Tolerance Is Only Necessary When You Refuse to Understand the Other

—I can’t believe Dave voted for Trump. It’s disgusting. I’m really disappointed in him. It’s hard to even be his friend now.

—But you support Zionism. From what I can tell, Trump is giving Israel everything it can hope for. Don’t you support his policies?

—Sure, but I still wouldn’t vote for him.

—Okay, but imagine you have friends and family living in Israel, and some of them have been killed by Hamas. Imagine they’re looking to you for support. Before the election, Trump wasn’t clear about his position, but knowing what we know now, wouldn’t you have voted for him?

—No.

—But isn’t that too easy to say now? I mean, imagine Trump had promised to get neighboring countries to take in all the Palestinians, to completely redevelop Gaza and the West Bank, to establish law and order, and to let peaceful Palestinians come back. Your friends and family would’ve counted on you to vote for him. Would you really have had the heart to say no?

—What’s your point?

—My point is that different people have different priorities. Since we don’t get to vote on individual issues, we have to choose the candidate who lines up with what matters most to us. You’re disgusted by Trump voters because you think their priorities should be the same as yours. You feel anyone with different priorities is just wrong and deserves contempt.

—But we can’t afford to be tolerant anymore. Trump is a racist dictator. We’re on the verge of losing our democracy. Not everything is relative. Some things are just plain wrong, murder, rape, racism. We shouldn’t live in a society where people are still debating whether rape is acceptable. That ship has sailed.

—True. It’s hard to find someone in the U.S. who thinks rape should be legal, and that’s a good thing. But just because most people today agree doesn’t mean it’s absolute or universal. Historically, rape wasn’t about violating a woman’s rights; it was about violating the property rights of her father or husband. So what you now take for granted as an absolute moral truth has actually been relative all along. We tend to think something is universal just because most people around us agree. But that doesn’t make it true.

—Be that as it may, that’s just some philosophical navel-gazing. For all practical purposes, rape is universally wrong. Who cares about the technicalities?

—We should care because that shows how all moral disagreements exist on a spectrum. There’s no magical point where morality becomes absolute. The reason you’re so self-righteous about how others vote is because you treat your own moral convictions as absolutes. If you understood morality as something fundamentally relative, you wouldn’t be so sure of yourself. The fact that we can’t make morality absolute matters when we debate messier issues, like abortion. You might be sure that a woman has the right to choose, but about a third of Americans believe it’s immoral. That’s not enough consensus to call it settled. We’re still debating it. So there is no moral position everyone agrees on. There’s no such thing as 0% or 100% consensus. It’s all a continuum.

—Sorry, but that just sounds like philosophical nonsense that has nothing to do with how the world works. If everything’s relative, why bother with anything at all?

—It’s actually the opposite. If even one thing could be proven to be absolute, then we could make everything else absolute in relation to it. So, if that one absolute existed, there wouldn’t be any disagreement in this world. If you disagreed, you’d be proven wrong. In that world, everything is already set in stone; so, why bother with anything? But since we don’t have that one absolute, we have to keep trying to understand each other. That’s why we don’t give up.

—But I don’t want to talk to anyone who thinks abortion should be banned. I don’t want to understand them. They’re just evil or stupid. Why should I take them seriously?

—You want abortion to be as morally settled as rape, but it’s not. The question is how we deal with these fundamental disagreements. If we disengage like you’re suggesting, there’s no way forward. Society can’t just leave something like this hanging with a “let’s agree to disagree.” Decisions still have to be made. Take immigration: people are waiting in line at the border. We either let them in or we don’t. “Let’s not talk about it because I think you’re evil” isn’t an option. If you won’t engage and a decision has to be made, we’re left with force. What other choices are there?

—But if we keep trying to understand people who want to take away our rights, aren’t we just enabling them? Where’s the line between understanding and complicity?

