Papers

Moore’s Unlimited Tolerance Paradox tells us that there is some limit to what can be tolerated or else we face allow the kind of harm tolerance was supposed to prevent. However, limiting tolerance is a way that doesn’t fall prey to self-defeat, can be accepted as a virtue in disparate moral frameworks, and yet, still remains more than simple indifference has proved troublesome. In this essay I propose a novel analysis of tolerance as a function of moral epistemology. I supply a principle one should act tolerantly: one should be tolerant of those moral acts and beliefs when one does not have significant epistemic justification for the wrongness of such acts or beliefs. And the combination of this analysis and the principle of tolerance allows us to escape the problems facing tolerance as well as understand it in a new light.

This paper produces a clear interpretation of Galen Strawson’s argument that thought is passive, eventually showing how it fails to consider a relevant distinction. Though many philosophers of mental action have produced accounts of thought as active, Strawson’s argument has not yet been dealt with in the literature. Just like an agent can move their arm, it is thought that an agent also has the ability to move their mind. On analogy with bodily actions, thinking, judging, and imagining could be considered mental actions. However, Strawson argues that what parts of our mental life we have control over are severely limited. One of his arguments focuses on thought; if thought is active, we would be led to an infinite regress of intentional states. However, I show that if we make the distinction between the immediate and reflective senses of concepts, the regress need not occur.