Tolerance and Intolerance (and Violence)

I just finished revising my paper "Moral Conviction and Disagreement: Getting Beyond Negative Toleration." There, I suggest that tolerance construed as merely "putting up with" is not a sufficient ideal for cultivating a genuine community. I also point out that seeking to engage tolerantly with those with whom one has strong moral disagreements is not a threat to one's integrity. (This might seem to be a threat, insofar as one might feel that the request to be tolerant asks one to put up with things that one finds intolerable.)

As always, this is only part of the story. In my recent Philosophy Now essay, "In Defense of Intolerance," I focus on something I discuss briefly at the end of the revised paper above, which is that sometimes intolerance is the right attitude. Sometimes one will find it impossible to tolerantly engage with those with whom one disagrees. What then? There, I focus on pointing out that "what then?" is an entirely separate issue from whether one can or cannot tolerate something (or someone).

A great deal of my interest in this topic was driven forward by reflecting on Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller. I'm still not quite happy with something I say in the Philosophy Now essay, which is that I am not happy allowing that violent intolerance is ever justifiable in the face of moral disagreement. I say, "I must ask what right I have to...risk someone else's life on the chance that I'm not mistaken - especially when that person has not consented to the risk." The obvious instantiation of this point is that I have no right to go around killing members of the so-called Tea Party. But this gets to the difficulty with my comment in Roeder's case. I'm not so much worried about the actual case, because Roeder shot Tiller dead in the lobby of a church. Utterly awful. But someone might spit my words back at me and ask, "What right does Tiller have to 'risk the life' of the fetus [viz. abort it] on the strength of his convictions?" I think, however, that the right answer here is that one could only ask that question by failing to pay attention to the details of the situations in which Tiller was involved. This isn't to say that such attention to details would lead one to accept or endorse Tiller's choices. But would I really be begging any obviously answerable questions if I said that any sane, judicious person would realize that the abortions Tiller performed were surrounded by complicated, unfortunate, and often tragic circumstances? (See here.) The difference between Tiller's decision to save and help those women (and girls) and Roeder's self-described choice to save unborn babies from Tiller is that Roeder acted from an abstract principle and Tiller acted in response to complex, concrete, and often tragic circumstances. Thus, Roeder's act shows what can happen when we put principles above individuals. We can convince ourselves that our principles make the murder of others ok. But maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, since Roeder, a Christian in name, simply failed to love even his enemies.

Thomson on the Perils of Exaggeration

I've been covering the abortion debate in my summer ethics class the last couple days, and happened upon an article by Judith Jarvis Thomson from the Boston Review (1995). The following two paragraphs caught my attention, given some of my recent thinking:

In the first place, those who accept the doctrine [that a fetus has a right to life from the moment of conception and thus that abortion is murder] ought not say that reason requires us to accept it, for that assertion is false. The public forum is as open to the false as to the true, but participants in it ought to take seriously whether what they say is true. There is already far too much falsehood in the anti-abortion movement. A recent newspaper photograph showed an anti-abortion protester holding a placard that said "Abortion kills;" that much is true. But under those words was a photograph of a baby. The baby looked to me about a year and a half old—counting in the ordinary way, from birth, not conception. The message communicated by that placard was that abortion kills fully developed babies, and that is false, indeed, fraudulent. Exaggeration for a political purpose is one thing, fraud quite another.

But falsehood is by no means the worst that comes of pronouncements that abortion is murder. Say that often and loudly enough, and some weak-minded soul is sure to start shooting to put a stop to it—as of course has happened, most recently in Brookline [where a shooting occurred; see the start of the article]. That is the second point to stress about the public forum: what is said there has consequences. Exaggeration for a political purpose is one thing, incitement to do harm quite another. (my emphasis)

A friend of mine also drew my attention to this op-ed from today's New York Times.

In the stuff I'm working on, which in part involves what we can justify once we've decided for ourselves that some thing is intolerable, I've argued that hateful rhetoric falls beyond the pale, precisely because it attempts to blur the line between non-violence (an exercise of free speech) and violence (via provocation). There seems to be a lot of hate in the air these days...anyone know what the remedy is?