“Can Speech Kill?” was the title question to last week’s fascinating show with Lynne Tirrell. The obvious answer, it seems, should be:yes, but not directly.

除非魔法存在，说几句话本身不会导致一个人倒地而死。但在两种情况下，谈话显然会导致死亡，甚至被视为谋杀。首先，正如一位来电者指出的那样，是下命令。如果有人命令下属去杀人，而下属这么做了，那么上级也犯了谋杀罪。Second—which wasn’t discussed on the show—one canhelp故意向意图杀人的人提供信息，从而实施谋杀。如果你想杀琼斯如果我知道了，告诉了你琼斯的下落，我的话就会帮你杀人。在这两种情况下，单词都是kill，但不是直接杀死;相反，它们传播的信息煽动或使一个人(使用任何暴力工具)杀死另一个人。

But Tirrell and our two hosts, Ken Taylor and Josh Landy, weren’t focused on the obvious cases. They were focused on hate speech, Tirrell’s area of active research, which is what made the show philosophically interesting. If one person engages in hate speech against another—using racial slurs or de-humanizing language such as “cockroaches” or “rats”—can that language be counted as killing or contributing to killing other people?

Unlike in the cases of direct order or knowingly informing a murderer, it’s not obvious here that the answer is yes. But a case that it is, as discussed on the show, can be built by considering the role of propagandistic hate speech in genocides, such as in Nazi Germany or Rwanda in 1994.Der Stürmer, for example, was a widely-read anti-Semitic publication that ran in Germany starting in 1923 and going through the end of WWII; its pages were full of slanders, caricatures, and calls for extermination of Jews, which arguably facilitated the holocaust. In Rwanda, the most prominent hate speech outlet during the genocide was the private radio station Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), which regularly called for a “final war” to “exterminate the cockroaches”—that is, the ethnic Tutsis. And as中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播contributor David Livingstone Smith would point out, such dehumanizing language removes psychological resistance to, and even motivates, mass killing.

Staunch free speech advocates, however, balk at such arguments. While granting that direct orders to kill or deliberately informing a known murderer constitute illegal acts (the “obvious” cases), a free speech activist would maintain that, in the propaganda/hate speech cases, it’s the killer who kills and not the talker. After all, in cases of hate speech, the physical killer still has to make a choice and is under nocompulsionfrom the propagandist, however horrible the speech may be.

两个论点都对吗?

My goal here is to point out an uncomfortable truth. It seems to me that there exists—both conceptually and in actuality—a messy continuum between cases where a speaker is obviously a murderer in virtue of using certain words and cases where a speaker, though saying bad things, can’t be assigned blame for anyone’s death. The messiness of this continuum, furthermore, fuels the contentiousness of the issue by making it hard to find a stable or clear solution.

这是连续的。(为了清晰起见，这个版本是虚构的，但我认为，要找到与连续体上不同点对应的真实案例并不太难。)

First, consider a man with robot that wields a knife. Suppose the robot is programmed with speech recognition technology. The robot recognizes imperative sentences of the form “Kill [NAME]” and responds by seeking the person whose name was used and stabbing them to death. Clearly, if the man knowingly utters “Kill Frank Jones” and the robot goes and stabs Frank Jones to death, then the man has committed murder by speaking. The words were lethal.

Second, consider a woman with a similar robot, which also has a knife and speech recognition software. But this robot doesn’t just recognize imperatives. This one also recognizes declarative sentences of the form “[NAME] is a cockroach.” This robot responds then in the same way as the first; that is, it goes and stabs the named person to death. Obviously, if the woman knowingly utters “Frank Jones is a cockroach” in the presence of the robot and Frank Jones gets stabbed to death, the woman has committed murder.

第三，假设一个男人有一个和女人一样的机器人——除了一点不同:这次的机器人是概率的。在机器人面前说“弗兰克·琼斯是一只蟑螂”并不能保证机器人就会去刺弗兰克·琼斯;相反，它让机器人进入一种状态，有35%的几率过渡到它准备刺死弗兰克·琼斯的状态。在这里，我们仍然可以清楚地看到，如果这个人在机器人面前故意说出“弗兰克·琼斯是一只蟑螂”，然后弗兰克·琼斯就被机器人杀死了，这个人就是通过说出这些话谋杀了弗兰克·琼斯。但是，如果这个人对机器人说了这些话，机器人没有转变成杀人的状态呢?或者如果几率远低于35%——比如说0.1%呢?

第四，想想一个女人，她有一群挥舞着刀的语音识别机器人，它们不仅能理解个人名字;they also processethnicitynames. Each robot, on processing the sentence “[ETHNICITY NAME]s are cockroaches” transitions into a state where it is somewhat more likely to go out and kill a random person of that ethnicity. But let’s add that the woman is onlyguessingat what the probability change is and has no idea which particular person or people would be killed. Still, I think it’s obvious that the woman has murdered by speech, if she utters, say, “Tutsis are cockroaches” in the presence of the robots and they go out and kill one or more Tutsis.

