"True Tolerance: The Illusion of Moral Neutrality"

By Dr. J. Budziszewski

Edited from a talk given at

Grace Valley Christian Center

Sunday morning, January 23, 2000 (9 a.m. service)

When we are influenced by the illusions, deceptions, and self-deceptions of the world, not only do we neglect the insights God has given to us in his holy word, the Scriptures, but even common sense fades and becomes dim. Even his general revelation becomes obscure to us.

My talk this morning is about common sense. It concerns those things that ought to be clear even apart from God’s word, but not apart from God’s grace.

Morally Neutral Euphemisms

Tolerance is a very funny word. We talk about tolerance in the universities today, but tolerance has sharp limits. As a scholar, I find that there are all sorts of words that I am not supposed to use. Suppose that I am speaking about state laws concerning homosexual unions, which is a topic that comes up very often. I have occasion to speak about constitutional jurisprudence in some of the classes that I teach, and if I use the English common-law term, sodomy, which is used in the laws themselves—they are said even by the Supreme Court to be laws concerning consensual sodomy among adults—someone will eventually say, "Professor, please stop using that intolerant term ‘sodomy.’ It sounds like it means something wrong. Be morally neutral and say something like ‘gay sex’ instead."

Of course it is true—the word sodomy does inescapably give the impression of something wrong. But the expression "gay," which used to mean joyful or happy, gives the impression of something right. So how is my challenger’s term more neutral than mine? He says, "Be neutral, but what he is proposing is something that is no more neutral than my term.

Or suppose that I am speaking about the controversy over partial-birth abortion, the procedure in which a living child’s skull is pierced and his brains are removed by suction after the child’s arms, legs, and torso are already out of the womb. The reason for removing the brains is so that the skull can be crushed. It passes through the birth canal more easily.

This subject arouses very strong feelings. In a previous year, during one of the several failed attempts of Congress to make this illegal, it came up in one of my classes. A student in the class actually started screaming at me, saying that it was all lies. If I describe one side as pro-partial birth abortion, someone will eventually say, "Professor, stop using that intolerant term." There’s that word again—intolerant. "Some of us are neither for nor against abortion, or partial-birth abortion. Be morally neutral and say "pro-choice" instead."

Now, I understand that the speaker wants adults to have a choice about partial-birth abortion. But the speaker doesn’t want the baby to have a choice about it, so how is his term more neutral than mine? I am challenged in the name of neutrality, called intolerant in the name of neutrality, but how is his term more neutral than mine?

Now euphemisms like "gay" for homosexual, "pro-choice" for pro-abortion, "liberty" for promiscuity, are hardly unusual. Ordinary English today, and also professional slang—the talk that university professors talk when they are talking to each other—is stuffed with them. I got this latest from a friend of mine who is a law school teacher at the University of Texas. He went to a meeting of legal scholars. They are usually organized into separate panel discussions. One of the panels that he discovered was on the subject of "intergenerational intimacy." You know, it sounds like having affection for your grandmother and having family get-togethers. What it means is sex with kids. That is another euphemism.

Why do we insist on such language? The official reason is that we don’t want to pass moral judgment. We want to be morally neutral for the sake of tolerance. Yet I can’t help noticing that in every single case these terms merely avoid passing one moral judgment while insisting on another. They illustrate what I call "the illusion of moral neutrality"—the belief that you never really have to take sides, that whenever you are presented with two alternatives, one of the alternatives isn’t really a choice and therefore you can always wash your hands of responsibility for whatever you have decided to do or whatever you have decided to support.

Put that way, I think you will recognize that the historical founder of the illusion of moral neutrality is Pontius Pilate. He believed that you could authorize wrong while remaining morally neutral. The corollary to this illusion is that people who admit that they are taking sides, people who are honest, are called intolerant because the other side is pretending that it is not taking a side, even though it is. And the corollary of the corollary is that you are not supposed to admit that you are taking sides. Whenever you do take sides, you are supposed to pretend not only to others but even to yourself, which takes some work, that you are doing nothing of the kind.

Three Fallacies of Tolerance:

Today we practice a kind of reverse Victorianism. Our stereotype about the Victorians is that there were so many things that were not mentionable among them. Certain vices could not be mentioned, and you couldn’t speak of certain articles of clothing. It was as though they didn’t exist. Polite people never talked about these things.

In our day, the unmentionable topic is moral judgment. We are supposed to pretend that it never happens. That leads me to my central point. Philosophically speaking, the illusion of moral neutrality is a false interpretation of a genuine virtue, the virtue of tolerance. I will not say tolerance is not a virtue. It is a virtue, and the people who are caught up in the illusion of moral neutrality are not deceived about that. They do know that tolerance is a virtue. But whenever they try to say what tolerance is, they keep making the same three mistakes. These three mistakes are exceedingly hard to uproot, and sometimes confuse those of us who ought to know better.

1. The Quantitative Fallacy

The first mistake I like to call the "quantitative fallacy." Quantity refers to amount. You could also call this the "more and more" fallacy. The quantitative fallacy holds that the meaning of tolerance is tolerating, and so the more you tolerate, the more tolerant you are. It sounds like common sense at first, but when you think about it for a moment, it begins to look pretty silly. And yet this is very pervasive—the idea that the more you tolerate, the more tolerant you are.

Social scientists will often go out and take surveys to find out how tolerant Americans are. The measurement of attitudes is a big project among social scientists, and you develop measurement instruments with questions, and you develop scales. You know, after asking people questions, you’ve got a scale. "He ranks number eight on a scale of one to ten of tolerance," or "She ranks number seven"—something like this.

The way that it works is this: A social scientist will typically measure tolerance by assigning to the person that he is questioning a point or two for each controversial act that the person is willing to tolerate. "Would you tolerate the expression of unpopular opinions?" "Uh, yes." Okay, you got a point there. "Would you tolerate such and such?" "Yes." Got a point there. The more he tolerates, the higher his score is.

With a point for tolerating abortion, another for tolerating the expression of unpopular views, another for tolerating perjury in public office, and so on—these points all add up. Notice that I have described the fallacy and perhaps hinted at what may be wrong with it, but I haven’t actually given you a refutation yet.

2. The Skeptical Fallacy

The second mistake I call the "skeptical fallacy," which holds that the best foundation for tolerance is to avoid having any strong convictions about right and wrong. The more you doubt, the more tolerant you are. The doubter is the moral hero of our generation.

Nietzsche committed this fallacy when he said that if men still took God seriously, they would still be burning heretics at the stake. He assumed that since we tolerate the expression of false views of God, since we practice tolerance regarding this, it must be that we are doubters, because tolerance is doubt. It must be that we really don’t believe what we profess to believe, because if we did believe it, we wouldn’t be tolerant. Do you see how the mistake works? It is the idea that the foundation of tolerance is doubt.

In the same spirit, I suppose, are notions like this: If men really cherished moral truth, they would suppress all beliefs that they considered false. If men still cared about the sanctity of the marriage bed, they would go back to making adulterers wear the scarlet "A."

3. The Apologetic Fallacy

The third mistake is the "apologetic fallacy." Remember, the skeptical fallacy says you shouldn’t have strong convictions about right and wrong. But what if you just can’t help it? "Oh, I know it’s bad of me, but I’m firmly convinced that such-and-such is true." Well, if you can’t help having strong convictions about right and wrong, then the next best foundation for tolerance is refusing to express them or act upon them.

This keeps a lot of Christians in the closet. We speak about homosexuality being in the closet. It isn’t homosexuals who are in the closet, it’s Christians who are in the closet in modern universities and in culture. So the next best foundation for tolerance is refusing to express or act upon your convictions. That means that the more chicken-hearted you are, the more tolerant you are.

Friends commit this fallacy, this intellectual error, when they say it is bad manners to discuss religion. Professors commit it when they shame students who state politically incorrect opinions. University trustees commit it, like those of Princeton University who recently said that although they know that the eugenic murder of unwanted people is wrong, believing in it has no bearing on one’s qualifications to teach ethics, so they appointed to a prestigious chair in The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity the notorious Peter Singer, who believes that parents ought to have a thirty-day option after the birth of their babies as to whether to kill them or not, who says that "a newborn baby has no more value than a snail." The Princeton trustees say, "Well, we don’t believe that. But it would be intolerant to say that this has anything to do with one’s qualifications to teach ethics. One shouldn’t express or act upon one’s convictions." Of course, Professor Peter Singer gets to express his.

Refuting the Fallacies

Closely examined, each of these fallacies of neutralism explodes itself. It is almost too easy to refute them, because they refute themselves. You don’t have to hurl an intellectual bomb at these false ideas. They ignite themselves. Let’s consider them one at a time.

If you really believe the quantitative fallacy that the meaning of tolerance is tolerating, so that the more you tolerate, the more tolerant you are, then doesn’t it logically follow that you would want to tolerate even intolerance? Of course it does.

If you really believe the skeptical fallacy–that the best foundation for tolerance is to avoid having any strong convictions about right and wrong–then you shouldn’t have a strong conviction that intolerance is wrong.

If you really believe the apologetic fallacy that when you do have strong convictions, you should refuse to express or act upon them, then you ought to refuse to express or act upon your conviction of the importance of tolerance. Your tolerance ought to be a dead letter. It ought to be one of the things that you are chicken-hearted about.

So consistent neutralism refutes itself. It is logically impossible that neutrality could be what tolerance is about, because neutrality is logically impossible. Understand me: I am not just saying neutrality is a bad idea. It does not even rise to the level of an idea. It is as though somebody doing geometry were to propose that a good solution to a geometrical puzzle is a square circle. The geometry teacher would be prudent to say, "I won’t even say that that is an incorrect geometrical conception. It isn’t a geometrical conception at all. You cannot consistently think of a square circle." Likewise, you can’t consistently think neutrality. It is a self-destroying idea.

The Unnaturally Long Life of Neutralism

If consistent neutrality does refute itself, then that raises a puzzling question: Why is it so persistent? If when examined it explodes itself, refutes itself, pulls the rug out from under itself and makes itself impossible, then how is it possible for it to live on in our newspapers, televisions, legislatures, universities, and all too often even in our pulpits?

There are two reasons. The first reason is that neutralism is never practiced consistently. It is logically inconsistent. It can’t be practiced consistently; rather, it is used selectively. It is used inconsistently as a weapon for demoralizing various moral religious and political opponents.

You see, the neutralist too has strong convictions, despite the skeptical fallacy, which says that you ought not to have strong convictions. It’s just that when he says that we shouldn’t be forward about our moral convictions, his own convictions aren’t the ones that he doesn’t want us to be forward about. It’s just yours.

Consistent neutralism, then, would hold that if it really is intolerant to express, for instance, the conviction that babies should not be cut into pieces, or that marriage is inherently heterosexual, or that our grandfathers should not be pressured into suicide, then it would also be intolerant to express the conviction that they may, that it isn’t, or that they should.

But selective neutralism remembers itself only long enough to condemn those who hold the former views. It doesn’t remember itself long enough to be neutral and condemn those who hold the latter views.

The mere fact that neutrality is logically inconsistent doesn’t stop the neutralist because he practices it inconsistently. He practices it selectively as a disguised weapon for attacking other people. It is a way to attack other people’s views in favor of your own while pretending to have no view. It is a way to be authoritarian in the name of anti-authoritarianism.

The second reason why the neutralist interpretation of tolerance lives on is this: Bombarded with the propaganda of a corrupt society, we have a hard time imagining any other interpretation of tolerance. When they call us intolerant, we think, "Well, gee, I can’t think what else intolerance would be. Maybe they are right. Maybe we are intolerant." Many Christians sort of cringe when people say, "Christians are so intolerant," and they start to think, "Well, we are. It’s true, you know. The gospel is true, but it is intolerant. I feel sort of bad about it. I wish God wouldn't make me do this." We just can’t imagine what else tolerance would be.

Of course, then you have an even more disastrous error. Christians who recognize that the neutralist interpretation of tolerance is false but make the same mistake of thinking that’s what tolerance is, therefore conclude that tolerance isn’t a virtue. Thus, you can be arrogant. You don’t have to practice humility. You should not respond to those who ask the reason for the hope that lies within you with gentleness, patience and respect. You can just be nasty.

An example of this—and this gives such a bad name to Christianity–would be those people who, for instance, if there is a gay pride march, will hold up big signs that say, "You are all going to hell, you bastards." Now, that is not the correct response to the recognition that the neutralist interpretation of tolerance is false.

