What is the “paradox of tolerance” and is it legit?
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“Tolerance” as used here is the position that we should peacefully accept a wide variety of viewpoints among our neighbors, even those we do not agree with. For instance, people of different religious faiths are certainly able to live and work side-by-side. They are able to take the position that their own religion is between themselves and whatever metaphysical power they believe in, and that their neighbors’ religion is none of their business. “Convert or die” is a choice they sometimes make instead.
The thing is, “tolerance” is also a viewpoint our neighbors might not share. Your neighbor might firmly believe his religion instructs him not to live in peace with followers of other religions. This is the paradox. According to the doctrine of tolerance, we are supposed to understand that this neighbor’s beliefs are none of our business, but in this case tolerating the belief might seem to entail tolerating abuse at the hands of your neighbor. This is usually referred to as “tolerance of intolerance.”
This becomes a particularly thorny subject because, particularly in troll-heavy online threads, the intolerant can be extremely dishonest about weaponizing the doctrine of tolerance against their opponents. They don’t believe in a fair fight, but they believe *you* believe in a fair fight, and they will loudly and publicly play the victim to shame you into a defensive posture while they set up the next sucker punch. Followed to its furthest implications, this seems to entail that intolerance always “wins” over tolerance.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the question, “is it legit,” but I’ll take a stab: Certainly the rhetorical strategy exists, and is widely used to confuse the issues. This is because it sadly often works. You can muddy the thinking and arguments of a person of good will by introducing doubts about their own commitment to tolerance of other viewpoints, and you can win points with a sympathetic audience by suggesting an opponent’s hypocrisy. On the other hand, in my opinion the paradox is rhetorical, not ethical. I can’t think of a moral theory that can’t be reduced to absurdity by strict absolutism, and in a debate *you* don’t get to tell *me* where the boundaries of my values lie. If I state a principle, I am not obligated to ride that principle into the grave for your benefit just because you can think of a way for me to do so. Neither am I required to help you deflect the debate into a sidebar about my the precise architecture of my own ethical framework.
The trick here is, many people have only thought about the “happy path” applications of their values: what practical benefits arise from adhering to certain principles? They are prepared to cite these benefits in defense of their values, but not prepared for a Socratic inquiry into the limits and consequences of those values. They might even believe they are strictly adhering to those principles, simply because they have not examined the boundary cases themselves. This isn’t an ethical weakness—confirmation bias is very human—but it is a rhetorical weakness if you’re trying to argue from those principles, particularly with a bad-faith opponent.
If you’ll indulge some philosophical speculation, the reason we form principles is that making the best ethical decision is often extremely difficult in the heat of present circumstances, but rationally we understand that making good ethical decisions (to use an extremely broad brush) makes the world a better place, so we form rules in advance that make decisions for us before the difficult situation arises. I have a personal principle, “if you break something in somebody else’s house, you should always tell them immediately and offer to make it right,” but I have that principle because in the moment it always seems like it would be easier to just walk away quietly. Sometimes societies codify such principles and call them “laws,” which require some behaviors and prohibit others.
The principle is a heuristic that spares us agonizing over difficult ethical decisions, and encourages us to make reasonable sacrifices in service of a greater good, but what happens when the sacrifice is not reasonable, or the greater good not great or good enough? At best the principle is an approximation of morality, not morality itself. Morality itself is a complex and still poorly understood balancing act of competing rights, harms and benefits, and no axiomatic system has successfully captured it in a way that always jibes with our moral intuitions. Thought experiments like the famous “trolley problem” are great for highlighting this: many answers are defensible by appeal to particular principles, but none of them is unequivocally correct. Sometimes we’re still just stuck doing the best we can and dealing with the consequences. If a principle exists to minimize harm, then no one is required to adhere to that principle past a point where it causes harm instead.
The law (at least in modern liberal nations) tends to have a very specific approach to this sort of thing: Beliefs are none of the State’s business. Actions are, and particularly the harms that result from actions. If your neighbor is a member of a cult with a doctrine of human sacrifice, their belief in the moral righteousness of human sacrifice is not the problem. Actually performing (or, to some extent, promoting) human sacrifice is the problem. You have a right to live peaceably, not afraid in your own home. The State often has an overarching goal that everyone has both a right and an obligation to live peaceably. This is a position defended not just on ethical grounds, but also on purely practical grounds. The State does not get bogged down in questions of whether a killing can be justified by religious belief. It takes no official position on the belief, but taking no official position, it can neither condemn people for merely holding the belief (which would officially invalidate the belief) nor admit the belief as a legitimate justification for the action (which would officially validate the belief).
A personal analogue of this legal approach is, in my opinion, a great response to the paradox of tolerance. Believing that you should not tolerate me is one thing. Acting on that belief is another. Conflating the two as a defense of the action is illegitimate. As long as you behave yourself, I don’t need to care what you believe, and if your beliefs say you are required to act against me, then the belief still isn’t my business, but the action very much is. Nobody else needs to share this principle for it to function, and you can’t label my opposition to the act as hypocritical intolerance without misrepresenting the principle.
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