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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This article is an attempt to develop a measure of ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance that occurs in schools. Acts of intolerance that indicate ethically insensitive behaviors in American schools were identified and tied to existing professional ethical codes developed by school-based professional organizations. The Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test consists of 5 scenarios that portray acts of racial intolerance and ethical insensitivity. Participants viewed 2 videotaped scenarios and then responded to a semistructured interview protocol adapted (...) from Bebeau and Rest. After a 2-week interval, this procedure was repeated. Stability of the REST across time was determined by using the overall test-retest coefficient. Internal as well as interrater consistency was also calculated for each scenario. Overall findings indicate promise for the REST as a reliable measure to assess racial and ethnic sensitivity. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum in her The New Religious Intolerance (2012) commits several old forms of epistemic vice including exclusion, orientalism, and colonial discourse. Unsurprisingly, as a result, her text contributes to the production of ignorance about Muslims and Muslim women despite her intention of combating Islamophobia. In this article, I specifically critique Nussbaum's anti-burqa-ban arguments and her pro-airport-profiling stance. To do so, I draw on the work of Audre Lorde and other feminist scholars and scholars of color to express the (...) harms of excluding Muslim voices and misusing Western/white voices in their place. Recalling Edward Said, Marilyn Frye, and María Lugones, I argue that Nussbaum's text is a classic example of orientalism and various forms of colonial discourse. (shrink)

In the context of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the intensification of hostility against the Huguenots in the 17th century, Pierre Bayle uses the notions of tolerance and intolerance to explain the difference between the effects of literal interpretation of the scriptures and the effort to understand. To explain Hume's political history, I employ the concept of melancholy to measure the challenge of escaping indolence and despair without yielding to the sectarian imposition of the idea and (...) activity as resources to avoid confronting collective impasses. History would undergo the reverse tension between tolerating melancholy, to work through its reasons, and intolerance of melancholy, moving toward the anticipation of political effects. (shrink)

This manuscript extends the Core Emotion Framework (CEF) to define the unique structural fingerprint of Obsessive‑Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The analysis demonstrates that OCD is characterized by a systemic outsourcing of cognitive distress to action, a mechanism the document describes as “the systemic outsourcing of cognitive function to action” and “using rigid action to resolve a cognitive deficit.” This pathological loop originates in the Head Center through a failure of the Calculating primer, expressed empirically as Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU), a (...) stable, trait‑like cognitive vulnerability strongly associated with OCD symptoms. The system bypasses affective integration and pathologically activates the Gut Center’s Arranging primer, producing compulsive rituals maintained by negative reinforcement. Additional structural failures—including Constricting deficits (inhibition breakdown) and suppression of Accepting (experiential avoidance)—create a rigid entanglement that prevents executive override and sustains compulsive behavior. -/- The manuscript establishes structural equivalence between these primer‑level deficits and the mechanisms of evidence‑based treatments: ERP targets Arranging/Boosting rigidity, ACT restores Accepting by countering experiential avoidance, and CBT repairs the Calculating deficit by restructuring catastrophic interpretations and uncertainty intolerance. This mapping provides a mechanism‑based rationale for sequencing interventions, prioritizing ERP/ACT to dismantle the action loop before applying CBT for cognitive repair. The paper concludes that the CEF offers a precise, transdiagnostic, and mechanistically coherent model capable of advancing personalized treatment selection for OCD. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

There is a large literature on how the use of an intolerant style of political rhetoric can erode democratic communication and give people reasons to question their faith in the democratic system. But the reverse is also true: that is, everyday linguistic practices shape political communication by providing stylistic forms and common words. My central claim is that an interactionist interpretation of the more-speech argument offers a normative foundation for a distinctive model of counterspeech as democratic self-defense: counterspeech as decentralized (...) democratic self-defense. The core of this model is the idea that democratic institutions have a role to play in making it easier for citizens to engage in conversations with those they would otherwise avoid. (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)

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)

This paper argues that fixed worth is not best understood as self-esteem, confidence, positive self-image, approval, or moral reassurance, but as the experiential expression of being in a conscious life. The paper develops this claim by asking what could remain as the deeper floor of a human being when role, image, validation, and other ordinary carriers of worth begin to fail. It proceeds reductively, distinguishing fixed worth from more unstable psychological formations and showing why these are too contingent to function (...) as the true basis of worth. From there, it draws together several themes developed across the wider sequence: collapse, validation dependence, shadow, and truth. Collapse reveals the difference between form-loss and total erasure; validation dependence reveals the structure of borrowed worth; shadow reveals where contact with deeper reality is interrupted; and truth shows why revision becomes intolerable when worth is fused to present form. Fixed worth thus emerges as non-borrowed, non-tradable value: the lived registration of a deeper ontological floor that is not exhausted by performance, approval, or present success. In conscious life, this deeper reality appears as enoughness, dignity, non-desperate okayness, and a way of being carried that does not depend entirely on the mirror. (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)

Moral failure in societies and institutions is commonly attributed to weak belief, declining virtue, poor leadership, or ideological disagreement. Such explanations misdiagnose the problem. Moral conviction, moral language, and moral exemplars persist across cultures and historical periods with remarkable regularity. What varies is not their presence, but whether systems remain capable of recognizing, sustaining, and integrating corrective moral signals before suppression occurs. This paper advances a structural account of moral agency under scale, arguing that moral durability is a function of (...) recognition fidelity rather than moral talent, consensus, or institutional form. I develop a diagnostic framework grounded in three core dynamics: abstraction pressure, coherence, and exemplar synchronization. As systems scale, mediation becomes unavoidable, introducing increasing distance between authority and lived reality. When mediation outpaces correction, coherence debt accumulates—unresolved contradictions between perception, value, and action that are deferred rather than resolved. Moral exemplars emerge as statistically inevitable coherence carriers under such conditions, articulating misalignment earlier and more acutely than others. Systemic failure occurs not when exemplars are wrong, disruptive, or unpopular, but when moral inertia is prevented from accumulating—when corrective signals are suppressed, fragmented, or neutralized before diffusion. The paper identifies minimal structural constraints required for moral agency to survive scale, including proximity to reality, public legibility and adjudicability of objectives, embodied cultural memory, smooth transfer of power, continuous feedback, and observer plurality. It further specifies failure signals by which moral collapse can be diagnosed. Chief among these is sustained moral silence under declared freedom of speech—a condition that cannot arise naturally in morally permeable systems and therefore constitutes a structural contradiction demanding investigation. The analysis is deliberately non-prescriptive. It does not propose moral programs, ideal institutions, or governance models. Instead, it provides a general diagnostic architecture applicable to states, corporations, religious authorities, bureaucracies, and intelligent systems. Moral systems endure not by enforcing virtue or achieving equilibrium, but by remaining capable of hearing emerging exemplars and allowing corrective moral inertia to form before domination renders recognition intolerable. (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)

Relational egalitarians oppose social hierarchy. Or, more precisely, they oppose intolerable social hierarchy. Stigma is often included among those unequal forms of relating that relational egalitarians ought to oppose, but there are circumstances in which stigmatizing behaviors or group identities might be strategically important for opposing social inequalities. Working through different responses to this puzzle, in this paper I advance the view that stigma is neutral, such that relational egalitarians should only oppose forms of it that are unwarranted.

This chapter investigates whether John Henry Newman's epistemology encourages the intellectual vice of dogmatism. Although Newman famously endorsed a "magisterial intolerance" regarding objections, I argue that his philosophical framework supports "committed settling" rather than vicious "permanent settling." By distinguishing Newman’s position from the "tentative settling" advocated by thinkers like Karl Popper and William Froude, I illustrate how Newman views assent as an unqualified commitment that remains revisable under specific conditions. Central to this defense is an expanded definition of the (...) "illative sense," which is presented as the faculty responsible not only for closing inquiry but also for discerning when "accumulating probabilities" require it to be reopened. Drawing on contemporary research regarding "epistemic resilience" (grit) and cognitive load, I argue that Newman’s approach avoids both the "unreal" demands of excessive skepticism and the pitfalls of closed-mindedness, offering a realistic account of how human beings virtuously manage belief. (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)

Some countries limit speech that is likely to incite hate-motivated violence upon a group or breach public peace. Internationally, political tension subsists between free speech advocates and those who want to regulate “hate speech”. In countries without prohibitions against hate speech, efforts to limit harm from public speech acts falls to private actors, who feel pressure either to adopt policies to create safe spaces or to allow all speech. This paper refocuses the debate and argues that the current tension between (...) legal regulations of hate speech and cancel culture antagonists misses an entire genre of speech acts that the law should protect its citizens against-- atrocious speech, which yields atrocious harm. The Atrocity Paradigm, the non-ideal ethical theory defended by Claudia Card and others, contends that ethics and legal theory should be dedicated to prevent the worst sorts of harms, atrocities. Speech acts which predictably lead to inexcusable, intolerable harm can be distinguished from those which predictably lead to ordinary, or even, hateful wrongdoing. Focusing on atrocious speech allows for legal protections cantered on transmutative harm and inexcusability, and preserves public good obligations to preserve the existence and dignity of oppressed people groups. (shrink)

Present world is the victim of conflicts on the basis of misunderstanding of religious dogmas of different religions, irrationality, ignorance and intolerance. People are moving away from knowledge, truth and reason. Indeed people accept false beliefs, hallucinations and myths. The role of religious plurality in philosophy is not to integrate and harmonize religions, especially religions cannot, and rather it is the business of religious pluralism to learn, think and acquire knowledge about the variety of religious beliefs, statements and injunctions. (...) This paper determines the function of intelligence/intellect to understand religious pluralism. How and where we make mistake in the plurality of religions. In this paper there is no issue to describe the conflict between faith and reason however reason is only to think and clear the ambiguities which we are using either to integrate one religion with another or to refute the religious dogmas of other religions. That is why authority places a significant part which teaches humans how to use their reason to bring peace, tranquility and acceptance in the plurality of religions. Mostly the scholar who practicing their religions and without having the authority and knowledge of other religions they are vehemently criticizing other religions. This paper shows that what is authority and where to use it. Who are authoritative persons? If authority in one religion is transferred to another what would happen. What would happen if authority is misrepresented? This paper further illuminates the concept of rational outlook to modify and learn from different religious; furthermore we can discuss the nature of consciousness or awareness in exploring religious pluralism. Is it necessary for a person who believes in one religion to learn another religion in order to resolve the controversies and evils in different religions conditional to authority? The more we mixing up religions into each other, the more religious conflicts arise. Therefore this paper tries to furnish people's mind with consciousness about religions realities and state of affair, inculcate world with rational outlook to ponder, analyze, understand and evaluate as well tolerate and accept the truth and authenticity in the domain of religions. This study analyzes and stress on the exertion of relative vision in accordance and intimation with reason, authority and moral consciousness to resolve the conflicts, diversities and issues in the field of religious pluralism. (shrink)

Stability is widely treated as a self-evident goal in the governance of civilization-scale systems—from global finance and international peace to climate policy and technological safety. Yet repeated stabilization efforts appear to increase systemic fragility and magnify the severity of eventual collapse. -/- This paper introduces the Structural Instability Theorem, a civilization-level no-go theorem concerning objective admissibility. Unlike Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (formal systems), Arrow’s impossibility theorem (collective choice), or Minsky’s instability hypothesis (financial dynamics), the present result operates at the level of (...) governance objectives. It asks not how instability arises, but whether stability itself can coherently function as an objective. -/- The theorem applies to systems characterized by failure intolerance, structural irreplaceability, and irreversible consequences. It establishes that, under these conditions, long-term stability, terminal equilibrium, and absolute safety are structurally inadmissible goals. Attempts to pursue them systematically externalize risk, accumulate latent fragility, and accelerate collapse probability. -/- Rather than offering policies or models, the theorem sets a structural boundary condition. By excluding stability as a legitimate objective, it reframes sustainability as non-collapse persistence under permanent non-equilibrium, delimiting the space within which coherent governance and risk management can proceed. (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)