But we have a hard time imagining any other definition for tolerance. What is the correct interpretation? What else could tolerance be but tolerating? That is the quantitative fallacy. Don’t strong convictions lead to persecution? There is the skeptical fallacy. Doesn’t religious freedom mean not acting on your religious convictions? There is the apologetic fallacy again. Shouldn’t we have a bad conscience about making moral judgments? I mean, doesn’t even the gospel say, "Thou shalt not judge"? Well, yes it does, but that’s not what it means. Dissenters from these notions live in guilty suspicion that their opponents are right and that they really are fanatics.

I am going to try to provide a non-neutralist interpretation of the virtue of tolerance. Tolerance is a real virtue. It is sort of a compound of a number of Christian virtues like humility, gentleness, forbearance, respect, longsuffering and love. But it isn’t what the neutralists say it is.

Every Virtue Has Two Opposing Vices

My first point is that the meaning of tolerance isn’t tolerating, per se; it is tolerating what ought to be tolerated. You might think, "That sounds crazy. Doesn’t that mean that you’ll only put up with good things and not with any bad things? What is the point of talking about tolerating? Doesn’t tolerating mean putting up with something that is bad?" Yes, it does. But every virtue is opposed by two vices, not just one. Every virtue has two enemies, not just one.

Take, for instance, cowardice. If somebody asks, "What is the opposite of courage?" people would usually say, "Cowardice." But that’s only half of the answer. Cowardice isn’t the only vice opposed to courage. A fireman who is so uncowardly that he enters a collapsing building when there’s nobody left to save shouldn’t be praised for being courageous; he should be criticized for being rash, and you can believe that his fire captain will say that to him, if he survives. So there is another vice that is also close to true courage. Courage is opposed on one side by cowardice and on the other side by rashness.

How about the virtue of generosity? Stinginess is not the only vice opposed to generosity. A giver who is so unstingy that he holds back too little to feed his own children is not praised for being generous. He is criticized, rightly, for being extravagant. You see, the virtue of generosity is opposed on opposite sides–on the one side by stinginess but on the other by extravagance.

How about friendliness? That is a virtue. But grouchiness is not the only vice opposed to friendliness. We certainly know that is opposed to friendliness. If you are grouchy, you are not friendly. But if you just go to the other extreme—if you say, "Well, therefore, friendliness must be ultra, ultra ungrouchiness," what you have got is obsequiousness. A companion who is so ungrouchy that he lets himself be struck and abused is obsequious, not friendly. Friendliness avoids both obsequiousness and grouchiness.

Now, danger on both sides is the rule in so many virtues, and it is the rule in many other areas of life too. You need your eyebrows to keep sweat out of your eyes. If you don’t have enough eyebrow, you are going to have a problem with sweat getting in your eyes. But if you have too much eyebrow it comes out and hangs down in front of your face. Too much is a problem; too little is also a problem. If danger on both sides is a rule in so many virtues, then should we be surprised to find that it is the rule in tolerance too–that tolerance is opposed by two opposite vices, not just one?

There are two different ways that you can miss the mark. Do you know one of the words for sin in Greek means "missing the mark"? I’ll call one of the vices opposed to tolerance "repressiveness" and the other one "overindulgence." We miss the mark of true tolerance both when we fail to put up with what we should but also when we put up with what we shouldn’t. We miss the mark of tolerance when we fail to put up with what we should, such as tattoos, silly bumper stickers and bad taste in art. If I saw a man with a tattoo on the street and wanted to put him in jail, I think you would be right to say I was not tolerant, but repressive.

But we also miss the mark of tolerance when we err in the opposite direction, when we do put up with what we shouldn’t, such as, to take obvious examples, murder, theft and rape. Would you praise a man for tolerance because he said, "Ah, well, he is just a rapist. Be tolerant. Be morally neutral"? That is not repressive but it is overindulgent. You are missing the mark of true tolerance in the other direction–by putting it up with what you ought not to put up with. So you see why I say that the meaning of true tolerance isn’t just tolerating, because that might be overindulgence, but rather tolerating what ought to be tolerated. A judgment ought to be made. That is what is wrong with the quantitative fallacy.

Is Doubt the Only Reason For Tolerance?

That brings me to my second point. The best foundation for tolerance isn’t to avoid having strong convictions about right and wrong, but to avoid having false convictions about right and wrong. If you have false convictions about right and wrong, you will be unable to decide which bad things should be tolerated and which bad things ought not to be.

