The main thesis of this article is that Western societies risk becoming Balkanized if they confront the superdiversity issue without sound management of intolerance. The Balkanization process has some essential features that allow the use of this term outside the area of origin (namely the Balkan Peninsula). Thus: It always affects a diverse political unit that comprises an inextricable medley of racial, ethnocultural, religious, ideological, or gender identities. It emerges only where neither the hegemony principle nor the confederacy principle (...) can sustain a divided population’s peaceful coexistence. It entails “antagonistic and conflict-oriented relationships resistant to resolution” between the groups or classes dissociated from a diverse political unit. It increases the density of physical and psychological boundaries between the formerly associated parts. It is perpetuated by the great sponsors of the dissociated parts. Any diverse political unit can enter a process of Balkanization, regardless of its degree of culture and civilization. Balkanization does not have a fatal course. Just as there is no society immune to Balkanization, there is no diverse society doomed to Balkanization. Balkanization can be prevented, checked, stopped, or reversed, depending on society members’ individual and collective actions. To survive, the superdiverse liberal democracies from the Euro-Atlantic area need an agonistic public sphere, where actionable truths emerge from a genuine clash of educated opinions. If intolerance management is the first step in preventing the Balkanization of a superdiverse political unit, promoting social and political tolerance towards all people who express educated opinions is the best starting point to genuine tolerance. The return to Enlightenment rationalism values that underpinned our freedom of thought and expression will help us meet the challenges inherent in current and future superdiversity. By feeding enlightened conversations and debates with genuine, educated opinions, people learn to have tolerance for “unpleasant” pieces of knowledge. Then, they spread general tolerance – as a by-product – across the entire society. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that businesses bear a pro tanto, negative, moral obligation to refuse to engage in economic relationships with representatives of intolerable ideologies. For example, restaurants should refuse to serve those displaying Nazi symbols. The crux of this argument is the claim that normal economic activity is not a morally neutral activity but rather an exercise of political power. When a business refuses to engage with someone because of their membership in some group, e.g., Black Americans, this (...) is a use of political power to signal that Black Americans are other. Conversely, when businesses engage with someone who is clearly representing an intolerable ideology, this is a use of political power that signals the acceptability of that ideology. Businesses should not do this. (shrink)

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political (...) conditions—is essential to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that a significant internal tension exists in John Rawls' political liberalism. He holds the following positions that might plausibly be considered incongruous: (1) a commitment to tolerating a broad right of freedom of political speech, including a right of subversive advocacy; (2) a commitment to restricting this broad right if it is intended to incite and likely to bring about imminent violence; and (3) a commitment to curbing this broad right only if there is (...) a constitutional crisis. By supporting a broad right of freedom of political speech in Political Liberalism, he allows militant intolerant people such as Jihadists, White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis to advocate publicly their dangerously intolerant beliefs. Public advocacy of dangerously intolerant beliefs can be construed as subversive advocacy. As demonstrated by the historical examples of the Weimar Republic and the Second Spanish Republic, militant intolerant groups could use a right of subversive advocacy to threaten the stability of liberal democracies. Hence, by allowing them to exercise a broad right of freedom of political speech, Rawls could jeopardize that which he intends to defend, namely the actual political stability of a liberal democratic order. Lastly, Rawls' conception of ideal constitutional interpretation, which privileges a broad right of freedom of political speech, might be insufficient to deal effectively with the threat posed by militant intolerant groups. Yet a tradition of American constitutional interpretation that balances freedom of speech with other important constitutional and/or political values has overcome a civil war, two world wars, the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks without abandoning democracy or permanently renouncing those values. Still, Rawls' ideal approach to constitutional interpretation might, in hindsight, help us to understand some of the excesses and deficiencies of American jurisprudence in times of emergency.<br><br><br><br>. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance (...) associated with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility that religiously motivated intolerance and conflict can be reframed and positively utilized for constructive social-political purposes. After reviewing efforts by political philosophers over the past two decades to accommodate religious voices in political discourse, I scrutinize Charles Taylor’s attempt to improve upon the limits of “accommodationist” approaches to religious intolerance and conflict. I argue that both accommodationist and Taylor’s recognition-based approaches to religiously motivated conflict take the gravity of such conflict with insufficient seriousness. (...) I then explore the potential goods of intentional conflict by examining Chantal Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism as a proposal for thinking beyond tolerance as an orienting value for resolving intransigent conflict. While I argue that Mouffe’s account finally suffers from certain of the same misgivings as the accommodationist and recognition-based approaches, I conclude that agonistic pluralism’s aim to conceptually reframe (rather than eliminate) intolerance and conflict moves in an important and promising direction. (shrink)

When an activity is unwanted, administrators often adopt a zero tolerance policy towards that activity. The background assumption is that, by adopting a zero tolerance policy, one is doing everything that one can to reduce or eliminate the activity in question. Yet which policy best serves to reduce an unwanted behavior is always an empirical question. Thus, those who adopt a zero tolerance policy towards some behavior without first investigating and finding that they are in a set of circumstances where (...) that policy is the most cost-effective way of reducing or eliminating the undesirable behavior are committing the zero tolerance fallacy. (shrink)

Graham Priest has influentially claimed that the Sorites paradox is an Inclosure paradox, concluding that his favored dialetheic solution to the Inclosure paradoxes should be extended to the Sorites paradox. We argue that, given Priest’s dialetheic solution to the Sorites paradox, the argument purporting to show that that paradox is an Inclosure is unsound, and discuss some issues surrounding this fact.