Experiential Empiricism presents a three-step argument of undergraduate simplicity: all evidence comes through experience; every piece of evidence for mind-independent reality comes through experience; therefore using experiential evidence to prove something independent of experience is circular. Despite this simplicity, the framework generates a distinctive response pattern: serial objections that do not claim error, institutional deflection, credentialing challenges, silence, legal threats, and structural appropriation. Across dozens of documented exchanges with philosophers, journal editors, and general interlocutors, not one respondent has identified a (...) logical error in the core argument. This paper synthesizes the documented case studies to propose an explanation: responses to EE are not evaluations of its logic but avoidance of its implication space. The path to accepting EE passes through territory containing solipsism, self-discontinuity, and meaning-structure collapse. Minds scan this territory, find it intolerable, and halt traversal. Objections are generated post-hoc to justify the halt. This mechanism, which I term Implication Space Avoidance, explains both the historical absence of EE (approximately 1,800 years after Pyrrhonism reached all necessary pieces) and the contemporary response pattern. The parallel with cryonics silence confirms the hypothesis: simple arguments with intolerable implication spaces generate not refutation but absence of engagement. The argument's validity is irrelevant to its reception when the path to accepting it passes through existentially threatening territory. (shrink)

This article describes the development of a computerized version of a measure of ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance, the Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test. The REST was based on James Rest's 4-component model of moral development and the professional codes of ethics from school-based professions. The new version, Racial and Ethical Sensitivity Test-Compact Disk, consists of 5 videotaped scenarios followed by an interactive "interview" presented on compact discs. Data from a study with 58 students provides initial validation of (...) the REST-CD. Ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance in schools, as measured by the REST-CD, was moderately related to attitudes toward racial and gender equity issues in society as measured by the Quick Discrimination Index. The results provide evidence for both interrater and internal reliability of the REST-CD scores. This study also tests the hypothesized relationship between REST-CD scores and previous multicultural and ethics course work. Students with multicultural and ethics course experience have scored significantly higher on the REST-CD than students without course work. The paper-and-pencil tests are not significantly related to previous ethics/multicultural course work. In this article, we discuss the implications of the results and directions for future research. (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)

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)

The author offers a critical commentary on Rousseau’s chapter on civil religion in the “Social Contract”, book 4, chapter 8. It investigates Rousseau’s attempt to overcome the conflict between politics and religion by merging a civil religion that creates an emotional bond to the particular state without fostering superstition and intolerance, and it shows that this attempt fails. It is demonstrated that Rousseau’s concept of civil religion neither offers any doctrine of salvation transcending this life nor prescribes any content (...) going beyond moral norms. Civil religion for Rousseau is in service to politics and its instrumental character is desired by the citizens who are supposed autonomously to agree on the need of a secularized civil ethic. (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)

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)

This paper argues that the development of artificial intelligence represents a simultaneous refutation and vindication of Marx’s two central predictions about capitalism’s internal dynamics. Marx held that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions for two primary reasons: first, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, grounded in the labor theory of value and the claim that only living labor produces surplus value; second, the immiseration thesis, which predicted that the structural dynamics of capital accumulation would concentrate wealth (...) to such a degree that the material conditions of the majority would become intolerable. I argue that AI decisively refutes the first thesis while vindicating the second through a novel and more severe mechanism than Marx envisioned. The refutation of the labor theory of value stems from a philosophical error in Marx’s Aristotelian inheritance—the assumption that purposive productive activity requires teleological agency of a kind only living beings possess. A functionalist account of intelligence demonstrates that this assumption is untenable, and that AI systems can and do produce economic value without living labor. The vindication of the immiseration thesis follows from the structural consequence of labor’s displacement: capital no longer requires labor to generate returns, eliminating the structural leverage that historically grounded labor politics and producing immiseration not through exploitation but through irrelevance. The paper further develops the empirical case for this vindication by examining the current trajectory of AI development through a tripartite taxonomy of barriers to disruption—ontological, technical, and material—and argues that none of these barriers is sufficient to forestall the displacement of cognitive labor at scale, although material constraints may modulate its pace. The paper concludes by developing a commons-based normative framework for redistribution in a post-labor economy, grounded in the claim that humanity’s collective cognitive output constitutes an appropriated commons from which AI capability was extracted. (shrink)