If tolerance doesn’t mean tolerating every bad thing—nobody would suggest tolerating rape, murder or theft—but it does mean tolerating some bad things, like tattoos, bumper stickers and bad taste in art, then you have to use moral judgment to figure out which bad things should be tolerated and which ones shouldn’t. So you don't need no convictions, you need right convictions.

A lot of people go wrong at this point because they think that the reason for tolerance is skepticism. They say the only reason to tolerate anything bad is doubt. This is the skeptical fallacy. They say, "Wait a minute. That’s strange. Why would you tolerate anything bad? If you knew for sure that it was bad, you wouldn’t tolerate it. If you were convinced that tattoos were silly, you would put people in jail for them. It must be that you are in doubt about that. It must be skepticism. The only reason for tolerating is doubt."

On the contrary, skepticism has nothing to do with tolerance. To see why, let’s glance at debate. Debate will be my example. Why do I choose debate? Because this is a practice that is notorious for the toleration of false opinions. You can’t have a debate unless at least one of the opinions is going to be wrong. Debate is a contest between two opinions. How can you have the contest unless both views get expressed? And it is logically impossible for both to be true. They might both be false, but at least one of them has to be false. So you cannot even have a debate, which we generally think is a good thing to have, unless you are tolerating the evil of error, the expression of a false opinion.

So let’s think about debate. We ordinarily think that in that context, at least, we certainly ought to tolerate the expression of a false opinion. Let’s see if it has anything to do with doubt. Let’s see if it has anything to do with skepticism.

Where do skeptics stand on debate? There are three logically possible cases. First, there is the total skeptic, somebody who doubts everything. I mean literally everything, all the way up to the limit. Everything that can be proposed he doubts. He doesn’t even know if he exists for sure.

Then there is the partial skeptic who doubts some things, but not everything. Lastly, there is the non-skeptic, who doubts nothing whatsoever. Everything that he believes he is utterly sure of. In every opinion he is absolutely certain he is right.

We have to treat these three cases separately, so let’s take them one at a time. What we are interested in here is whether skepticism has anything to do with tolerance. Our example is debate. So let’s see–can any one of these three cases justify something like debate and how it would work?

First, can the utter skeptic take the side of letting things be heard at a debate and having it out? Can he say, "Yes, debate is a good thing. We should have both sides be heard. We’ll tolerate even the one that’s wrong, whichever one that is"? Well, no. He can’t take that position, because he is an utter skeptic. He doubts everything, so he has to say, "Well, the rightness of hearing and the rightness of shutting people up are equally in doubt. I can’t tell you whether to have a debate."

Well, utter skepticism didn’t help us in intolerance there, did it? So forget about the total skeptic who doubts everything.

How about the partial skeptic who doubts some things? Can the partial skeptic take the side of letting things be heard, of having it out in a debate? Well, he might, but it depends–which things does he doubt? Which are the things that his skepticism includes and which are the things that his skepticism exempts? He might say, "Well, I’m skeptical about both the worth of truth and the worth of discussion," and then perhaps he would favor shutting people up. But he might not say that. He might say, "Well, I don’t know much, and I am skeptical about a lot of things, but not about this. I am convinced of the value of discussion," and then he would let people speak.

Now, is it because of what he included in his skepticism, what he doubted, that he let people speak? No, it was because of what he didn’t doubt. He is convinced of the value of discussion. So skepticism is not what made him tolerant.

How about the non-skeptic, who thinks that none of his beliefs are in doubt? Can he take the side of letting things be heard? You might think that he couldn’t but, in fact, he can. It all depends. Now, he might say, "Shut everybody up. One of the things that I am sure of is that we ought to shut up everybody who doesn’t agree with me." But that might not be what he is sure of. Maybe what he says he is sure of is this, "I am absolutely certain that refuting error is the best way to sharpen the insight I already possess and the most likely method of converting my opponent." And in that case, of course, he will want the false opinion to be expressed so that he can refute it. What is it that enabled him to tolerate the expression of the false opinion? Not what he was in doubt about, but what he was certain about.

