How Hate Speech Inflicts Violence
Neuroscience reveals how speech enables rights abuses by blocking empathy for targets.
This book combines the neuroscience of empathy, cognitive neuroscience of language, linguistics and jurisprudence to provide an empirically based theory that frequent exposure to the fascist’s or demagogue’s dehumanizing rhetoric diminishes public empathy for targeted groups so as to politically and emotionally enable violence and rights abuses against them.
“Neurobiological Legal Theory: Dehumanizing Hate Speech Facilitates Fascism, is a wonderfully provocative, persuasive, and accessible new book arguing for the regulation in the United States of dehumanizing hate speech. A must read for anyone interested in how such speech causes serious injuries both to outlier groups and to our Country as a whole by increasing the potential for fascism.”
- Professor Eric J. Segall, Georgia State University
About this Book:
This book provides a remarkable synthesis of scholarship across diverse fields of inquiry, including jurisprudence, neuroscience, history, philosophy, psychology, biosemiotics, linguistics, the emerging field of artificial intelligence, and many others. Hate speech is proliferating in the United States and around the world, in the political arena and social media, fueling a rise of populist fascism that threatens rights based constitutional democracy. This book sheds light on how we think and work together, for good or ill. It illuminates a path forward for society to traverse to reach a more prosperous level of cooperative endeavor.
More specifically, it provides an incredibly timely and compelling argument for the need to legally regulate explicit dehumanizing rhetoric in our public discourse, particularly by political leaders. It explains how frequent passive exposure to such language disrupts the neurophysiologic mechanisms which produce healthy and adaptive empathy, empathy which is required for civilization to move forward.
"This timely must-read draws on neurological, legal, linguistic, and historical studies collectively pointing in the same direction: repeated exposure to hate speech short-circuits critical thinking, rewiring the brain with dehumanizing associations that threaten a descent into fascism. The authors advocate regulation of such hate speech to safeguard democracy."
- Professor Laura A. Janda, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
"Who should count as a person under law? In this highly original and accessible contribution, Murrow and Murrow address dehumanization from the nexus of neurobiology, psychology, linguistics, and jurisprudence. Neurobiological Legal Theory is a must-read for anyone interested in dehumanization, its toxic effects in the current political climate, or its relevance to legal theory. Don't miss it!"
- David Livingstone Smith, author of Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization