As I say in the article, Popper restricted the tolerance paradox to very authoritarian movements. Moreover, he recognized that broad interpretations of the paradox threatened liberal democracy. In my opinion, liberal interpretations are now too broad.

Zombified liberalism?

Makes sense, capitalism is basically a shambling corpse at this point, dead and decaying and obvious to anyone paying attention, but still barely able to pass itself off as alive and healthy to the general public.

> When the values of self-expression and dignity are hegemonic, liberal tolerance seems to erode, implying that liberalism is becoming something else.

It seems to me that liberalism died 40 years ago and lives on as "neoliberalism", a market logic form of thinking about politics and ethics and everything else, and that analysis of liberalism today amounts to an analysis of a decomposed corpse. That is, what we're seeing today isn't liberalism at all, but its successor.

I love how you solely focus on liberal's "intolerance" while saying nothing about conservative's intolerance. Your perspective is garbage.

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This makes a classic mistake (so classic, there's a phrase for the conundrum: the Tolerance Paradox) of presuming that tolerance itself is the end that is sought.

Tolerance is merely a means and is not a valuable thing on its own in a vacuum. We refuse to tolerate many things in society. That's why prisons exist. It's why any disincentivization structure exists.

Liberals (well, the ones who've given it any thought) aren't speaking of tolerance as though it's a value unto itself; they speak of it as the solution to a problem whereby someone who does no harm to others is being targeted and oppressed.

It's a clever rhetorical trick by opponents to obfuscate actual issues by turning the conversation away from their unjustifiable prejudice of innocent people to the liberals' justifiable prejudice of prejudiced people, an argument that obviously falls apart when examined with any depth at all. If we had to tolerate all evil in order to tolerate innocence, then society would literally either crumble or become ruthlessly libertarian/anarchic.

The whole conversation has to ethics the same rigor as Paschal's wager has to metaphysics.

I think your desert island example is a very good use here because it exemplifies what my point was. In the desert island scenario no matter what you do at least one person will die. Because almost all people choose cannibalism over starving. So if you vote you can influence who dies but you can't prevent someone from dying. This is like you can vote but you can't control who gets into office. You don't have a moral obligation to vote as much as you have to recognize that you can only do so much to impact the results of the election and that not voting as a protest means that you still bear some of the responsibility of the outcome. You can frame voting on the island as voting for who gets eaten but also voting for who doesn't get eaten. That was my point. You can call voting for Biden a vote for biden to be in office or a vote for trump to not be in office. If you can't bring yourself to vote for biden to be in office you are also accepting that you are not voting against trump being in office, specifically because of the nature of the first past the post nature of our election system.

>Abstaining from voting isn't quite the same. If you genuinely believe that either candidate will do harm, then I don't think you have any civic responsibility to support one over the other.

If the harm were somehow equal then yes voting either way would be just as bad and so your best bet would be to not vote. But when a clear and obvious difference exists you can't pretend that you didn't play a part in the results. Mind you, in the Biden/Trump example everyone that didn't vote at all is more culpable than someone that voted but voted third party but anyone who could vote against trump and doesn't is partly responsible for him being elected. Unless you just swim away from the island or refuse to eat the meat and die of starvation you will reap the results of the vote whether you cast a vote or not.

‘In recent years, there have been extensive debates about liberal (in)tolerance, involving topics such as the right to hold controversial views and the right of businesses not to serve conservatives. Yet focus on individual cases tends to miss the point.

Whilst individual episodes will involve different rights and wrongs, the large number of cases means that irregularities will even themselves out.

There has been a restructuring of liberal incentives. In Western societies, liberal values of dignity and self-expression have become hegemonic, meaning that liberals have fewer incentives to advocate tolerance.

We may wonder whether liberalism without tolerance is credible, ideologies which are stripped of central elements becoming something else. Indeed, social justice ideology seems to have succeeded liberalism, perhaps spelling the end of liberalism as we know it.’

I commented on your Yt aswell, but can't you switch out Christianity in your argument with any other thing (e.g. the Spaghetti monster) ?

The real deal is to explain why you put Christianity in your Argument, and not anything else imaginable.

Plus, your definition of Philosophy stems from an old Tradition, i don't think all modern Philosophers would agree. Philosophy is the love for Wisdom, and that can entail the fact that there are no truths at all (in an objective sense atleast). Greetings

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I agree with you in your examples, but don't think any are a good example of what I was trying to express.

