ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
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Warner asks “What happened to the tolerant left?”
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Elle replies, smiling “Who said we were tolerant?”
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Warner continues “I thought you were supposed to be tolerant of all beliefs!”
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Elle looks confused “Why would we tolerate bigotry, inequity, or oppression?”
The whole idea that Tolerance is a Social Contract seems to be what works best: One is Tolerant towards others who are Tolerant and those who are not Tolerant are breaking the Social Contract of Tolerance and thus are not entitled to be the recipients of Tolerance from others.
Tolerance as a Principle doesn’t work well exactly because of the Paradox Of Tolerance which is that by Tolerating the Intolerant one is causing there to be less Tolerance since the Intolerant when their actions are tolerated will spread Intolerance (as painfully demonstrated in Present day America, especially with Trump).
The paradox of tolerance doesn’t lead to a unique conclusion. Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions. I favor John Rawls’:
Accordingly, constraining some liberties such as freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one’s mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty. However, violence or violations of rights & regulations could justifiably be constrained.
I was talking only about the individual tolerating or not the intolerant (in ways such as speaking or not against them).
As soon as Force is also thrown into the equation (which what a Society would use to stop the intolerant) it’s a whole different thing because Force itself has its own much more complex moral framework.
It’s easy to see the conundrum that one gets around using Force against intolerance by considering that it wouldn’t be acceptable to kill somebody (an extreme use of Force) for merely saying something deemed racist. If there’s an unacceptable use of Force against the intolerant, then is there one which is acceptable and if there is, were does the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable lie in the use of Force against intolerance and who gets to set it?
Add Force into the equation and it’s just not the same thing as an individual’s moral guidance for nonviolent reactions against nonviolent intolerance.
I don’t see how that follows: spell out the logic?
I’m mostly confused, because I was thinking of violence/force used by the intolerant for intolerant acts: that can be justifiably constrained.
Legal constraint implies force by legal authorities: violators go to jail or get legal penalties.
Tolerance by itself already does not tolerate harming non-consenting adults, quite independently of the agressor being an intolerant or not.
Further, violent intolerance is already covered by the rules against violence in general (there is a case to be made about the punishment for intolerant violence being greater than for similar violence which is not intolerant, but I’m not going into that here).
I was only talking about personal acts in the framework of non-violence, for example speaking out or not against non-violent displays of intolerance, allowing the intolerant to use a space you control to spread their intolerance in a non-violent way and so on.
So yeah, as soon as Force (be it via a social structure for the exercise of Force such as the Law or outside such structures) is considered against non-violent displays of intolerance, merelly Tolerance as a Social Contract does not suffice to cover it since the initiation of violence against other human beings who are not being violent comes with its own rules of morality.
I never liked the analogy of a social contract. A contract is something that people agree on. Most of society is just people going through life fairly passively, and inheriting the values of those around them.
A lot of hate comes from ignorance, whether taught or absorbed from someone’s surroundings. Not because they are opting out of some kind of previously agreed upon contract. I think that’s an important thing to recognise.
The paradox of tolerance is a hypothetical idea of complete tolerance, which I’m not sure ever exists in humans in the real world.
The concept of a “social contract” is regularly used to deny rights to prisoners.
It’s not necessary, even to address the “paradox of tolerance”, it’s actively harmful, and it’s erroneous anyway (contracts are necessarily consensual[1], but exceptionally few people get to make a choice about the society they live in)
Yes, this criteria invalidates a lot of modern contracts in the US especially around tech, but this is largely a failure of the judicial system. Legislation still makes it clear that contracts must be consensual in the US and other western countries, and it often goes further in that they must be reciprocal. ↩︎