do evil games expect evil prizes, thank you Rainer Forst
edit: this is a pedagogical post, not a philosophical one. i actually fully agree with the paradox of tolerance and its conclusion! i just find that it doesn’t work as well as an educational tool for introducing people to the concept. sorry for any confusion :)
right, so if it’s a problem that’s always had an easy answer, why do i hear about the problem all the damn time 😡
name one other example of a “paradox” being used as justification or argument for something. you can’t, because there’s a sense of instability inherent in the term; a proper logical paradox actually has no solution.
so why do we fall back so quickly and consistently to the “paradox” as an explanation for perhaps the single most important concept in ethical philosophy when it comes to community preservation and mitigation of violence?
it’s rhetorically inefficient. no one actually thinks about paradoxes in this fashion, so it doesn’t make for a compelling argument. imagine if queer advocates were like “yeah technically it’s like, totally natural for just males and females to experience mutual attraction, but some don’t. a paradox! 🤯” nobody would buy it. instead we say “sexual orientation, while most common in the male-female reciprocation, is diverse such that male-male and female-female attraction also exist throughout nature.”
likewise: “tolerance is a social contract. violate the contract, society has the right to intervene.” boom. done and dusted. enough of the sophistry. enough of the sophistication olympics. use arguments that convince people, not ones that makes you sound smart.
It's called a paradox because it is unsolveable... if you are a free speech absolutist.
The point he's getting at is that absolute tolerance is not only bad; it's impossible. A society that tolerates absolutely everything - the kind free speech absolutists claim to envision - will inevitably become less and less tolerant over time, because the intolerant members of that society will abuse those freedoms to create more intolerance.
Its framed the way it is because Poppler is essentially responding to those people who invoke the slippery slope to argue that you cannot ever censor anything, because then how do you decide what not to censor? Poppler replies "Here's how."
If it helps you to frame it better, call it the "paradox of absolute tolerance" or the "paradox of perfect tolerance."
totally. thank you for your insight and i fully agree for the record.
but you needed four paragraphs to explain the “paradox”. that is a surefire signifier that is maybe not rhetorically the best fit for the role of convincing people deplatforming nazis is good…
again, i’m criticizing the tool. i’m fully in alignment with what it does, there’s just so many better ways to say it.
No one is telling you that can't say "Tolerance is a social contract." But when you frame that as being in opposition to Poppler's statement, rather than literally being a summation of his ultimate conclusion, all you're doing is spreading misinformation. There are people in this very thread who think that you're outright disagreeing with Poppler's conclusions.
The paradox is necessary, because without it you haven't built out the philosophical underpinnings to support your version of the statement. That doesn't mean that you have to start with the philosophical underpinnings - in many cases, you may not even need to elaborate on them at all - but you do need to understand them in order to defend yourself against common criticisms.
The problem with "Tolerance is a social contract", in absentia of Poppler's groundwork, is that someone will inevitably say "But you are violating the social contract by being intolerant of me. Surely I now have a right to be intolerant of you. Where does it end?" This is more commonly framed as, for example, "We have to allow Nazis on Twitter, because if we start censoring some political speech then we would have to censor all political speech. Otherwise how are we to judge which political speech is acceptable and which isn't?"
This sounds reasonable enough that most people will nod and say "That's a good point actually." But Poppler's framing cuts through those objections. It lays out, with absolute clarity that it is not not only good and necessary to silence intolerance, but that it is, in fact, impossible to create a tolerant space if you do not.
It's not meant to be a teaching tool. It was never originally framed as such. It's a proof; Poppler is showing his work.
thank you for clarifying the point of confusion; I actually posted an edit a few seconds ago
I gotta say, I love the fact I learned this through a comedian, who actually is literate and went through the work of reading and realising the answer is right there