Hate Speech: Enthymemes, Fallacies and Chilling Effects

Abstract

Hate-speech regulation is often justified within deliberative theories of democracy as a means to protect equality and public reason, yet its application frequently relies on open-ended formulations that invite moral evaluation. This article examines how such indeterminacy enables the strategic use of hate-speech accusations to silence political disagreement. Combining legal semiotics, criminal law theory and rhetorical analysis, it shows how the structural expansion of criminal law — from the violation of concrete subjective rights to the protection of abstract collective goods — transforms hate-speech norms into instruments of moral evaluation, functioning as a moral machine. The article introduces the concept of the Hate Speech Fallacy: a recurrent pattern in which a contested position is reclassified as hatred through the attribution of unfavorable implicit premises via enthymeme, shifting assessment from argumentative merit to normative stigma. Distinguishing this fallacy from the legitimate regulation of dehumanizing expression tied to historically specific trajectories of violence and state capacity, the article proposes a five-criteria diagnostic heuristic to identify fallacious uses. It argues that evaluating hate-speech regimes requires attention not only to their aims, but to the semiotic processes by which meaning is constructed and stabilized in practice.