National strategies to curb religious intolerance often struggle to engage the complex, lived realities of the communities they aim to regulate. This study analysed the disconnect between official state discourse and the actual practice of interfaith relations at the grassroots level. The research was situated within three Protestant denominations across the culturally distinct and historically pluralistic landscape of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. A phenomenological-hermeneutical framework was employed during the qualitative phase of a mixed-method study, utilising in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, (...) field observations and document analysis grounded in Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity theory. The findings revealed that while state terminology remained alien to congregants, harmony was organically sustained through local cultural vernaculars such as Siangga’ [mutual respect] and Sipakatau [to humanise humans]. These indigenous values, rather than bureaucratic compliance, provided the resilience needed to navigate historical trauma. It was concluded that authentic moderation was a narrative achievement of the community rather than a product of policy, requiring a theological shift that prioritises indigenous wisdom over prescriptive definitions. Contribution: This article contributes to public theology by proposing a ‘Lived Theology of Moderation’ that challenges state-centric approaches. It demonstrates how indigenous cultural forms function as legitimate theological frameworks for interreligious peace, offering a resilient ecclesiological model for navigating the tension between national ideology and local identity. (shrink)

Remembrance Education (RE) indicates “an attitude of active respect in contemporary society based on the collective remembrance of human suffering that is caused by forms of human behavior such as war, intolerance or exploitation, and that must not be forgotten.” Unlike traditional history education, the point of RE is not the straightforward teaching of historical facts (if that is at all possible). Instead, RE’s purpose is to bring learners into a community, a community of memory, where they become witnesses, (...) judges and guardians of the memories of tragic past events. Writings on RE are conspicuously absent from Dewey studies. In this bibliographic essay, I offer an overview of RE, including a sample of its programs, initiatives and curricula. In addition, I propose that Dewey’s educational philosophy can helpfully inform the practice of RE. Rather than articulate a definitive account of Dewey-inspired RE, my intention is only to draw a tentative ground map to motivate future research. (shrink)

This paper examines Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s understanding of metaphysical certainty in terms of his theory of ta’wīl (interpretation) while showing his optimism in attaining metaphysical certainty. Rāzī, also known as the leader of the skeptics (shaykh al-mushakkikīn) in the Shiʻi sources, while thoroughly criticizing the philosophical and kalam traditions before him, remains a controversial figure among scholars. His critical thinking confounded subsequent thinkers, and thus, various ways of reading about Rāzī have emerged. Some have evaluated Rāzī as a metaphysical agnostic (...) who believed that the intellect cannot attain certainty in theological knowledge. This study positions Rāzī’s account of metaphysical certainty in relation to his theory of ta’wīl. The first part of the article focuses on the history of the relationship between metaphysical certainty and ta’wīl the debates over the relationship between intellect and transmission in theological knowledge  and offers the historical context in which Rāzī developed his idiosyncratic approach. The second part identifies Rāzī’s principles of reason in metaphysical knowledge through the interpretation of the concept of istiwā’. This article does not aim to fully investigate Rāzī’s understanding of ta’wīl. However, it analyzes how intellectual truths, one of the main components of the theory of ta’wīl, become metaphysical certainties. The Muʻtazilī mutakallimūn made metaphysical certainties, which are transformed from intellectual truths, a yardstick of understanding and interpreting religion. On the other hand, what some might call their obsession with reliance upon metaphysical certainties became an intolerant attitude towards different interpretations of religion, grew into an oppressive ideology with political power, and ultimately fueled a critical resistance by non-Muʻtazila scholars against rationality (or even rationalism itself). As a natural consequence, the rational development of other doctrines was slowed down by the reaction against Muʻtazilī influence. The first part of the article, while discussing Kalam schools, especially the Ashʻarī school of theology, in terms of metaphysical certainty and the interpretation of revelation, charts the crystallization of the Ashʻarī account of the relationship between interpretation (ta’wīl) and intellectual truths, a historical process inversely correlated with the presence of the Muʻtazila. However, the crystallization process, which was somewhat ambivalent until Rāzī, reaches its ultimate form with Rāzī. The first of the main principles of Rāzī’s theory of ta’wīl is that the intellect is the foundation of revelation (al-ʿaql aṣl al-naql). The intellect becomes the decisive factor not only in terms of authentication and understanding of revelation but also in terms of its interpretation (ta’wīl). Focusing on his Tafsīr, one of his last treatises and which was left incomplete, this article argues against the claim that toward the end of his life, he was inclined to metaphysical agnosticism, falling into an epistemic pessimism with respect to attaining metaphysical certainty. Rāzī takes a firm stance on the probability of transmission in works written throughout his life. Rāzī’s firm stance on the probability of transmitted sources necessarily leads to the principle that reason is the foundation of transmission. Especially with his account of ta’wīl, he offers a rational theology in which he maintains his optimism on metaphysical certainty. (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)

