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.