.
Matsuda et al. (eds.) Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 1; Ira Glasser, ‘Introduction’, in H. Gates et al. (eds.) Speaking of
Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (New York, NY: New York University
Press, 1994), p. 1; Laura Lederer and Richard Delgado, ‘Introduction’, in L. Lederer and R. Delgado
(eds.) The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography (New York, NY:
Hill and Wang, 1995), pp. 4–5; Kathleen Sullivan and Gerald Gunther, Constitutional Law (New York,
NY: Foundation Press, 1995), p. 1131; Larry Alexander, ‘Banning Hate: Speech and the Sticks and Stones
Defense’, Constitutional Commentary 13 (1996): 71–100, p. 71; Bryan A. Garner, Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th
Edn (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1999), pp. 1407–1408; John. T. Nockleby, ‘Hate Speech’, in L. Levy and
K. Karst (eds.) Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, Vol. 3, 2nd Edn (Detroit, MI: Macmillan, 2000), p.
1277; J. Angelo Corlett and Robert Francescotti, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Hate Speech’, The Wayne
Law Review 48 (2002): 1071–1100, p. 1083; Tsesis, Destructive Messages, p. 211, n. 1; Jon B. Gould, Speak
No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 14;
Raphael Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance: Studies on the Costs of Free Expression and Freedom of the
Press (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 153; Raphael Cohen-Almagor, ‘Holocaust Denial is a Form of Hate
Speech’, Amsterdam Law Forum 2 (2009): 33–42, p. 35; Raphael Cohen-Almagor, ‘Fighting Hate and
Bigotry on the Internet’, Policy and Internet 3 (2011): 1–26, pp. 1–2; James Weinstein and Ivan Hare,
‘General Introduction: Free Speech, Democracy, and the Suppression of Extreme Speech Past and
Present’, in I. Hare and J. Weinstein (eds.) Extreme Speech and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), p. 4; Kathleen Mahoney, ‘Hate Speech, Equality, and the State of Canadian Law’, Wake
Forest Law Review 44 (2009): 321–351, pp. 325–326; Post, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 127; Steven P. Lee, ‘Hate
Speech in the Marketplace of Ideas’, in D. Golash (ed.) Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World (Dor-
drecht: Springer, 2010), p. 22; Douglas M. Fraleigh and Joseph S. Tuman, Freedom of Expression in the
Marketplace of Ideas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), p. 139; Susan Benesch, Dangerous Speech: A
Proposal to Prevent Group Violence (New York: World Policy Institute Paper, 2012), p. 1; Eduardo Bertoni
and Julio Rivera, ‘The American Convention on Human Rights: Regulations on Hate Speech and Other
Similar Expressions’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking
Regulation and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 499; Kylie Weston-Scheu-
ber, ‘Gender and the Prohibition of Hate Speech’, Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice
Journal 12 (2012): 132–150, pp. 139–140.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 421



purposes of legal regulation in one form or another. Some of these
legal scholars seek to characterise a specific legal concept hate speech
that relates to a particular body of law and legal regime, such as
incitement to hatred laws in England and Wales. Others characterise a
cluster legal concept hate speech that is associated with a class of hate
speech laws, such as incitement to hatred laws. Yet others characterise
an umbrella legal concept hate speech that implicates a range of dif-
ferent clusters or classes of hate speech law, such as laws proscribing
group libel, media regulations limiting negative stereotyping or
stigmatization, laws disallowing insult or denigration, laws banning
incitement to hatred, and so on.6 Because these characterisations differ
both in terms of whether they are grounded in what has been, what is,
or what could be treated as hate speech within a body of law and in
terms of the levels of generality at which they operate, they often wind
up saying very different, often contradictory things about hate speech.
Given that hate speech laws provoke such strong moral reactions, on
the part of defenders and critics alike, and given that legal meanings
will themselves draw on a range of deeper values and principles about
which people reasonably disagree, it is no surprise that there remains
such divergence over how to define the very term that stands at the
epicentre of the disagreement.

However, I believe that in order to understand how best to re-
spond to hate speech, whether this is via bodies of law and legal
regimes and/or through a range of extralegal measures including
counter-speech and education, we must pay serious attention to the
fact that hate speech is not merely a legal concept, in the narrow sense
of a concept that is used and in some cases even defined, explicitly or
implicitly, within bodies of law and legal systems; it is also an
ordinary concept that is (a) used by people who are not legal pro-
fessionals or writers about the law, and (b) has a panoply of uses not
only within bodies of law and legal systems but also within a range
of other social, cultural, political and economic domains. If we focus
too hard on a legal concept hate speech we risk prejudging what the
right response to the problem of hate speech might be: for, we may
have defined the nature and contours of the phenomena in question
precisely with legal responses in mind. For defenders of hate speech
laws, the danger is that if all one has is a hammer, everything starts

6 Cf. Brown, Hate Speech Law, ch. 2.

ALEXANDER BROWN422



to look like a nail. Conversely, for critics of hate speech laws, if one is
fixated on the idea that it is wrong to use a sledge hammer to crack a
nut, then everything starts to look like a nut. Therefore, I position
my analysis much closer to a different scholarly tradition, one that
has attempted to analyse the meaning of the term ‘hate speech’ using
various techniques of conceptual philosophical analysis.7 Neverthe-
less, my analysis also differs from that of these other philosophers in
two main ways to be further explained and defended in the course of
the articles: first, unlike them, I reject some of the implicit
assumptions about hate speech carried over, consciously or uncon-
sciously, from the work of legal scholars; second, unlike them, I
argue that hate speech is a family resemblances concept that does
not admit of definition.

Before setting out these points of differentiation, however, I need
to clarify what I see as the ostensible differences between the legal
concept (or class of concepts) hate speech and the ordinary concept
hate speech. I do not mean to claim that the legal concept hate speech
is somehow detached from the ordinary concept hate speech as
though legislators, legal professionals and scholars of law operate
separately from and with indifference to the rest of human life car-
rying on the background. Such a claim would be difficult to square
with the fact that such people are all influenced or inspired by values
and principles not merely of a legal character but also of a more
general ethical, moral and political character, especially in areas like
hate speech law, which concern what we owe to each other in
matters of interpersonal interaction. Rather, what I mean to say is

7 See, e.g., Andrew Altman, ‘Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech: A Philosophical Examination’,
Ethics 103 (1993): 302–317, pp. 309–310; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New
York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 77; Susan Brison, ‘The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech’, Ethics 108
(1998): 312–339, p. 313; Susan Brison, ‘Hate Speech’, in H. La Follette (ed.) The International Encyclopedia
of Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 2332; David Brink, ‘Millian Principles, Freedom of
Expression, and Hate Speech’, Legal Theory 7 (2001): 119–157, p. 119; L. W. Sumner, ‘Hate Crimes,
Literature and Speech’, in R. Frey and C. Heath Wellman (eds.) A Companion to Applied Ethics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), p. 142; David Miller, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), p. 65; Norman Fischer, ‘First Amendment Morality Versus Civility Morality’, in
C. Sistare (ed.) Civility and Its Discontents: Civic Virtue, Toleration, and Cultural Fragmentation (Lawrence,
KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), p. 161; Parekh, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 214; Jeremy Waldron, ‘Dignity
and Defamation: The Visibility of Hate’, Harvard Law Review 123 (2010): 1596–1657, pp. 1600–1601;
Kevin M. Graham, Beyond Redistribution: White Supremacy and Racial Justice (Plymouth: Lexington
Books, 2010), pp. 77–78; Caleb Yong, ‘Does Freedom of Speech Include Hate Speech?’, Res Publica 17
(2011): 385–403, p. 386; Rae Langton, ‘Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography’, in I.
Maitra and M. McGowan (eds.) Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), pp. 74–77; Rae Langton et al., ‘Language and Race’, in G. Russell and D. Graff
Fara (eds.) Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 757–760.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 423



that how the term ‘hate speech’ is defined, explicitly or implicitly (via
interpretation), within some body of law and legal system, cases and
doctrines as well as statutes, is only the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays
a great many different kinds of people who are not legislators, legal
professionals or scholars of law use the term ‘hate speech’ in
countless different types of context about a tremendous diversity of
phenomena.

Now it is certainly true that the term ‘hate speech’ was coined by
a group of legal scholars in the late 1980s in the United States (more
on this in ‘What is Hate Speech? Part 2: Family Resemblances’,
henceforth ‘Family Resemblances’) in response to what they saw as
the way different legal systems tackled certain sorts of harmful racist
speech. When Mari Matsuda first used the term ‘hate speech’ in her
seminal article from 1989, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech: Con-
sidering the Victim’s Story’, her central purpose in using the term
‘hate speech’ was to highlight the way in which the legal system in
the United States failed victims of harmful racist speech by providing
them with inadequate means of seeking redress, civil or criminal. In
the article, she includes a number of legal cases and also some
examples not associated with actual legal proceedings and not easily
actionable under current laws. But these examples were intended to
show the limitations of the legal concept hate speech in the United
States, as a form of protected speech. She contrasted the American-
based legal concept hate speech with an ideal type or model version of
what the legal concept hate speech could and should be. Perhaps in
the process she was also invoking specific legal concepts hate speech
found in Europe. Because of the work of legal scholars like Matsuda,
the term ‘hate speech’ has now been taken up legislators and legal
professionals themselves more explicitly. However, and this is the
crucial part, this new bit of terminology or legalese has now also
been taken up by the media and by ordinary people and has taken on
a life of its own.

By way of evidence for this last point, entering the term ‘hate
speech’ into Google returns more than eighty million results.8 No
doubt a significant proportion of these results are about the concept
hate speech as it pertains to hate speech law. Indeed, it seems likely
that the term ‘hate speech’ (and its non-English equivalents) often

8 On December 8, 2016.

ALEXANDER BROWN424



first comes to the attention of ordinary people through television
and radio programmes, newspaper and magazine articles, Internet
message boards, social networking websites, and Internet news
channels that mention the issue of hate speech in relation to high
profile court cases, especially those involving already recognised
public figures. Consider well-reported hate speech cases involving
the French politician Brigitte Bardot, the Australian journalist An-
drew Bolt, the Indian politician Akbaruddin Owaisi, the French
comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the Kenyan politicians Moses
Kuria and Junet Mohamed, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
These and similar cases around the world have all become trending
stories on social media and online news channels. Nevertheless, the
term ‘hate speech’ is also used by people who are not legal profes-
sionals and/or writers about the law, and in the course of talking
about events that are not connected with legal proceedings and
where there is virtually no possibility of legal proceedings. So, for
example, at the time of writing, entering the search term ‘hate
speech Donald Trump’ into Google returned over four million re-
sults. Indeed, a research group funded by the European Union has
recently undertaken a survey of the media across Europe using the
European Media Monitor (EMM) tool to find hits of the term ‘hate
speech’. The preliminary figures for the UK shows an average of just
under 100 hits per month between April 2015 and February 2016,
with a spike of 224 hits in December 2015 with many hits occurring
within stories about the campaign speeches of Donald Trump.9

Hitherto, the term ‘hate speech’ has been perhaps most often
associated with liberal progressives, or people on the left of politics –
who use it to highlight and problematise speech that they view as
racist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, disab-
list, or in some other way targeted at minority groups in ways that
supposedly violate ideals of respect, solidarity, tolerance, and so
forth. By contrast, many political and religious conservatives repu-
diate such uses of the term, and view them simply as crude attempts
to close down meaningful debate on what they believe are the evils
of open-border policies, the failures of multiculturalism as a social
experiment, the lamentable decline of traditional moral values,
political correctness gone made, and so on. Yet even people who are

9 Preliminary figures obtained from Professor Sharon Millar, University of Southern Denmark, a
member of the European Union funded research network C.O.N.T.A.C.T.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 425



deeply critical of what they see as an inordinate and dangerous
obsession with identity-based speech will use the term ‘so-called hate
speech’, thereby implicitly acknowledging that the term ‘hate
speech’ has an ordinary meaning – albeit they disapprove of this
term given its ordinary meaning. More importantly, some political
and religious conservatives have now consciously adopted terms like
‘hate speech’, ‘hate mail’, and ‘hate’ to describe speech on the part of
liberal progressives and civil rights activists – speech which, in the
eyes of those political or religious conservatives, picks them out and
attacks them on the basis of their conservative beliefs.10

In addition to this, the ordinary concept hate speech seems to be
playing an increasing role in popular culture. Consider the South Park
episode from 2005 in which Cartman’s school presentation about
‘ginger kids’ – who it is claimed are suffering from ‘gingervitis’ and
have ‘no souls’ – causes Kyle to object, ‘That’s not a lecture, it’s a
hate speech.’11 Or take the furore surrounding the singer Beyonce’s
halftime performance at Super Bowl 50 in 2016. Some people –
including members of the All Lives Matter social movement – took
to social media to describe the fact that Beyonce’s backing dancers
were dressed like Black Panther members, along with the content of
her recent music videos and public statements in support of the
Black Lives Matter movement, as ‘hate speech’.12 And no doubt
there were defenders of Beyonce’s public stance on the injustices
faced by people of colour in the United States who viewed the
portrayal of Beyonce’s performance and music videos as ‘hate
speech’ as itself hate speech. Or bear in mind what the Harry Potter
author, J. K. Rowling tweeted after it emerged that Donald Trump
won the 2016 presidential election.

We stand together. We stick up for the vulnerable. We challenge bigots. We don’t
let hate speech become normalized. We hold the line.13

10 See, e.g., interviews with, and sermons given by, the United States evangelical Christian pastor
Steven Anderson broadcast as part of the television documentary Preachers of Hate, aired on the BBC
UK, October 11, 2016.

11 South Park, Season 9, Episode 11, aired on Comedy Central US, November 9, 2005.
12 Adam Howard, ‘Beyoncé Super Bowl Performance Inspires Protest, Counter-protest’, NBC News

Online, February 10, 2016. Available at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/beyonc-super-bowl-
performance-inspires-protest-counter-protest-n515996.

13 J. K. Rowling, @jk_rowling, Twitter, November 8, 2016. Available at https://twitter.com/jk_
rowling/status/796252371739430913.

ALEXANDER BROWN426

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/beyonc-super-bowl-performance-inspires-protest-counter-protest-n515996
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/beyonc-super-bowl-performance-inspires-protest-counter-protest-n515996
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/796252371739430913
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/796252371739430913


There is always a chance, of course, that as society as a whole co-
opts the term ‘hate speech’ and puts it to myriad purposes, the term
itself will be emptied of its original, legal-technocratic meaning to
such an extent that it becomes merely an empty vessel; a generic
term of disapproval that has the same semantic content as, ‘I really
don’t like what you said’. But even if we are on the path toward
emptying the term ‘hate speech’ of substantive meaning, I do not
think we are there yet. The point is that the term ‘hate speech’ is
used because it is useful, and it will remain useful so long as it can be
used to do more than merely signal disapproval. If all it did were
signal disapproval it would soon fall out of fashion or be replaced by
newer, cooler bits of language that did the same thing but in more
interesting ways.

My hunch is that many ordinary people have been willing to use
the term ‘hate speech’ (and its non-English equivalents) for much the
same reason that legal scholars coined the term in the first place,
namely, that it provides a rough but nevertheless serviceable term to
describe phenomena that have been the subject of legal sanctions, of
one kind or another, since the Roman laws on group defamation14

but that, in all likelihood, have also been present throughout human
history beginning with the earliest multiethnic societies of the an-
cient world,15 that is, the expressive dimensions of identity-based
envy, hostility, conflict, mistrust and oppression. It is also worth
remembering at this point that the term ‘hate speech’ is only the
latest in a succession of terms that historically have been used to
refer to forms of speech that attack members of groups or classes
people identified by certain protected characteristics, including, for
instance, ‘race hate’, ‘group libel’ and ‘hate propaganda’.16 So for
some time societies have found good use for this family of terms. But
what is immediately noticeable, I think, about the term ‘hate speech’
is its generality, the way it can be used to meaningfully talk about far
more protected characteristics and far more varieties of speech than
any of its predecessors. Thus it seems to me that it makes a material
difference that people use the term ‘hate speech’ rather than these

14 See, e.g., David Riesman, ‘Democracy and Defamation: Control of Group Libel’, Columbia Law
Review 42 (1942): 727–780, p. 728.

15 See, e.g., Lionel Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt, Revised and Expanded Edition (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 58–59.

16 See Samuel Walker, Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 8.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 427



older terms, and it makes a difference because the term is referring
to a much broader and more capacious concept; and this is not
necessarily a bad thing.

Judith Butler once wrote, ‘the category [hate speech] cannot exist
without the state’s ratification’.17 As a claim about the legal concept
hate speech this is trivially true. But there is surely an ordinary con-
cept hate speech whose existence is not dependent on the state’s
ratification. Butler does not explain in unambiguous detail what she
means by ‘ratification’, but suppose it means that when the state
takes on the role of deciding what may or may not be permissibly
said, it in some sense produces legal categories, such as the legal
category hate speech. (This means that even a state which assumes
the aforementioned role but decides not to ban hate speech never-
theless creates the category hate speech, which goes into the per-
missible or protected speech column.18) This point about the
dependence of the category on the state’s ratification is much harder
to sustain in the case of the ordinary concept hate speech, however.
Whether or not the state takes on the role of line-drawing in relation
to acceptable and unacceptable speech, there may well remain an
ordinary concept hate speech. I do not mean to say that the state’s
decision in this regard has no impact on the content of the ordinary
concept hate speech. The ordinary concept is constituted by how
ordinary people use the term ‘hate speech’ and this is likely to be
influenced by how legal professionals and scholars of law use the
term ‘hate speech’ and vice versa. So if the state decided to refrain
from line-drawing, the ordinary concept hate speech might not exist in
exactly the same form. But this concept would persist, I think, pre-
cisely because it reflects ordinary people’s sense of what is accept-
able and unacceptable speech in relation to groups or classes of
persons identified by protected characteristics, based on ordinary
people’s moral values and principles. Now it is also true that the
ordinary concept hate speech probably includes the idea that hate

17 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 77.
18 I am not sure how Butler thinks that the state could avoid producing the category hate speech

given that the state does not operate in a vacuum and once groups come forward to request protection
against hate speech, the state will make a determination about whether or not to meet the request, and
either way it will make some sort of category hate speech, either as regulatable speech or protected
speech. Suppose public order law was radically reformed in England and Wales, with all the offences
that the legislators and legal scholars interpret as ‘hate speech’ offences being repealed, thus going the
same way as the blasphemy offence in England and Wales. In that case it would still be producing a
category hate speech, only this time as speech that is not to be treated as a public order offence.

ALEXANDER BROWN428



speech is regulatable speech (in the sense that there is a pro tanto reason
to regulate it). But at least as regards to the ordinary concept this
feature of the concept does not depend on the state’s ratification.
Ordinary users of the term ‘hate speech’ could think that hate speech
is regulatable speech even if the state itself decided to withdraw from
line-drawing in relation to acceptable and unacceptable speech and/
or there was no immediate prospect of hate speech actually being
regulated.

Interestingly, there is precedent for drawing a distinction between
the legal concept and the ordinary concept hate speech within normal
legal practice itself. It is customary for judges to mark the distinction
between the legal meaning of key words in statutes and the ordinary
meaning of those words (e.g., the word ‘insulting’ discussed in
Brutus v. Cozens19), whether it is to argue that the legal meaning need
not depend on the ordinary meaning or to insist instead that other
things remaining equal the legal meaning should be interpreted
primarily according to the ordinary meaning (known as the ordinary
meaning principle or plain meaning rule).20 I wish to invoke some-
thing like this ubiquitous distinction within legal interpretation here;
albeit, perhaps unordinarily, I am interested in a term (‘hate speech’)
whose ordinary meaning has arguably developed in the light of, and
certainly after, the birth of the legal meaning.

How does one get at the ordinary meaning? Justice Scalia once
wrote about the idea of ordinary meaning in legal interpretation that
‘the acid test of whether a word can reasonably bear a particular
meaning is whether you could use the word in that sense at a
cocktail party without having people look at you funny.’21 I suspect
that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the only cocktail parties in
which the term ‘hate speech’ could have been used without people
being looked at funny would have been those attended by legal
scholars. But things are different now, the term ‘hate speech’ has
entered into the fields of politics, popular culture, the arts, sport,
media, education, science, and many more besides. So the cocktail
party test must involve a party with the most diverse set of guests
imaginable. Of course, the guests will also include legislators and

19 [1973] AC 854.
20 See Brian G. Slocum, Ordinary Meaning A Theory of the Most Fundamental Principle of Legal Inter-

pretation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
21 Johnson v. United States 529 U.S. 694 (2000), Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 429



legal professionals, since they are not merely influenced by ordinary
meanings but will inevitably influence ordinary meanings by
adopting and promulgating certain legal meanings. At any rate, the
basic idea of the cocktail party is that ordinary meaning has some-
thing to do with linguistic intuitions, part of the stock-in-trade of
analytical philosophers. I shall say more about this and other aspects
of my methodology in Section II.

In saying that more needs to be done to excavate the ordinary
concept hate speech – so as to augment and, if necessary, offset the
work that has already been done on the legal concept hate speech – I
am advocating a new research agenda, to be pursued from a variety
of academic disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sci-
ences. All too frequently when academics from other disciplines have
turned their attention to the topic they have followed legal scholars
in focusing on the legal concept hate speech. For example, as I have
already mentioned, over the past twenty-five years or so a number of
generalist philosophers have attributed meanings to the term ‘hate
speech’,22 but more often than not these philosophers have not
strayed very far from that which is prohibited by campus hate speech
codes, certain types of municipal ordinances, and incitement to
hatred laws.

What is particularly striking to me about the philosophical liter-
ature is the extent to which it echoes the work of legal scholars. I
mention five notable overlaps. First, when legal scholars working in
the field of critical race theory identified hate speech with various
ways of subordinating, wounding, humiliating, or degrading histor-
ically oppressed or victimised racial groups,23 arguably they laid the
groundwork for those philosophers who would later utilise speech
act theory to understand hate speech,24 albeit these critical race
theorists and these philosophers of language were themselves
influenced by the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea

22 See note 7 above.
23 See, e.g., Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech’, pp. 2358, 2363; Charles Lawrence III,

‘Cross Burning and the Sound of Silence: Anti-Subordination Theory and the First Amendment’,
Villanova Law Review 37 (1992): 787–804, p. 792; Lawrence et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

24 See, e.g., Altman, ‘Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech’, pp. 309–310; Langton, ‘Beyond Belief’,
pp. 74–77; Langton et al., ‘Language and Race’, pp. 757–760; Ishani Maitra, ‘Subordinating Speech’, in I.
Maitra and M. McGowan (eds.) Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), pp. 96–118; Mary Kate McGowan, ‘On ‘Whites Only’ Signs and Racist Hate
Speech: Verbal Acts of Racial Discrimination’, in I. Maitra and M. McGowan (eds.) Speech and Harm:
Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 122; Brown, Hate Speech Law,
pp. 75–86.

ALEXANDER BROWN430



Dworkin, who originally identified pornography as subordinating
speech in the context of proposing anti-pornography laws.25 Second,
the legal scholar Kent Greenawalt analyses the term ‘hate speech’ by
appealing to the legal doctrines of fighting words, hostile environ-
ment harassment, and group libel,26 and much the same character-
isation can be found in the work of the philosophers Susan Brison
and Timothy C. Shiell.27 Third, several legal scholars have drawn
distinctions between immediate, instant, face-to-face, targeted, and
individualised hate speech, on the one hand, and indirect, diffuse,
generalised, and impersonal hate speech, on the other hand,28 and
these same distinctions are replicated by the philosopher Caleb
Yong.29 Fourth, numerous legal scholars have implied that emotions,
feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature
of hate speech and what distinguishes such speech from other kinds
of speech and that the meaning of the term ‘hate speech’ is com-
positional, that is, a function of the literal meanings of the terms
‘hate’ and ‘speech’,30 and similar assumptions can be found in the
work of some philosophers, notably Norman Fischer and Bhikhu
Parekh.31 Finally, scholars of hate speech law often proceed on the
assumption that the term ‘hate speech’ is univocal and definable (it

25 See, e.g., Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (eds.) In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

26 Kent Greenawalt, Fighting Words: Individuals, Communities and Liberties of Speech (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), chs. 4 and 5.

27 Brison, ‘The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech’, p. 314; Timothy C. Shiell, Campus Hate Speech on
Trial, 2nd Edn (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2009), p. 162.

28 See, e.g., Alan E. Brownstein, ‘Hate Speech and Harassment: The Constitutionality of Campus
Codes that Prohibit Racial Insults’, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 3 (1994): 179–217, p. 179;
Greenawalt, Fighting Words, p. 63; Nicholas Wolfson, Hate Speech, Sex Speech, Free Speech (Westport, CT:
Praeger Publishers, 1997), p. 60; Steven H. Shiffrin, Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 76–77; Thomas Peard, ‘Regulating Racist Speech
on Campus’, in C. Sistare (ed.) Civility and Its Discontents: Civic Virtue, Toleration, and Cultural Frag-
mentation (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), p. 142; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic,
‘Four Observations About Hate Speech’, Wake Forest Law Review 44 (2009): 353–370, pp. 362–363;
Heinze, Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship, p. 282.

29 Yong, ‘Does Freedom of Speech Include Hate Speech?’, pp. 394–396.
30 See, e.g., Glasser, ‘Introduction’, p. 1; Garner, Black’s Law Dictionary, pp. 1407–1408; Nadine

Strossen, ‘Incitement to Hatred: Should There Be a Limit?’, Southern Illinois University Law Journal 25
(2001): 243–279, p. 244; Corlett and Francescotti, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Hate Speech’, p. 1083;
Post, ‘Hate Speech’, pp. 123–125; Weinstein and Hare, ‘General Introduction’, p. 4; Iginio Gagliardone
et al., Mapping and Analysing Hate Speech Online: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethiopia (Oxford:
University of Oxford Programme in Comparative Media and Law Policy, 2014), p. 9.

31 Fischer, ‘First Amendment Morality Versus Civility Morality’, pp. 161–162; Parekh, ‘Hate Speech’,
p. 214.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 431



has a single meaning, even if complex or disjunctive, and this
meaning can be defined),32 and some philosophers seem to labour
under the same assumption.33 Associated with this particular
assumption is a tendency to be oblivious to important differences
between the writer’s proffered definition and those of other scholars,
and even to differences between the writer’s own definitions from
earlier to later work, as though the differences are inconsequential or
that they along with all other writers are essentially defining the
term in the same way only using slightly different language (lan-
guage that can be used interchangeably).

I find some of these overlaps and shared understandings among
generalist philosophers and legal scholars entirely unproblematic.
The first three overlaps, I think, are extremely plausible and perhaps
illuminate something of the subtle interplay and reciprocal rela-
tionship between the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech.
Nevertheless, in this article I do also want to challenge some of this
received wisdom: specifically, the putative wisdom that emotions,
feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature
of hate speech, what I call the myth of hate; and the conventional idea
that the term ‘hate speech’ is univocal or has a single meaning, call
this the myth of compositionality. Now I do not claim, nor should we
believe anyone who did try to claim, that challenging this received
wisdom is likely to be decisive in settling disputes about whether
hate speech laws are warranted. These disputes are far too deep-
rooted in our understanding of a range of values and principles to be
easily resolved. But challenging this received wisdom could, I think,
at least remove some of the obstacles to progress, such as if, say, one
side of the debate is doing more reasoning than the other on the
strength of false impressions about what hate speech is. I shall try to
draw out these implications at the end of ‘Family Resemblances’.

Before I begin, however, let me be clear that by focusing on
concepts and words I do not mean to overlook the fact that what is
at stake here are interpersonal phenomena that involve the inter-
action of actual human beings and often very real harms. On the

32 See, e.g., Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance, p. 153; Cohen-Almagor, ‘Holocaust Denial is a
Form of Hate Speech’, p. 35; Cohen-Almagor, ‘Fighting Hate and Bigotry on the Internet’, pp. 1–2.

33 See, e.g., Altman, ‘Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech’, pp. 309–310; Brison, ‘The Autonomy
Defense of Free Speech’, p. 313; Brison, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 2332; Brink, ‘Millian Principles, Freedom of
Expression, and Hate Speech’, p. 119.

ALEXANDER BROWN432



contrary, the point of focusing on concepts and terms is to gain
access to or illuminate our understanding of the phenomena in
question. In the words of Austin, ‘[w]hen we examine what we
should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we
are looking again not merely at words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they
may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we
are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception
of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.’34

The remainder of the first part of this article is structured as follows.
Section II outlines existing attempts to characterise the legal concept
hate speech and highlights some of the inconsistencies and contradic-
tions in this existing body of characterisations. Section III examines the
ordinary concept hate speech and assumes for the sake of argument that
it is a compositional concept: that the meaning of the whole concept is
a function of the meanings of the parts that make up the whole.
Focusing on the assumption that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred are one basic building block of the ordinary concept hate
speech, I proceed to argue that despite the existence of several possible
connections between speech and hate or hatred none appear to cap-
ture an essential feature or defining quality of hate speech. This in turn
undermines the compositionality assumption. Section IV looks at
two, more nuanced versions of the idea that the term ‘hate speech’ has
compositional semantics: the first, that it is a semi- or quasi-compo-
sitional term akin to ‘zebra crossing’ or ‘pillow talk’; the second that it
is part of a set of core-dependent homonyms. Although these ap-
proaches have some plausibility, I argue that they only serve to
underline the speciousness of the myth of hate.

II. THE LEGAL CONCEPT(S) HATE SPEECH

In this section, I shall use the method of conceptual jurisprudence to
analyse the legal concept(s) hate speech. This method involves
explicating concepts that emerge from given bodies of law and legal
practices. This includes looking at the way the term ‘hate speech’ has
been defined in different human rights instruments, statutes, and
legal cases, both positively (‘hate speech is…’) and negatively (‘hate
speech is not…’). But it also includes an attempt to reconstruct the

34 J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57
(1956–7): 1–30, p. 8.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 433



legal concept(s) hate speech from the occurrences and meanings of
various linked or associated concept-terms that appear in the rele-
vant bodies of law and legal practices – terms such as ‘group
defamation’, ‘incitement to hatred’, ‘the circulation of ideas based on
inferiority’, ‘racist propaganda’, ‘speech based on xenophobia,
homophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism’, ‘group vilification’,
‘violation of dignity’, ‘discriminatory harassment’, ‘racist fighting
words’, ‘Holocaust denial’, and so on. Part of the aim of conceptual
jurisprudence is to capture the fundamental quality of the legal
concept under investigation as well as something of its relationship
to other legal concepts, principles and doctrines in the relevant
bodies of law and legal practices.

I start by observing that the original uses of the then neologism
‘hate speech’ belonged to legal academics and journalists writing in
academic journals and books and mainstream newspapers and ma-
gazines. They tended to use the term ‘hate speech’ for the purposes
of classifying and make generalisations about a particular group of
laws. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary entry for the term
‘hate speech’ offers only three illustrations of uses.35 The first comes
from a Newsweek article from 1988 in which Tamar Jacoby uses the
term ‘hate speech’ in discussing the merits of university regulations
designed to curb discriminatory harassment on university campuses
(campus speech codes).36 The second is from Samuel Walker’s 1994
book Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy in which the
historian contrasts the constitutional protection of ‘offensive forms
of expression’ in the United States with the fact that ‘[a]lmost every
[other] country prohibits hate speech directed at racial, religious, or
ethnic groups’.37 The third is from an article appearing in Business
Day, a national daily newspaper in South Africa, from 2001 outlining
aspects of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Dis-
crimination Act 2000 which, amongst other things, prohibits hate
speech.38

Yet the term ‘hate speech’ is certainly not the preserve of legal
scholars. It is now being utilised in the decisions of some interna-

35 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Hate Speech’, July 2002. Available at www.oed.com.
36 Tamar Jacoby, ‘Time to Outlaw Racial Slurs? New Questions About Protecting Hateful Speech’,

Newsweek, June 6, 1988.
37 Walker, Hate Speech, p. 1.
38 Unkown, Business Day, January 28, 2001, p. 13.

ALEXANDER BROWN434

http://www.oed.com


tional human rights courts and in some domestic legislation. In Surek
v. Turkey39 and Gündüz v. Turkey,40 for example, the European Court
of Human Rights (ECtHR) directly and explicitly employed a defi-
nition of the term ‘hate speech’ that had been given by the Com-
mittee of Ministers of the Council of Europe back in 1997: ‘the term
‘hate speech’ shall be understood as covering all forms of expression
which spread, incite, promote or justify racial hatred, xenophobia,
antisemitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance […]’.41 In
both cases the Court also reiterated that to count as hate speech it is
not sufficient that the words merely offend, shock or disturb; they
must be capable of inciting hatred or violence. Or, to give one
example from domestic law, in South Africa s. 10 of the Promotion
of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 2000 out-
lines a set of offences under the heading ‘Prohibition of Hate
Speech’, including most notably s. 10(1)(c), ‘[…] no person may
publish, propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or
more of the prohibited grounds, against any person, that could
reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to: (a) be
hurtful; (b) be harmful or to incite harm; (c) promote or propagate
hatred.’ Likewise, s. 16(2) of the South African Bill of Rights specifies
that the right to freedom of expression does not extend to ‘advocacy
of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that
constitutes incitement to cause harm’.

A variant of the current approach also assumes that hate speech is
primarily a legal concept but does not limit the materials of analysis
to explicit attempts to clarify the concept within international and
domestic law. In other words, it seeks to analyse the legal concept(s)
hate speech through bodies of law that may not contain the exact
term ‘hate speech’. It does so by picking out certain similarities or
common traits that could be interpreted as elements of the legal
concept hate speech. How on this approach do we know which laws
and legal cases are the correct ones to look at? The ECtHR’s Press
Unit points in one useful direction. Its 2016 ‘Factsheet – Hate Speech’
does not attempt to lay down a universally accepted definition of the

39 No. 26682/95, Strasbourg, July 8, 1999. At para. 62, and Partly Dissenting Opinion of Judge Palm.
40 No. 35071/97, Strasbourg, June 14, 2004. At paras. 21–22, 40–1, 44, 48, 51, and Dissenting Opinion

of Judge Türmen.
41 Recommendation No. R (97) 20, October 30, 1997, Appendix. Available at https://rm.coe.int/

CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=0900001680505d5b.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 435

https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=0900001680505d5b
https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=0900001680505d5b


term ‘hate speech’ but instead points to various conventions and a
host of legal cases which in its view pertain to hate speech.42

Following this lead, progress could be made by searching laws
and legal cases for words that are indicative of, contiguous with,
or being used as proxies for the term ‘hate speech’ – for example,
‘hate’, ‘hatred’, ‘contempt’, ‘hostility’, ‘enmity’, ‘inferiority’, ‘racist
propaganda’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘anti-Semitism’, ‘aggressive national-
ism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘group
defamation’, ‘group vilification’, ‘insult’, ‘negative stereotyping’,
‘stigmatisation’, ‘humiliation’, ‘degradation’, ‘violation of dignity’,
‘discriminatory harassment’, ‘intolerance’. I shall not attempt here
to provide a complete inventory of all clusters of laws that em-
ploy or exhibit this terminology and that could be used as source
material for an interpretation of the legal concept(s) hate speech.43

It is enough for my present purposes to indicate what this sort of
approach looks like, and to outline some of the results it has
yielded.

A small army of legal scholars and lexicographers have set forth
characterisations of hate speech using the aforementioned approach.
These characterisations exhibit numerous points of consensus but
are also marked by significant inconsistencies and contradictions.
First, consider how they deal with the connection between hate
speech and hate or hatred. Some characterisations take hate speech
literally to mean speech that expresses or communicates emotions,
feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred,44 others imply that the motive
of hatred is almost all there is to hate speech,45 and still others
identify hate speech as that which promotes, incites, or stirs up
hatred.46

Second, there is the issue of identifying which groups are covered
by the legal concept hate speech. While most characterisations pro-

42 ECtHR Press Unit, Factsheet - Hate Speech, June, 2016. Available at www.echr.coe.int/
Documents/FS_Hate_speech_ENG.pdf.

43 Cf. Brown, Hate Speech Law, ch. 2.
44 See, e.g., Garner, Black’s Law Dictionary, pp. 1407–1408; Strossen, ‘Incitement to Hatred’, p. 244;

Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Hate Speech’; Corlett and Francescotti, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Hate
Speech’, p. 1083; Post, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 123; Weinstein and Hare, ‘General Introduction’, p. 4;
USLegal.com, ‘Hate speech’, June 2010. Available at http://definitions.uslegal.com/h/hate-speech/.

45 See, e.g., Glasser, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
46 See, e.g., Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance, p. 11; Cohen-Almagor, ‘Holocaust Denial is a

Form of Hate Speech’, p. 35; Weston-Scheuber, ‘Gender and the Prohibition of Hate Speech’, pp. 139–
140.

ALEXANDER BROWN436

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http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Hate_speech_ENG.pdf
http://definitions.uslegal.com/h/hate-speech/


vide a list of group-identifying characteristics, including but not
limited to race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender or gender
identity, sexual orientation, disability,47 some specify not a list of
characteristics but a single core feature – for example, that the speech
in question is about or against historically oppressed or victimised
groups.48 Some make no mention of the kinds of groups that are
germane to the legal concept hate speech,49 which is surprising given
that almost without exception all actual hate speech laws attempt to
specify which groups fall within the scope of the law.

Third, there is the question of the nature of the speech. Whereas
some characterisations depict hate speech as a special case of
insulting speech (i.e., insulting about or insulting to members of
certain groups)50 or offensive speech (i.e., offensive about or offen-
sive to members of certain groups),51 other characterisations describe
hate speech as ‘hostile verbal abuse’,52 ‘malicious speech’,53 ‘speech
that denigrates people’,54 ‘speech that puts people down’,55 or ‘an-
tisocial oratory’.56 Moreover, only some characterisations stress that
hate speech, properly called, typically causes or has a substantial
likelihood of causing harm of one kind or another.57

Fourth, most characterisations make it clear that hate speech is
not simply speech but is also performative or can involve speech acts
of various types. Yet even here there are important differences. Some
describe hate speech in such broad terms as to mean that a large

47 See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, ‘Hate Speech’ and Freedom of Expression: A Human Rights Watch
Policy Paper (New York, NY: Fund for Free Expression, 1992), p. 1; Tsesis, Destructive Messages, p. 211, n.
1; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Understanding Words That Wound (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2004), p. 11; Cohen-Almagor, ‘Fighting Hate and Bigotry on the Internet’, pp. 1–2; Bertoni and Rivera,
‘The American Convention on Human Rights’, p. 499.

48 See, e.g., Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech’, p. 2357; Walker, Hate Speech, pp. 8–9;
Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance, p. 153.

49 See, e.g., Kermit L. Hall, ‘Hate Speech’, in K. L. Hall (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Supreme
Court of the United States, 2nd Edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 426.

50 See, e.g., Alexander, ‘Banning Hate’, p. 71; Larry Alexander, ‘Hate Speech’, in R. Newman (ed.)
The Constitution and Its Amendments, Vol. 3 (New York, NY: Macmillan Reference, 1998), p. 14.

51 See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, ‘Hate Speech’ and Freedom of Expression, p. 1, n. 1; Sullivan and
Gunther, Constitutional Law, p. 1131; Ivan Hare, ‘Hate speech’, in P. Cane and J. Conaghan (eds.) The
New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 520; Post, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 12.