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)

This paper investigates critics’ claims that John Dewey neglected to adequately engage with racism—particularly his complicity in “whiteness,” including his valorisation of American democracy as an exemplar of the Anglo-Saxon legacy, viewed by critics as a narrative of human progress from “primitive” to “modern;” his failure to address his own prejudices and assumptions about the student and the community; and avoidance of the racial realities regarding “Black experience.” These criticisms could have ramifications for philosophy for children, which Matthew Lipman has (...) said owes a debt to Dewey. We contend that education in Western-style democracies has not adequately responded to racial intolerance, and that liberal democracy has not lived up to its philosophical ideals of equal rights and opportunities, irrespective of people’s backgrounds. However, we argue that the problem goes deeper, that the very concept of freedom in liberalism is an obstacle to overcoming the problems that Dewey’s critics identified. We conclude that because reconstruction is inherent in pragmatist epistemology, reconstructing some of the assumptions that inform the community of inquiry, especially assumptions about democracy and deliberation, has the potential to strengthen engagement with the Aboriginal concepts of freedom and autonomy, thereby challenging the belief in the superiority of liberal philosophical thought in Western-style democracy. We begin our argument by drawing attention to the liberal concepts of freedom and autonomy (as idealised characteristics of identity that are the foundation of liberal understanding of human nature), followed by criticisms of Dewey’s ideal vision of the student and the classroom community, as well as his failure to acknowledge racial dynamics. We then introduce the Aboriginal political concept of autonomous regard (a core concept of simultaneously respect the autonomy of others that fosters a relational worldview of community and with the land). This relational worldview is informed by Aboriginal knowledge systems which emphasise careful, deliberate, and patient observation and engagement as a process of understanding our relationship with the world. In this sense, they share characteristics with Dewey’s relational epistemology, interconnectedness of experience, and continuity of the human, the organic, and the natural world, and could be understood as a forebear of pragmatism. As such, we turn to relational pedagogy to salvage the theoretical deficiencies in Dewey’s theory and practice, and to focus on Indigenous experience and colonisation, particularly experiences of belonging to land as integral to identity, knowledge, and cultural practices, including governance, kinship, and society. (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)

Political philosophy has seen vibrant debate over the connection, if any, between liberalism and pluralism. Some philosophers, following Isaiah Berlin, reckon a close connection between the two concepts. Others--most notably John Gray--believe that liberalism and pluralism are incompatible. In this essay, I argue that the puzzle can be solved by distinguishing the responsibilities of liberal states to their peoples from the responsibilities of liberal states to other states. There is an entailment from pluralism to liberalism, and it in turn implies (...) that while liberal states must tolerate "illiberal" lifestyles within their borders, liberal states must not tolerate illiberal states. The fact of liberal intolerance, however, does not justify unreasonably aggressive intervention by liberal states, nor does it mean that illiberal states deserve to be punished. (shrink)