Fifth, replace the robots from the last example with people who undergo an increase in likelihood of killing by way of experiencingincreased motivation杀死。这些(潜在的)杀人的听众仍然有他们自己的目标和动机，但这些动机被特定说话者的句子所推动和拉动，如“[种族名称]是蟑螂。”

Sixth, replace the individual speaker with a large group of people who are saying “[ETHNICITY NAME]s are cockroaches,” no single one of whom issufficientto increase the likelihood that other people go out and kill, but where the existence of agroup of voicesis sufficient to increase other people’s motivations to kill. In such a case, can we say that the speech of anyoneperson in thisgroup声音是致命的?

This sixth spot on the continuum, arguably, is a simplified approximation of the situations for most of the propagandists and hate speech mongers in Nazi Germany and in 1994 Rwanda.

So we might at this point reason as follows. Since the hate speech in Nazi Germany and Rwanda occupies the sixth spot on the continuum, and since the sixth spot on the continuum bears obvious structural parallels to positions 1-5, where speech was more clearly murderous, the propagandists in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda also count as having murdered by their words.

I actually think that argument (or a filled-in version of it) is more or less right, and for that reason I agree with Tirrell. But we also start to see why this is an intellectually uncomfortable territory, for we could easily continue along the continuum to a point where, though someone is speaking in a deplorable fashion, that person can’t be said to have murdered by words.

Somewhere farther along the continuum, say then因此，没有人会增加任何人因为说出种族诋毁而被杀害的可能性，因为当时的社会中没有人是出于种族仇恨而杀人的。However, the following counterfactual is true at spotn:if there were a chorus of many people uttering such slurs, then the likelihood of someone’s being killed for their ethnicity would go up. Now say (withoutthe antecedent of that counterfactual being true) someone in situationnutters a slur about an ethnicity. Two things to me at this point seem true. First, it’s still bad; slurs are ugly and demeaning, even if no one is at risk of being killed. Second, such speech at spotnis not lethal. Why not? Because in context, there is no chance of its causing someone to die. (Furthermore, labeling such speech at position n “murderous” would dilute the category of interest [lethal speech] to the point where it’s uninformative.)

So the pendulum swings the other way. Someone might just as well trace a line from thenth spot to the sixth spot and say, “See, because the sixth spot resemblesn在各种情况下，发生在第6点的言论也不应该被视为致命的。”I myself would reject such an argument, and in arguing for such a rejection, I’d point to morally relevant differences between spotnand the sixth spot.

But engaging that argument is not the point of this blog. The point is to show why this is a difficult problem—to highlight the complexity of the problem space. We could just as well extend the continuum out in multiple directions along multiple dimensions. And that would further show that there are nocleandividing lines between “obvious” cases and the non-obvious ones. Nor is this multi-dimensional continuum merely hypothetical. Note, for example, that the radio voices on RTLM didn’t just call Tutsis “cockroaches.” They also said things such as “they must be exterminated” (which resembles an order) and gave information as to the whereabouts of Tutsis in ways that enabled the executors of the genocide to go and find them (which constitutes knowingly informing a murderer). We could just as well construct continua from those cases to other bad but non-lethal ones—and then back to direct orders and targeted lethal informing. These continua also won’t have bright lines.

These theoretical difficulties bleed over into practical difficulties. Free speech and preservation of life are both, in their own ways, sacred values. And sacred values seem to demand clear, bright lines in order to protect and preserve them. The existence of the sort of continua I’ve pointed out here guarantees that it will never be obvious where the lines around the sacred values should be drawn; there will always be an element of the arbitrary. That’s our practical and intellectual predicament.

My own approach, if I could choose, would be similar to the approach to speech taken in present day Germany. In Germany, speech generally is free, but hate speech (such as denying the holocaust) and other speech inciting ethnic violence are against the law. This approach recognizes the lethal danger of contained in some forms of speech, while doing very little that would inhibit the free flow of information, which is crucial to democracy. I find it ironic yet strangely illuminating that this reasonably effective approach to the problem (as much as could be hoped) should have been pioneered in a country in which speech, historically, proved to have its most lethal powers. I hope we never stop learning from that example. Speech can kill, even if not directly.

Relevant links:

Last week’s show://www.f8r7.com/shows/can-speech-kill

Lynne Tirrell:https://philosophy.uconn.edu/2017/07/25/welcome-lynne-tirrell/

David Livingstone Smith’s book,Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others:https://www.davidlivingstonesmith.com/project-09

BBC reporting on Rwandan radio propaganda:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm

OnDer Stürmer:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stürmer

On Germany’s current law against hate speech:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung

On recent development in German hate speech legislation:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html