52 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Hate Speech’.
53 Cohen-Almagor, ‘Fighting Hate and Bigotry on the Internet’, p. 1.
54 Benesch, Dangerous Speech, p. 1.
55 Anthony Cortese, Opposing Hate Speech (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), p. 1.
56 Tsesis, Destructive Messages, p. 211, n. 1.
57 See, e.g., Richard Delgado, ‘Toward a Legal Realist View of the First Amendment’, Harvard Law

Review 113 (2000): 778–802, pp. 787–788; Tsesis, Destructive Messages, p. 211, n. 1; Delgado and Stefancic,
Understanding Words That Wound, ch. 1.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 437



number of potential speech acts might fall under the umbrella of this
category – for instance, ‘speech attacks’,58 ‘verbal aggression’.59

Others define hate speech more narrowly in terms of specific or
particular speech acts or disjunctive sets of speech acts – for example,
offending or advocating hatred,60 insulting or defaming,61 disparag-
ing,62 degrading,63 ambushing, terrorising, wounding, humiliating or
degrading,64 harming or inciting discrimination or violence,65 or
inciting persecution.66

As I have said, the main aim of this article is to say something on
behalf of a broader approach that goes beyond just the legal concept
hate speech. In order to motivate this, let me briefly note some
limitations of the foregoing approach and its results. Aside from the
internal inconsistencies and contradictions in the above characteri-
sations, I find them at the same time too narrow (under-inclusive)
and too broad (over-inclusive). Because many of the foregoing
characterisations are anchored in a particular body of law and legal
doctrine, such as an extreme free speech doctrine embraced by many
American legal scholars and various United States Supreme Court
Justices, or a slightly less extreme free speech doctrine embraced by
legislatures and courts in some European countries who are to some
extent influenced by these ways of thinking, they are also tethered to
the narrow purposes and perspectives of these bodies of law and
legal doctrines. An acute awareness of First Amendment protections
of freedom of expression and a general presumption against speech
prohibitions hangs like a shadow over these characterisations. Con-
sequently, some of the characterisations tend toward highly restric-
tive understandings of hate speech. The rationale behind narrowing
the boundaries of the concept is this: if the legal concept hate speech is

58 See, e.g., Smolla, Free Speech in an Open Society, p. 152; Gould, Speak No Evil, p. 14. Cf. Anthony
Lewis, Freedom for the Thought that We Hate (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007), p. 157.

59 Terry A. Kinney, ‘Hate Speech and Ethnophaulisms’, The International Encyclopedia of Communi-
cation (Blackwell Reference Online, 2008). Available at http://www.blackwellreference.com/
subscriber/uid=/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g978140513199513_ss4-1.

60 Coliver, ‘Hate Speech Laws: Do They Work?’, p. 363.
61 Sumner, ‘Hate Crimes, Literature and Speech’, p. 142; Fraleigh and Tuman, Freedom of Expression

in the Marketplace of Ideas, p. 139.
62 Nockleby, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 1277.
63 Kevin W. Saunders, Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us About Hate Speech (New

York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), p. 132.
64 Lawrence et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
65 Schauer, ‘Uncoupling Free Speech’, p. 1349.
66 Tsesis, Destructive Messages, p. 211, n. 1.

ALEXANDER BROWN438

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to be useful, it should only extend to forms of speech or expression
that could conceivably be regulated under a constitutional regime
committed to freedom of expression. But this leads to an unneces-
sarily restrictive account of the ordinary concept hate speech, in my
view. For example, some writers appear to suggest that something is
hate speech if and only if it is incitement to hatred.67 Others have
even toyed with the idea of restricting what may count as hate
speech to speech that is addressed to a captive audience.68 These
suggestions may be understandable given a particular vision of the
function of the legal concept hate speech, but they are nevertheless
both inaccurate and unhelpful as applied to the ordinary concept.

The above characterisations are also too broad (over-inclusive) in
the way they handle the connection between hate speech and hate or
hatred. They embrace the myth of hate: the myth that in order for
speech to qualify as hate speech, and to be appropriately called ‘hate
speech’ by competent users of the term, the speech must be con-
nected in some relevant way with emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred, meaning intense or extreme dislike, aversion,
loathing, antipathy, enmity or hostility toward or against something
or someone, even an impulse to banish or obliterate that thing or
person.69 According to Parekh, for example, the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate
speech’ ‘implies hostility, rejection, a wish to harm or destroy, a
desire to get the target group out of one’s way, a silent or vocal and a
passive or active declaration of war against it’.70 And this account of
the hate in hate speech certainly echoes seminal accounts of simple
hatred in the philosophy of the emotions.71 Yet those who embrace
the myth of hate do not allow conceptual space for the possibility
that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are merely
contingently associated with, and non-essential to, hate speech as

67 See, e.g., Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance, p. 11; Cohen-Almagor, ‘Holocaust Denial is a
Form of Hate Speech’, p. 35; Waldron, ‘Dignity and Defamation’, p. 1601, n. 14.

68 See, e.g., Brink, ‘Millian Principles, Freedom of Expression, and Hate Speech’, p. 135.
69 See, e.g., Glasser, ‘Introduction’, p. 1; Garner, Black’s Law Dictionary, pp. 1407–1408; Strossen,

‘Incitement to Hatred’, p. 244; Corlett and Francescotti, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Hate Speech’, p.
1083; Fischer, ‘First Amendment Morality Versus Civility Morality’, pp. 161–162; Parekh, ‘Hate Speech’,
p. 214; Post, ‘Hate Speech’, pp. 123–125; Weinstein and Hare, ‘General Introduction’, p. 4; Gagliardone
et al., Mapping and Analysing Hate Speech Online, p. 9.

70 Parekh, ‘Hate Speech’, p. 214.
71 See, e.g., Jean Hampton, ‘Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred’, in J. Murphy and J. G. Hampton

(eds.) Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 60–61.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 439



properly understood. The truth is, however, that even though a
good deal of hate speech is connected with emotions, feelings, or
attitudes of hate or hatred, this is neither inevitable nor necessarily
true of all instances of hate speech. For example, some instances of
hate speech have nothing to do with hate or hatred, strictly speaking,
but everything to do with emotions, feelings, or attitudes of con-
tempt, disdain, scorn, condescension, or dismissiveness, which are
matters of regarding something or someone as unworthy of one’s
consideration or respect and of having an impulse or reason there-
fore to withdraw from, avoid or shun that thing or person.72 In the
cases I have in mind the hate speaker does not hate the objects of his
speech precisely because he holds them in contempt and, therefore,
in his mind, they are beneath a level of consideration or respect that
would be required to feel something or have regard for them, be that
hate or anything else.73 At least some speech, then, is plausibly
counted as hate speech because it expresses or conveys the speaker’s
feelings or emotions or attitudes of contempt for the objects of the
speech as distinct from feelings or emotions or attitudes of hate or
hatred.74

Note, I do not mean to suggest that hate speech is always con-
nected with hate or contempt or both, and by ‘both’ I mean
something like despisement (hating people because one has con-
tempt for them). If that were true, then we could simply treat the
word ‘hate’ in ‘hate speech’ as referring to hate or contempt or
despisement as a disjunctive mental quality that we attribute to the
motivations of all hate speakers, and/or something that all hate
speech conveys or symbolises, and/or something that all hate speech
is designed to produce in the audience (people the hate speaker is
seeking to bring on side).75 But, in fact, hate speech can be associated

72 See, e.g., Michelle Mason, ‘Contempt as a Moral Attitude’, Ethics 113 (2003): 234–272; Kate
Abramson, ‘A Sentimentalist’s Defense of Contempt, Shame, and Disdain’, in P. Goldie (ed.) The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Macalester Bell, Hard Feelings:
The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

73 I do not claim, however, that hatred and contempt are in themselves mutually exclusive. Cf.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p.
170; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Epigrams and Interludes’, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 92.

74 See also Robert Simpson, ‘Dignity, Harm, and Hate Speech’, Law and Philosophy 32: 701–728, pp.
701, n. 2, 702; Robin Jeshion, ‘Slurs, Dehumanization, and the Expression of Contempt’, in D. Sosa (ed.)
Bad Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

75 See, e.g., Raphael Cohen-Almagor, ‘Hate and Racist Speech in the United States - A Critique’,
Philosophy and Public Issues 6 (2016): 77–123, pp. 103–104.

ALEXANDER BROWN440



with a wide range of different speaker motivations not exhausted by,
and potentially not even including, hate or contempt or despisement,
everything from fear or envy to the need to fit in or a simple desire
for attention from others. It can also express or articulate a wide
range of different speaker feelings or emotions or attitudes other
than hate or contempt or despisement, such as anxiety, disgust or even a
sense of alienation. And it can be intended to cause or bring about a
wide range of different emotional affects or cognitive states in the
audience even in the absence of hate or contempt or despisement,
including, for instance, shock, excitement, pleasure, or even a sense
of camaraderie.

By the same token, however, I am not suggesting that the term
‘hate speech’ is a misnomer in the strict or strong sense. Some hate
speech clearly is associated with hate or hatred. Nevertheless, what I
am saying is that the term ‘hate speech’ is highly misleading if the
implication is that hate speech is always associated with hate or
hatred, and is still somewhat misleading even if the suggestion is that
hate speech is normally or typically or in-all-but-outlier-cases asso-
ciated with hate or hatred.

Now I do think it would be inaccurate, and therefore unfair, to
claim that all writers on hate speech fall into the trap of blindly
accepting the myth of hate. It seems to me that Catharine
MacKinnon, Timothy C. Shiell, Jeremy Waldron, and Martha C.
Nussbaum come much closer to avoiding the myth of hate than
most writers.76 Yet it also strikes me that philosophers should do
more than merely beware the myth of hate, they should try to
directly challenge it and if possible explode it; and that is precisely
what I shall attempt in the next two sections.

III. THE ORDINARY CONCEPT HATE SPEECH
AS A COMPOSITIONAL CONCEPT?

Let us begin with the idea that the ordinary concept hate speech
might be a complex or compositional concept. To say that a concept

76 See Catharine MacKinnon, ‘Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination’, Boston University
Law Review 71 (1991): 793–808, p. 808; Catharine MacKinnon, ‘Forward’, in I. Maitra and M. McGowan
(eds.) Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. xvi–
xvii; Shiell, Campus Hate Speech on Trial, pp. 161–162; Waldron, ‘Dignity and Defamation’, pp. 1600–
1601; and Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Haterz Gonna Hate? There Are Limits to What the Law Can do to
Police Cyberabuse’, The Nation, November 5, 2014.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 441



is complex or compositional is to say that it is made from or com-
posed of other, simpler concepts. These simpler concepts are more
basic or more ordinary concepts in the sense that they include larger
classes of things. Complex or compositional concepts are said to be
amenable to a method of decompositional conceptual analysis: a process
of breaking down the complex concept into its component parts.
The standard example is the concept bachelor which is said to be
made from or composed out of three more basic or more general
concepts: (1) adult human, (2) unmarried, and (3) male. Decomposi-
tional conceptual analysis is often used to produce precise defini-
tions, the specification of a set of necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions for the application of concepts or for the appropriate use
of terms used to refer to concepts. That something falls under each
of the more basic or more general concepts that compose the
compositional concept is necessary and jointly sufficient for that
thing to fall under the compositional concept. Thus, it might be said
that something falls under the concept bachelor only if (1) it is an
adult human, (2) it is unmarried, and (3) it is male. And that if
something is (1) an adult human, (2) unmarried, and (3) male, then it
is a bachelor.

To apply this method to the ordinary concept hate speech is to
attempt to break down this concept into its component or con-
stituent parts, its more basic, simpler concepts and to use these
concepts to produce a precise definition. If the ordinary concept hate
speech is a compositional concept, how are its component parts to be
identified? One way is to focus on the words that make up the term
‘hate speech’. In particular, one could work on the assumption that
this term is not simply a compound noun in its grammatical or
syntactical form77 but also a compound noun in its meaning or
semantic content. In short, one could treat the meaning of the term
‘hate speech’ as being a function of the meanings of its constituent
parts. Following on from this, one might suppose that in order to
divine the meaning of the term ‘hate speech’ one simply understands
the meanings of the two words ‘hate’ and ‘speech’ and links those

77 One interesting grammatical or syntactic feature of compound nouns is that it is possible to stack
two or more nouns together or construct compound nouns recursively. So one can add together
‘fiction’ and ‘science’ to make ‘science fiction’ and then combine ‘writer’ and ‘science fiction’ to make
‘science fiction writer’. Similarly, one can add together ‘speech’ and ‘hate’ to make ‘hate speech’ and
then combine ‘law’ and ‘hate speech’ to make ‘hate speech law’.

ALEXANDER BROWN442



meanings to each other in some appropriate way.78 For example,
one might suppose that the term ‘hate speech’ is a hyponym of the
word ‘speech’. So just as the term ‘olive oil’ denotes a subcategory of
oil, the term ‘hate speech’ denotes a subcategory of speech. What is
more, it might be thought that the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate speech’
functions semantically to tell us something about the essential nature
of the subcategory of speech in question, namely, that it involves or
is intimately connected with emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate
or hatred. Indeed, the fact that the compound noun ‘political speech’
is semantically compositional (it denotes a subcategory of speech
that is political in nature) may lead us to assume that the compound
noun ‘hate speech’ adheres to the same principle.

So far I have been assuming that the ordinary concept hate speech
is composed of the two more basic concepts hate and speech. How-
ever, on further reflection we might think that the concept hate
speech is even more complex than the words ‘hate’ and ‘speech’
imply. Perhaps the concept hate speech is also composed of other
concepts. One possibility is the concept group or class of persons. Most
people would instinctively recognise as hate speech, I think, the
slogan of the nineteenth century nativist, Denis Kearney: ‘To an
American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinaman’.79

Part of the reason we would recognise this as hate speech is that it is
about or against Chinese people. Similarly, few people nowadays
would fail to understand that between the two insults, ‘Fuck you!’
(one white person to another white person in anger) and ‘Fuck you,
nigger!’ (one white person to a black person in anger), the latter is
more likely to have the label ‘hate speech’ attached to it. Of course, a
racial insult, such as this, can be, and often is, targeted at or directly
addressed to only one individual. But where the insult takes the form
of a pejorative reference to the individual’s race, the individual may
be no more than a representative of an entire group or class of
persons in the mind of the hate speaker. If the addressee is inter-
changeable, in that sense, then the hate speech is really about or
against the entire group or class of persons.

