Intolerance, Tolerance and the Implausibility of Opposing Views

The charge of intolerance has come to wield enormous power in much of Western culture – at least as much as the charge of "communist" during the McCarthy years. It functions as a "defeater." A defeater belief is a belief that defeats other beliefs – i.e., if you hold a defeater belief to be true (whether it is true or not is irrelevant), you cannot possibly hold certain other beliefs to be true: the defeater belief rules certain other beliefs out of court and thus defeats them. For instance...