Second time I see that and second time I think to myself “Isn’t that exactly what the paradox points at? Meaning that meme is completely useless?”
Tolerance is a moral or ethic, not a contract. Like other aspects of morality, it continues to apply to people who violate it, otherwise it would be legitimate to, e.g., lie to a liar, steal from a thief or, indeed, to murder a murderer.
If you don’t believe those responses are legitimate, you have to construct an argument as to why tolerance is a special case among the other morals.
The origin of “outlaw” didn’t mean someone was a bandit.
It meant they had broken the social contract, and as such were no longer protected under any laws
An outlaw didn’t avoid civilization because they’d be arrested, it was because everyone else could steal from them or even kill them, and face zero consequences for it.
They didn’t abide by the social contract, so others didn’t have to either
Yea, all it took was not paying your taxes.
Don’t pay your share, no protection of the law, seems pretty simple.
I wish it were an option nowadays, honestly. I’d make that bet in a heartbeat. Statistically id be so much safer I could make a case for my life insurance rates to drop. Statistically I am at my highest chance of death in the presence of a police officer, whether they’re in the area because of me or not, so even as a bystander. If I could cut that cord, it’s a no brainer. Also my car is getting 20 extra batteries dropped in it wired up in series for parking and pumping 240vdc to every metal part of the chassis. And my property will have a dozen armed sentry’s that will fire on anything that moves unless you got the optics for it to sense friendly, which I’ll just have implanted inconspicuously into a tattoo.
Certainly one possible lifestyle, however you could just participate in society instead.
So then those that tolerate the intolerance are also excluded from the contract, right?
Edit: this is a genuine question.
Also, what do you have to be willing to tolerate?
Do you have to tolerate people who are lobbying the government to lower the age of consent to 8 years old? Do you have to tolerate people who insist on having violent sex in public places? How about the local cannibal society that openly eats human flesh, but only from people who are willing to donate their bodies after they die, or who are willing to have limbs surgically removed to donate to the cause? What about the modern-day gladiator arena where volunteers battle to gruesome deaths in pursuit of fame and prizes?
It seems like if you’re intolerant of any of those things, you’re an intolerant, have broken the terms of the contract, and nobody has to tolerate you. But, while that might “solve the paradox”, it doesn’t seem like a very good place to live.
Did everyone involved give their informed consent with valid alternatives? Then yeah, go right ahead!
So, that’s the kind of world you want to live in?
Having the option is not being forced. Just because some people like spicy food doesn’t mean everyone is forced to eat it.
But everyone is required to tolerate people who want to have sex with children, people who want to have sex in public, people who want to eat human meat, etc. You couldn’t have laws against those things because that would be intolerant.
It’s reasonable to conclude that some people cannot consent to some things, particularly things they don’t understand. Sex with children, animals, and adults under some kinds of intoxication fall into this category.
Sex in public can work, if that public consents. Indeed there are some publics that do consent, usually small communities, but it does happen.
Consumption of human flesh is theoretically A-OK, it’s the obtaining of that flesh that is difficult. The dealing of human material outside of controlled channels can lead to the killing of people for money or power, which is why it’s illegal to buy or sell organs for transplants or research. With stakes this high, any compensation can be twisted into coercion. This, plus the risk of bioaccumulation and parasites, has led the consumption of human flesh to be a taboo, although exceptions do get made in extreme circumstances. As such, if the origin of such flesh can be confirmed to be uncoerced and not used for long-term sustenence, and this can be rigorously enforced, then I have no problem with it.
The allowing of things which may lead to disallowed things does depend on the ability of a community to understand the risks and adapt to reduce them. For example, Canada recently began practicing medically assisted dying for those who choose it, yet some doctors have already been criticised for pushing it unprompted instead of recommending treatment. I shudder to think what could happen if insurance companies could legally consider it a valid alternative.
