From here on, I’ll no longer mention Zunger, because the arguments at this point are mine and do not necessarily represent (even poorly) any of the more detailed claims that Zunger makes.

As a first step off on our own, consider what makes the terms of a contract valuable in the first place, such that one would incorporate them into a systematized structure of contractual obligations. The idea of tolerance” as one such contractual obligation is a very attractive one, with many points in its favor. But why would tolerance become a part of such a contact in the first place? We find that social relations are smoother, more productive, more mutually (that word again) beneficial when such a contractual agreement is in place. But isn’t that the same as asserting that tolerance is a moral precept? Simply the fact of being a “line in the contract” does not establish that that line has any morally justifiable “business” actually being in the contract. So it seems as though there really are two things going on here: there is the fact of the precept, and then there is the force of the precept. The first is just the precept itself, while the second is its contractual standing.

Part of the business of moral inquiry is the distillation and understanding of moral precepts. This is not so much a process of discovering what was always already there, as it is one of uncovering what has emerged with time and tide. For example, the idea of health care as a right is rather laughable when one considers the state of medicine prior to the 19^th (frankly, prior to the 20^th) century. Doctors in general, and hospitals in particular, were more likely to kill you than whatever happened to otherwise ail you. With the emergence of safe and effective birth control, the infantile moral prohibitions against sex outside the financial contract of marriage ceases to have any rational standing. Speaking of which, with the changing landscape of precept and obligation, squeezing out enough spawn that some of them might still be alive should you actually live long enough to endure the indignities of old age is itself an imperative (a precept) that can be dropped.

A precept is a standard of action and behavior that is justifiable on its own grounds. But those grounds are not fixed, and hence neither are precepts. The contractual aspect comes into play where mutuality is involved. A person’s sexual orientation and gender identity are no part of my business. But my tolerance of that person for who and what they are is a matter of our mutual business.

Notice how this opens up different avenues of discussion on other topics as well. Respect for other persons, per se, is a moral precept. But showing respect is a matter of mutual respect, and hence is more a matter of contract than precept. I owe no respect to someone who has trashed that contract by refusing to show me any.

These are not strictly separable matters, as even the language in the above ought to already indicate. So I’ll finish with a brief Whiteheadian analysis of some of the salient relations.

In the tradition of western philosophy, the argument has long been over the primacy – even existence – of external vs. internal relations. External relations are all just that: they are external, outside of, and “other to” any particular “thing” under consideration. Internal relations say just the opposite: how a thing is related to the world is constitutive of that “thing’s” very being. So both approaches hinge on the notion of identity, and differ to how they characterize identity. With external relations, identity is the first given fact; with internal relations, it is the last achieved result. Most philosophical approaches in the west have been built upon accepting one without question while rejecting the other wholesale. (For example, traditional empiricism was all about external relations, idealism all about internal relations.)

Whitehead argues, convincingly, that both approaches are essential, but that the way they have been approached has rendered them irreconcilable. So rather than talking about “internal” and “external” relations, as a process philosopher, he argues for those phases of coming to be that involve the internalization and externalization of relatedness. This produces the two aspects of an actual occasion: internalization gives us the subject while externalization gives us the superject. The full explanation of how this occurs is obviously not going to happen in a blog post.⁵

But this is where these details would be worked out in a Whiteheadian, process schematism. The mutuality of a social contract comes into play with the internalization of relatedness, because this is where the “other” becomes essential for the “self.” The standard of a moral precept projected through the externalization of relatedness, where the precept as a kind of “self” stands independently of the “other.” This is the kind of development that an ambitious scholar might pursue as worthy of a paper or a dissertation. The point being that we do not have an issue of precept versus contract, but rather a case of both precept and contract. Whitehead’s metaphysical system provides us with the basis for making this both coherent and widely applicable to a variety of moral situations.

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1 The essay is Yonatan Zunger, “Tolerance is not a moral precept,” at https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376

2 A casual search of the web brought up a variety of other articles advancing similar notions. I’ve made no attempt to zero in on an “original” author of Zunger’s ideas. It may, indeed, by Zunger. Since his was the article that alerted me to the argument, his is the one I will highlight and recommend.

3 One need not have an in depth grasp of contract law to nevertheless have a solid understanding of the basic concept of a contract.

4 Superficial critics of the social contract theorists sometimes attacked them on this ground, an attack which exemplifies the “Hollow Man” variant of the Straw Man fallacy there is. The social contract theorists were not talking about actual contracts, but rather about a metaphor with which to grasp the implicit system of agreements by which members of a social group engage with one another.

5 The full explanation, of course, is to be found in Whitehead’s Process and Reality. A pretty decent explanation of the explanation can be found in the book by Randall Auxier and myself, The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism.