Morality and toleration
Toleration is about allowing things we disapprove of. But why do we disapprove of some things and not others? An overview of the articles on morality and toleration.
Important for toleration is the question of how we relate to others. Toleration is about consciously allowing things that we have a negative opinion about. Things that we actually disapprove of. Let's take a very fundamental approach: why do we disapprove of some things and not others? As far as behavior is concerned, we then enter the field of ethics. Ethics is about right and wrong: how do you determine what is right or wrong?
We can approach this question in a number of different ways. Ethics is a philosophical discipline, so a philosophical approach is obvious. But sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists and psychologists also offer interesting perspectives. An important difference is that philosophers tend to treat the question normatively more often than the other disciplines. The latter approach the question rather descriptively: they mainly describe why people regard some things as good and others as bad.
Before we get to the normative questions about good and bad, it is good to consider why we think some things are good and others bad. We have a rudimentary morality that seems partly genetically ingrained and partly the result of a cultural revolution that humanity has collectively experienced over the past tens of thousands of years. Then we come to the three most influential philosophical approaches to good and bad: virtue ethics, Kantian deontology and utilitarianism.
The episodes in this series are: