Should governments criminalize hate speech and insults?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should governments criminalize hate speech and insults?". Your opponent's style: Devils advocate

**“Countries should generally not restrict free speech and should also allow things like insults. They enable a freer development of society and public debate. In particular, controversial opinions can be expressed more openly, which benefits societal discourse, since such opinions are often especially disruptive or revolutionary and therefore frequently presented in unusual, new, and often unconventional ways. Furthermore, it would significantly reduce the workload of judicial authorities, especially regarding online insults, which currently burden them heavily and limit their ability to focus on more important tasks. However, there should still be limits — although very broad ones. Things like Holocaust denial or defamation should remain prohibited.

You're carving out exceptions that demolish your whole argument. If Holocaust denial crosses the line, why? Because it causes real harm—it weaponizes lies to delegitimize genocide victims. Once you admit *some* speech harms society enough to ban, you've already lost the principle. And "insults"? You're romanticizing cruelty. Systematic harassment campaigns don't spark revolution—they silence voices. Women leave social media after coordinated abuse, not to find themselves through debate. You've just hidden censorship behind judicial efficiency rather than justice. The real question: Who decides where your "broad limits" end? You, confidently. But tomorrow, it's someone else drawing the line differently. That's why consistent principles matter more than comfortable compromises.

So you acknowledge that drawing a line to determine whether a statement is harmful or not is completely impossible and incredibly subjective — yet you do exactly the same thing yourself by drawing your personal line at insults. You justify this by saying that insults can silence people, for example through coordinated harassment, but in doing so you argue against the very principles you yourself established.

You caught me—but there's a difference. I'm not arguing *for* a legal line; I'm exposing yours as incoherent. You want courts policing "insults" while protecting "revolutionary speech," but courts don't work that way. They need clear rules, and you haven't provided them. My point stands: once you criminalize Holocaust denial, you've admitted harm matters more than absolute freedom. So either accept that logic consistently—which means protecting harassment victims too—or abandon the exceptions entirely. You can't have both. Pick one position and defend it honestly instead of hiding behind "broad limits" that solve nothing.

Alright, I’m happy to engage with your proposal. In fact, I’m very torn on this question myself, but I tend to lean more toward absolute freedom of speech. However, I also ask that you don’t simply ignore parts of my original arguments. For example, what about the relief this would bring to the justice system? That would be something genuinely positive, wouldn’t it?

Fair point—but that's a terrible reason to protect speech. You're basically saying we should legalize drunk driving because it reduces court cases. Judicial burden isn't a principle; it's just convenience. If hate speech genuinely harms people, freeing up courts doesn't make it right. And if it doesn't harm people, then criminalization was wrong anyway—not because courts are busy, but because the speech was harmless. You're confusing two separate arguments: whether something *should* be illegal, and whether we have *resources* to enforce it. The real solution isn't abandoning hate speech laws—it's funding courts better. Efficiency arguments are just lazy escapes from the harder moral question.

**“Well, if you want answers to the moral question but insist on ignoring essential points like efficiency, practicality, and enforceability, then fine — even then, there is very little that speaks in favor of restricting free speech. One point I raised is a word you’ve used several times now: harm or harmful. In most countries, statements are considered insults — and therefore criminal offenses — when they violate a person’s dignity or honor and have no further purpose beyond that violation. So criticizing someone for making unwise decisions is allowed, but calling someone an ‘idiot’ without evidence or substantive context is forbidden. Often, it is also important that criticism is directed at a person’s actions rather than the person themselves: ‘You did this, and it was bad’ is allowed; ‘You are bad’ is not. If such a case occurs, the person who feels (supposedly) insulted must file a complaint. Supposedly is an extremely important word here, because — as we remember — one of the criteria is that an insult must violate a person’s dignity. But unlike murder, a car accident, or other objectively verifiable events, whether someone feels their dignity has been violated is absolutely impossible to prove. It is enough that others could perceive the statement as dignity‑violating. Could is another crucial word, because this too is extremely subjective. Additionally, third parties usually have little to no insight into the remaining criteria — for example, whether someone calls another person an idiot simply to hurt them, or whether they do so because they have worked with them for years and the person consistently performs poorly. In that case, the statement might actually fulfill criterion 2 (connection to substantive criticism) and criterion 3 (attack on the matter rather than the person). A person can, through persistent behavior, acquire characteristics or descriptions that create a substantive and personal connection — someone who fishes often becomes ‘a fisherman’; someone who repeatedly does idiotic things becomes ‘an idiot’. And here we encounter the same massive problem in all these points: the absolute subjectivity of everything involved. Courts can hardly evaluate these things reliably. And that’s without even mentioning additional factors like the current cultural climate, the evolution of language, shifting meanings of terms, or differences between cultures. All of these point to one thing: an incredible and unique level of subjectivity that no legal text or court ruling can meaningfully capture

You're right that dignity is subjective—but so is every law. "Reasonable person" standards, "excessive force," "unfair competition"—courts navigate subjectivity constantly. You're demanding impossible certainty from speech law while accepting it everywhere else. Your real argument is that subjectivity makes enforcement *hard*, not impossible. Yes, courts struggle. But struggling with context-dependent harm is literally their job. The fisherman becomes a fisherman through evidence. The idiot-caller's work history matters—discoverable facts, not magic. You're using subjectivity as a trump card to dodge the actual question: does dignity matter legally or not? If it does, courts figure it out messily. If it doesn't, say so.

Well, whether dignity plays a legal role or not is not a matter of opinion — in most democratic countries, it is simply a fact. And yes, that is actually highly problematic, because the term is not defined in most legal codes. That means that ‘dignity’ is interpreted according to whatever the majority of society happens to understand by it at a given time. This is why things like slavery, the absence of women’s voting rights, legal marital rape, or the lack of a minimum wage were once considered compatible with ‘human dignity’ — simply because past societies did not view these things as violations of dignity. Regarding your point about uncertainty in court proceedings: yes, in principle you’re right. But what fundamentally distinguishes an insult from crimes like murder, accidents, or theft is that not only is the process of determining what happened uncertain — the event itself is uncertain. If someone steals something, then something is objectively missing from the store. If someone commits murder, a person is objectively dead. During investigations or trials, it may turn out that the accused was innocent — but what remains undisputed is that something must have happened, because the result is real. Something must have happened to the stolen gold coins, even if it was a pigeon flying in and using them to build its nest. But an insult is uncertain in its very existence. It must have harmed someone — but whether that emotional harm actually occurred is completely unclear. Or it must at least appear harmful to a third party. That would be like someone standing in front of a store, seeing a person walk out who looks suspicious to them personally, and filing a theft report based solely on that — while investigators are denied access to the store to check whether anything was actually stolen. We would never allow this standard for any other crime.

You've built a clever trap, but it collapses under one fact: we already prosecute crimes with no physical evidence. Fraud, conspiracy, harassment, blackmail—all invisible harms. Juries weigh testimony about subjective impact constantly. Your "pigeon stealing gold" analogy fails because emotional harm *is* real. Harassment campaigns destroy careers and lives. The harm exists whether you can photograph it. Courts can't verify grief either, but we still prosecute manslaughter. The real issue isn't that insult laws are uniquely subjective. It's that you've decided *this* particular harm doesn't count as real enough to matter legally. But you won't admit that—you hide behind "impossibility" instead.