more on intolerance

[eirias]

Shoot, a stray mouse click erased my half-completed post.

I'd hoped that my earlier writing on this topic would get the thoughts on intolerance out of my system, but it didn't seem to work that way -- which probably means I missed something. Maybe this shot will do the trick.

I think that part of my problem -- which perhaps is what cos was alluding to -- is that I was trying to treat tolerance as a binary: you tolerate something or you don't. ukelele added a nuance -- tolerance of beliefs vs. people -- but it only seemed to confuse the matter in my head, because I was trying to conceptualize it as a separate dimension (obviously not orthogonal but nevertheless distinct).

Today I began wondering if perhaps a sliding scale is more appropriate. Here I will try to make one up, with totally invented numbers, as a sort of thought-experiment. Because I am neither a professional psychometrician nor a professional philosopher, it will be clumsy, so anyone with relevant expertise who cares, feel free to poke me with improvements.



Let X be some proposition about the world, e.g. "Falun Gong is the path to salvation." Here is a scale of possible government responses to X.

-300 [Belief that X] is forbidden.
-200 Belief is unregulated, but [publishing that X] is forbidden.
-100 Publication is unregulated, but [acting on a belief that X] is forbidden.
0 No regulation of X.
100 Publication is unregulated, but [acting on a belief that not-X] is forbidden.
200 Belief is unregulated, but [publishing that not-X] is forbidden.
300 [Belief that not-X] is forbidden.

Here I tried to distinguish between public and private heresy; one can imagine a society that, e.g., permits private Falun Gong belief but prohibits advertisements about meetings in major papers. One could probably interpolate other government-actions on this scale as well.

Of course, as libertarians are fond of noting, there are ways of persuasion that don't require the government sledgehammer. I have no idea where to put these -- realistically I suspect they should be interleaved with the above in some more sophisticated way -- but for now I will just sandwich them in the middle like so:

-30 [Belief that X] makes you a social leper.
-20 Belief has no major consequences, but [publishing that X] makes you a social leper.
-10 Publication has no major consequences, but [acting on a belief that X] makes you a social leper.
0 No regulation of X.
10 Publication has no major consequences, but [acting on a belief that not-X] makes you a social leper.
20 Belief has no major consequences, but but [publishing that not-X] makes you a social leper.
30 [Belief that not-X] makes you a social leper.

By "social leprosy" I mean that X has major social consequences, such as discrimination in employment or housing.

Finally, because I think social consequences must admit to finer distinctions, here's a third scale:

-3 [Belief that X] is considered rude.
-2 Belief is a matter of taste, but [publishing that X] is considered rude.
-1 Publication is a matter of taste, but [acting on a belief that X] is considered rude.
0 No regulation of X.
1 Publication is a matter of taste, but [acting on a belief that not-X] is considered rude.
2 Belief is a matter of taste, but [publishing that X] is considered rude.
3 [Belief that X] is considered rude.


And here is an example analysis.

Let X be "women suck at math and science."

• US government: I would rate this a -100: you can talk smack all you want but you can't use gender as a hiring criterion, and if it becomes obvious that you have, you are wide open for a lawsuit.
  
• Major social consequences: Based on Larry Summers' experience, I think I would put this as a -20. (This is where more sophisticated interleaving is needed... or maybe just 3 separate, correlated scales.)
  
• Minor social consequences: Highly dependent on the circles you run in. In most of the circles I'm in it would be a -3. However, there are some in which it would rank as a -1 or a 0.
  

Now we get into the part where ukelele's cry for tolerance of people has me confused, because I explicitly meant to put it in this scale somehow, and yet I'm not sure what it maps to. It's clear that anything with an absolute value from 10...100 is insufficiently tolerant of the people -- but stuff in the very middle, well, I'm just not sure.

And this is where we get back to why I wish we weren't relying so much on this word in the first place -- what does it mean to tolerate a person? Does it mean "to separate judgment of a person from judgment of his beliefs"? With some extreme beliefs, this is neither possible nor practical: I'm sure there are some otherwise-lovely racists in this world, but I'm not all that keen on inviting them to alphabet nights. I don't think a single person who knows me would object to this decision. However, if I turned it around and said I wasn't going to invite any Christians to my parties, I'd definitely be the bad guy. I want some way of distinguishing the two cases that doesn't rely on "it's different because I said so" -- which, frankly, every liberal apology for the distinction seems to do.

I guess a lighter way of putting it that might also be a little clearer is: What niceties does one owe to the rude? Is it OK to write someone off for rude beliefs? statements? actions?

I bet for all of us the answer is, "It depends on the belief." Which is precisely why I think generic "tolerance" is the wrong way to look at it.

Comments

[kirin]

Minor quibbles:

First with one of your examples; my impression has been that Larry Summers probably does not actually believe "women suck at math and science" - I think he was intending to make a much subtler statement aboutaverages and outliers. However, it seems clear that a lot of people relying on sound bites *believed* that he believed you example statement, which may actually be what's relevant to the discussion of social consequences.

Next up, I've known many instances of people choosing to overlook certain beliefs of a person and invite them to social functions anyway, even to the point of outright racists being invited by social progressives. In most cases, this is because the invitee was family. Now, I realize that that's an important and socially distinct extenuating circumstance, but it remains interesting that often in such cases positive interaction can be had as long as certain topics are avoided. Other people, of course, *wouldn't* put up with such things even in family, but where it does occur it's certainly a data point for active person/belief separation.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

First with one of your examples; my impression has been that Larry Summers probably does not actually believe "women suck at math and science" - I think he was intending to make a much subtler statement aboutaverages and outliers. However, it seems clear that a lot of people relying on sound bites *believed* that he believed you example statement, which may actually be what's relevant to the discussion of social consequences.

Your antithesis and synthesis are both very good points, and I agree with both :).

Next up, I've known many instances of people choosing to overlook certain beliefs of a person and invite them to social functions anyway, even to the point of outright racists being invited by social progressives. In most cases, this is because the invitee was family. Now, I realize that that's an important and socially distinct extenuating circumstance, but it remains interesting that often in such cases positive interaction can be had as long as certain topics are avoided. Other people, of course, *wouldn't* put up with such things even in family, but where it does occur it's certainly a data point for active person/belief separation.

This is also a great point and something I will have to think about more.