The ideological interface between Muslims and liberal educators undoubtedly is strained in the realm of sex education, and perhaps on no topic more so than homosexuality. Some argue that schools should not try to ‘undermine the faith’ of Muslims, who object to teaching homosexuality as an ‘acceptable alternative lifestyle’. In this article, I will argue against this monolithic presentation of Islam. Furthermore, I will argue that a narrow view of Islam is neglectful of gay and lesbian Muslims who are particularly (...) vulnerable to the unrepentant hostilities of their own communities. (shrink)

Tolerance is part of the self-definition of democratic societies, one of the major foundations underlying secular democracy’s sometimes unstated and always ambivalent claim to represent a higher form of civilisation. The transformation of tolerance from a type of indulgence to a type of virtue is explained in part by what it does. It helps to preserve peace in societies with a high level of ethnic and religious diversity, and it has also played an important part in eliminating the injustices that (...) religious and racial minorities suffered when Western societies were more homogenous. Historically, intolerance has extended in extreme cases to persecution, segregation, violence and mass-murder. In more “normal” situations it has usually meant denial of civil and political rights and unequal treatment at law. A fair and decent society is obliged to address this injustice, not least by state and judicial action against groups which refuse to respect the freedom and rights of other people. Problems arise, however, when even groups which respect the freedom and rights of others, such as the Christian churches, are accused of discrimination and treated as intolerant for observing legitimate distinctions; for properly exercising a preference; and for defending the rights of others. In these cases the concept of intolerance, understood as a refusal to respect the rights of others, has been extended to encompass something which is not a form of intolerance at all; namely, the right we all have to refuse to validate choices with which we disagree. (shrink)

Millikan's famous oil drop experiment is scrutinized from the viewpoint of the methodological dicta of the credibility revolution.

Open Access: This essay argues that Claudia Card numbers among important contributors to nonideal ethical theory, and it advocates for the worth of NET. Following philosophers including Lisa Tessman and Charles Mills, the essay contends that it is important for ethical theory, and for feminist purposes, to carry forward the interrelationship that Mills identifies between nonideal theory and feminist ethics. Card's ethical theorizing assists in understanding that interrelationship. Card's philosophical work includes basic elements of NET indicated by Tessman, Mills, and (...) others, and further offers two important and neglected elements to other nonideal ethical theorists: her rejection of the “administrative point of view,” and her focus on “intolerable harms” as forms of “extreme moral stress” and obstacles to excellent ethical lives. The essay concludes that Card's insights are helpful to philosophers in developing nonideal ethical theory as a distinctive contribution to, and as a subset of, nonideal theory. (shrink)

Governments and social scientists are increasingly developing machine learning methods to automate the process of identifying terrorists in real time and predict future attacks. However, current operationalizations of “terrorist”’ in artificial intelligence are difficult to justify given three issues that remain neglected: insufficient construct legitimacy, insufficient criterion validity, and insufficient construct validity. I conclude that machine learning methods should be at most used for the identification of singular individuals deemed terrorists and not for identifying possible terrorists from some more general (...) class, nor to predict terrorist attacks more broadly, given intolerably high risks that result from such approaches. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

Unfortunately, many people today see the regulation of lies, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news as an infringement of free speech, at least when such speech is ‘political,’ despite the damage that such speech can do. But this very protective attitude toward speech rests on a mistaken understanding of the role of free speech in a liberal society. The right to free speech is based on the liberal value of freedom, and as such can be no broader than freedom itself. (...) And freedom has always been subject to reasonable limits in a liberal society. Indeed, while the principles of toleration and neutrality are often cited as supporting a broad interpretation of the right to free speech, they also tell us that certain limits apply to that right. We need not tolerate speech that encourages intolerance, and while government should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, it need not be neutral between reasonable and unreasonable conceptions. These ideas form the framework of liberal society, and as I shall show, also provide a guide for understanding what kind of speech is protected in a liberal society and what it is not. (shrink)

The alienation constraint on theories of well-being has been influentially expressed thus: 'what is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive …. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him' (Railton 1986: 9). Many agree this claim expresses something true, but there is little consensus on how exactly the constraint is to be (...) understood. Here, I clarify the sense in which the quote offers a basic constraint on theories of well-being—a constraint that should be adopted by (e.g.) hedonists, desire satisfactionists, and objective list theorists alike. This constraint focuses on affective engagement, or positive affective stances in connection with a proposed good. I show that the constraint explains a near-universal intuition, and rules out a number of well-known theories of well-being. (shrink)

Twin-earth thought experiments, standardly construed, support the externalist doctrine that the content of propositional attitudes involving natural-kind terms supervenes upon properties external to those who entertain them. But this doctrine in conjunction with a common view of self-knowledge might have the intolerable consequence that substantial propositions concerning the environment could be knowable a priori. Since both doctrines, externalism and privileged self-knowledge, appear independently plausible, there is then a paradox facing the attempt to hold them concurrently. I shall argue, however, that (...) externalist claims about the dependence of content on environmental factors presuppose certain theses about the semantics of natural-kind terms that, if sound, would make those claims eligible for empirical justification instead. In fact, that is the only interpretation of their epistemic status that could square with the standard conclusion from twin-earth cases. Furthermore, it can be shown to solve the paradox of externalism and self-knowledge in a more doxastically conservative way--accommodating precisely each of the well-accepted intuitions about knowledge, closure and the individuation of content given up by available competitors. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities (...) for thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argues that human mortality is a good thing because living forever would necessarily be intolerably boring. His argument is often attacked for unfoundedly proposing asymmetrical requirements on the desirability of living for mortal and immortal lives. My first aim in this paper is to advance a new interpretation of Williams' argument that avoids these objections, drawing in part on some of his other writings to contextualize it. My second aim is to show how even the best version of (...) his argument only supports a somewhat weaker thesis: it may be possible for some people with certain special psychological features to enjoy an immortal life, but no one has good reason to bet on being such a person. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have recast feminist arguments against pornography in terms of Speech Act Theory. In particular, they have considered the ways in which the illocutionary force of pornographic speech serves to set the conventions of sexual discourse while simultaneously silencing the speech of women, especially during unwanted sexual encounters. Yet, this raises serious questions as to how pornographers could (i) be authorities in the language game of sex, and (ii) set the conventions for sexual discourse - questions which these (...) speech act-theoretic arguments against pornography have thus far failed to adequately answer. I fill in this gap of the argumentation by demonstrating that there are fairly weak standards for who counts as an authority or convention-setter in sexual discourse. With this analysis of the underpinnings of a speech act analysis of pornography in mind, I discuss a range of possible objections. I conclude that (i) the endorsement of censorship by a speech act analysis of pornography competes with its commitment to the conventionality of speech acts, and, more damningly, that (ii), recasting anti-pornography arguments in terms of linguistic conventions risks an unwitting defence of a rapist's lack of mens rea - an intolerable result; and yet resisting this conclusion requires that one back away from the original claim to women's voices being 'silenced'. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across (...) deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

Psychological well-being is a major global concern receiving more scholarly attention following the 2008 Great Recession, and it becomes even more relevant in the context of COVID-19 outbreak. In this study, we investigated the impact of economic uncertainty resulting from natural disasters, epidemics, and financial crisis on individuals' mental health. As unemployment rate exponentially increases, individuals are faced with health and economic concerns. Not all society members are affected to the same extent, and marginalized groups, such as those suffering from (...) chronic mental illnesses or low-income families cannot afford the downsizing, mass lay-offs and lack of access to public health services. Psychiatric profession is familiarized with the phenomenon of intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and we examine how this concept is associated with job uncertainty and social identity disturbance. Several studies have formally investigated the effects of IU, but to our knowledge, this is the first research integrating the psychological well-being, job uncertainty and identity disturbance caused by economic breakdown. Literature points to many reported cases of PTSD, anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies following major social disasters. Yet, we have undertaken to analyze the subjective experiences underlying the self-harming behaviors in an attempt to fill the methodological gap by drawing insights from prominent psychological, sociological and economic theories. We find economic uncertainty to have a positive relation to job uncertainty and identity disturbance, and a negative relationship with psychological well-being. Psychological well-being depends on coherency between both abstract subjective and concrete objective identity, and when these perceptions are inconsistent, cognitive dissonance arises resulting in identity disturbance. We argue that stability is not associated with monetary advantage only, but also with a wide range of other benefits that are crucial for individuals' growth, satisfaction and sense of identity. Therefore, we propose the implementation of social support and public welfare policies to mitigate health risks during the turbulent socio-economic changes. (shrink)

A recent report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention in cooperation with the Swedish Security Service shows that the Internet has been extensively used to spread propaganda by proponents of violent political extremism, characterized by a worldview painted in black and white, an anti-democratic viewpoint, and intolerance towards persons with opposing ideas. We provide five arguments suggesting that philosophical dialogue with young persons would be beneficial to their acquisition of insights, attitudes and thinking tools for encountering such (...) propaganda. The arguments are based on stated requirements for problem solutions given by experts in violent political extremism, recent research about the effects of philosophical dialogue in young persons’ thinking skills, and parts of the basic theoretical framework of Philosophy for Children. Philosophical dialogues seem a promising way for young people to achieve a stronger democratic awareness and a more tenacious resistance against extremist views online. (shrink)

In a morally diverse society, moral agents inevitably run up against intractable disagreements. Civility functions as a valuable constraint on the sort of behaviors which moral agents might deploy in defense of their deeply held moral convictions and generally requires tolerance of other views and political liberalism, as does pluralism. However, most visions of civility are exceptionless: they require civil behavior regardless of how strong the disagreement is between two members of the same society. This seems an excellent idea when (...) those required to do the tolerating might otherwise smash us. However, the demands of civility are universal and fall upon everyone, including ourselves. They may seem to require us to tolerate the intolerable, leading us not into pluralism but rather into functional relativism, and also require the powerless to moderate their demands for redress. They also place moral agents in a very difficult position with respect to realizing our deeply held moral values. Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism, by contrast, allows us to violate tolerance when we come up against values which, put into practice, are incompatible with a form of life we can tolerate. Despite the many fronts on which civility and pluralism align, they are also pitted against each other. Only a qualified (not exceptionless) civility based in respect for persons can cohere with pluralism and thus resolve the double bind in which the moral agent seemed to be placed by exceptionless civility. I develop a rule for Accepted Exceptions that helps to explain how moral agents can be civil, value pluralism, demand redress, and maintain their own deeply held moral commitments. (shrink)

