The non-hypocricy of tolerance
Dec. 3rd, 2015 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackDid I talk about this before?
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
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Date: 2015-12-03 02:52 pm (UTC)For now, I'll just raise a few points…
Firstly, how narrowly or broadly do you define "harm anyone else"? For example, is it OK to advertise a product to people who don't need it, or does that harm them financially? What if we define political dissent as an attempt to harm people by encouraging them to vote for the wrong political party?
Now that I'm a Christian, I see a lot more harm in the world than I did as an agnostic. However, I also see the need to tolerate other views even if they harm someone else. "Do not resist the one who is evil." In part, what you rightly say about humility surely applies whether or not you see harm to others in a person's wrongness? In part, resisting a wrongdoer simply doesn't work.
But then this goes meta: we see people doing wrong things, and we see people wrongly resisting them. So what should we do: stop the people wrongly stopping the wrong people? Where does it end? Being topical for a moment, WWIII is where it ends. Yet, seeing where it ends, still we begin. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and all that.
The other issue is that the Golden Rule seems to be the only moral principle we can get near-universal agreement on, but "kill people who are wrong" isn't inconsistent with it. If somebody says to kill people who are wrong, how do you convince them otherwise?
My tendency now is to recognise "don't kill people for being wrong" as a Christian principle. After two thousand years, it's deeply embedded in our Western psyche, so much so that it's surviving secularisation. We all know what it's like to live without the fear of being killed for making a mistake and we're reluctant to live any other way, but that's an experiential justification for incorporating such principles into our social contract, not a rational one.
If someone disagrees, we need to change their heart, not their mind. And that's an important distinction.
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Date: 2015-12-03 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 12:03 am (UTC)Admittedly you hurt somebody less by placing no value on their life than by killing them…
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:52 pm (UTC)If you decided you wanted to try to fix the problem, presumably you'd start with wider-ranging and less-damaging interventions, like putting some restrictions on _publishing_ such opinions. That could shift opinion without killing anyone. I'm not sure if the potential benefit to society outweighs the potential for abuse (if whoever decides which views are restricted abuses their power), which is why I'm considering it but not sure if it would be a good idea or not.
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:58 pm (UTC)So there must be some benefit large enough and some number of little old ladies small enough that utility can be demonstrated?
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Date: 2015-12-04 05:12 pm (UTC)I agree, not infinite, so yes in theory, provided (a) the proposed execution spree actually had some beneficial effect and (b) you were arbitrarily prevented from using a more effective method of changing people's minds, that could be a better choice than not doing it...
But I'm genuinely not sure where you're going with this, do you mean, you're considering if that could be an actual good thing to do? Or you're interested if I ever endorse killing people in hypothetical situations? Or something else?
I think reasons against it:
* Trading off _accidental_ deaths is something you have to do, but choosing to deliberately kill people is generally bad for all sorts of reasons even beyond whatever inherent utility you assign, so you should usually only do it for reasons which are important and urgent.
* Inconsistent and draconian enforcement is generally ineffective AND oppressive. Widespread enforcement is usually better.
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Date: 2015-12-04 05:35 pm (UTC)Honestly, I'm not completely sure where I was going with that. (-8 I suspect I was just pushing the Goldacre "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" ethos.
On consideration, however, I'd say my thinking leads to a two-layered conclusion.
Firstly, though by careful choice of utility metrics you can make Utilitarianism a broadly true thing, in practice the limits of measurement and computation power may make it about as reliable as a weather forecast. Worse, the feedback loop from Utilitarian consideration to action to consequence to new situation to be weighed in a Utilitarian fashion is far tighter than the feedback loop from weather forecast to human behaviour to climate change to new weather forecast.
Secondly, God is omniscient in such matters and can offer wisdom better than our own. That's a traditional anthropomorphic way of looking at it; maybe you'd find it more palatable if I say that prayer and related disciplines offer a better path to making moral choices than Utilitarianism in the same way that we can catch a ball more easily than we can measure distances, velocity, gravity and air resistance then solve an equation.
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Date: 2015-12-05 07:44 pm (UTC)I genuinely don't know, there's some aspects of morality I'm fairly sure of, and others where I have intuitions which often work but sometimes conflict and, no overall framework to rely on.
I think that, in a binary choice, the correct choice is the one with greatest utility, but problems with utilitarianism I don't know how to resolve yet include:
* is actively doing a bad thing worse than letting it happen? sometimes I think yes, sometimes no
* how do we cope in a world where there's more things we should do than we know we will ever reasonably do
* I'm fairly sure that there are rules its better to follow almost all of the time even if breaking them seems better in some individual cases, and I'm not sure how to include that in a utilitarian framework -- accept those rules as aims in themselves, or have a framework for "how to act 99% of the time" separately from what's ultimately moral, or what?
* as you say, there are many cases where it's not at all clear what's for the best in the long term, and I think we should still do the best we can, but saying "what's best for most people" doesn't really help us know what that IS.
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Date: 2015-12-04 02:48 pm (UTC)I agree that's a complex question and most things exist in a middle ground somewhere between "obviously ok" and "obviously not ok" and codifying what's ok and what's not is a major part of what a society is.
But I also think, it's still helpful to establish that as a principle, because when you make it explicit that you need to decide "to what extent does this harm other people", it's common that you can, in practice, judge reasonably well how much it does harm.
There are exceptions which are genuinely difficult and people vehemently disagree, but I think it's important to recognise we can often work out the answer and agree about it if we try, even if we can't always do that.
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:43 pm (UTC)I thought those were the cases we were talking about?
At least, you started by talking about people being wrong, which strongly implies you've found somebody who's prepared to disagree with you vehemently about it!
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 05:03 pm (UTC)There's peer pressure, perverse economic incentives, and so on. As well as all the more contentious questions about welfare provision for people when something is "their own fault".
Also, I'm coming round to the view that people would ideally do a lot fewer things which mostly only affect themselves. (-8
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Date: 2015-12-10 04:42 pm (UTC)Hmm, I can see two pretty much opposite interpretations of this, and I don't actually know which you meant:
a) "Ideally, people would do fewer things than they currently do, and it would especially be ideal if the things which they do would mostly only affect themselves."
b) "At the moment, a lot of the things people do only affect themselves. It'd be better if a smaller proportion of people's actions only affect themselves, and a greater proportion of people's actions affected other people."
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Date: 2015-12-04 02:50 pm (UTC)Yes, I glossed over that because it was difficult, but that was the intent of my disclaimer in the paragraphs after the bullet points, that sometimes you think someone is doing harm, but (for various reasons, mostly the same ones as before) it may be worse to try to stop than not to.
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Date: 2015-12-04 02:52 pm (UTC)I agree it's difficult. I think we have to try to decide as best we can, and hope it will turn out ok, while accepting that sometimes other people will disagree, and sometimes most people will do what they think is right and it will end badly, but complete passivity may not be better.
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:53 pm (UTC)(From that perspective, the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple is one I've found challenging, though it's important to note that the Biblical account doesn't entail the level of violent anger represented in a lot of the paintings.)
To put God right at the centre of this issue: human nature is such that people trying to decide as best they can and hope it will turn out OK will be deceived, and selfish and evil. To be in closer communion with God is to be less deceived, and less selfish and less evil.
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Date: 2015-12-04 02:57 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what you mean by this?
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:57 pm (UTC)I think those fundamentalist Muslims are wrong. You think they're wrong. But I know of no persuasive objective argument which could convince even a rational person of this.
As a rationalist, that's a terrifying realisation I made about six months into being a Christian: evil isn't irrational.
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:09 pm (UTC)It seems to fit morally -- presumably people who think apostasy should be punishable by death, don't want people from some other religion to come along and say "our religion says we should kill you for some reason that only makes sense to our religion", and should treat apostates accordingly, if they agree with the golden rule?
And it seems to fit practically -- whether you think it's moral or not, you should avoid killing people because they may try to kill you back.
My post could be something like, if they DON'T accept the golden rule, because they claim that killing apostates is more important than that, then you have to prevent it, coercively if necessary.
evil isn't irrational.
I think both -- I think there are sorts of evil that come from laziness and short-sightedness, and sorts of evil that are pefectly rational but come from selfishness and not choosing to value other people at all...
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Date: 2015-12-04 05:20 pm (UTC)The "how would you like it if our religion did the same to you?" argument, in many people's eyes, simply doesn't work. Their religion is right and yours is wrong. From that perspective such arguments make as much sense as "You want to punish people for burning orphans? How would you feel if we punished you for burning logs?" They see a moral distinction between religion A and religion B which destroys the symmetry required to apply the Golden Rule in the way you'd like.
