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There actually is no paradox if you think of this way:
Be tolerant of ideas that harm nobody.
Be intolerant of ideas that harm others.
"I'm gay." <- Tolerable.
"I'm not gay, so I won't date men." <- Tolerable.
"I'm not gay, so I think we should kill all gay people." <- Intolerable.
The dilemma is how you define harming others and what implies being intolerant to an idea rather than a person holding that idea.
Beliefs and personal convictions muck that up a bit though.
There's a sadly significant portion of people who truly believe that being gay is hurting other people.
Whether they believe it only because they were told to or for some personal reason, they believe it nonetheless.
A gay person existing doesn't actually literally harm anyone though. A homphobe shouting slurs at a gay person, excluding them from vital social, economic or whatever activity or beating them up does very concretely harm someone. It's not that difficult.
It doesn't, but that doesn't mean people can't believe that it does.
The problem with this is that people disagree about what harms others. Right wing insane people are not living in the same reality that you and I are. They genuinely believe that even seeing a gay person is harmful. They genuinely believe that the existence of gay people is harmful to others.
Yes. I think harm is an excellent way to qualify it. As the old saying goes " if it ain't harm none do as thou mote "
or more succinctly: an ye harm none, do what ye will
Paradox doesn't mean there is no answer, it means the answer is unintuitive. Part of the paradox of tolerance is the given answer.
No, a paradox is an intrinsic contradiction.
There's no resolving it without redefining the terms - if you traveled back in time, you broke causality, meaning time was never what we think of it as. If you spawn a new timeline, you never created a paradox - the apparent contradiction is from an alternate timeline.
But in this case, there never was a paradox - people made one up by misunderstanding tolerance for universal acceptance. That's never what it meant - South Park even did an episode about it when the term was pretty new.
It doesn't mean you like them or support their choices, it means you treat them with common decency according to the social contact. You can be a bigot deep in your heart, but you don't make it their problem.
It's about That's all it is, it's about "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". And conversely, if a bigot acts acceptably and they keep that between them and their priest, you tolerate them.
Ideally, you wouldn't be prejudiced against them... I'm sure plenty of Nazis were decent people. Like Russians today - some support a horrible and unjustified war, because propaganda works. Many genuinely believe they're liberators paying an enormous price for the freedom of Ukrainians. Show them the concentration camps from then or the war crime videos today, and they'd be instant converts the minute they're convinced they start to accept they've been lied to
But you still stop them. They're still wrong, and need correction, because they're hurting others no matter what they believe.
You don't let chistofacists abuse their children, and you don't let klan members or fascist organize - you respond with counter-organization to their organization, you mock them for being a fucking idiot/asshole when they post dumb shit online, you argue them calmly when they push stupid beliefs respectfully and in good faith, and you respond with overwhelming violence to imminent harm.
It's not a philosophy, law, religion, or ethics framework... It's just the explicit form of the basic social contact for people who struggle to keep their prejudice in check
That's the given answer to the paradox.
Every time you repost this meme, a philosopher weeps
how so
A friend I know who has a philosophy degree got visibly angry when she saw this, because she hates it when complex philosophical/political quandaries are "solved" with a paragraph, especially since all of said paragraph-long solutions start breaking down the second you start thinking about them.
Especially since the Paradox of Tolerance did not require 'solving'. It wasn't a mysterious problem waiting decades for a smart mind to find a solution.
I guess I need to toughen up 🤣
The Paradox of Tolerance did not need dissolving. It wasn't an unsolved mystery. It posed no obstacle to anyone who was capable of exhibiting tolerance.
And at its essence, it says exactly the same thing as this: that you do not have to be, and cannot be shown tolerance if you do not show tolerance towards others. Rephrasing it solves no problems, and changes nothing. Because the ultimate problem is that there are too many people in this society who demand full tolerance for themselves while being completely unwilling to show tolerance for others. And they won't care whether you frame it as a moral standard or a social contract - it just gives them more ammunition for their culture wars.
So I think we can stop posting this on a daily basis now. It's not a revolutionary new finding. It's just another way of framing how society works. No more, no less.
Ok.