It is very well known that from the late-1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply-held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences. It is equally well known that, from around the same period, he also began to radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies, for instance by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate (...) human societies. But what is less known is how, if at all, these two sets of challenges were connected, and why Feyerabend felt it important to raise them at all. In this chapter, my aim is to explore these issues by considering why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Why, for instance, did Feyerabend defend alternative medicine, psychical abilities, astrology, magic and witchcraft and why did he argue that ‘Western science’ is complicit in environmental destruction, intellectual imperialism, social oppression, and spiritual destitution. Located in their historical and political context, such defences and arguments seem peculiar, not least because science was recognised not only as a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union, but also because Western victory in that site was considered inevitable. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards – of tolerance, critical enquiry – which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy. I suggest that Feyerabend was trying to demonstrate that scientists were, too often, guilty of the same intolerant and dogmatic attitudes which were, according to prevailing propaganda, the property of illiberal totalitarian societies. Science does not reflect the superior epistemic and political values of Western societies but are, in fact, reflective of the same vices ascribed to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then the sciences are not symbols of our epistemic and political values, but quite the reverse, hence Feyerabend’s talk of the ‘dogmatic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘ratiofascist’ nature of modern science. But there is a positive upshot to Feyerabend’s challenge. For even if the sciences do not yet reflect the epistemic and political values of liberal democratic Western societies, they might yet be reformed so that they are. And there is a parallel between Feyerabend’s strategy and that of many of the other radicals of the time – student activists, environmentalists, and pacifists – namely to test the commitment to tolerance and deliberative debate of the establishment by asking it to seriously engage with ideas and convictions opposed to its own. For both science and society can become ‘tyrannical’ through the same means: by exempting themselves from critical scrutiny, by promoting self-serving ‘myths’ about themselves, and by derogating and excluding alternatives, including the ‘outsider’ perspectives they offer. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Feyerabend is distinctive in virtue of his willingness to offer radical criticisms of the authority of science such that it can fulfil its legitimate ideological role – namely, of symbolising and instantiating our core epistemic and political values – such that we can offer a sincere and meaningful answer to Feyerabend’s question ‘what’s so great about science?’. (shrink)

The Growing Block Theory of time asserts that temporal reality encompasses all present and past things. The world grows as things come to be present. When something becomes past it does not cease to be, it simply moves away from the growing edge of reality. Thus past things are just like present ones, except not present. But if past things are just as real as present ones, and qualitatively just like them, how can I tell if what is happening is (...) present and not past? It seems everything would look the same to me whether I was past or present. And so I don’t know that I am present. To avoid this intolerable result, I argue on behalf of the Growing Block Theorist that the present does not look the same as the past. Experiences exemplify the property of presentness when they are present, and I can be directly acquainted with that fact. My direct acquaintance enables me to be justified in believing my experiences are present and to know the same. I develop this view and conclude by responding to objections. (shrink)

The issue discussed in this paper is as topical today as it was in the early modern period. The Reformation presented with heightened urgency the question of how to relate the system of beliefs and values regarded as fundamental by an established political community to alternative beliefs and values introduced by new groups and individuals. Through a discussion of the views on toleration advanced by some key early modern thinkers, this paper will revisit different ways of addressing this problem, focusing (...) on the relationship between truth and toleration. The comparison between different proposals in their historical and political contexts, will reveal a variety of understandings of toleration and of models for its promotion. These understandings will be shown to be grounded in different conceptions of religious belief, of its relation to truth, and of human reason’s ability to reach it. They will provide a map of possible models for addressing conflict in a pluralist world from which lessons of enduring relevance can be learnt. The upshot of the paper is that, from a theoretical point of view, the culprit in intolerance is not in itself belief in some objective truth. Some of the common assumptions about the denial of religious truth or the reduction of religious truth to a minimal creed as the best paths to universal toleration will be challenged. Likewise, the narrative centred on England and France which has led to the celebration of the heroes of a supposedly ‘universal’ toleration that still manages to exclude millions of people will be shown to be in need of significant revision. After discussing approaches based on the rights of the individual conscience and on the unknowability of religious truths above human reason, the paper will finally investigate whether grounds for a general and principled theory of toleration can be found in religious truth itself and, following the tradition of natural law, in some universal truth discoverable by natural reason. (shrink)

The article intends to analyse the problem of the coexistence of opposite and alternative “comprehensive doc- trines” in today's Western society, on the basis of a comparison between the thought of Schmitt, Böckenförde, Habermas, Rawls and Charles Taylor. In this regard the article proposes a possible solution to avoid, on the one hand, the intolerant goal of a total homogeneity, and on the other a naive and aproblematic acceptance of a relativistic multiculturalism.

