Tolerance: A Paradoxical virtue

This paper explores the paradoxical nature of tolerance in a multicultural world. After a brief introduction, the second section provides a terminological and historical clarification of the nature of tolerance and the difference between tolerance and toleration. The third section summarizes recent sociological and psychological research on people’s attitudes toward tolerance in modern Western societies. The conclusion is that although the cultural boundaries within and between these societies have become permeable, people remain deeply attached to the values and traditions of their own local or national culture and tend to be intolerant of the ideas and practices of the nearby sociocultural Other. Freud’s theory of the narcissism of the smallest difference offers an intriguing psychological explanation for this phenomenon.
These observations are the starting point for the fourth section, which explores the individual and social virtue of tolerance from a philosophical perspective. Located between indifference, prohibition, acceptance, and recognition, tolerance is a paradoxical virtue. Tolerance is based on a reflexive assessment of the conflicts that require and permit tolerance and thus must take into account the specific history and character of the groups involved.
Section five discusses some thorny societal and epistemological questions of the limits of tolerance: In the name of whom or what should we be tolerant of the sociocultural other? Can we justify setting limits to tolerance, especially in the case of non-moral issues? The multicultural nature of contemporary societies implies that the contexts of justification diverge. Consequently, tolerance cannot be assessed solely on the basis of the universal principles of human dignity and human rights; rather, it should be complemented by an appraisal of different traditions of tolerance and by a broadening of the idea of reason, on which the justifications of tolerance are based.
The conclusion of this paper is that the absence of a unified normative regime of tolerance is not a drawback but can be an opportunity for a more contextual justification of tolerance, insofar as different ethical traditions can help us avoid potential cultural biases of dominant justifications and open our eyes to new insights about tolerance and its limits.