Tolerance & Relativism

Presenter: Eldon Soifer
Tolerance is an odd virtue, because you can really tolerate only things you don't like or don't approve of. Nevertheless, people often think it's very important to tolerate others' beliefs. Sometimes the claim that we should tolerate others is grounded in the observation that, in the past, people who were confident that they knew the truth about things such as ethics and religion, ended up doing a lot of terrible things. It is suggested that we should take a more modest approach to our beliefs, and this is often taken to mean that we should accept that our beliefs are no better or worse than anybody else's, they're just the ones we happen to have. On this view, there are no objective truths about morals, only relative ones. Yet it turns out that such "relativism" is a philosophical view that stands in need of defense just as much as any other--and there are important reasons for thinking that it might not be right. Furthermore, relativism in any case might not be able to provide the justification for tolerance that drew many people to it in the first place.