In a recent paper, I argued that an externalist understanding of mental disorder from the philosophy of psychiatry presents an ethical challenge to the practice of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) for psychiatric illness, because it highlights the ways in which the suffering associated with psychiatric illness is sustained by features of the external environment wherein the person is embedded, including social barriers and injustices. In a response to my paper, Harry Hudson argues that addressing social inequality lacks relevance to (...) the immediate permissibility of psychiatric MAiD and that the issue of psychiatric MAiD should be informed by ‘pragmatic politics’ rather than by ‘obfuscatory philosophy’. Herein, I contend that Hudson’s response misconstrues my position and ascribes to me views I neither express nor endorse. My paper does not claim that psychiatric MAiD should be denied to people who are presently in intolerable distress. Rather, it suggests that the provision of psychiatric MAiD comes along with social responsibilities of the state to attend to the barriers and injustices that sustain and exacerbate psychiatric illness, as well as ethical responsibilities of clinicians to consider a wider range of presently available psychological and social interventions which may have been neglected under a traditional internalist approach. (shrink)

Discussions of John Locke’s theory of causation tend, understandably, to focus on the related notion of power and in particular the dialectic with David Hume. But Locke faces a very different threat, one that is internal to his view. For he argues both that causation is a relation and that relations are not real. The obvious conclusion is intolerable. And yet the premises, I argue, are unassailable. Building on an interpretation of Locke’s treatment of relations I have developed elsewhere, I (...) show how Locke can at once speak meaningfully of causation and deny its mind-independent existence. (shrink)

This paper develops the implications of Spinoza’s invocation in chapter 6 of the traditional analogy between the oikos and the polis. Careful attention to this analogy reveals a number of interesting features of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza challenges the perception that absolute monarchy offers greater respite from the intolerable anxiety of the state of nature than does democracy. He acknowledges that people associate monarchical rule with peace and stability, but asserts that it can too easily deform its subjects. Unchallenged monarchy (...) may be credited with a certain order, “but if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, there can be nothing more wretched for mankind than peace.” This is all familiar to friends of Spinoza, but what kind of democracy is the alternative to those monarchies that tend toward despotism? It is a form of association that, he suggests, resembles a bitterly quarrelsome but nevertheless virtuous family. Thus, he admits that democratic, or popular, rule is typically turbulent and disorderly, but urges his reader to view contentions and disputes as a kind of salutary discord that preserves rather than threatens virtue. (shrink)

This article clarifies Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s understanding of toleration, a topic that has become controversial in the last few decades. For the purpose of brevity and exactness, only his writings and letters dating from the beginning of his philosophical thought (1668 to 1676) are analysed, while the main focus is on Leibniz’s understanding of political toleration, or the relation of the state towards the existence of confessions (i.e., churches or denominations) different than the ruler’s. The article investigates the understanding of (...) toleration in the 17th-century Holy Roman Empire, which turns out to be the sufferance of difference rather than its affirmation or celebration, as well as the historical context of tolerating different confessions in various states of the 17th-century Empire. While indirect evidence is shown that Leibniz favoured toleration in confessionally mixed German states, the main point of the article is that young Leibniz cannot be counted among the proponents of toleration only if his vision of politically and ecclesiastically united Empire didn’t tolerate further existence of differing confessions. Based on the analysis of the memorandum Securitas Publica from 1670, it is conclusively shown that Leibniz was in favour of toleration of differing confessions even in the united Empire that he envisioned. The last part of the article explains Leibniz’s attitude towards “atheism” on the cases of celebrated philosophers which were widely perceived as atheists in the learned world of the time, namely Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. It is concluded that the relation of young Leibniz to them and their work cannot be characterized as intolerant or censorious. (shrink)

The Orthodox Church has been given the fullest of truth by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, truth honored and valued in the communion of the Saints. For men, to grasp divine truth is a progressive process part of a permanent development. Each and every person walks along this path together with other people, without being the same as the others. Every person is offered and understands truth according to their own religious experience and skills to understand. Ultimate truth exists (...) and it has been revealed completely, but the way in which it is grasped varies from one person to another. “This is not a narrowly doctrinal vision of theological truth. However, it is an essentially spiritual vision for worldly reality, one that removes arrogance from authority and opens new ways of approaching believers of other religions. It presupposes magnanimity and charity, faith and hope, tolerance and reconciliation. It opposes forceful conversion and conflinct, imposition and intolerance, aggression and violence”.85 This approach prevents us from assigning to God intentions and plans which are exclusively ours. Thus, whenever we have a dialogue with those of different beliefs and ideologies, we must always start from God’s sacrificial love for all men. (shrink)

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible (...) contents debate into a multimodal framework, charting its various significances. The second is to explore whether any experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal (or ‘high-level’ or ‘rich’) account of perception’s admissible contents. I conclude that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot of this argument is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

