> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
> in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance
I have a lot more respect for people whose ethics are not conditional on the behavior of others.
Imagine you live in a society that allows personal gun ownership. Obviously, in such a society you still don't want people running around shooting each other willy-nilly, so you make a law: shoot someone, go to jail.
Now imagine someone pulls out a gun and shoots you. Result: you're dead, they go to jail.
However, you'd really prefer not to be dead. So imagine that someone pulls out their gun to shoot you, but then you pull out your gun and shoot them. Result: they're dead, you go to jail. It's what the law says, after all.
This is undesirable to most people because it looks like you've been punished for defending yourself. So we'll change the law: if someone is pointing a gun at you, you can shoot them without going to jail.
Now imagine that someone pulls a gun on you, then you pull a gun to defend yourself, but then they shoot you anyway. Result: you're dead, and they don't go to jail. It's what the law says, after all: you were pointing a gun at them. Oops, it's equivalent to having no law at all! This is the worst form of the law so far, and it's also the same thing as the paradox of tolerance.
The way you solve this is the same way you solve the paradox of tolerance: you say that the initial aggressor does not receive any protections if their own weapons are used against them. This produces a result that matches people's intuitions. This also creates a lesser problem, where people try to toe the line of aggression and goad someone else into making the first move so that they can justly retaliate, but it's still a vast improvement on the situation that intuitively matches how people expect things to work, which just so happens to involve ethics that are conditional on the behavior of others. The condition in this example: violence is acceptable, if it's in self-defense.
EDIT: I see this is being downvoted, would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
The laws of a society are imposed on you regardless of whether you want them. A person's code of ethics is adopted by choice. The law you are referring to is only unjust because it is being imposed on everyone. A devout monk can be a good person, while a society that forces you to behave like a monk would be tyrannical. The coercion is the difference.
I think you would agree that a person whose code of ethics includes "if I shoot someone, I will promptly report myself to the police for murder" is not an unjust condition at all. However, a society that forces you to live that way in a gun-loving society would be very unjust indeed.
a) someone being shot and someone pointing a gun are very well defined things while what is or is not intolerant is very subjective
and
b) unlike in your analogy, if someone expresses a opinion you consider intolerant then you are not dead, you can still defend your own opinion and counter theirs and most importantly you have not been harmed irreparably.
1. I've been on the internet.
Your example really has nothing to do with the paradox of tolerance or the idea of ethics being independent of the actions of others.
FTFY
> would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
I think a lot of people on HN are just anti gun/very left wing, which may taint their judgement while your example was nice about the initiation of violence being the issue.
It doesn’t work nearly as well with knives, which other people aren’t totally defenseless against (or cars, which are hard to pull out of your pocket in response to someone pointing theirs at you).
Ok, so maybe I couldn’t resist being a little bit snarky, but really, it was a good example.
FYI: contrary to popular belief, these are mutually exclusive.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." -- Karl Marx
Anyone who advocates disarming the working class and leaving it entirely defenseless against capitalism and the state apparatus it inevitably begets is not leftist, and I'm personally rather tired of pretending otherwise. Gun control advocates might be "left" of the far-right, but that's a stunningly low bar.
In historical context, it's seems squarely aimed at the paramilitary organizations of various movements popular around the 1930s or so who physically injured people for saying things they disliked.
It’s about not tolerating people who make it impossible to have debate, not declaring arbitrary sets of views intolerable or beyond the pale.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Note that Popper is not claiming that "fists or pistols" are a necessary condition for not tolerating intolerance: they're a final stage of said intolerance. Popper explicitly says that we might reserve the right to preempt intolerance before it reaches the point of its followers resorting to violence.
The problem with tolerance and intolerance is, that a few people (a loud minority) think they're the universal good guys, even in cases where their "good thing" is incompatible with itself.
