Essentially Contested Concepts: What is Hate?

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., hate, fairness, constitutional, legal, moral, good, evil, etc.), but not on the best realization or definition thereof. They are concepts the proper definition or use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper definitions or uses on the part of their users. These disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. The disputes are unresolvable, but unfortunately are quite common in politics. Disputes over essentially contested concepts cannot be resolved by anything other than compromise, an imperfect resolution, because the definitions are heavily influenced by personal cognitive and social factors such as morals, political ideology, and social- and self-identity.

A Washington Post article discusses whether the hate group list that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has compiled is fair, dangerous or otherwise detrimental. The article starts with a member of the Family Research Council (FRC) pointing out the bullet holes in the group's lobby. The FRC, a conservative Christian anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage advocacy and political lobbying group, is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. A deranged man with a gun came to kill people in the FRC because the FRC was on the SPLC hate list.

Is it fair or safe to identify groups like the FRC with the same language, hate group, as the Klu Klux Klan? What is the definition of hate in the context of politics?

The WaPo writes: “‘Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing. Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,’ Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.’”

Context: For context, the FRC operates ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which are set up in poor neighborhoods. From the outside, they appear to be medical centers that provide professional medical access to abortion services. These centers have been called unethical for deceiving pregnant women by applying pressure tactics that range from lying about abortion options, e.g., falsely telling a woman that abortion is illegal or unavailable, to exerting intense psychological pressure to prevent a woman from having an abortion. These centers often seek to delay long enough so that a woman is forced by law to give birth. People running crisis pregnancy centers typically have no formal medical training at all and instead are Christian activists in white lab coats trying to prevent abortions by any means possible short of illegal actions such as threats of physical violence.

In view of lies, deceit and misery that crisis pregnancy centers were inflicting on low income women who were being tricked into bearing a child, California passed a law “intended to compel crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to offer factual information about all options available to pregnant women and to disclose if a facility is unlicensed. . . . . NPCC asserts that 91% of unlicensed CPCs provided defective medical information such as a false link between abortion and breast cancer or suicide.”

What is hate? Do deceit-driven tactics related to abortion, like what the FRC and other groups engage in, amount to hate? Do other activities such as lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges to abortion or same-sex marriage amount to hate?

Hate (verb): to feel intense or passionate dislike for someone, a concept, e.g., the idea of abortion, or something.
Hate (noun): an intense or passionate dislike or loathing for someone, a concept or something.

Clearly, lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges are legal political activities. Can legal activities amount to hate? If it isn't hate, what can it more reasonably be called? Aggressive conservative or Christian activism? Immorality or unethical?

It appears that much or most of the activities the groups on the SPLC’s hate list amount to mostly legal activism infused with a rigid unwillingness to compromise. If one believes that, for politics in a liberal democracy, compromise is a core moral value and necessary for democracy to function properly (a concept or belief advocated here), then a refusal to compromise can be seen as immoral.

Is immorality the same as hate? If the definitions of hate given above are generally accepted as maybe incomplete but generally accurate enough, then it would logically seem that refusal to compromise alone will often or usually include a component of hate in it. Is that reasoning sound or flawed? Is compromise the only or best form of resolution for disputes over contested concepts?

The WaPo is right to raise this issue. A deranged man with a gun used the SPLC hate list to find a target for murder. That would seem to be no different than president Trump continually referring to journalists as ‘the enemy of the people’, thereby inciting a few people to begin to act to kill journalists. Is that hate?

If nothing else, one can see from the foregoing why essentially contested concepts lead to intractable disputes and how the disputed concepts can foster actions that lead to misery or even social conflict and outright murder. Essentially contested concepts can be dangerous because of the heavy cognitive (moral) and social (identity and social context) loads they carry. From that point of view, it is easy to see why (i) disagreements over essentially contested concepts are not resolvable, and (ii) compromise must necessarily be a pillar of peaceful, non-tyrant, democratic society.

B&B orig: 11/15/18