To date, both the United States federal government and twenty-one individual states have passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts that aim to protect religious persons from having their sincere beliefs substantially burdened by governmental interests. RFRAs accomplish this by offering a three-pronged exemption test for religious objectors that is satisfied only when (1) an objector has a sincere belief that is being substantially burdened; (2) the government has a very good reason (e.g., health or safety) to interfere; and (3) there is (...) a reasonable alternative to serve the compelling interest. Legal balancing tests like those found in RFRA are content neutral insofar as they sideline the belief-content of conscientious objections as irrelevant when determining the permissibility of granting legal accommodations. However, some theorists worry that this legal picture may be backward: perhaps balancing tests should be content non-neutral given the usual features of conscientious objections. For example, Yossi Nehushtan contends that, contrary to their typical codification, religious conscience beliefs seem undeserving of special legal accommodations because they possess uniquely strong empirical and theoretical ties to intolerance. Thus, the illiberally intolerant content of these conscientious objections might actually give the state a reason to refuse to grant legal exemptions. In this paper, I offer a cursory defense of content neutrality with respect to balancing tests like those found in RFRA. To begin, I outline Nehushtan’s argument for content non-neutrality. The cornerstone of his argument is that illiberal intolerance is intolerable such that conscientious objections that are based upon illiberally intolerant values provide the state with strong, normally prevailing reason not to grant an exemption. I argue that, even when the illiberally intolerant content of one’s conscience constitutes a weighty and relevant factor in determining the permissibility of granting a legal exemption, there remain significant problems. It is difficult, for example, to determine which views are illiberally intolerant and difficult to say whether illiberally intolerant views can effectively serve as the principled demarcating line in balancing tests. To conclude, I offer several cursory arguments in favor of adopting content-neutral approaches without necessarily making a comprehensive case. By drawing on the work of Amy Sepinwall, Nadia Sawicki, and Nathan Chapman, I show that content-neutral approaches can help to safeguard robust protections for conscience by permitting atypical exercises of conscience, protect minority thoughts and practices from being coercively supplanted by majoritarian understandings of morality, appropriately maintain the skepticism and humility that we owe each other as compatriots in a pluralistic society, and allow the kind of justifiable civil disobedience that has an important place in political history among other things. (shrink)

Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life is undesirable for a human because it would inevitably grow intolerably boring. I will argue against Williams and those who share his view. To make my case, I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. Though my response to Williams will partly overlap with some prior (...) responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways. For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by “one’s part-whole-reality conception” I mean “one’s conception of his or her place in the whole of reality.”. (shrink)

To fully respond to the demands of multiculturalism, a view of toleration would need to duly respect diversity both at the level of the application of principles of toleration and at the level of the justificatory foundations that a view of toleration may appeal to. The paper examines Rainer Forst’s post-Rawlsian, ‘reason-based’ attempt to provide a view of toleration that succeeds at these two levels and so allows us to tolerate tolerantly. His account turns on the view that a constructivist (...) requirement of generality and reciprocity provides a suitable criterion of toleration since a commitment to this requirement is part of what defines people as reasonable. But it is neither plausible nor coherent to build such a requirement into an idea of reasonableness from which an account of toleration starts. Thus, constructivism cannot provide a tolerant criterion of toleration, if such criterion, in order to overcome the ‘paradox’ of intolerant toleration, must escape reasonable disagreement. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...) development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

his paper argues that we will never get rid of the extremist mentality unless the dualist view prevails and is taught as part of the educational system. The dualist view takes account of both sides of an argument whereas the extremist view promotes one side unequivocally without considering the merits of the opposing view. The merits of the dualist view can be taught in schools so that everyone learns to recognise that mentality when it is evident not only in other (...) people’s behaviour but also in their own thinking about things. The dualist view is a flexible one involving trial-and-error processes as we work our way through life. That view is contrasted with the monist view that focuses on one point of view to the exclusion of all others. The extremist’s view is usually monistic and is intolerable of views that contradict or dispute their dogmatic view of things. This paper therefore examines these two contrasting views. It outlines the spectrum between monist and dualist ways of thinking, and it concludes that systematic form of dualism is possible that takes the middle way between the extremes of dogmatic and sceptical thinking. Only through dualist studies will the dualist view be more thoroughly developed, as is outlined here. (shrink)

Tolerance is not a virtue or a moral species in and of itself, rather tolerance exists with its contrary of intolerance. If we reduce tolerance and intolerance to its bare acts, we find that tolerance involves an act of indifference, and intolerance involves an act of intervention. Some may find that it is problematic with associating tolerance with indifference, but for it to be practiced as a virtue as such, those are the acts that must be performed. (...) Additionally, not only must acts of indifference and intervention be involved for tolerance in general to be a moral virtue, the level of indifference and intervention must be appropriate for the circumstance as its relevant guiding cardinal virtue dictates. Lastly, as all things good, there exists an evil form of tolerance and intolerance known as virtue signaling which meets the criteria of false prudence and should not be tolerated. -/- . (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

La tesis principal de este trabajo es que los modelos estadísticos facilitan explicaciones acerca de los errores que pueden cometer nuestros procedimientos de inferencia de datos a fenómenos, en el contexto de la estadística clásica o frecuentista. La explicación del error es una operación que, a su vez, ayuda a evitarlo en donde es evitable e intolerable; tolerarlo donde es inevitable y tolerable; y suspender el juicio donde es inevitable e intolerable. Todas estas operaciones son elementos de una práctica generadora (...) de evidencia confiable. Se ilustra esta tesis con el modelo lineal en econometría, el estimador de mínimos cuadrados ordinarios, el estimador y modelo de variables instrumentales y con los conceptos relacionados con las pruebas de hipótesis. Se pone especial énfasis en las propiedades de insesgadez, consistencia y precisión como caracterizaciones del tipo de error que se puede cometer usándo un estimador. Se sostiene que los modelos explican identificando patrones de dependencia contrafáctica entre características del mecanismo estocástico representadas por el modelo y características de los procedimientos inferenciales. (shrink)

