In Chapter 8, I presented a simple, two-step argument in defense of hate crime laws: hate crimes are worse than ordinary crimes, worse crimes merit greater punishment, so hate crimes merit greater punishment. I noted that many people who oppose hate speech restrictions are led to oppose hate crime laws for the same sorts of reasons, acknowledged that this “thought police” objection to hate crime laws is considerably stronger than it may at first appear to be, but argued that in the end the objection fails to undermine the case for hate crime laws. Let’s now suppose that I was right about this. Even if I was right, hate crime laws might still be objectionable for some other reason. So in this chapter, I’ll consider and respond to other objections that people have raised against such laws. I’ll conclude that none of them are successful, either.

What’s Hate Got To Do With It?

Step one of my simple argument for hate crime laws maintains that hate crimes are worse than the ordinary crimes that they otherwise resemble. A number of people have raised doubts about this step of the argument. It isn’t necessarily that their intuitions about such crimes are different from mine. As far as I can tell, even many critics of hate crime laws have the same sort of fundamental response that I have: the arsonist who targets a house because a black family lives in it does something worse than the arsonist who strikes at random. But while they may share my intuitive reaction to such cases, these critics aren’t satisfied with letting a case for hate crime laws rest on such reactions. Instead, they demand a further argument of some sort, an argument that doesn’t simply establish that we tend to think that hate crimes are worse than ordinary crimes, but that explains why they are worse. More specifically, they demand an argument that identifies some property that distinguishes hate crimes from ordinary crimes and that can plausibly be used to show that hate crimes are worse in a manner that’s consistent with other things we commonly believe about the relative severity of crimes. For a variety of reasons, these critics are skeptical about the viability of such an argument. And, for a variety of reasons, I’m not. In fact, I think there are two distinct arguments that can plausibly be given to justify the conclusion that hate crimes are worse than the ordinary crimes that they otherwise resemble.