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The paradox of intolerance
(lemmy.kde.social)
Original post: https://lemmy.world/post/5353095
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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A little while back I saw someone recontextualize the paradox of intolerance in a very nice way. They basically said "tolerance is part of a social contract." So if you live in a society that has tolerance as part of its social contract, and someone is intolerant, then they are rejecting the social contract and it's not hypocritical to censure them for that.
That's smart - I never thought about handling it through Hobbes.
Another way that I found to handle this is through some pseudo-utilitarianism. Like this:
Tolerance is scalar, not binary; you can have more or less tolerance in a society, but it's never zero or complete. And the goal of a tolerant society is to maximise the amount of tolerance in itself, in a sustainable way for the future.
When you remove a discourse from public spaces, you're decreasing the overall tolerance of the society. However, the spread of intolerant discourses also decreases it. So a tolerant society should weight those two things, and remove intolerant discourses from public spaces only as much as necessary.
The net result is similar, in spirit, to Popper's paradox of tolerance: the society should give itself the right to curb down intolerance, but it shouldn't use this right willy-nilly.
Sure. Although 'tolerance' here needs stricter defition. I would argue that the proponents of censorship are few. The victim is discourse itself, and by extent, regular imperfect people.
This is by no means a perfect definition, but I think that "tolerance is the acceptance of someone's intrinsic attributes, appearance, behaviour and utterances, without acting or speaking against the person because of those things" should be a good start.
I'm pleasantly surprised that someone caught this up - originally the argument was about freedom of speech, that's why it focuses so much on discourses.