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Date: 2015-12-05 04:35 pm (UTC)Either they accept that the people they want to kill are people, and accept that even if THEY think that's the right thing to do, they shouldn't impose on those people. And we have the golden rule working.
Or they think that their morality is SO persuasive that they should impose it on other people for good reasons even if the other people don't want it. Which is self-consistent, but seems to me to be exactly REJECTING the golden rule, and the thrust of my original post is that in that case, you may have no choice but to resist them physically.
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Date: 2015-12-05 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-05 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-05 07:17 pm (UTC)Ah, but is it, though?
Forcing people to do things feels very short-termist. It would clearly be better if people were doing things willingly. If they won't do it willingly, enforcement will get you part-way there in the short term, but does it get you any closer to the ultimate goal of people who want to contribute?
I guess there are examples of cases where it does. Support for the death penalty gradually falls in countries which abolish it, for example. But I'm not seeing people gradually happier about giving money to the state as a result of taxation.
Asking the really big question: if someone sits on a big pile of money while other people are poor, whom are they really hurting?
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Date: 2015-12-05 07:36 pm (UTC)Yes, because:
* as mentioned elsewhere, people need to be prevented from doing things which harm other people
* if one person has a pile of food or shelter (aka money) and other people are suffering without, they should be forced to share to some extent
* sometimes enforcing decisions on people clearly IS for their own good (eg. infrastructure building, disaster funds, etc)
Forcing people to do things feels very short-termist. It would clearly be better if people were doing things willingly. If they won't do it willingly, enforcement will get you part-way there in the short term, but does it get you any closer to the ultimate goal of people who want to contribute?
I agree, I think we are in the PROCESS of moving towards a society where people agree. I don't know for sure, but I hope, as civilisation goes on, it slowly gets less violent, as fewer and fewer people find that to their actual advantage, and people are more and more accepting, progressive, and in favour of moderate redistribution. I think those are already happening.
But they haven't finished. I think people are mostly in favour of SOME useful taxes, and generally against most violence. But only because they've grown up with that. I want to move towards a society where violence and poverty are increasingly unthinkable. But I think you have to MAKE those things happen for a long time before people do them automatically. And you probably always need SOME civic enforcement of people who don't or can't play by the rules.
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Date: 2015-12-05 08:12 pm (UTC)I do wonder what would happen if a nation created an income tax opt-out. By default you pay, but anybody who wants to can fill in a form that says "until further notice, I choose not to pay income tax, signed ___", it gets processed, they keep the tax. The list of who opts out isn't made public; opting out is between you and your conscience.
One thing's for sure, it would take all the transgressive excitement out of tax evasion and tax avoidance. Never again could someone boast about finding a loophole. In the process it would remove the incentive for accountants to advocate tax non-payment, in the same way that the state providing drugs to addicts removes the incentive for drug dealers to get people addicted.
What's more, all the elaborate machinery of tax rebates and examptions could be eliminated: if you think it right that you pay less tax, pay less tax.
Also, the sense of participation would be far higher if people knew they'd chosen to let the government have a share of their earnings.
As 1 Tim 6:10 says, the love of money is the root of all evil. Granted, that needs to be taken in context — plenty of evils have little to do with money. On the other hand, I made the above comparison with drugs intentionally. Sensible commentators realise a "war on drugs" doesn't work, and makes the problem worse. Maybe if we also realise the love of money is an addiction, we could similarly start treating its victims with compassion and tolerance. Taxing a money addict does no more good — to them or society — than taking away a heroin addict's stash. They'll just go and find some more money, probably in an antisocial way.
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Date: 2015-12-08 03:04 pm (UTC)I'd also be afraid of a prisoner's dilemma style problem if it's completely optional: people are often willing to chip in to cover other people when it's a complete emergency, but feel it's futile to try to cover their fair share if everyone else in similar situations is opting out. People might be more willing to pay if it's strongly encouraged that everyone pays, even if it's not quite mandatory.
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Date: 2015-12-08 05:49 pm (UTC)Indeed. As would many people.
One of Jesus' key messages was that the "I'll do it if (and only if) you'll do it" mentality doesn't build bridges to anything like the same extent as doing the right thing without first waiting to see if anybody else will join you. "I'll do it if you make it compulsory so that person I envy can't not do it" is even more problematic, because that other person is going to be looking for loopholes.
That's really challenging, though. Living up to it individually is difficult, let alone persuading an entire nation to.