—In a democracy, we don’t need to try to understand every tiny fringe group. Like, we don’t need to hear from people who think rape should be legal; that group’s too small to matter politically. But abortion is different. A huge chunk of Americans think it should be banned. That kind of opinion can’t be ignored. The more people hold a belief, the more effort we have to make to understand it, even if we disagree.

—But that assumes the intolerant stay irrelevant. What if we wait too long? What if by engaging them we legitimize them, and they grow stronger? Karl Popper’s point was that unlimited tolerance leads to the death of tolerance. A small intolerant group can become dangerous if left unchecked. Look at the Nazis; they started on the fringe. By the time people took them seriously, it was too late. We can’t wait for numbers to grow. The content of the belief matters too, especially if it threatens the foundation of democracy itself.

—When any law is passed, one side is seen as tolerant, the other intolerant. Take abortion. Right now, in New York, pro-lifers are being tolerant. If they were intolerant, they’d physically stop abortions instead of just protesting. The current law legitimizes the intolerance of the pro-choice camp. If abortion were banned, pro-choicers would have to tolerate pro-lifers’ principles as they would be encoded as law. Who’s labeled tolerant or intolerant just depends on which side is in power. Democracy doesn’t solve who’s right or wrong. And since we can’t determine moral truth absolutely, we have no solution when a minority position, seen as intolerant, becomes the majority view. But just because we don’t have a solution doesn’t mean some elite group should decide. We just have to live with the limits of democracy. Shutting people out and refusing to understand them isn’t a solution.

—You’re right that the terms “tolerant” and “intolerant” can be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we stop using them. It’s not about who wins or protests. It’s about whether a group supports the basic principles of an open society, pluralism, civil rights, democratic norms. If an ideology pushes to suppress those things, even if it does it peacefully, it’s still anti-democratic. Pro-lifers have a right to protest, sure. But if their end goal is to force everyone to follow a religious belief, that’s not just another political view. That’s a threat to secular democracy. We can’t just look at their tactics, we have to look at what they’re trying to accomplish. You say we can’t determine right or wrong. Maybe not absolutely. But we can tell when someone’s threatening the very framework that allows us to debate right and wrong at all.

—Suppose you and your friends form a group of ten mountain climbing enthusiasts and agree to make decisions democratically. You all go on a trip, and then you hit some really bad weather. Everyone’s scared. Since one guy is a far more experienced climber, the group decides to let him make all the decisions, like martial law. You all make it back safely. It worked out so well that everyone except you wants him to be the permanent dictator. Should you be allowed to deny what everyone else wants?

—That’s exactly why liberal democracies aren’t just about majority rule; they’re also about constitutional limits. The U.S., for example, is a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. You can’t vote away someone’s right to free speech or due process, no matter how many people want to. Why? Because history has shown us that majorities can be dangerous, mob rule, tyranny of the majority. Constitutional democracy exists to protect minority rights from majority overreach. In your mountain climbing scenario, sure, the group can hand over power for survival, but that’s just a temporary suspension in an emergency. It doesn’t mean democracy should let itself be permanently voted out. That would be suicide. If you vote to end democracy, you didn’t really believe in democracy; you believed in majority rule. And there’s a difference.

—If your Constitution prohibits undemocratic laws from being enacted, then fine; it can rule on whether something violates it or not. But let’s be clear: that’s not a question of what’s morally right or wrong. So this idea of “tolerance” becomes irrelevant. If banning abortion is unconstitutional, then there’s nothing to tolerate; it’s simply not allowed under the law.

—Sure, that’s true from a legal standpoint. But you’re missing the political and cultural reality. Constitutions can be amended. Judges can be replaced. Laws and precedents change. Saying “it’s unconstitutional” doesn’t end the discussion; it just states the current legal status. If millions believe abortion is murder, they’ll work to change the Constitution or reinterpret it. That’s why tolerance still matters, because law follows culture, not the other way around.

