Counterspeech and Ordinary Citizens: How? When?

Abstract

Central to the still-nascent normative literature on counterspeech is the widespread belief that citizens should engage discursively with haters and the effects of hate speech. It is also increasingly clear that discursive engagement with intolerant members of society should be understood as a continuous and extended series of different and connected actions. Much less has been said about the ways that attempts in persuasion and direct responses to hate speech relate to one another and about when specific counterspeech actions should happen. This essay advances a more expansive and refined account of counterspeech, which is understood as a combination of continuous discursive engagement with intolerant members of society and acts of distancing from haters (shaming, correcting falsehoods, “Not in my name” campaigns, protests, and forms of discursive exit). After reconsidering discursive agency distribution (that is, who is an active participant, how, and when) around public hate speech, I show that continuous discursive engagement with intolerant members of society should be interrupted by visible acts of distancing when haters make hateful representative claims.

Can Rawlsian Containment of Hateful Viewpoints Be Effective?

“…This article does not capture several of such considerations. I recognise that other variables, such as reduction in the authority of speakers (Wilson and Kiper 2020: 99), receptiveness of the audience (Lepoutre 2019;Fumagalli 2021), and audience capacity to deal with the negative effects of hate speech (Tirrell 2018), should go into assessing the effectiveness of containment practices. Without studying the context of speech, it remains difficult to predict how soft and harsh containment practices can in themselves empower the audience and, therefore, lead to a reduction in the number of people supporting (and advocating for) hateful viewpoints.…”

“…Philosophical defences of soft containment in the Rawlsian tradition echo arguments for counterspeech, understood as discursive actions that citizens, and, as we have just seen, states, take in the first person to undermine offensive or dangerous communicative acts and the proliferation of hateful viewpoints (Fumagalli 2021;Howard 2021). Seen through such lenses, continuous discursive engagement with citizens who support hateful viewpoints is meant to alter the conversational context to the point that it becomes difficult for hateful viewpoints to be transmitted from one citizen to another.…”

“…On the other side, listeners can contribute to the proliferation of hateful viewpoints in at least two ways. First, they may provide speakers with inputs about what ought to be said in a certain context (Fumagalli 2021). Second, hearers may let explicit hateful statements and coded expressions go through (Langton 2018, Maitra 2012.…”

“…While bans have an impact mainly on public speakers and mainly after the fact and therefore, as Lepoutre (2019: 180-81) has recently argued, are unlikely to succeed in countering deep-rooted attitudes, persuasion, which is a continuous process and is extended over time, can precede and follow single hate speech events and therefore affect conditions for uptake (Fumagalli 2021;Lepoutre 2019;Tirrell 2018). Yet, compared with arguments for hate speech bans, it is more difficult to evaluate whether the presence of an imperfect duty of pressure can in itself decrease the number of citizens who, both as speakers and addressees, play a role in the proliferation of hateful viewpoints and can in itself limit the number of people directly or indirectly exposed to discursive engagement.…”

“…So far, demonstrating the immediate positive effect of sustained discursive engagement with citizens displaying different kinds of unreasonableness has proven to be very difficult. There is an increasingly widespread feeling that counterspeech might be effective in the long run, but we are very far from having conclusive evidence (Fumagalli 2021;Howard 2021;Lepoutre 2019;Tirrell 2018). We know that wholesale changes in attitudes are rare: attitudes evolve slowly, develop with the accumulation of experience, and become nuanced over time (Dovidio and Kawakami and Gaertner 2000).…”