An article by Yonaton Zunger from seven years ago received some new legs on social media, enough that I was made aware of his argument.¹ Zunger’s basic argument is that what seems like a moral “precept” of, say, tolerance, is in reality a social contract. This is why when individuals break that contract – for example, neo-fascists like Trump and his cultists – we are no longer under any obligation to show such people the tolerance which they categorically refuse to show to others. It is a good essay and worth reading.² And it did what such essays are supposed to do: it got me thinking. So I am going to do my own spin on this idea, but from a Whiteheadian and Process orientation.

The basic claim in Zunger’s article is that “tolerance” is not so much a moral ideal as it is a social contract. As a moral ideal, it saddles us with the “paradox of tolerance,” where we must either be tolerant of the intolerant who will not hesitate to obliterate us, or else we must violate our moral ideal and be intolerant in response. There have been various responses to this so-called paradox, but most of them have stayed within the bounds of treating tolerance as a moral precept. Zunger’s move is that he denies the status of the idea of tolerance as a moral precept entirely, arguing instead that it is a social contract.

The idea of a social contract goes back at least as far as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), though arguably its best early formulation can be found in the work of John Locke (1632–1704); it’s most famous contemporary advocate would surely be John Rawls (1921–2002). The basic idea of the social contract is simple enough: members of a society enter into a kind of contract with one another in which they agree to certain rights and responsibilities with respect to one another. Insofar, it is really indistinguishable from a standard business contract, the idea of which most of us are at least marginally familiar with.³ The difference here is that there is no actual contract in law.⁴ Rather, there are patterns of behavior and expectations that can be represented as exhibiting contract-like agreements of mutuality between members of a social group. The term “mutuality” is going to come front and center in a moment, hence I highlight it now. So the social contract theorists provide a metaphor and an example of how social interaction ought best to function in the ideal, based upon this concept of a contract binding each to all.

In contrast, a moral precept is often taken to be a kind of “absolute,” although even here there is a dangerous superficiality and dogmatism in the suggestion. Arguably, such precepts should be viewed as guiding ideals, heuristics in the exercise of moral inquiry, and not as rigid and non-negotiable demands. It is this latter approach that creates the so-called paradox of tolerance, where tolerance is treated as just such a moral absolute, rendering it impotent to defend itself against the savage onslaughts of the willfully intolerant. Zunger’s argument is that tolerance is not a moral precept of any kind: rather it is a social contract, an agreement implicit in its formulation but binding in its application. Thus there is no “paradox of tolerance” for the simple reason that no paradox is involved in showing no contractual obligations to someone who has already willfully destroyed the very basis of that contract.