Tolerance as a Borrowed Norm

Modern secular ethics frequently treats tolerance as a moral requirement. Persons are said to deserve respect, protection, and liberty even when their beliefs are unpopular or offensive. Tolerance is therefore framed not merely as prudence, but as duty.

Yet this framing presupposes something stronger than pragmatic conflict-avoidance. It presupposes that persons possess inherent worth that demands restraint, even when coercion would be advantageous. Without intrinsic dignity, tolerance loses its moral grounding.

If human beings are nothing more than biological organisms produced by unguided processes, then tolerance cannot be binding in principle. It becomes a contingent social strategy, justified only so long as it serves preference, stability, or utility.

Theism grounds tolerance in the kind of beings humans are: bearers of intrinsic moral worth that does not fluctuate with circumstance. Atheism may endorse tolerance instrumentally, but instrumental endorsement is not moral obligation. The central challenge remains: why should tolerance remain binding when intolerance would be popular, advantageous, or evolutionarily favored?

Formal Argument

P1. Moral tolerance is asserted as an objective duty grounded in the equal and inviolable moral status of persons.

P2. Atheistic naturalism does not supply inviolable moral status grounded beyond preference, convention, or utility.

P3. If moral status is preference-, convention-, or utility-based, then tolerance is not a duty but a strategy revocable when inconvenient.

C. Therefore, atheistic naturalism cannot ground tolerance as a moral obligation; it can only defend tolerance as contingent policy, forfeiting the moral force by which intolerance is condemned.

Analogy

A company may adopt a policy of civility because it increases productivity and reduces lawsuits. If profits reverse and hostility becomes advantageous, the same company may discard the policy without contradiction.

The policy was never moral; it was instrumental. A genuine moral duty, by contrast, cannot be abandoned simply because it becomes inconvenient.

If tolerance is truly a moral requirement, it must be grounded in something deeper than advantage. Otherwise it remains a negotiable tactic whose authority rises and falls with circumstance.