78 See, e.g., David Boromisza-Habashi, Speaking Hatefully: Culture, Communication, and Political Action
in Hungary (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013), pp. 35–36; Gagliardone et al.,
Mapping and Analysing Hate Speech Online, p. 9.

79 Cited in Elmer Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1973), p. 65.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 443



Things might not be so straightforward, however. When critical
race theorists started to employ the term ‘hate speech’ they did so in
relation to speech about or against not just any type of group or class
of persons. They classified racist insults like, ‘Fuck you, nigger!’
(a white person to a black person in anger), as hate speech precisely
because of the oppressive social relationships embodied and facili-
tated by this sort of speech.80 Thus, Matsuda classifies as ‘hate
speech’ a case in which a group of white workers place a noose in
the work area of an African-American worker,81 whereas she inter-
prets ‘an angry, hateful poem by a person from a historically sub-
jugated group as a victim’s struggle for self-identity in response to
racism’.82 Following this lead, some writers have analysed the con-
cept hate speech as being partly composed of the concept historically
oppressed or victimised groups or classes of persons.83 According to this
analysis, if, taking into account other tell-tale signs (to be discussed in
‘Family Resemblances’), certain words or symbols are about or
against members of a historically oppressed or victimised group,
then this can lend credence to words or symbols being hate speech.
Then again, more recent usage seems to permit a competent user to
describe as ‘hate speech’ instances in which members of an op-
pressed or victimised group lashes out verbally against members of
an oppressive or victimising group – ‘Fuck you, white devil!’.84 This
newer accepted usage may partly reflect a white backlash against the
original use of the term ‘hate speech’ (to condemn what whites had
to say about other racial or ethnic groups), but it is also likely to
reflect the broader work that society as a whole now expects the
term ‘hate speech’ to do – for example, to identify or flag up forms of
speech that society as whole fears have the potential to be very
socially divisive or destructive of social cohesion. I shall expand on
some of the broader functions of the term ‘hate speech’ in ‘Family
Resemblances’. Therefore, maybe the more basic concept here is
groups or classes of persons identified by protected characteristics.

80 See, e.g., Matsuda, Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech’, p. 2357.
81 Ibid., p. 2327.
82 Ibid., pp. 2361–2362.
83 See, e.g., Cohen-Almagor, The Scope of Tolerance, p. 153; David Boromisza-Habashi, ‘Hate speech’,

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (Boston, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2015),
p. 715.

84 See, e.g., Greenawalt, Fighting Words, p. 164, n. 39.

ALEXANDER BROWN444



But what are protected characteristics? Many writers seem to
define this concept by simply enumerating a list of characteristics,
statuses or identities that they take to be examples, such as race,
ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender or gender identity, sexual
orientation, and disability.85 But this cannot count as an adequate
definition: first, because the lists proffered are not, and are not in-
tended to be, exhaustive, merely illustrative or indicative; second,
because it is rarely explained what feature or essential nature is
shared by all of the characteristics listed. It might be tempting at this
point to define the term ‘protected characteristics’ in a legalistic way,
as characteristics that are legally protected. But this seems to create a
status quo bias in favour of whatever characteristics are protected by
current hate speech laws. It renders problematic statements of the
following form: ‘Hate speech against group x isn’t currently, but
ought to be, banned because x should be a protected characteristic.’
This statement appears meaningful, but if ‘hate speech’ means
speech that picks out protected characteristic, and the statement is
deliberately referring to a characteristic that is not currently pro-
tected, then strictly speaking the statement is meaningless.

An alternative is to define the term ‘protected characteristics’ as
characteristics that ought to be legally protected. But this definition
relies on a deeper account of the real or underlying function or
purpose of hate speech law, that is, a justification of why we should
have hate speech law in the first place. With such an account in hand
we might then be in a position to explain why some things should be
on the list of protected characteristics and why other things should
not. A right-wing politician might choose to express in public that he
sincerely hates communists, for example, but we might think it
inappropriate to label this ‘hate speech’ given the real or underlying
function of hate speech law. Identifying or flagging up speech that
attacks people on grounds of their political or ideological beliefs is
arguably not one of the important jobs or roles that we have hitherto
assigned to or carved out for the legalised concept hate speech.

85 See, e.g., Brison, ‘The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech’, p. 313; Delgado and Stefancic, Un-
derstanding Words That Wound, p. 11. For a discussion of the numerous characteristics that governments
could potentially deem ‘protected’ for the purposes of hate speech law, see Alexander Brown, ‘The
‘Who?’ Question in the Hate Speech Debate: ‘Part 1’: Consistency, Practical, and Formal Approaches’,
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 29 (2016): 275–320; and Alexander Brown, ‘The ‘Who?’
Question in the Hate Speech Debate: Part 2: Functional and Democratic Approaches’, Canadian Journal
of Law & Jurisprudence 30 (2017): 23–55.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 445



So let us assume for the sake of argument that the concept hate
speech is composed of the following three more basic, simpler con-
cepts: (1) speech or other expressive conduct, (2) groups or classes of
persons identified by protected characteristics, and (3) emotions, feelings, or
attitudes of hate or hatred. This permits an analysis of the ordinary
concept hate speech in terms of three necessary conditions for
something being an instance of the concept. Under this analysis,
something is hate speech only if it (1) is speech or expressive con-
duct, (2) concerns any members of groups or classes of persons
identified by protected characteristics, and (3) involves or is inti-
mately connected with emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or
hatred. What is more, this set of necessary conditions itself consti-
tutes a sufficient condition for something counting as hate speech.
Thus, if something qualifies as (1), (2), and (3), then it is hate speech.
Let us also assume for the sake of argument that this analysis can
shed light on the meaning of the compound noun ‘hate speech’,
whether it is understood syntactically as a noun–noun or as an
adjective-noun, compound noun.

In the remainder of this section, I want to focus on the third part
of this conceptualisation: the basic concept emotions, feelings, or atti-
tudes of hate or hatred as a building block of the putatively complex
concept hate speech. As mentioned above, an assumption that is ex-
plicit or implicit in the work of quite a number of writers on hate
speech is that semantically the word ‘hate’ carries its ordinary or
literal meaning: it denotes the presence of emotions, feelings, or
attitudes of hate or hatred.86 The myth of hate certainly takes us
some of the way to understanding condition (3) above, in the sense
that it reminds us of the ordinary or literal meaning of ‘hate’. But it
still leaves unanalysed the precise sense in which speech involves or is
intimately connected with emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or
hatred. In principle, I believe that this involvement or connection
could take at least four possible forms.87 However, I shall try to
show for each form that the connection between hate speech and
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred is contingent.

86 See, e.g., Glasser, ‘Introduction’, p. 1; Garner, Black’s Law Dictionary, pp. 1407–1408; Strossen,
‘Incitement to Hatred’, p. 244; Corlett and Francescotti, ‘Foundations of a Theory of Hate Speech’, p.
1083; Fischer, ‘First Amendment Morality Versus Civility Morality’, pp. 161–162; Parekh, ‘Hate Speech’,
p. 214; Post, ‘Hate Speech’, pp. 123–125; Weinstein and Hare, ‘General Introduction’, p. 4; Gagliardone
et al., Mapping and Analysing Hate Speech Online, p. 9.

87 Boromisza-Habashi proffers three. See his Speaking Hatefully, pp. 35–36.

ALEXANDER BROWN446



A. The Reaction of Hearers

One possible connection between speech and hate concerns the
reaction of hearers. Here the presence of hate speech is signposted
by hatred as a reactive emotion, by the way that hearers, including
not only the objects or targets of hate speech but also its audiences,
feel about hate speech when they hear or learn about it. On this
analysis, something is hate speech only if: (3a) it arouses reflexive
hatred amongst a significant section of society directed toward the
speech and perhaps also the speaker. In other words, the putative
connection between speech and hate consists in the fact that a sig-
nificant section of society hates certain forms of speech that are
about or against groups or classes of persons identified by protected
characteristics.

This connection echoes one possible analysis of the related concept
hateful speech. There are two main senses of the word ‘hateful’. In one
sense, the word ‘hateful’ signals something about how the hearer
regards the speech in question, as speech that is detestable, repugnant
or despicable, so much so that it arouses emotions, feelings, or atti-
tudes of hate or hatred in the hearer toward the speech and perhaps
also the speaker, or deserves to arouse such hatred. In a second sense
the word ‘hateful’ connotes something about the content of the speech
itself, as speech that says something derogatory or deeply insulting
about members of certain groups. I shall return to this second sense in
‘Family Resemblances’. Now sometimes when people call the word
‘nigger’ a ‘hateful expression’, or describe acts of burning crosses
outside the homes of African American families or marching in Jewish
neighbourhoods wearing replica Nazi uniforms and Swastika symbols
as ‘hateful acts’, they have in mind the first sense of ‘hateful’. They
mean that such words or expressive acts are so detestable that they
either do or should arouse emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hatred in
any fair-minded person.88

As a conceptual analysis of the term ‘hate speech’, however, the
current connection has few serious advocates, Nadine Strossen being

88 Some writers use the words ‘hate speech’ and ‘hateful speech’ interchangeably, as though they are
mere synonyms, and, what is more, fail to distinguish between different senses of ‘hateful’. See, e.g.,
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Must We Defend Nazis? Hate Speech, Pornography, and The First
Amendment (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1997), p. 128; Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 102; Ian
Cram, ‘Hate Speech and Disabled People: Some Comparative Constitutional Thoughts’, in A. Lawson
and C. Gooding (eds.) Disability Rights in Europe: From Theory to Practice (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005),
pp. 65–67; Heinze, Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship, p. 19.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 447



an exception.89 This is for good reason. For one thing, there may be
things that (1) are forms of speech, (2) are about or against members
of groups or classes of persons identified by protected characteristics
and (3a) arouse reflexive hatred amongst some significant section of
society, but which nevertheless do not seem to fall under the ordi-
nary concept hate speech. Suppose a controversial politician in a
majority white racist society makes a speech arguing for the equal
rights of blacks. Even if this speech satisfies conditions (1), (2) and
(3a), it scarcely seems plausible to call it ‘hate speech’. On the other
hand, there could be things that fail to (3a) arouse reflexive hatred
amongst some significant section of society, but which nevertheless
do seem to fall under the ordinary concept hate speech. Consider
another politician in the majority white racist society who makes an
extremely subtle, veiled speech about inherent differences between
racial groups, one that fails to arouse emotions, feelings, or attitudes
of hate or hatred against the speech. We might yet call this ‘hate
speech’ even if people do not hate it. The point is that hearer
reactions, including hate or hatred, are not always reliable guides to
how we should use the term ‘hate speech’.

What is more, in many countries or socio-legal communities hate
speech is treated as regulatable speech. I shall say more about this in
the ‘Family Resemblances’. But if we define hate speech as speech
that audiences hate because of what it says about members of certain
groups, then this would seem to undermine the legitimacy of the
idea that hate speech is regulatable speech. This is because we tend
to think the mere fact that an audience hates a form of speech is not
in itself a legitimate reason to ban it.90 Now it might be objected at
this point that to reject the present way of understanding the ordi-
nary concept hate speech on the proposed grounds would be to once
again allow the legal concept hate speech to cast a shadow over the
analysis. In other words, because the legal concept hate speech es-
chews any suggestion that hate speech is simply speech we hate be-
cause of legal sensibilities over what is regulatable speech, this deters
us from understanding the ordinary concept hate speech in those
terms. But the main thrust of my arguments in these articles is not
toward the conclusion that the legal and ordinary concepts must

89 Strossen, ‘Incitement to Hatred’, p. 244.
90 Cf. Richard Delgado and David Yun, ‘‘The Speech We Hate’: First Amendment Totalism, the

ACLU, and the Principle of Dialogic Politics’, Arizona State Law Journal 27 (1995): 1281–1300.

ALEXANDER BROWN448



always be kept apart and that appealing to any analyses of the former
can only detract from or thwart good analyses of the latter. Rather,
my point is that some aspects of the analysis of the legal concept hate
speech may be unhelpful to understanding the ordinary concept hate
speech. For example, to refuse to admit as examples of hate speech
anything that would be protected from regulation under a relatively
extreme free speech doctrine embraced by many American legal
scholars and United States Supreme Court justices would be
unhelpful, especially when the ordinary concept hate speech extends
well beyond that doctrine. By contrast, to reject as a conception of
hate speech the idea that hate speech is simply speech we hate because
it would be inconsistent with virtually any free speech doctrine
embraced by legal systems around the world would be appropriate.
Clearly both the legal and the ordinary concepts hate speech will draw
on, and be infused by, a shared body of general ideas about what is,
and what is not, regulatable speech that can be found in the wider
socio-legal context or cultural milieu.

