paradox of tolerance

先々週のEconomistはルワンダだけでなく、様々な国の事例から内戦後、虐殺後どのように社会をまとめていくのかと考察しています。

Post-conflict societies
To hell and back
How nations torn apart by atrocity or civil war can stitch themselves together again
Apr 5th 2014 | KIGALI | From the print edition

国を立ち直らせるには民主主義を機能させることが重要だとしながらparadox of toleranceの議論を持ち出し、不寛容を認めない態度の必要性も一方で認めています。

Most nations that heal well are functioning democracies. Day-to-day negotiations in a legislature chip away at the zero-sum mentality of the battlefield. Northern Ireland’s hard men now sit together at the cabinet table, seemingly with relative ease.

But enforcing new norms to replace those that drove the conflict can require measures that in other circumstances would be illiberal. Until recently, Germany banned reprints of Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf”. (Internet downloads and its copyright ending changed officials’ minds.) Philosophers talk of the “paradox of tolerance”: that upholding tolerant values may require intolerance of bigots. John Rawls, a liberal American philosopher, argued that keeping an endangered group safe may justify a measure of intolerance.

Rwanda has far overstepped this mark. It is an autocracy, though one run by often reasonable Tutsis with an understandable fear of the génocidaires regaining power. At the last presidential election Paul Kagame, who led the rebel forces that defeated the Interahamwe 20 years ago, received 93% of the vote. He has turned out to be an impressive technocrat—but one who brands his opponents, including some former allies, enemies of the state. South Africa has accused him of sending assassins to kill dissidents living in exile in Johannesburg. Independent parties and media are cowed by the security forces.

ただ、ルワンダの場合は行き過ぎていると見ているようですね。この当たりはTimeと同じような立場かもしれません。paradox of toleranceはウィキペディアにも載っています。いくら寛容といっても、寛容を認めないような不寛容な立場を認めることはないという主張のようです。

（ウィキペディア）
The tolerance paradox arises from a problem that a tolerant person might be antagonistic toward intolerance, hence intolerant of it. The tolerant individual would then be by definition intolerant of intolerance.

こちらのブログに上記の立場を肯定するカールポパーの言葉として以下が引用されていました。孫引きになります。

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even though those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade as criminal.

Wikipediaには、このような状況をパロディにしたものとして以下の番組が紹介されていました。



白黒はっきりつけられる問題ではないので、このあたりのバランスをどこに置くのかは難しそうですね。