But difficult isn't the same thing as impossible. Nor the same thing as "not to be attempted'.
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:02 pm (UTC)This is a tangent, but it reminds me of something that I was thinking about, that I admire pure pacifism as a principle, but I'm not sure I can embrace it as a universal. The examples given are usually about people choosing not to defend themselves, which I admire, but it seems much more difficult to agree it's moral to let someone else die when you could have defended them. Like, I think the closer we can get to that, the better, if we can protect people without risking killing anyone that's a lot better. But if violence is the only way to protect someone, I think it's better to accept that than let it happen :(
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:27 pm (UTC)The government of Elbonia decides to prohibit convicted criminals from voting. The Kneedonian minority feels it has been wrongly picked upon by the brutal and unaccountable police force for decades, with the result that a significantly larger proportion of Kneedonians than the majority Elbons have criminal records. The Elbons retort that the Kneedonians genuinely are more criminal, especially blaming their patellas — independent religious schools widely suspected of fomenting fundamentalist Kneedam.
When the government passes this law, rioting breaks out in several major cities and the police struggle to contain it. After a few months, it's clear the situation has become a civil war in all but name. Elbonia responds by cutting off electricity and telecoms to the breakaway republic of Kneedonia.
Now the Pelvonians decide this is unjust and resolve to intervene to help the Kneedonians. They condemn the cynics who point out that they rely on the Kneedonian asparagus crop for their national dish. They send drone aircraft to attack Elbonian troops in the conflict zone and manage to keep civilian casualties below 30%.
After five years and 300,000 deaths, with Amnesty International accusing both sides of war crimes, Brazil, the principal importer of Elbonian bismuth, persaudes the 93-year-old Elbonian President Gobshite to stand down. In the following election, the moderate Dr Git GitGit is elected and immediately holds a referendum in which Kneedonia is granted its independence.
In Kneedonia, there is rejoicing. However, in their first post-independence election the Kneedam party wins a landslide on a platform of enforcing traditional values. They impose a theocracy, outlaw other political parties, and cut off the asparagus supply to Pelvonia.
Then a Kneedam extremist, whose uncle once owned a shop in the capital of Kneedonia, assassinates Chancellor Merkel. All of a sudden, Germany notices the evil theocrats in Kneedonia, which they'd previously been studiously ignoring. They establish military bases in Pelvonia and invade in order to restore democracy. The Groini people from the Pelvonian marshlands then move into the power vacuum and occupy most of the adjacent marshland in Kneedonia, which they claim as an ancestral homeland. They promptly impose a 20% duty on asparagus transit through the marshes and demand reparations from Pelvonia for a perceived genocide against them in 1837.
The Pelvonians therefore start attacking the Groinis and the Kneedam fundamentalists support them. The Germans give up after ten years, fifty billion euros and two thousand combat deaths. Chancellor Bleer's name is now mud, especially as it eventually turned out that fundamentalist assassin had actually been radicalised half-way across the world in San Shitbag. The Germans stage a phased withdrawal.
Now what?
More importantly, which people acted wrongly at which stages in that narrative?
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Date: 2015-12-05 04:39 pm (UTC)But, my point is, quotes from Jesus like "Do not resist the one who is evil" seem to me to being saying you shouldn't resist people doing bad things EVER in ANY circumstances, or pure pacifism. And I think that's a laudable ideal, but a practical society can only aspire to it, not necessarily reach it. I'm not sure if you agree that's what Jesus meant, or if you agree with the conclusion?
If you agree that sometimes you do have to act in defence of someone else, you already agree with what I was trying to say. I didn't mean, "you can ALWAYS do so". I agree -- it's difficult to know WHEN you should do that, and when it will just make matters worse. Your example is a good one but I never thought otherwise.
Whereas, if you do mean, you should NEVER act to defend someone that, then you wouldn't need to show an example where you shouldn't, you need to show that in ALL examples, however clearcut, you still shouldn't...
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Date: 2015-12-05 05:37 pm (UTC)And I feel it's important to take a nuanced view about people saying "that's a laudable ideal, but". It is understandable for people to say that. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn others for saying that. It's going to happen. But that doesn't make it good, and I should personally abstain if I can.
Back in January, I wrote "Little Gidding", which elaborated my thinking on such topics in a certain amount of depth. Right now, I'm re-remembering one of the passages from Slate Star Codex which I quoted back then:
Now that I think this way, whenever I hear "that's a laudable ideal, but", the "but" is the rumble of the bus's axles flexing to bounce over some waived ideal that's been thrown in its path.