B. What Hate Speakers are Expressing

A second possible explanation for the connection between speech
and hate focuses on what hate speakers are expressing. On this
analysis, something is hate speech only if: (3b) it expresses the
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred of the speaker for
any members of groups or classes of persons identified by protected
characteristics.91 Another word for this sort of speech might be ‘hate-
filled speech’ or ‘hate-laden speech’. It is speech that carries forth,
articulates, symbolises or represents in some way the speaker’s
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred toward the subject
of the speech. An example of hate-laden speech in its explicit form
might include an utterance that began, ‘I hate…’, as in ‘I hate those
damn Jews!’. However, that a speaker chooses to use or not use the
words ‘I hate…’ is not decisive. Most hate speakers are only too
aware of hate speech laws or regulations and sometimes prefix their

91 See note 44 above.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 449



utterances with ‘I honestly don’t hate x, but…’ in an attempt
(probably misguided) to insulate themselves from prosecution.92

Therefore, it is important to recognise that hate-laden speech can
take implicit forms, such as when people express their hatred of
certain groups in subtle, careful, tendentious, disguised or dissem-
bling ways (without ever explicitly saying, ‘I hate…’).

Once again, however, this analysis is flawed. For one thing, not
everything that seems to fall under the concept hate speech is an
expression, explicit or implicit, of emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred toward members of groups or classes of persons
identified by protected characteristics. Consider four examples. First,
suppose a fundamentalist or evangelical Christian directs the fol-
lowing words at people on a public street as they enter an LGBT
social club, ‘You homosexuals and lesbians are sinners in the eyes of
God, you disobey the teachings of the Bible, and for this reason you
will go to hell if you do not repent.’ It is surely conceivable that this
utterance could function not as an articulation or expression of
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred but rather as an
expression of deeply held religious beliefs or as some sort of religious
exercise or rite of passage or even as an outpouring of feelings or
sentiments of disgust or repulsion that have been learned from
parents or community leaders. If (3b) is a necessary condition for
hate speech, then this example is not hate speech. But either as a
form of speech that carries the prejudiced (because contemptuous)
message that homosexuals are morally inferior beings or as a speech
act that amounts to ranking, degrading, harassing or persecuting

92 In March 2004, for example, the BNP’s Tony Collett made a speech at a public house in Keighley
in which he allegedly stated ‘I honestly don’t hate asylum seekers – these people are cockroaches and
they’re doing what cockroaches do because cockroaches can’t help what they do, they just do it, like
cats meow and dogs bark’. Guardian Staff and Agencies, ‘Jury Hears of BNP’s ‘Multiracial Hell’ Speech’,
The Guardian, November 3, 2006. If this was a strategy to avoid prosecution it reveals a certain
ignorance of the law. Putting to one side the question of whether asylum seekers could be counted as a
racial group, in the UK it is not against the law to express hatred for racial groups per se. Rather, it is
against the law to stir up hatred against racial groups.

ALEXANDER BROWN450



homosexuals, it might qualify as hate speech nevertheless.93 Second,
suppose a scientist publishes his controversial findings concerning
the relative intelligence of African Americans including the state-
ment, ‘African Americans tend to have lower IQs than white
Americans.’94 Again, it is quite possible that his statement is not an
expression of any emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred
toward African Americans, conscious or unconscious. Instead, it
could be merely the expression of a sincerely held scientific belief
about the effect of both genes and environment on interracial dif-
ferences in IQ, and about how IQ is a good indicator of interracial
differences in such things as educational attainment, income, and
reproductive and marriage choices. Because of this there may be an
impulse not to count it as hate speech.95 Yet it is also perfectly
intelligible for people, not only African Americans, to think that this
is hate speech by virtue of the fact that in a very public way it

93 Of course, it is a further question whether or not this type of hate speech should be regulated all
things considered given the countervailing right to freedom of religion. See, e.g., Albert Weale,
‘Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Religion’, in Free Speech: Report of a Seminar. Discussion Papers 2
(London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1990); Robert Wintemute, ‘Religion vs. Sexual Orientation:
A Clash of Human Rights?’, Journal of Law and Equality 1 (2002): 125–154; Ian Leigh, ‘Hatred, Sexual
Orientation, Free Speech and Religious Liberty’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 10 (2008): 337–344; Ian Leigh,
‘Homophobic Speech, Equality Denial, and Religious Expression’, in I. Hare and J. Weinstein (eds.)
(2009) Extreme Speech and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Carolyn Evans, ‘Religious
Speech that Undermines Equality’, in I. Hare and J. Weinstein (eds.) (2009) Extreme Speech and Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ashby Jones, ‘Is Hateful Speech at a Military Funeral Protected
by the First Amendment?’, Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2010; Jeffrey Shulman, ‘When is Religious
Speech Outrageous? Snyder v. Phelps and the Limitations on Religious Advocacy’, Penn Statim 114
(2010): 13–18; Adelle Banks, ‘Is Phelps a role model on free speech issues?’, Christian Century 128 (2011):
18; Alon Harel, ‘Hate Speech and Comprehensive Forms of Life’, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds.) The
Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012); Brown, Hate Speech Law, pp. 74–75, 93–94. In Canada, for example, the part of
the criminal code that bans wilful promotion of hatred also contains exemptions or permissible defences
against prosecution ‘if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an
opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text’. See s. 319(3)(b) of the
Criminal Code (as amended by An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Hate Propaganda) of 2004).
Similarly, some states in Australia have on the books legislation banning incitement to hatred which sets
out exemptions for speech that has a religious purpose or is motivated by sincerely held religious beliefs.
See ss. 11(b)(i) and 11(2) of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 (the State of Victoria) and see s.
80G(1)(b)(i) and 80G(1)(b)(i) (as amended by s. 6 of Law No. 80 of 2004) (the State of Western
Australia). In the UK, s. 29JA of the Public Order Act 1986 (as amended by s. 74 of the Criminal Justice
and Immigration Act in 2008 and by Schedule 7 of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013) might be
interpreted as implicitly giving special dispensation inter alia to religious hate speech concerning sexual
conduct or practices and same-sex marriage.

94 This need not be a hypothetical example. The authors of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life, for example, assert that the average IQ of African Americans is 85, Latinos 89,
Whites 103, Asians 106, and Jews 113. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, NY: Free Press, 1994).

95 See, e.g., Mari Matsuda, ‘Commentary – Language as Violence v. Freedom of Expression:
Canadian and American Perspectives on Group Defamation’, Buffalo Law Review 37 (1988–1989): 359–
364, p. 364.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 451



rehearses and supports, rather than challenges and confronts, a
particular negative stereotype or social stigma about African Amer-
icans as unintelligent or less intelligent than whites.96 Third, it is
possible that some disablists could use the insults ‘retard’, ‘cripple’,
and ‘freak’ in order to express their contempt or disdain for people
with physical or mental disabilities, to express the fact that they look
down on such people, believing them to be worthless or beneath
consideration, without at the same time articulating, symbolising or
representing emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred toward
such people.97 They may even think that hate or hatred would be
wasted on ‘pitiable creatures’ whom they believe are less than fully
human. But even if such uses of ‘retard’, ‘cripple’, and ‘freak’ express
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of contempt as opposed to hate, it
does seem perfectly meaningful to call these uses ‘hate speech’.
Fourth, consider a group of married men talking together about their
wives and women in general. Together they espouse a range of
derogatory ideas and negative stereotypes about women (e.g., ‘a
woman’s place is in the home’, ‘the man is in charge’, ‘women are
no good at practical things around the house’), and at the same time
they neither question these ideas nor offset them with more positive
stereotypes.98 But just suppose for the sake of argument that the
men do not in fact harbour any emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred toward their wives, meaning they do not possess
intense or extreme dislike of their wives and do not have any atti-
tudes of enmity or hostility toward their wives and so do not regard
them as people to be banished or destroyed. Nonetheless, we might
instinctively think that this sort of sexist discourse can be appropri-
ately classified as hate speech, perhaps because it expresses a certain
type of disdain or condescension toward women or maybe because it

96 See, e.g., Bob Herbert, ‘In America; Throwing a Curve’, The New York Times, October 26, 1994.
Once again, it is a further question whether or not this particular type of hate speech should be
regulated all things considered. It might be argued that hate speech laws should include exemptions or
permissible defences relating to scientific speech for fear of impeding scientific truth discovery, not
because scientific speech can never be hate speech but because when push comes to shove not all hate
speech should be banned. In some countries, such Australia and South Africa, there are certain laws
banning hate speech that include exemptions or permissible defences for scientific speech. See s. 18D(b)
of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Australia), s. 20C(2)(c) of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (New
South Wales), s. 66(2)(c) of the Discrimination Act 1991 (Australian Capital Territory), and s. 12 of the
Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 2000 (South Africa).

97 Cf. Robin Jeshion, ‘Expressivism and the Offensiveness of Slurs’, Philosophical Perspectives 27
(2013): 231–259, p. 241.

98 Note, I have given an example of some men talking about women but the example is not
intended to depict or stereotype all men.

ALEXANDER BROWN452



serves to maintain forms of gender subordination (from which men
benefit).99

Of course, a defender of the view that hate speech necessarily has
something to do with expressing the speaker’s feelings or emotions
or attitudes of hate or hatred, could simply deny that the above are
genuine examples of hate speech. They might insist that as soon as
we move beyond the relatively narrow and precise legal concept and
begin to carve out the boundaries of an ordinary concept hate speech,
we are in unchartered waters, so we must expect people to use the
term in inconsistent or even chaotic ways, or perhaps to use the term
in ways that merely serve political or ideological ends (‘I call this hate
speech because this sort of speech offends me or contradicts what I
believe’). And so (according to this response), the person who uses
the term ‘hate speech’ to describe the above examples, even though
the speech does not express hate or hatred, is simply confused or an
incompetent user of the term, or perhaps is using the term in a
deliberately subversive or provocative way.

However, I think that this dismissal of the counter-examples is
too quick. For one thing, if one is relying on the legal concept hate
speech to provide some sort of guidance for the task of carving out an
ordinary concept hate speech, then we must also pay attention to the
fact that most legal regimes that actually do employ the term ‘hate
speech’ do so in relation to incitement to hatred legislation, wherein
the necessary mental element of the relevant offences tends to be
intent, as opposed to the expression of emotions, feelings, or atti-
tudes of hate or hatred. Moreover, if the current version of the myth
of hate were true, then ordinary users of the term ‘hate speech’
would tend to look upon the following sort of statement as involving
considerable confusion on the part of the speaker, as involving a
contradiction in terms. ‘What the scientist said was hate speech; now
I’m not suggesting that the speech was expressing any feelings or
emotions or attitudes of hate or hatred, I strongly suspect it wasn’t,
but it was hate speech nevertheless because of the way it negatively
stereotyped people of colour.’ But it seems to me that most ordinary
language users would, or could, find this sort of statement quite
meaningful and not a contradiction in terms, regardless of whether
they happened to agree or disagree with it.

99 See, e.g., Donna L. Lillian, ‘A Thorn By Any Other Name: Sexist Discourse as Hate Speech’,
Discourse Society 18 (2007): 719–740, pp. 732–733.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 453



Furthermore, arguably carving out the boundaries of a new
ordinary concept hate speech is partly a matter of trying to say
something about what the term ‘hate speech’ ought to mean if it is
to be useful or do any good. But arguably, conceptualising hate
speech as the expression of hate or hatred may have the unwelcome
effect of pathologising hate speech. To conceptualise hate speech as
the act of people who harbour so much hatred or deep-seated ani-
mosity toward members of certain groups that they cannot help
themselves but express their hatred outwardly through speech,
seems to imply that hate speech is abnormal or a symptom of mental
pathology. Hate speech becomes the act of someone with obses-
sional, paranoid, or irrational feelings or emotions or attitudes and
uncontrollable impulses to express these things to other people.
However, we might intuitively think that a great deal of actual hate
speech is undertaken by non-pathological people – people who may
not harbour hatred or deep-seated animosity toward others, and
who, even if they do harbour such hatred, are perfectly capable of
resisting outwardly expressing it through speech.100

There is another potential drawback. Consider once again the
proposition that hate speech is a type of regulatable speech – a
proposition that is perhaps a function of the connections between
the ordinary and legal concepts hate speech. The current way of
defining hate speech seems to be incompatible with this proposition.
After all, if what makes something hate speech is that it expresses the
speaker’s emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred, then
there is potential that any laws designed specifically to prohibit hate
speech so defined would thereby also prohibit, by design, potentially
important forms of self-expression and self-realisation. For example,
it might be that one way of coming to know one’s own emotions,
feelings, or attitudes is through expressing or articulating them in

100 I take inspiration here from any argument made by Barbara Perry about conceptualisations of the
concept of hate crime that emphasise feelings of hatred. Barbara Perry, ‘A Crime by Any Other Name:
The Semantics of ‘Hate’’, Journal of Hate Studies 4 (2005): 121–137, p. 124.

ALEXANDER BROWN454



public.101 Not only that, one might also take the view that expressing
hatred in public acts as a safety-valve, a way of letting off emotional
steam, so to speak, as an alternative to acting out emotions, feelings,
or attitudes of hate or hatred through acts of discrimination or
violence.102 (Some scholars reject certain key premises of the safety-
valve argument, of course,103 but let us just assume for now the
argument is sound.) If so, then potentially any laws designed
specifically to prohibit hate speech so defined would thereby also
prohibit, by design, potentially important forms of letting off emo-
tional steam. All of this might seem to suggest that hate speech is not
regulatable speech after all. Therefore, if one is committed to the
proposition that hate speech is regulatable speech, then one has
reason to refrain from defining hate speech as the expression of hate
or hatred.

C. The Motivation of Hate Speakers

A third possible connection between speech and hate has to do with
the motivation of speakers for saying what they say. On the pro-
posed analysis, something is hate speech only if: (3c) it is motivated
by the speaker’s hatred for any members of groups or classes of
persons identified by protected characteristics.104 We might call this
‘hate-fuelled speech’. This is speech that is motivated by the speak-
er’s hatred of a given group of people, irrespective of whether or not
it serves to express or represent that hatred. As in the case of hate-
laden speech, hate-fuelled speech is identified by the state of mind or

101 See, e.g., Samuel P. Nelson, Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 65. Cf. Brown, Hate Speech Law, pp. 120–
127.

