I am not particularly knowledgeable about the subject of hate speech. I am not a philosopher at all. Yet Peter Molnar has pursued me persistently to contribute to this project. I could not understand why he kept calling me up and sending me emails telling me I should speak on a subject I know nothing about. I finally realized that the answer had to be that I once bumped into him at Washington Square Park and we had a conversation about hate speech.

That conversation took us back to the mid-1990s, when I heard Ronald Dworkin lecture in Budapest. Dworkin was speaking, of course, a few hundred miles away from the Balkan tragedy, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed on the basis of violent hate ideologies, and on a continent in which a hundred million people were killed in that century on the basis of violent hate ideologies. My recollection is that he argued for total freedom to express hatred of other people, without considering this context.