The issue here is that some things can create an intolerance for some rights, without violating those rights to begin with. Where the line is drawn should depend on how strictly the line can be enforced, so while historically many lines were drawn very broadly, we have stronger social technology now, and we can free up areas near those lines. Should we spend the effort to have those thinner lines is another question, and usually depends on how useful that area is; for example stem cell testing could teach us a lot, but eating human flesh is very inefficient and possibly dangerous long-term.
If something causes intolerance, then we certainly should create laws against that intolerance. It’s usually simple to make the laws against the thing itself, but laws could be made that allow more things without allowing the intolerance. It can be a complicated matter, but one worth pursuing, otherwise everything would eventually end up outlawed.
some people cannot consent to some things, particularly things they don’t understand
But, where do you draw the line? Historically the age of consent has changed a lot. Maybe it should be that nobody under 30 can consent because their minds are still developing.
Sex in public can work, if that public consents
How do you determine if the public consents? What if some of the public consents and other public doesn’t?
Consumption of human flesh is theoretically A-OK,
According to whom?
If something causes intolerance, then we certainly should create laws against that intolerance
The point is, it’s all going to come down to lines a community decides based on a variety of things from religious influence, to culture, to infectious diseases, to healthcare systems, to population density, to all kinds of influences. It will be absolutely fine to be intolerant of someone who crosses one of those lines, because the community has decided that that’s where the lines are. On the other hand, it won’t be fine to be intolerant of someone who crosses what is a line for another society.
- No, because there’s a good argument to be made many 18 year olds are not mature enough yet to consent to life decisions, let alone 8. We just have to draw the line somewhere.
- If they have consent from everybody in that place, sure.
- See #2
- See #2. Though that might bring up other issues like encouraging violence, etc.
For #2, if you aren’t involved in the act, but don’t consent to witnessing it, then aren’t you just being intolerant?
If 9 people are dining at a table with 1 Nazi, how many Nazis are sitting at the table?
- Unless they poisoned the Nazi’s food and are just waiting to see the waterworks.
Ten,
Unless they poisoned the Nazi’s food and are just waiting to see the waterworks.
Then 1
It’s not that easy. Social contact theory can work when there’s a relatively objective standard like “physical violence” but you’ll often believe that the people you disagree with are being intolerant, and they’ll believe that you’re being intolerant. If the general rule is “I’ll only tolerate people if I’m convinced that they’re tolerant” then very soon no one will be tolerating anyone else.
With that said, I don’t think there’s a “paradox of tolerance” simply because tolerance is hard. The people talking about a paradox want to get credit for “tolerating” just the people they don’t mind having around, but you have to tolerate the people you hate, the people you think are a threat to you. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.
We get muddy when we move from “physical violence” to “the threat of physical violence”. It runs us into the “I’m not touching you” game on one end and Nextdoor paranoia on the other.
Is someone tolerant if they come right up to the line of what defines tolerance and acts like an asshole within the strict bounds of the law? Is someone intolerant when they violate (often unwittingly) some local rule of decorum or social taboo? Is someone intolerant if they are startled into a panic? What if they conspire to sow panic without actually getting their hands dirty inflicting harm? If we’re the victim of violence from an unknown source, what then? If we’re the victim of violence that we falsely attribute, are we intolerant? Is the falsely accused subject now flagged as intolerant?
The people talking about a paradox want to get credit for “tolerating” just the people they don’t mind having around, but you have to tolerate the people you hate, the people you think are a threat to you. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.
More broadly, how do you tolerate someone or something you don’t know or understand? How do you deal with perception bias?
I’m reminded of growing up in the 90s and having people freak out over “loud rap music”. The media bias against young black men and their taste in music is very clearly an example of intolerance. But the dialogue of the era framed playing this music (particularly the edgy stuff like NWA or Biggy) as itself an act of intolerance.
How do you square that contradiction? Who gets to adjudicate the offender and the offended? What gets defined as tolerable?
OP’s image doesn’t really set that out.