The waterbottle scenario isn't a zero-sum situation as if you had a choice to take someone's water, endangering them in the process, while you didn't need it. I think the best alternative I could give to this one is an interesting inverse of having one vote but no one you desire to use it on: if I made you aware of people who are in danger of thirst or starvation, and need donations or funding to survive. You presumably have limited funds, and cannot help everyone who needs it, so you would need to choose which people you will save. The others will continue to die. According to the WFP, about 9MM people annually starve to death.

In this scenario, do you accept moral responsibility over all of the people you are choosing not to help? Or do we acknowledge that we aren't super heroes, there are reasonable limits to our responsibility to others, and that the individual pursuit of comfort, sustainability, and pursuit of passions/meaning has its own value?

The Epipen dilemma is similar in that we can imagine it as an inverse scenario to not voting - you have the option to do good, and can choose not to. Or extrapolate to assume you have two people, and only one Epipen. And you must decide who will recieve it, knowing the other will die.

Abstaining from voting isn't quite the same. If you genuinely believe that either candidate will do harm, then I don't think you have any civic responsibility to support one over the other.

For the last example about the trash bag that wouldn't give marriage licenses to gay people? I think she was perfectly within her right to refuse to perform a function of her job. I also think she, and anyone else who refuses to perform a function of their job should be fired from that job. If she truly believes participating in gay marriage will in some way cause harm to her in a theoretical afterlife, then I believe it is immoral to try to force her to participate in it.

I think we all have to find a balance of pursuing meaning and comfort in our own lives, while helping (or at the very least not harming) others. But when being a part of a society is compulsory for most people, I think it is too much to expect them to carry some kind of moral responsibility to engage with it and choose between two choices that do they disapprove of.

The best topical analogy I can think of that helps represent my thoughts on voting is the stranded passengers scenario. You are stranded on a desert island with a group of people and have run out of food. The group has pushed it to the brink of starvation, and without securing something to eat, you will all die. The prevailing opinion of the group is that you must resort to cannibalism, and you must choose between the two most popular meal choices, where your vote may be the deciding factor, or a third person who is almost garunteed not to be selected by popular opinion.

To complicate this a little further and help make it a lesser of two evils situation: one of the meal-candidates is a violent criminal, and the other is the one who's body would provide the most sustenance.

In the desert island scenario, do you have a moral obligation to vote?

"I bought an extra water bottle and now someone in Indonesia died because the relief effort was one water bottle short so I killed them" and "I personally chose not to use the epipen the person was begging me to stab them with while they were dying of anaphylaxis because I am morally opposed to stabbing people" are not the same. No reasonable person would be afraid of that slippery slope.

People have to make decisions that they feel are immoral to mitigate worse outcomes all the time. If cops are morally opposed to prostitution do they just not have to investigate the murder of a hooker? That awful woman who was the clerk for her town who was morally opposed to gay marriage should absolutely be legally forced to give out marriage licenses to gay people. If she didn't want to compromise her own personal morals she should have to leave her job.

Your argument rests on the assumption that Christianity can be determined to be true or false.

This might not be popular, but I think individuals have a right to refuse association, and divest responsibility to a broader group.

This line of thinking (admittedly extrapolated to the extreme) would make you responsible for any person who died from lack of access to a resource that you have, simply because you didn't seek them out to provide it to them. The level of effort involved is a fair qualifier to bring up, but I would still disagree that there is any scenario where someone is obligated to make a decision they feel is immoral to mitigate a worse outcome - especially if you allow for metaphysical beliefs that could be effected by these decisions.

I think this is an argument only considering the short-term impact. Withholding votes sends a signal that your vote is available, but no one has attracted it with their platform.

In the future, if the issues important to a vote witholder are common enough, it's reasonable to expect that a candidate will emerge from that population in the future, or recognize the niche and cater to it.

Like Soc, Lao Tzu, and Epictetus. What other philosophers were wrote about but never wrote anything themselves?

More people have been killed because of books than because of videos games. Take your junk science elsewhere.

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This article seems to deliberately conflate an action with the use of that action as a symbol.

The reason leaving a photo with its eyes cut out for someone to find is hurtful is because of the symbolic meaning to that action and to the further deliberate action of leaving it out for them to find. It is something you would normally only do because you want them to be hurt.

The sanctimonious ending where you "give them a lecture on the metaphysical status of images" only further cements the point that the author is presenting a straw man.

Yes, publicizing symbolically awful things to people likely to be hurt by them is morally wrong. Posting pictures of an npc you beat up in a video game with "feminist got what's coming to her" is wrong, but not because you beat up an npc in a video game. It is wrong because you are publishing it with the intention to spread the repulsive message that feminists deserve to be beat up.

If the author wants to defend the proposition that "video game violence isn't innocent" then they would need to pose a different hypothetical. Is someone beating up npcs in a video game and not publishing it doing anything wrong? If one person kills an NPC because they are impeding a quest, and another person kills that same NPC because the player is racist and the NPC is black, does that difference make the second act morally wrong? even though no observer is ever going to be able to tell the difference between the two actions?

There are real questions to ask about this topic, but the article doesn't engage with any of them. Instead focusing on the use of actions in video games as a symbol outside video games, which does not support the hypothesis.

There seem to me to be two elements here. They are interwoven in the article and in practice they may not be separable.

The first is the speech-like or communication act. This is exemplified by the example of leaving the desecrated photo for your partner to find. However, the act of publishing some of the games mentioned is also a speech-act. "Come have fun burning these effigies". This issue should be considered alongside other speech-act pros and cons.

The second is more unique to video games. I was involved in the development of multiplayer games already 25 years ago. When playing games you are reprogramming the emotional and values oriented modules of your brain.

Of course every moment changes something in you, but that is on a trivial level. When you take actions in a graphic environment, when you do an act that you would find taboo in real life, the short term and longer term sub-linguistic modules that make up who you are - will change.

It may be true to a lesser extent when watching passively, but game designers are sometimes explicit in their ability to change you and your priorities. For example, when you spend time trying to achieve a goal (even putting some pixels in to top left corner), your motivations are being changed.

I do not wish to propose conclusions. There are cognitive values in (some) games as well as social. Having fun is also valid part your preference structure. I am making a more factual claim (though hard to track experimentally) that you are making changes in playing, particularly with the sort of games described in this article.

(1) Do you want to make those changes? (2) If you can program yourself to be a worse person, is it ethical to do so?

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Some of the examples used in the article, such as the RDR2 controversy, are in the realm of that "deliberate statement to others who will observe this." So I'm not sure what you say about it being better than films or media is always true.

Anyway. Problem with the article doesn't end with what you've pointed out, the problem also is that it's really superficial. 1. There's no real attempt to differentiate between the two levels of the proposed "experiment" (as you point out: private acts and nonprivate acts). 2. No attempt explain why the private acts, even the grossest ones, like playing Battle Raper, are actually immoral. 3 No differentiation between indulgent violence and violence designed to be uncomfortable (this applies to films etc as well). 4. No real attempt to discover if all video game violence is wrong on some level, or if it's just extreme examples that are wrong and that some forms of video game violence are justified. And 5. If it's the latter, why is this the case, and if it's the former, why does the author play smash bros and fantasy RPGs?

All in all, basically reads like an article someone wrote on the toilet lmao. So par for the course for this sub.

With the example of MLK and also with the example of beating the suffragette, it seems like the objectionable part is sharing that virtual action with others. Doesn’t violence done in video games in solitary skirt those issues, and become less morally objectionable? Or to use his last example, hurting a photo doesn’t offend me, but leaving out a damaged photo for others to see is asking for problems. In other words, can’t I shoot zombies alone in my own basement without hurting anyone?

>"I found God belief and now feel better, therefore a God exists."

That's not my position exactly. God happened to me, so I believe in God as much as anything else in my reality.

If you say "I found a banana, and it cured my hunger" can you jump from that to say that bananas exist and objective reality is definitely real and not just an experience you're having? You can describe your experience with labels like "banana" and "hunger" but there's no way to prove to yourself that bananas and hunger are actually real and not part of the dream you're currently having.

I describe my experience with labels like "God" and "consciousness" but it is just the labels on the experience. I experience tables and chairs, I call them tables and chairs. I experience God, I call it God.

> Please, for everyone's benefit, learn basic logic and skepticism

Sure. Prove that your belief in objective reality is justified logically and rationally. Prove it's real, and not just a materialist dogma you're applying to your experience of reality. Prove that things can even be provable, and it isn't a circular argument that relies on reality being provably real when it isn't.

I'll be sitting here reading Sextus Empiricus until you do...

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