—We’re going in circles. If the Constitution can be amended, then the majority can vote for dictatorship. And if the Constitution allows that, your whole point about “constitutional limits” falls apart. If 9 out of 10 people in your mountain climbing group want permanent dictatorship, and the Constitution lets them do it through amendments, who are you to say they can’t? Who decides what’s allowed and what isn’t?

—At some point, you have to stand for something more than just process. If you think democracy is only a method for making decisions, then yes, you’re right. It can vote itself into a dictatorship. But if you believe democracy is also a set of values, then some things can’t be put up for a vote, even by a majority. So who decides? Ideally, a balance of powers: independent courts, international norms, basic human rights. Imperfect, yes, but necessary. Otherwise, you don’t have a democracy anymore. You’ve got mob rule dressed up as democracy. There’s a difference between the will of the majority and a just political order. And if you’re the one dissenting voice in that climbing group? Then yes, you stand your ground. Because democracy without principle is just tyranny in democratic clothing.

—There’s actually no mechanism in a democracy, like American democracy, that protects minority rights. That’s just a perception, or even an illusion. Take freedom of the press. Sure, we can’t pass a law banning FOX News, even if most people want to. But at the same time, that’s because the majority doesn’t want FOX banned. The majority still wants freedom of the press. So it’s not that minority rights are being protected. If the majority ever stopped wanting the freedom of the press, they could change the Constitution. The Constitution is really just a set of meta-laws, the laws of laws. If you’re the one writing it, you can absolutely impose your personal values. And let’s be honest; that’s anti-democratic. It means there’s only one moment in a democracy’s life when personal values can be imposed, at the founding. After that, it’s all majority rule. The values in the Constitution aren’t protecting minorities; they’re just the opinions of the people who wrote it. Whether those were majority or minority opinions, we’ll never really know, because the Constitution wasn’t written democratically.

—But the framers weren’t just imposing random values; they were trying to embed universal principles, like liberty and equality. Principles learned through historical experience.

—And again, how do we know those principles are “universal”? Who gets to decide that? You’re so convinced certain things are true that you can’t even imagine disagreement. So you call them “universal.” But you can’t prove it. And politically, we have to start from that lack of certainty. No matter how universal the Constitution sounds to you, the truth is: there’s nothing beyond interpretation. No text, legal or otherwise, can be true or false outside of interpretation. Even “1+1=3″ can be interpreted differently, like when a man and a woman have a child. We don’t arrive at supposedly universal truths through logic. That’s impossible, because logic always starts with assumptions. So we assume something is right or wrong, and then we build logical arguments to justify it.

—That might be technically true, but we still need shared fictions, constitutions, laws, moral frameworks, to hold society together. If we throw them out, all we have left is relativism and chaos.

—I’m not saying we should throw them out. I’m saying we have to recognize them for what they are, fictions or myths. They’re useful, sure, but they’re not sacred. And once we admit that, we have to also admit that rights, laws, and morals exist because of popularity and power, not because of logic or truth. You believe in substantivism, that we make decisions based on universal truths, and if someone disagrees, it’s because they don’t understand them. My view is proceduralism, we don’t agree on what’s right or good, but we agree on how we make decisions. And as you must admit, there’s no objective standard for right and wrong. Every moral claim, human rights, dignity, the good life, equality, is built on unprovable assumptions. So proceduralism isn’t just the dominant model; it’s the only one that can intellectually hold. Not because it’s ideal, but because every alternative collapses under its own logic. If we insist on believing it in spite of it, it’ll be just another religion. Which means the term “proceduralism” is kind of redundant; there’s no real opposing concept. We don’t deliver justice; we just deliver decisions. When someone insists on “universal” principles, it’s just a euphemism for “This is right because I say so.” That isn’t democracy; it’s authoritarianism. It’s a refusal to understand opposing views, and that’s precisely why tolerance becomes necessary. But for those willing to understand, there’s no one to tolerate, only someone to listen to.

—That makes sense because I don’t want to listen to you anymore, but I’ll tolerate you.