This chapter considers the challenges to, and the resources for, cultivating a personal capacity for tolerance, given a Spinozist account of belief-formation. After articulating two main components of personal tolerance, I examine the features of Spinoza’s theory of cognition that make the cultivation of tolerance so difficult. This is followed by an analysis of Spinoza’s account of overcoming intolerant tendencies. Ultimately, I argue that the capacity of individuals to be tolerant depends crucially on the establishment of conditions of trust, conditions (...) that are conspicuously lacking in many modern democracies. (shrink)

Title: The Systemic Causes of Emergent Religious Dogma and Its Violation of the Three Universal Laws of Nature -/- Author: Angelito Malicse -/- Abstract: This paper examines the systemic causes behind the emergence of dogmatic teachings in major world religions and analyzes how such dogmas violate the Three Universal Laws of Nature proposed by the author. These laws include the Law of Karma (understood as error-free system functioning), the Law of Balance (homeostasis in natural and mental systems), and the Law (...) of Natural Feedback (interconnected response mechanisms within and between systems). By identifying the historical, cognitive, and systemic roots of religious dogmatism, this paper aims to provide a framework for reprogramming educational and leadership systems toward holistic and balanced decision-making. -/- 1. Introduction Religious dogma has played a central role in shaping civilizations, cultures, and individual behavior. While it has often provided moral guidance and social cohesion, it has also contributed to ignorance, intolerance, and societal imbalance. Through the lens of the Three Universal Laws of Nature, we can identify the ways in which rigid dogmatic systems disrupt natural and cognitive harmony. -/- 2. The Three Universal Laws of Nature -/- Law of Karma (System Integrity): Every system must operate without defects or errors to function effectively. When errors persist, the system’s outcomes are flawed. -/- Law of Balance (Homeostasis): All natural and human systems strive for balance. Imbalance causes internal conflict, societal dysfunction, or collapse. -/- Law of Natural Feedback: All systems must remain open to feedback from their internal and external environments. Ignoring feedback leads to maladaptation and systemic failure. -/- 3. Causes of Emergent Religious Dogma -/- 3.1 Fear-Based Origins Many religious doctrines emerged as responses to existential fear—of death, the unknown, and natural disasters. Dogmatic narratives provided simplified explanations and behavioral rules. 3.2 Example 1: Ancient Mesopotamian religions attributed floods and famines to the anger of gods. Such beliefs led to ritual sacrifices as a means to appease divine forces, rather than understanding ecological or agricultural causes. -/- Example 2: In medieval Christianity, the Black Death was interpreted as divine punishment for sin. This view discouraged public health interventions and led to persecution of marginalized groups. -/- Example 3: In early Hinduism, untouchability was justified through religious texts associating impurity with karmic punishment from past lives, perpetuating caste discrimination and fear-based exclusion. -/- Example 4: In pre-Columbian Aztec religion, fear of cosmic catastrophe led to mass human sacrifices to ensure the sun would rise. This reflected a deep-seated fear-based cosmology that stifled alternative explanations of natural cycles. -/- Violation: These teachings suppress inquiry and reinforce imbalance by replacing curiosity with fear, violating all three universal laws. -/- 3.3 Authority Control and Power Structures Religious institutions often formalized dogma to maintain social or political control, discouraging dissent and elevating select individuals or groups as unquestionable authorities. 3.4 Example 1: The Catholic Church during the Middle Ages used religious dogma to justify inquisitions and excommunication. Galileo was tried for promoting heliocentric theory. -/- Example 2: In early Islamic empires, the rationalist Mu’tazilite school was silenced by political authorities in favor of more conservative Sunni orthodoxy. -/- Example 3: In Tibet, theocratic rule under the Dalai Lamas mixed religious and political power, sometimes using spiritual authority to suppress rival views or secular reforms. -/- Example 4: In Imperial Japan, State Shinto was enforced as a sacred national ideology, deifying the emperor and using religion to justify wartime expansion. -/- Violation: These systems ignored feedback, violated the Law of Balance by consolidating unchecked power, and created systemic dysfunction. -/- 3.3 Lack of Critical Thinking in Education Religious dogma has historically discouraged critical thinking by promoting belief over analysis, often within educational institutions. -/- Example 1: In Islamic madrasas during the Abbasid period’s decline, rote memorization of Qur’anic verses replaced the earlier golden age of open philosophical debate. -/- Example 2: Christian parochial schools often emphasize catechism and obedience over philosophical inquiry, especially before modern curriculum reforms. -/- Example 3: In Orthodox Jewish yeshivas, intense focus on Talmudic repetition can limit exposure to secular critical reasoning. -/- Example 4: Buddhist monastic training in some Theravāda traditions may discourage questioning of senior monks or re-evaluation of ancient commentaries. -/- Violation: This suppresses the Law of Feedback (students cannot question), and disrupts cognitive homeostasis (Law of Balance), leading to mental rigidity. -/- 3.5 Mythologizing Natural Laws Early religions often interpreted natural phenomena (e.g., storms, disease, fertility) as divine interventions rather than natural processes. 3.6 Example 1: In ancient Egypt, the Nile’s flooding was attributed to the goddess Isis’s tears rather than seasonal rainfall patterns. -/- Example 2: In Norse mythology, lightning was seen as Thor’s hammer striking enemies of the gods, preventing meteorological exploration. -/- Example 3: In early Christianity, illness was often seen as divine punishment or demonic possession, leading to reliance on exorcism rather than medicine. -/- Example 4: In many African traditional religions, droughts or epidemics were attributed to the anger of ancestors, promoting rituals over sustainable agriculture or hygiene. -/- Violation: These interpretations contradict the Law of Karma (scientific accuracy), perpetuate system errors, and prevent systemic adaptation. -/- 3.5 Cultural Echo Chambers and Isolation When religious communities isolate themselves ideologically or physically, they create self-reinforcing dogmas. -/- Example 1: The Amish community rejects most forms of modern technology, sometimes impeding access to life-saving medical care. -/- Example 2: Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities may reject secular sciences and discourage contact with outsiders, limiting exposure to empirical knowledge. -/- Example 3: Some Pentecostal or evangelical sects promote insular beliefs about divine prophecy, rejecting scientific consensus on evolution or climate change. -/- Example 4: In certain Buddhist nationalist movements (e.g., in Myanmar), religious dogma is used to isolate the majority from minority faiths, promoting violence and xenophobia. -/- Violation: Such communities resist external feedback, violate the Law of Balance (sociopolitical harmony), and risk collapse under external pressures. -/- 4. Implications for Holistic Education and Leadership To rectify the imbalances caused by dogmatic teachings, education systems must integrate the Three Universal Laws. Leadership training should emphasize systemic thinking, feedback reception, and the pursuit of balance in decision-making. -/- Example in Practice 1: Finland’s education system promotes critical inquiry, emotional intelligence, and a secular understanding of comparative religion. -/- Example in Practice 2: Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness model balances spiritual traditions with modern governance, integrating wellbeing, feedback, and environmental balance. -/- Example in Practice 3: Montessori and Waldorf education methods encourage experiential learning and questioning authority, aligning with natural feedback and balanced cognitive growth. -/- Example in Practice 4: In Rwanda, post-genocide leadership training incorporates forgiveness and rational unity, balancing traditional values with forward-looking governance. -/- 5. Conclusion Dogmatic teachings in major religions arose from systemic needs but now often function in opposition to natural laws. By understanding their origins and violations through the Three Universal Laws of Nature, societies can reform education and leadership systems to restore balance, functionality, and human well-being. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I maintain that Spinoza systematizes independently credible accounts of belief-formation, affect, and desire into an intriguing general theory of how the mind works. His account also explains disparate downstream psychological phenomena, including: (1) emotional responses to fiction; (2) belief perseverance; (3) the reduction of cognitive dissonance; (4) epistemic conservativism that opens us up to confirmation bias, identity protection, and intolerance. Given the promise of Spinoza’s program, I conclude with a plea for further philosophical engagement.

