What is the “paradox of tolerance” and is it legit?
In: 1208
To be more concrete, if you really want, say, gay people in your community spaces, you can’t be tolerant of people spouting off about how gay people should be burned alive.
Or, since people really aim for acceptance nowadays over mere tolerance; you can’t both accept gay people and those who openly want to murder them. They aren’t going to happily co-exist. A community has to choose.
There is a difference between being tolerant of, say, criticism of the powerful, or criticism of the government, and being tolerant of eliminationist rhetoric towards individuals in the community. The “paradox of tolerance” is the claim that it is ethically impossible not to have both. If you can acknowledge that those two stances do not have the same validity, then there is no paradox.
Latest Answers