That is the process I tried to illustrate with my narrative: a tangled mess of agents, all optimising for proximate goals, all looking at the idea of peace and saying "that's a laudable ideal, but". I intentionally created a fictitious scenario, and tried to leave out any details which might make it easy for an onlooker to say "Well, agents A,D and G were in the right, but B,C and E were dead wrong. F was right at first, but wrong later." History tries to make "sense" of wars along such lines centures later, but even if they somehow judge rightly, that's no guide to B,C,E and F at the time, when they're in the thick of it. And even if A,D and G are in the right, that doesn't make it right for them to wage war.
Meanwhile, in my narrative, things gradually got worse and worse, without any step being locally pessimal.
If we don't want to live in a world with such descents into Hell, or even if we accept such descent will happen but want to minimise the part we personally play, we have to take a step back and optimise at a higher level. Pacifism is one such higher-level optimisation.
I've adopted pacifism. I won't say I'm a "pure" pacifist, firstly because I'm flawed and secondly because I'm open to the notion of alternative high-level optimisations. What I try to reject is sacrificing it to more short-sighted objectives.
From a Christian perspective, success in moving towards such "higher goals" is immensely spiritually satisfying, bringing a peace and joy, even sanctification which is its own reward, more than offsetting any mundane losses one might suffer in the process. Also, what we call the Holy Spirit is sent to aid us, allowing us to act in ways more noble than we ever could have by our own strength alone.
Also, from a Christian perspective, it's acknowledged we're not perfect and we are forgiven our manifest and manifold lapses. But are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!
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Date: 2015-12-05 06:27 pm (UTC)But to me, there also examples where acting is just clearly better than not acting. Think of something really blatant, like lynching people because of what race they appear to be. That used to be effectively legal. Then it was made illegal, and there was a long, very painful process of actually enforcing that. But even if some murders got put in prison, that CLEARLY seems better than the previous situation. Would Jesus rather we just TOLD the murderers not to lynch anyone? I'm worried that if I were a better person, I would find a better way of persuading them they're wrong. But arresting them is clearly violence, but seems clearly better than just letting them go on killing people.
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Date: 2015-12-05 07:50 pm (UTC)The passage speaks to several issues, but in this respect my thinking structures roughly as:
Did Jesus condone the actions of the crowd by telling the disciples not to stop them? No.
Did Jesus in turn physically prevent the disciples from attacking the crowd? No.
When the crowd wasn't stopped, did they go on killing people? Yes.
Is this story a special case, specific to the passion narrative, or is it an example with broader applicability? I'd say the latter.
Now the difficult bit: when Jesus told people not to attack the crowd, did He "let them go on killing people"? In the short term, plainly yes. Taking the two-thousand-year view, what happened that night had lasting implications, making the world a considerably better place.
On a less epic scale, that kind of story has played out many more times in many more places.
So. On one level, Jesus said "whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it". If people come to kill you, and you have a gun, put the gun down. Meeting violence with violence doesn't help, and there are more important issues at stake. Yes, even more important than your life.
On another level, that's a hard teaching, and one I know I'll find it very difficult to put into practice if push ever comes to shove. When someone opens fire on the mob that's come to kill them, maybe we try to take the middle path between condemning and condoning. That middle path is one Jesus exemplified, yet is missing from a lot of moral thinking.
Meanwhile, I personally know someone who did, in apartheid-era South Africa, step between the black protesters and the white police officers who were about to attack them. "In the name of Christ, I ask you to stop." And, well, they did stop. She's here to tell the tale. That sometimes making oneself vulnerable is the greatest form of strength isn't just a hypothetical from the land of fairy tales.
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Date: 2015-12-08 03:09 pm (UTC)But if someone asks "if you have the power to prevent A killing B at a small risk of hurting A, should you do so?" it seems to be dodging the question to say "if you CAN'T stop A, you shouldn't hurt them"..?
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Date: 2015-12-08 05:54 pm (UTC)It's somewhat worrying how short the Bible is on guidance when it's someone else's life at stake. It would be really easy to use B's plight as an excuse for selfish deeds, especially if you got to choose which of B,C or D you fancied protecting. But if it's a straight choice between "stop A from killing B, at no cost" or "omit to stop A from killing B"… my instinct is clearly to stop A.
