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 :)
Which is exactly what the paradox of tolerance says. So why are you agreeing with OP?
It’s way simpler to say that tolerance is a contract and you’re not bound by a contract breached by the other party, that description isn’t paradoxical in any way
Yes, if you’re looking for a simple way to express the concept, that’s a good way to do it.
Poppler’s formulation isn’t meant to be simple. It’s meant to be complete.
If I’m teaching an end user how to use the program I wrote, I’m not going to explain the code line by line. But if they ask me why it can’t do some random and largely impossible thing that they want, I absolutely need to understand the code in order to explain why that isn’t possible.
Understanding Poppler’s formulation allows you to address the many ways in which people will try to undermine your simplified version. An example I’ve used elsewhere in this thread is the idea that “We can’t ban Nazis from our platform because then we’d have to ban all forms of political expression. Otherwise we’re just playing favourites.” It’s the “If you censor me then you’re the one being intolerant” argument, usually strapped to a slippery slope fallacy about how you’ll never stop censoring stuff once you start. And it’s very, very effective. Lots of well meaning people who are not Nazis or Nazis sympathizers can still be very easily swayed by this logic.
Poppler cuts through all that. He gives us a clear and definite criteria for what ideas are acceptable and what aren’t, and an ironclad justification for why. The theory he lays out is essential knowledge if you ever want to successfully defend the position expressed by “Tolerance is a social contract,” or the “Nazi bar” analogy, or any other excellent ways of introducing these ideas.
You don’t have to start with Poppler’s paradox, but sooner or later you will need it.
i agree with what it says. i just don’t think it’s good as an educational tool for introducing people to the concept.
e: oops sorry for the double comment
Because OP’s thesis is that it isn’t paradoxical.
Which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the paradox.
Poppler never said that there wasn’t a solution. In fact the solution he offers is, quite literally, “Punch Nazis.”
That’s the entire point.
Tolerance is a paradox if you believe in absolute tolerance. That’s what Poppler is saying. Absolute tolerance means tolerating everything, even intolerant behaviours. It’s the “MUH FREEZE PEACH” mentality. Poppler demonstrates that by trying to create a society that hews to absolute tolerance, you ultimately create the conditions for that society to become absolutely intolerant (ie, bigoted, hateful).
Instead - paradoxically - a perfectly tolerant society must be intolerant of one thing; intolerance.
It’s Poppler’s answer to the slippery slope argument. “If we start censoring political speech, where does it end?” is a common refrain of Nazis, because they know credulous liberals, panicking about their ideological purity, will buy into it. “It ends at intolerance,” Poppler replies. “That’s the line. Be on the right side of it.”