Tolerance

In light of the current Supreme Court Case dealing with the issue of Religious Freedom and Freedom of speech I think it is crucial to review the concept of Tolerance. I will be presenting a van der Breggenian distinction of two senses of Tolerance and the fallacy of equivocation that so often results.

Tolerance Sense 1:
All views are equal, we can't judge any view as being better than any other view, some views are just different than others. We somehow must agree with everyone.

Tolerance Sense 2:
Some views are better than others. I disagree with view Y because I think view X is better, but I still love and tolerate all persons who hold view Y even though I think they are wrong.

Everyone understands that we should practice tolerance as a virtue. However the tolerance that is referred to is T2 which somehow gets morphed into T1. This is faulty because there are inherent logical contradictions that come with T1 that demonstrate that this view of Tolerance should be rejected. T2 is the way to go, "Be egalitarian in regards to people but elitist in regards to ideas".

3 comments:

Jordan said...

Here's to hoping we'll see the phrase "van der Breggenian" used more and more in the future!

Ryan Turnbull said...

Amen to that Jordan!

Hendrik van der Breggen said...

Like!