But that's the kind of crack into which Satan can introduce a crowbar. "Ask God on a case by case basis" seems a good option, for those who have that kind of relationship with Him.
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Date: 2015-12-03 04:32 pm (UTC)~Tom Lehrer
But yeah, imposing "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" by police fiat is a little tricky, and not merely in a theoretical way. If you dig beneath the foolishly fearmongering accusations that Islamic fundamentalists wish to impose 'sharia law' on the West, the somewhat more serious flip side is the anxiety that tolerance of divergent ideas goes too far if it allows for the promotion of anti-democratic ideas about the legal system.
And to what degree is the gain of democratic political power for anti-democrats a threat to a democracy, and to what degree does the system protect against its own overthrow?
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Date: 2015-12-04 03:06 pm (UTC)Good point, and I don't know. I think accepting a reasonable amount of obnoxious political beliefs is usually better than trying to restrain them, but I agree, there may be a tipping point where it's better to restrict views you know are going to be damaging. But I'm not sure where that point is.
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Date: 2015-12-04 04:22 pm (UTC)I mean, maybe you construct a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis: If prospective government B gained political power, it would restrict personal freedoms by X amount, so I as a leader of current government A am better serving the people as long as I only restrict personal freedom by less than X. But that seems wrong to me- that kind of utilitarianism seems like it would breed cynicism and mistrust in government A, if Government A is promising to be open and free and in actuality is only a little better than prospective government B. I want open government to be its own advertisement of its superiority, but that's not really necessarily the case. If an open democracy is struggling economically people are potentially likely to favor an undemocratic government that promises better economic circumstances, at least under some conditions.
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Date: 2015-12-04 11:17 am (UTC)My reading up specifically on religious tolerance leads me to believe it has two forms, "vague syncretism" and "war fatigue". The first is the classic Roman religious tolerance, having beliefs that allowed for a large pantheon and for various gods to be identified with each other, and thus to say that other religions aren't that different and they all honour the Gods in their own way. This approach couldn't handle Christianity. The second surrounds Enlightenment ideas of religious tolerance; in the background were wars such as the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, overall the various conflicts between Catholicism and various Protestantisms had become stuck in stalemates and people were sick of the bloodshed. I may be over-interpreting with the last bit but it's the impression I get.
To a certain extent you can reframe the question as not being "how tolerant should I be" but "what norms of tolerance should there be" - if the norms by which you act would allow other people to make intolerable impositions on you, then there's a problem. On the other hand, there's little point in having a neat little system in your head that has everything worked out, if no-one else subscribes to that system or is likely to - it would be like being the only person who owned a fax machine.
So I suppose the question could be, "What norms of tolerance are there out in the world that deliver (preferably: have a track record of delivering) the best mixtures of peace and progress?", and to subscribe to, promote and develop those.
At this point, we can go no further with armchair moral philosophy, we must look at the world in detail.
(Minor side note: the correct spelling is hypocrisy - cognate with "crisis" (but the etymology is more complicated than that, the old Greek word is a word for an actor on a stage playing a role). It's not a -cracy, there's no suggestion of kratos (rule, strength). I had a fancy that hypocrite might be cognate with critic and on a deep level it is, but not in the way I hoped it might be.)
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-06 09:23 pm (UTC)Never attempt to change someone's mind unless you've made a careful assessment of your likely success - and weighed up the damage that could follow failing badly.
...And weighed up whether the gain in doing so is wirth the cost - being right is worthless.
That's not the same as saying 'never try'...
...And I'm a very effective public speaker: that's a very dangerous skill to have.
Worse, or better, I'm a lot more skilled at person-to-person and small-group persuasion than I used to be; and, these days, I am fairly confident that I'm not seen as 'tolerated outsider' by a pretty substantial number of people.
Changing minds is dangerous - and I believe that the worst risk of all is succeeding when you're wrong.
Worst of all, I've seen enough of it being done by skilful liars- and I learn by watching - to know that it is far, far easier to change minds for all the wrong reasons, than for any good one.
A hint: walk, don't run, if you ever hear my half-humorous "What could possibly go wrong?"...
...And run, don't walk, if you ever hear a hint of my warning that there is a very special class of lie - the lies that people are eager to believe - because I may have spotted that the people around me are are nodding in unison, led by someone who is almost clever enough to draw me along, too.
Changing minds, indeed... Mostly, it's a subtle art of making them more the same.