ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 asks one apparently straightforward question. What does the future hold for hate speech and hate speech laws, and will this be better or worse than today? We critically examine four kinds of pessimism. The first is that our focus on contextualism runs the risk of cultural relativism and so makes it harder to be critical about how a given country has defined and responded to the problem of hate speech. The second is that the relevant disputes are intractable, meaning that people who see the idea of hate speech as an extension of the dictatorship of liberal values will never come to accept hate speech laws. The third is that there is absolutely no reason to think that the use of hate speech among political figures will decrease in the future. The final kind of pessimism accepts that our predictions may come true but holds that it would actually be a bad thing if in the future political figures felt less able to use hate speech because of laws, rules or codes of conduct prohibiting them from doing so. We provide arguments and evidence against each of these lines of pessimism.