So let’s take stock. We looked at the complete skeptic, the partial skeptic, and the non-skeptic, and the only one of the three who can’t approve debate is the utter skeptic. Either the non-skeptic or the partial skeptic might be able to approve it, but even if he does approve it, neither one of them is approving it because of what he doubts. On the contrary, each of them, if he does approve it, approves it because of what he doesn’t doubt. So skepticism isn’t the real reason why we sometimes tolerate evils or put up with injuries to good.

Tolerating Evil to Avoid Greater Evil

What is the reason, then, if skepticism isn’t the reason, why we sometimes tolerate evils or put up with injuries to good? What is the reason why we would ever do it? The reason that we sometimes tolerate evils or put up with injuries to good is to prevent or avoid still graver evils.

You see, there is a certain paradox in this business of suppressing evils. Suppression itself may cause something bad. In fact, it often does. It is on this fact that the virtue of tolerance is founded. We always have to put the two evils in a scale. In one pan of the scale there is the evil that we wish we could eliminate and that you might be tempted to suppress. In the other pan of the scale is the evil that the suppression itself may cause in some cases.

You could probably do away with the evil of gossip by putting microphones absolutely everywhere and having gossip police listen in. But it is better to put up with the evil of gossip than to suppress it in that way. You might do away with the evil of gossip, but I think you would bring about greater evils. Do you see what I am saying?

Now, there are some cases where such comparison is inappropriate. I admit not all goods and evils can be compared with each other. Some are incommensurable. I also agree it is never right to do evil that good may result.

But there are cases where this kind of comparison can be made and, where it can, the rule is that when the evil that suppression causes is greater than the evil that suppression stops, don’t suppress. Put up with the evil in question. We suppress rape instead of putting up with it because the evil of rape is greater than whatever incidental evils might come in the attempt to catch rapists and punish them. But we don’t try to suppress gossip because the weighting works the other way around there.

Tolerance Requires Making Moral Judgments

But herein lies the problem: How are you to know which evil is greater? How do you weigh an evil in the scale and decide whether to suppress it or put up with it? There is no magic formula. The neutralists think there is a magic formula to tolerance. But there is no moral formula.

That brings me to the third point that I want to explain. Tolerance requires acting on our moral judgments, on our moral convictions. The terrible truth is that practicing tolerance doesn’t get you off the hook of moral judgment; it puts you on the hook of moral judgment. It does not release you from the burden of practicing judgments about goods and evils; it puts onto you the necessity of making those decisions, those judgments about goods and evils. That is so important that I want to say it again: Practicing tolerance doesn’t get you off the hook of moral judgment, it puts you on the hook of moral judgment.

Let’s make it practical. Believing in tolerance, the neutralist would like to suggest that if you are tolerant, that settles a lot of moral issues. Because tolerance is good, two guys in a bed are having a marriage. Because tolerance is good, people ought to be allowed to have abortions. Because tolerance is good, you should be able to use public funding out of the pockets of taxpayers to have a picture of the mother of Jesus with elephant dung smeared on her, which you will find in a New York museum right now. They think tolerance settles all the moral questions about whether those things should be permitted.

It doesn’t. You can be pro-tolerance and it doesn’t settle a single question. You still have to talk about it in every case. Just knowing that you should be tolerant doesn’t exempt you from the need from further judgment, moral judgment, to decide what to tolerate. It doesn’t settle a single question of life or public policy. "Tolerance is good" doesn’t tell you whether killing babies should be illegal. It doesn't tell you whether or not we should say two men are having a marriage. It doesn’t tell you whether or not doctors should give poison to depressed patients who ask for it. It doesn’t tell you what to do about any moral issue.

That is not to say there are no answers to those moral issues. But just saying, "Tolerance! Tolerance!" is not going to give you the answer. It cannot properly be used as a club to preempt moral debate by branding the politically incorrect side as intolerant.

To practice tolerance one must make moral distinctions; one must seek the good and avoid the evil; one must discriminate among the alternatives. To practice tolerance one must exercise right judgment in the protection of greater ends against lesser purposes, and right judgment in the protection of purposes against mistaken means.

Now there is nothing neutral about any of this, is there? It requires that we avoid, not strong convictions, but false ones. It requires, not suspending judgment, but judging. It requires, not refusing to act, but acting. Tolerance is good and possible. Fairness is good and possible. Objectivity is good and possible. But there is no "neutral" ground in the universe. Every square inch is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.