102 See, e.g., Calvert Magruder, ‘Mental and Emotional Disturbance in the Law of Torts’, Harvard
Law Review 49 (1936): 1033–1067, p. 1053; Thomas Emerson, ‘Toward a General Theory of the First
Amendment’, Yale Law Journal 72 (1963): 877–956, pp. 884–885; Marjorie Heins, ‘Banning Words: A
Comment on ‘Words That Wound’’, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 18 (1983): 585–592, p.
590.

103 See, e.g., Richard Delgado, ‘Words That Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and
Name-Calling’, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 17 (1982): 133–181, p. 140; Richard Del-
gado and David Yun, ‘Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Assessment of Four Paternalistic
Arguments for Resisting Hate-Speech Regulation’, California Law Review 82 (1994): 871–892, pp. 878–
880; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ‘Ten Arguments Against Hate-Speech Regulation: How
Valid?’, Northern Kentucky Law Review 23 (1996): 475–490, pp. 477–479.

104 See note 45 above.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 455



the emotional state of the speaker. But whereas the expressive
content of hate-laden speech directly represents or articulates the
hatred of the speaker, hate-fuelled speech is a function of the
motivation (hatred) of the speaker. On this analysis, the term ‘hate
speech’ might be interpreted as an adjective-noun compound noun
meaning speech that is motivated by hatred.

The task of identifying actual examples of hate-fuelled speech is
made difficult by a lack of reliable information about the speaker’s
state of mind. In the absence of this information, we may be left
drawing inferences from what was said, the circumstances in which
it was said, and the personal history of the speaker. In other words,
we infer that the speaker would simply not have said what he said
about members of certain groups unless he possessed, even if
unconsciously, emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred for
them. For example, some people take the view that in the context of
the overwhelming weight of evidence that the Holocaust happened,
Holocaust denial must be motivated by an implicit hatred of Jews – a
hatred that leads or motivates Holocaust deniers to misread, mis-
construe, ignore, overlook, twist, and distort the evidence.105 In
other words, some people take the view that but for hatred of Jews,
nobody would deny the Holocaust. If this is correct, then Holocaust
denial is hate-fuelled speech. Such speech is motivated by hatred
even if its expressive content does not directly represent or articulate
that hatred.

There are, once again, difficulties with this analysis in addition to
problems of identifying actual examples. When something is iden-
tified as hate speech by virtue of a particular mental element that is
thought to be present in the motivational structure of the speaker,
this opens up the possibility of things being conceptualised as hate
speech even if they do not portray any of the normal or intuitive
signs of being hate speech. Suppose a senior politician or superior
judge in a racist society utters the words, ‘I hereby grant equal voting
rights to blacks.’ But suppose his motivation for doing so is actually
an extreme hatred of blacks. Suppose he believes that once blacks
have the vote they will make such poor decisions that the country
will descend quickly into bankruptcy and civil war, causing blacks

105 This view is articulated on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for
example. ‘Holocaust Denial and Distortion’, Available at www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/
holocaust-denial-and-distortion.

ALEXANDER BROWN456

http://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion
http://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion


tremendous hardship and suffering. So powerful is his hatred that he
is prepared to cut off his nose to spite his face. His utterance satisfies
conditions (1), (2) and (3c), but could we appropriately call it ‘hate
speech’?

Conversely, there may be forms of speech that we would intuitively
want to say are examples of hate speech even if they are not motivated
by hatred. Someone could choose to publicly insult or deride members
of the Muslim community where she lives, for example, not out of any
emotion or feeling or attitude of hate or hatred but out of a sense of
fear or loss or alienation caused by the presence of any ‘foreigners’ in
her community. Usage of what we instinctively want to label ‘hate
speech’ might be driven by a range of motives which not merely have
nothing to do with hatred per se but also have nothing intrinsically to
do with the groups in question. Boredom, attention-seeking, pleasure
in being controversial, or even something as mundane as economic
self-interest – these are just some of the generic motives that may
explain the behaviour of hate speakers in some circumstances. Con-
sider the shopkeeper who makes false damaging statements of fact
about Jews living in his area not because he hates Jews – in fact he
greatly admires Jews – but because he sees Jewish-owned businesses as
economic competitors and he wishes to steal their customers with the
help of a smear campaign.

In addition to this, there is the thought that hate speech is reg-
ulatable speech. The potential disadvantage with defining hate
speech as speech motivated by hate or hatred is that any laws that
are designed to regulate hate speech so defined could be seen as, in
effect, regulating people’s emotions, feelings, or attitudes. Yet many
people instinctively believe that it is not the job of the state to
regulate people’s inner or private world. The state should no more
legislate emotions and feelings than it should legislate attitudes or
thoughts, even if they involve hate or hatred. Indeed, it is partly
because people believe a free society is one in which legislators
should not have the prerogative to use laws for the purposes of
thought control that people support the constitutional right to
freedom of conscience. Thus, one danger with analysing the word
‘hate’ in ‘hate speech’ in the proposed way is, as Waldron points out,
that it gives the clear impression ‘that the task of legislation that
restricts hate speech is to try to change people’s attitudes or control

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 457



their thoughts’.106 Of course, there are advocates of hate speech reg-
ulations (not to mention hate crime or penalty-enhancement regula-
tions) that have actively embraced this impression.107 Then again,
there is surely also a case to be made that creating this impression
severely weakens the claim that hate speech is a type of regulat-
able speech. Indeed, because civil libertarians wrongly assume that the
concept hate speech is really about the attempt to legislate thoughts,
they argue that there is a slippery slope that begins with the prohibition
of hate speech and ends with the prohibition of ‘hate thought’, a type of
thought-crime in the Orwellian sense.108 So as well as linguistic reasons
not to define ‘hate speech’ in terms of a motivation of hate or hatred,
there may also be sound purpose-oriented reasons not to do so. More
on such reasons in ‘Family Resemblances’.

D. The Effects of Hate Speech

A fourth possible connection between speech and hate highlights the
emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred that can be incited
or stirred up by speech, whether by intention or by likelihood.
According to Waldron, for example, ‘if ‘hatred’ is relevant at all, it is
relevant (in many of the statutory formulations) as the purpose of
the offending speech, not as its motivation’.109 On this analysis,
something is hate speech only if: (3d) it incites hatred toward any
members of groups or classes of persons identified by protected
characteristics.110 Call this ‘hatred-inciting speech’ or ‘incitement to
hatred’. Like the first connection outlined above, incitement to
hatred involves the arousal of hatred in the audience or hearer. But
whereas in the case of the first connection the hatred aroused re-
bounds back toward the speech itself or the speaker, in the case of
incitement to hatred the hatred is aroused or stirred up in the
audience or hearer toward members of some other group or class of
persons. To clarify, the supposed connection between speech and

106 Waldron, ‘Dignity and Defamation’, p. 1601.
107 See, e.g., Delgado, ‘Words That Wound’, pp. 148–149; Diana Tietjens Meyers, ‘Rights in Col-

lision: A Non-Punitive, Compensatory Remedy for Abusive Speech’, Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 203–
243, p. 233.

108 Joseph Fallon, ‘UK-USA: The British Character of America’, The Social Contract (2000–2001): 91–
95, pp. 94–95.

109 Waldron, ‘Dignity and Defamation’, p. 1601, n. 14.
110 See note 46 above.

ALEXANDER BROWN458



hatred has to do with either the intended or likely effect of speech,
meaning that we call something ‘incitement to hatred’ either when
the speech is intended to cause emotions, feelings, or attitudes of
hate or hatred or when emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or
hatred are its likely effect even if the speaker does not set out to
incite hatred but nevertheless does so through recklessness or neg-
ligence. It goes without saying that the difference between inten-
tional and negligent stirring up hatred may be important as far issues
of moral blame and legal liability are concerned. Some legal regimes
may choose to only criminalise intentional stirring up hatred.
However, in the present discussion I am primarily interested in
articulating the basic ways in which speech can be related to hate or
hatred, as part of the project of defining what hate speech is as
opposed to justifying how we ought to respond to it. And so I discuss
the broad category the effects of hate speech, which includes intended
as well as negligently created effects.

It is more important to notice that something may count as
incitement to hatred quite apart from whether or not the speaker is
motivated by hatred or is using speech to express or articulate his or
her own hatred. Consider ‘Muslims deserve only hatred’. This might
be motivated by or express the speaker’s hatred, but not necessarily.
One could imagine someone engaging in this sort of speech in order
to create anti-Muslim feeling in his neighbourhood yet not because
he hates Muslims but because he is lonely and wants to be accepted
by people who would like him to stir up hatred against Muslims; not
in a way that articulates his hatred of Muslims but in a way that
symbolises his own self-loathing.

A familiar problem confronts this line of analysis. A good deal of
speech concerning members of groups or classes of persons identi-
fied by protected characteristics might not be intended to incite
hatred and might not actually incite hatred against them, but we
might nevertheless think it appropriate to call it ‘hate speech’. Sup-
pose a white student goes up to a black student on a university
campus and addresses him as ‘nigger’, without irony and without
playfulness or a misguided attempt at friendship. Nobody else is
around. This is not intended to, nor does it, incite hatred against
black students among other white students. But it is surely hate

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 459



speech; and perhaps even a paradigmatic example of hate speech.111

Of course, it might be countered that in these sorts of cases the
speech could be intended to stir up or have the effect of stirring up
self-hatred among the objects of speech.112 But just because this can
sometimes be the case it does not mean it is always the case. It is
equally possible that the intended and achieved purpose is to
intimidate the victim, to produce feelings of fear or insecurity, to put
him or her off balance, or to change the calculation of whether it is
worth going to college.113 And in that scenario surely it remains
plausible to call this ‘hate speech’.

Conversely, much political speech could have the likely effect of
stirring up hatred against members of certain groups, but it is not
always clear that this speech should count as hate speech. Consider,
for example, comments made by the Labour politician, and then
Leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw MP, in an article
entitled ‘I Want to Unveil My Views on an Important Issue’, pub-
lished in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph in October 2006, concerning
his experiences of talking to Muslim women in his constituency
office whilst they are wearing a full veil.

It was not the first time I had conducted an interview with someone in a full veil,
but this particular encounter, though very polite and respectful on both sides, got
me thinking. In part, this was because of the apparent incongruity between the
signals which indicate common bonds — the entirely English accent, the couple’s
education (wholly in the UK) — and the fact of the veil. Above all, it was because I
felt uncomfortable about talking to someone ‘face-to-face’ who I could not see.114

Some people regarded the article as measured, reasonable, non-
derogatory, balanced, informed, respectful in its tone, and thought-
provoking. Nevertheless, the Socialist Worker reported that the
comments led to a new wave of religious hatred against Muslims in
the area.115 I do not know whether this report was accurate. But
suppose it was. Suppose Straw’s comments unconsciously reinforced
the stigmatising assumption that being veiled means being silenced,
unwittingly normalised negative stereotypes about Muslim practices

111 See, e.g., Matsuda, ‘Public Response to Racist Speech’.
112 Ibid., p. 2336, n. 84.
113 Ibid.
114 Jack Straw, ‘I Want to Unveil My Views on an Important Issue’, Lancashire Evening Telegraph,

October 5, 2006.
115 Charlie Kimber, ‘Jack Straw’s Veil Comments are Ammunition for Racists’, Socialist Worker 2022,

October 14, 2006.

ALEXANDER BROWN460



in general, implicitly assured people that it was acceptable to hate
Muslims, even created new anti-Muslim hatred. What is more,
suppose that Straw’s comments were always likely to have the effect
of stirring up hatred in that part of England, because of existing
predispositions to animosity and hostility between Muslim and non-
Muslim communities. On the current conceptualisation, Straw’s
comments were hate speech. But if our intuitions tell us something
different, then we may question the veracity of the conceptualisa-
tion.

The main thrust of the argument so far has been to challenge the
assumption that the best way to explain the meaning of the term
‘hate speech’ is compositionally, including by drawing on the literal
meaning of the term ‘hate’ consisting of emotions, feelings, or atti-
tudes. But let us now pause to ask this important question: where
does the assumption that the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate speech’ carries its
ordinary or literal meaning come from? Perhaps it comes from what
we take to be the semantic constant across a range of other complex
terms that include the word ‘hate’, such as ‘hate crime’, ‘hate inci-
dent’, ‘hate stare’, ‘hate campaign’, ‘hate mail’, ‘hate group’, ‘hate
literature’, ‘hate propaganda’, ‘hate movies’, ‘hate site’, ‘hate tweets’,
‘the politics of hate’, and ‘haters gonna hate’. But the basic problem
is that not all compound terms that contain the word ‘hate’ are
partly composed of the ordinary or literal meaning of ‘hate’. In other
words, it would be wrong to simply assume that the word ‘hate’
functions semantically within the term ‘hate speech’ in the same way
it does within other complex terms which also contain it.

IV. THE ORDINARY CONCEPT HATE SPEECH AS A SEMI- OR QUASI-
COMPOSITIONAL CONCEPT?

Nevertheless, before we give up entirely on the compositional ap-
proach, there are some alternative analyses of the term that need to
be considered because they construe hate speech as having semi- or
quasi-compositional semantics. According to these approaches, even
if syntactically the term ‘hate speech’ is a compound noun, seman-
tically its meaning is not a function of the literal meanings of the
parts that make up the whole term, and understanding the literal
meanings of the parts of the whole term may be an unreliable or
even highly misleading pathway to understanding the meaning of

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 461



the whole term. Nevertheless, the term ‘hate speech’ is semi- or
quasi-compositional in some relevant way.