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
As long as nobody is bringing pistols to tech conferences or starting fistfights in the hallways, Popper would not support excluding attendees for having intolerant ideas. Perhaps if contributors to your open-source repository are doxing and SWATting each other, putting lives at risk, then Popper would exclude them. But as long as they're just making offensive comments, Popper would not "claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force." (It might still be better to decline their patches so as to avoid being associated with them.)
I wouldn't go even as far as Popper, because his argument eats itself; as demonstrated in this thread, when people start applying his ideas, Popperism itself becomes an intolerant idea that, according to Popperism, we should suppress by violence. Moreover, any political position that advocates that the government take an action is advocating that some policy be imposed on the unwilling parts of the population by violence.
Much more sustainable is to suppress the violent actors and protect those who are merely calling for violence, while remonstrating with them to change their minds.
Wow, this ironically sounds exactly like the people spouting off about needing to "fight intolerance" in the past couple years.
It’s also interesting that the more extreme version of the “paradox of tolerance” is very close to the legal reasoning used during the Red Scare to justify bans on communist parties.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is widely misunderstood to be a licence to be intolerant yourself. For the last time : it is not.
Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.
Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance. You can perfectly tolerate people who hate women, who hate men, who hate gays, who hate the rich, who hate the poor, who hate any and every religion, ideology, way of life, identity, worldview or personality type. You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.
It's well known in software that a data structure can have infinite readers, but the presence of even a single writer either necessitates that the data structure is completely private to the writer, or an explicit and consistent writing policy needs to be devised to coordinate the writer with the readers and possibly other writers. Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is a restatement of this basic observation in the context of human societies. You can have infinite tolerance and diversity, as long as not a single ideology or group "writes" their conflicting views to society. If you have a group that does that, then you must choose whether you will cede all control of society to that group, or to set a strong writing policy that is much less permissive than infinite tolerance.
Stop using an argument for tolerance as an excuse for intolerance.
If you let them say whatever they want on an online forum without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat, or something similar. The intolerant views take over.
Argue all the philosophy you like, practical experience shows that every time someone tries an unmoderated forum in any medium it ends up a cesspit of intolerance.
I didn't know about Voat, sad that it was closed down. I would have loved to try it.
>The intolerant views take over.
This sounds to me like a you problem. You can very well admit that you don't know how to argue and shout back (in whatever style necessary to win), or that your views are so unpopular that you can't defend them unless to a supportive audience, but don't make this some sort of universal law or inevitable tendency. There is nothing about any view that makes it inherently more popular or appealing.
>a cesspit of intolerance.
This usage of 'intolerance' hints that you don't really understand Popper's sense of the word. Popper wasn't talking about what offends you, Popper was talking about people violently forcing you out of a society. There is no intolerance on 4chan or 8chan or any similar platform, literally everyone is allowed there, everyone is just an anonymous unique number. Only your own offence prevents you from participating, which is not anybody's fault. Every single "bad" tech platform, the ones that allow speech that mainstream progressive-dominated US companies love to rave about, only suffer due to external pressures imposed on them, the audience of those services very much like it, and they don't seem to physically force reality or other people to like what they like. The only one doing the forcing here are the self-appointed tolerance defenders, who are so so worried about tolerance that they are willing to freely dispence intolerance left and right to protect it. It's like how pro-war folks say that war protects and preserves the peace: It's indeed very true in a certain narrow sense, but you can't be doing it willy nilly, or you will risk destroying the very thing you claim you want to preserve.
I also don't understand why defending unlimited expresssion of views must imply defending unlimited expression of view without moderation. There is no reason why we can't moderate any ideology at all, see the subreddit r/themotte for example to see a place where everyone from radical feminists to white nationalists expressing their views in moderated threads.
Where they pose a danger of it.
If you let them do it before reacting, you've already lost, and that's the point.
Anyhow, it's not widely misunderstood, AFAICT, since when it is invoked it is invariably with the strong implication, and usually the explicit statement, that that is the threat being addressed. You might at times question the judgement behind the assessment of the risk, but that's not a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance.