This all makes sense when you remember that the underlying topic here is bigotry. Ergo, tolerance is defined in those terms. Not in the more general terms.
The right uses the “paradox of tolerance” to hide what this is ultimately about, a common tactic.
It isn’t about tolerating all ideas. It is about tolerating groups of people different from yourself.
Put another way, if society has a rule “don’t be a bigot” and then someone is a bigot and gets in trouble, is society bigoted against bigots? No. Of course not. Thinking that would be asinine. Society is enforcing rules against bigotry.
Bigotry is not a synonym for Racism. Bigotry is maintaining a personal opinion or prejudice even when holding that opinion or prejudice is unreasonable.
Can “Bigotry” include someones belief that a group of people are inferior because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference ? Yes it can but it’s so much broader than that.
Someone can also be a Bigot by holding the opinion that only Apple MacBooks should be allowed on Airplanes because they are the only ones with safe enough batteries and then refusing to change that opinion when presented with contrary evidence.
Bigotry isn’t about people, it’s about ideas, opinions, and prejudices all of which can be positive or negative on literally anything at all.
We have the “Paradox of Tolerance” because if we tolerate anything, including intolerance, then we have intolerance. If won’t tolerate intolerance then we also have intolerance. It’s that simple and it’s also vastly over blown.
What we need to do is reject the unspoken implication that we must have a perfectly tolerant Society. Some amount of intolerance needs to exist but only so far as it has a positive outcome. Intolerance of racism is a good example, intolerance of non-defensive violence is another.
Somebody who teaches rhetoric sat through multiple debates about the so-called paradox of tolerance without thinking about the social contract once? Maybe I should just teach, I’m also incompetent at everything I do.
Having worked in public education for nearly a decade now, I absolutely hate your response and how much it validates those entitled parents who call my coworkers overpaid babysitters.
On the other hand, I hate even more the fact that your comment perfectly represents the career choices of about 7-10% of the teachers I know. That’s far too high a number of people who decided to influence the life-path of children because they figured it’s easy if you’re complacent and callous enough.
Don’t like to bash on teachers, but I have to agree.
there is no Paradox to disappear, nor there is a solution, a Paradox is a paradox, this is like trying to solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma with some clever workaround.
just no.
Let’s posit a society is totally tolerant, you have a tolerant society
if someone starts to act intolerant, you have to options:
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If you tolerate it, then you now have intolerance in your society.
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If you don’t tolerate it, or put it another way you are intolerant towards there intolerance and remove them from your society, then you now have still have intolerance in your society.
that’s it, that’s the paradox, it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.
This also doesn’t mean that not tolerating nazis and someone not tolerating the existence of PoCs for example is the same thing.
it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.
There is, and in mathematics we’d define it as Closure. We define a set such that operations on members of the set will always reproduce new members of the set. The problem with applying this logic to a sociological environment is that - in practice - what we’re doing is defining “personhood” as membership in the closed “tolerant” set. Dehumanizing anyone outside the tolerant group is not - I suspect - what the OP was hoping to achieve.
That gets us to the “trivial” solution to the paradox of tolerance, which is to kill everyone. Alternatively, to kill everyone except yourself or to kill everyone who isn’t in your tolerance set. Viola! Everyone can express perfect tolerance because the only people alive are the folks who share that same sense of perfect tolerance. We might call this a “Final Solution” to the problem of tolerance.
But like many strictly logical and mathematical approaches to resolving social contradictions, it isn’t in any way practical or particularly ethical. It is a brute force approach to solving what is, at its heart, a problem of interpersonal perception, accrued bias, and political manipulation.
The real problem of intolerance comes down to the old Dunbar’s Number, the upper limit that human brains can process additional individuals as people worthy of empathy. This is a biological limit, not a logical one. And it produces a whole host of knock-on effects that the simple logical paradox doesn’t engage with.
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So, where do we all stand on the “do unto others as you would have others do on to you” philosophy?
That sentiment is nice and all, but considering that a nontrivial percentage of conservatives literally want to murder me for my gender identity, I’m not going to treat those people the way I would want to be treated
That sentiment is nice and all,
That sentiment, if followed by everyone, would make for a really good and peaceful world to live in. It’s something we should all strive for.
conservatives literally want to murder me
I doubt the majority of conservatives would want to literally murder you.
There are always a few crazies on either end that we all have to deal with.
for my gender identity,
My suggestion would be to live somewhere where the majority of the people you live amongst don’t give a flying f about your gender identity and will not harass you about it.
And then work politically for change, maybe even running for office.
And if you can’t move, try to find others with the same circumstances as you and network with them, work together, and try to affect change as a group.
I’m not going to treat those people the way I would want to be treated
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Human beings are easy to ramp up into destruction, and hard to keep passive into peace.
The reality is we can’t all just go and do what we want, whenever we want, we have an ethical and social contract with each other that we all need to adhere to.
When that is not done, war and death happens.
Never said they all want to murder me, you just conveniently left that part out so you could argue against a position I didn’t take.
The ones that do want to murder me don’t deserve the same treatment as those who do. I’d recommend reading eg https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d637.
As for moving, I’m absolutely not about to allow right-wingers to control my life to that extent that I’d move to some other country.
Never said they all want to murder me
conservatives literally want to murder me
I’ve never seen anything of any substance in the (so-called) “Paradox Of Tolerance.”
“Tolerance” is of no use to me or anyone else - we don’t owe people “tolerance,” we owe each other mutual respect. If you are dead-set on proving yourself unwilling of giving mutual respect (such as, for instance, fascists or capitalists) you disqualify yourself from that paradigm - zero “paradoxes” required.
You just used different words to describe exactly the same thing as the OP.
No, actually. They rephrased it in a way that results in the opposite meaning. First they lowered the stakes from “we will not tolerate you in our society” to “mutual respect” which is very weak and vague language. Mutual respect is something fascists love both giving and receiving. Superficial civility is how they play the game. While they gain influence in a government they use police power to protect themselves from and later actively suppress protestors and activists while extolling the virtues of civility and the ‘marketplace of ideas’.
What @masquenox@lemmy.ml said is exactly what I would expect a fascist would.
Tolerance is nonsensical bullcrap whose only purpose is mental masturbation.
There are things I like and there are things I don’t like, deal with it. Can’t deal with it? Maybe don’t ask me anything and I won’t give you answers that might hurt you.
The only thing that matters is basic human decency. Also I can’t match everyone’s values, me being truthful matters more to me than your feelings do and I won’t lie that I like X when I hate X. The common decency comes in like this - I won’t tell you I hate X if you didn’t ask. This is important in public jobs like medical care, I guess.
If anything, the tolerance-pushing crowd is most intolerant one. You apparently MUST like X even if you hate X and if you hate X you in fact are wrong, which is retarded. I will like and hate whatever I want, fuck you. Streisand effect is also at play. There possibly exist things I absolutely hate but I’m not aware of and it’s not like I go outside looking for people to harrass for everything they do in their life.
Edit: When I made this comment, his only said
Tolerance is nonsensical bullcrap whose only purpose is mental masturbation.
There are things I like and there are things I don’t like, deal with it. Can’t deal with it? Maybe don’t ask me anything and I won’t give you answers that might hurt you.
He put the rest there to try to make it less shitty
End edit
You sound like someone who doesn’t understand the mutual benefit of society in general.
Like sure, have your intolerance. Tell people exactly how you feel without a filter and then tell them to fuck off right after. No one is making you participate in the social contract. The point is that it’s a two way street, and you’re never going to be the guy receiving the benefit of the doubt.
Just don’t be surprised when the only people who want your company are other intolerant assholes like you.
Absolutely relevant for religion and especially muslims.