One approach is to treat ‘hate speech’ as a partially transparent
idiom whose meaning is not directly deducible from the literal
meanings of the words ‘hate’ and ‘speech’, but whose meaning can
be inferred in the sense that the words ‘hate’ and ‘speech’ provide a
clue to the meaning of the idiom. One possibility is that the word
‘hate’ is operating as an attributional metaphor, meaning that the
word ‘hate’ refers to something that possesses a quality that can also
be attributed to the phenomena referred to by ‘hate speech’. The
basic idea here is that the word ‘hate’ could operate in the term ‘hate
speech’ akin to how the word ‘zebra’ operates in the term ‘zebra
crossing’, namely, to attribute to crossings a quality that is possessed
by zebras. The word ‘zebra’ does not carry its literal meaning into
the term ‘zebra crossing’: namely, as a word that refers to species of
African equids with distinctive black and white striped coats. But it
does continue to denote one of the attributes or qualities possessed
by zebras, that is, monochromatic stripiness. In other words, the
word ‘zebra’ in ‘zebra crossing’ means like a zebra in at least one
respect. The reference to this quality itself partially contributes or
provides a clue to the figurative meaning of ‘zebra crossing’.116 In
this way the attribute or quality of monochromatic stripiness is
mapped from the base domain of zebras to the target domain of
crossings. Just as the word ‘zebra’ does not contribute reference to
African equids to the meaning of ‘zebra crossing’, so the word ‘hate’
does not contribute reference to hate or hatred to the meaning of
‘hate speech’. This is evidenced by the fact, as demonstrated in
previous sections, that many instances of hate speech have nothing
whatsoever to do with hate or hatred. Nevertheless, maybe the word
‘hate’ continues to denote at least one of the attributes or qualities of
hate or hatred and the reference to this attribute or quality partially
contributes or provides a clue to the meaning of the term ‘hate
speech’. In other words, the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate speech’ means like
hate in at least one of its attributes or qualities.

116 The figurative meaning of ‘zebra crossing’ is a crossing point for pedestrians marked with black
and white stripes, which stands in contrast to its literal meanings, such as a spot where zebras traverse
something, the phenomenon of zebras traversing something, or the act of travelling across zebras.
Compare this with compound nouns that are more straightforwardly or transparently semantically
compositional such as ‘pedestrian crossing’ and ‘hedgehog crossing’.

ALEXANDER BROWN462



But which likeness or quality? Perhaps the word ‘hate’ refers to
the attribute or quality of being an emotion or feeling or attitude and
contributes this to the meaning of ‘hate speech’. Or maybe the word
‘hate’ refers more specifically to the quality of being a negative
emotion or feeling or attitude. Or conceivably it refers to the quality
of being mobilising or motivational for human action. Then again, is
it really part of the meaning of the term ‘hate speech’ that the speech
in question possesses one or more of the aforementioned qualities? I
have my doubts. Even so, I shall not attempt to provide a definitive
answer here, safe to say that in each case it would be necessary to
show that the relevant quality makes an appearance, without fail, in
all bona fide instances of hate speech, in the same way that the quality
of monochromatic stripiness can be found in all genuine zebra
crossings. A far more telling point, however, is that at most we can
only think of the term ‘hate speech’ as semi- or quasi-compositional,
but even here it would be wrong to assume that the word ‘hate’
carries with it reference to its most distinctive quality, hate or hatred,
that is intense or extreme dislike, aversion, loathing, antipathy, enmity or
hostility toward or against something or someone. So there is still no
escaping the myth of hate even under the proposed analysis.

Alternatively, maybe the term ‘hate speech’ is a relational meta-
phor, meaning that it conveys at least one relational structure that is
common to both feelings or emotions or attitudes of hate or hatred
and to the speech in question. In the case of ‘pillow talk’, for
example, the contribution made by the word ‘pillow’ is not to refer
to qualities of pillows but to connote the idea that pillows stand in a
certain relation to beds, namely, they are typically found on them,
which is the same relation in which pillow talk stands to beds, it
happens on or in beds. Perhaps the contribution made by the word
‘hate’ is also to identify a relational structure that obtains in both
hate and hate speech. In other words, the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate
speech’ means analogous to hate in at least one of its relational structures.

But which relation? This depends on the meaning of ‘hate’ of
course, but one possibility is that hate or hatred is typically toward or
against something or someone. And so the word ‘hate’ in ‘hate
speech’ means toward or against something or someone analogous to how
hate is toward or against something or someone. In its plain or literal
sense the word ‘hate’ does not specify who or what is the object of

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 463



hate. But perhaps when it is used in combination with ‘speech’ or
‘crime’, for example, the word ‘hate’ does not convey its plain or
literal sense but means something more specific. As Cortese points
out, ‘[s]ince the mid-1980s, ‘hate’ began to be used in a much more
restricted sense to characterize an individual’s negative beliefs and
especially feelings about the members of some other category of
people based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation,
religion, age, or physical or mental disability.’117 This usage persists
in current work on hate speech and hate crimes. For example, in her
latest article covering these issues Matsuda talks about hate as
though it were a target-specific concept.118 Or, to take another
example, in her recent book on hate crimes on the Internet, Danielle
Keats Citron defines ‘hate’ as saying something negative about or
doing something negative to protected groups.119 What this suggests
is that the word ‘hate’ can itself have different meanings depending
on the context. Its core or standard meaning is intense or extreme
dislike, aversion, loathing, antipathy, enmity or hostility toward or against
something or someone. And this is the meaning it portrays in the term
‘hate mail’ and the slogan ‘haters gonna hate’. But in more spe-
cialised contexts, such as in the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’,
the word ‘hate’ can mean simply against members of groups or classes of
persons identified by protected characteristics. This underscores why,
under this analysis, the term ‘hate speech’ lacks pure compositional
semantics: one cannot deduce the meaning from the literal meaning
of the words involved because the term ‘hate’ itself has a figurative
or metaphorical meaning. The upshot is that on the current analysis
the figurative or metaphorical meaning of ‘hate speech’ is speech that
is toward or against members of groups or classes of persons identified by
protected characteristics analogous to how hate is toward or against
something or someone.

Interestingly, in her study of child development and the inter-
pretation of metaphors, Dedre Gentner found that children possess

117 Cortese, Opposing Hate Speech, p. 3.
118 Mari Matsuda, ‘Is Peacemaking Unpatriotic? The Function of Homophobia in the Discursive

World’, Journal of Hate Studies 11 (2013–2014): 9–28, p. 19.
119 Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014),

p. 16.

ALEXANDER BROWN464



an early ability to understand metaphors based on shared object
attributes (e.g., ‘the tire is like a shoe’, both are made of rubber) before
they develop the ability to interpret metaphors based on shared
relational structure (e.g., ‘the tire is a shoe’, they both provide a point of
connection with the ground).120 Moreover, Gentner has found that
adults not merely have an ability, which children lack, to understand
relational metaphors but will actually prefer or favour relational
metaphors over attributional metaphors in the sense that they will
tend to focus primarily on relational commonalities in interpreting
metaphors and will rate metaphors based on relational commonali-
ties as more apt than metaphors based on attributional commonal-
ities.121 Thus, if the term ‘hate speech’ really does connote certain
attributional and relational metaphors, then we cannot expect chil-
dren to have the ability to understand or interpreted ‘hate speech’ as
a relational metaphor, whereas we can expect adults to prefer or
favour an interpretation of ‘hate speech’ as a relational metaphor.

One final approach worth considering treats the terms ‘hate
speech’, ‘hate crime’, ‘hate mail’, ‘haters gonna hate’, and so forth, as
what philosophers of language call core-dependent homonyms. The
basic idea, due to Aristotle,122 is that even though a set of terms
which share a common word can have different meanings, under-
standing their meanings ultimately depends on understanding the
core meaning of one of their number, a core meaning on which they
are all strongly dependent, whereas understanding the core meaning
of the relevant foundational term does not depend on understanding
the meanings of the other terms, so there is asymmetry.123 Take, for
example, the terms ‘healthy body’, meaning in good physical condition,
‘health supplements’, meaning substances designed to provide nutrients
that may otherwise not be consumed in sufficient quantities in a normal
diet, and ‘healthy urine’, meaning urine that is the colour of pale
translucent yellow to gold. To say these terms are core-dependent

120 Dedre Gentner, ‘Metaphor as Structure Mapping: The Relational Shift’, Child Development 59
(1988): 47–59.

121 Ibid.
122 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. H. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 80–81 [1003a-

b].
123 Cf. Christopher Shields, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 4.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 465



homonyms is to say that even though they mean different things,
they each have a strong dependence on a single core meaning upon
which they depend. Thus, it might be that the real meaning of the
term ‘health supplements’ is something like substances designed to
provide nutrients that may otherwise not be consumed in sufficient quan-
tities in a normal diet and that preserve good physical condition. And the
real meaning of the term ‘healthy urine’ is in fact urine that is the
colour of pale translucent yellow to gold and that is an indicator of good
physical condition.

It is not hard to see how the compound terms ‘hate speech’
and ‘hate crime’ might be dependent upon, in some cases, the
meaning of the term ‘hate’, namely, emotions, feelings, or attitudes
of intense or extreme dislike, aversion, loathing, antipathy, enmity or
hostility towards or against something or someone. Thus suppose for
the sake of argument that ‘hate speech’ means, in some cases,
negative speech against members of groups or classes of persons iden-
tified by protected characteristics, and ‘hate crime’ means, in some
cases, criminal acts against members of groups or classes of persons
identified by protected characteristics. Perhaps we could say that in
these cases the meanings of ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ depend
on the meaning of ‘hate’ in the following strong ways. The term
‘hate speech’ means, in some cases, negative speech against members
of groups or classes of persons identified by protected characteristics that
expresses the speaker’s emotions, feelings, or attitudes of intense or
extreme dislike, and so on. And we could say that the term ‘hate
crime’ means, in some cases, criminal acts against members of groups
or classes of persons identified by protected characteristics that are
motivated by the perpetrator’s emotions, feelings, or attitudes of intense
or extreme dislike, and so on. But this is by no means always the
case, and may not even be typically the case or generally the case.
As I have tried to show in this article, there are many instances of
hate speech where this putative connection is not merely weak
but non-existent. In other words, it is an open question whether
the dependency that the putative meanings of the terms ‘hate
speech’ and ‘hate crime’ have on the core meaning of the term
‘emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred’ are sufficiently
common across all meaningful uses of the terms ‘hate speech’ and
‘hate crime’ to sustain the idea that these are core-dependent

ALEXANDER BROWN466



hyponyms. In other words, it is still possible that the terms ‘hate
speech’ and ‘hate crime’ can be used in cases where no hate or
hatred is involved, and where the meanings of these terms are
not dependent on the literal meaning of ‘hate’. So long as this is
the case we are obliged to take seriously my thesis about the
myth of hate.

Notwithstanding everything I have said so far about semantic
compositionality and the myth of hate, thus far I have not sought to
directly challenge another important assumption found in the liter-
ature on hate speech. This is the assumption that the term ‘hate
speech’ is univocal or has a single meaning. Why should we accept
this assumption? What if the principal feature of the term ‘hate
speech’ is that it has multiple meanings? How do we analyse it then?
Of course, we could simply try to extend some of the approaches
employed in this part. We might suppose, for instance, that the term
‘hate speech’ is doubly figurative or metaphorical; which is to say,
the term ‘hate speech’ is systematically ambiguous between its
attributional and relational metaphor.124 Nevertheless, once we are
no longer bound by the assumption of univocality, we are free to
utilise a range of forms of philosophical analysis to get at the
semantic multiplicity of the term ‘hate speech’. In the second part of
this two-part article, ‘Family Resemblances’, I try to defend this
equivocal reading of the term ‘hate speech’ and to carry out four
types of philosophical analysis that can shed some light on the full
extent of the family of meanings associated with it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of this two-part article were presented at the UEA School of
Law Seminar in 2013, the UEA School of Politics, Philosophy, Language
and Communications Studies internal speaker series in 2016, and the
American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific Division conference in
2016. I am very grateful to all those who attended and provided
excellent comments on those occasions. During the course of writing I
also benefited immensely from input of ideas and corrections by Susan

124 Cf. Gentner, ‘Metaphor as Structure Mapping’.

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? 467



Brison, Eugen Fischer, Michael Frazer, Robin Jeshion, Eric Kaufmann,
Mary Kate Mcgowan, Catherine Rowett, Adriana Sinclair, and Robert
Simpson. Finally, I would like to thank the journal’s anonymous re-
viewer for much positive support and numerous helpful suggestions.

OPEN ACCESS

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by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
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School of Politics, Philosophy,
Language and Communication Studies,
University of East Anglia (UEA),
Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
E-mail: alexander.c.brown@uea.ac.uk

ALEXANDER BROWN468

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	What is hate speech? Part 1: The Myth of Hate
	Abstract
	Introduction
	The Legal Concept(S) Hate Speech
	The Ordinary Concept Hate Speech as a Compositional Concept?
	The Reaction of Hearers
	What Hate Speakers are Expressing
	The Motivation of Hate Speakers
	The Effects of Hate Speech

	The Ordinary Concept Hate Speech as a Semi- or Quasi-Compositional Concept?
	Acknowledgments