The UK Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is currently progressing through Parliament. The bill is designed to strengthen free speech and academic freedom in higher education, in response to what former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describes as ‘the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses’. But is there really a crisis of academic freedom in British universities?To see that there is, say Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, we need only look at the contemporary reality of (...) suppression of debate on sex and gender. The evidence they catalogue of suppression of research, of blacklisting, harassment and smear campaigns, of no-platforming, disinvitations and shutting down of events, is incontrovertible. The recent experience of scholars and students wishing to discuss the material reality and political salience of sex makes complacency about academic freedom a luxury we cannot afford.Suissa and Sullivan set out a powerful argument for the role of academic freedom in pursuing truth within the academy and developing democracy beyond it. They effectively counter attempts to narrow the scope of academic freedom so as to render it compatible with no-platforming. And they lay out a series of practical steps administrators can take to ensure that universities are places where an expansive and pluralistic intellectual climate prevails.This is a timely and compelling intervention in a vexed but urgent public debate. For their clear-sighted diagnosis of where and how academic freedom has been eroded in our universities, and for their judicious account of what must be done to rebuild it, Suissa and Sullivan deserve a wide and attentive hearing. (shrink)

Our time is characterized by what seems like an unprecedented process of intense global homogenization. This reality provides the context for exploring the nature and value of toleration. Hence, this essay is meant primarily as a contribution to international ethics rather than political philosophy. It is argued that because of the non-eliminability of differences in the world we should not even hope that there can be only one global religion or ideology. Further exploration exposes conceptual affinity between the concepts of (...) intolerance, ideology, and doctrinal evil. The last concept is developed in contrast to pure evil and average evil, and under the assumption of the metaphysical necessity of free will. Doctrinal evil is found to represent the main source of intolerance as a result of a mechanism that tends to confuse doctrinal evil (or the competing conceptions of the good) with pure evil. This connection between doctrinal evil and pure evil provides ideologies with their forcefulness. Tolerance cannot be properly understood in terms of a simple opposition to intolerance, however. Tolerance emerges as a sort of vigilance, conscientiousness, and non-negligence based not on a supposedly correct interpretation of the good, but rather on the acceptance of the fallibility of any such attempted definition. Conversely, the principal evil in doctrinal evil is found in arrogance that accompanies the intolerance-inducing irresponsible thoughtlessness. With this conceptual topology in mind the paper also addresses questions regarding religious tolerance, the ideology of human rights and democracy, the right to self-defense, ways to face evil, the dialectics of using old names for novel evils, and related issues. (shrink)