I saw a refutation of the paradox of tolerance a month or so ago, that it's not a paradox at all if you think of tolerance as a social contract, and therefore anyone who is intolerant is simply breaking the contract and therefore you don't have to tolerate them. it's elegant.
I think it is also deceptively simple. because now we need everyone to agree on the terms of a social contract. the same terms. I think anyone could, with enough effort, decide on terms they would accept, but it's not going to look the same as everyone else's, maybe not even anyone else's. but this contract of tolerance would require everyone to agree on the same terms, otherwise we don't have a contract, do we?
btw please fight me on this, I want to be wrong.
Social contract is a term with roots in thinkers like John Locke. It's something that simplifies human interactions in the ways that ultimately get twisted around into illusions like the paradox of tolerance. Fake surface level ideals used as shields, when they are mistaken for the motivating force. When you pull back that veil, it tends to be about justifying punishment. Force. Violence. Beatings, killings. The rape-torture-murder quotient of a society, and the necropolitics of whom it's acceptable for those things to fall upon.
The fact is, tolerance is not an end in itself, and that's why the paradox is bull and null. Tolerance is a tool in the social kit. It's a measure of how far it's reasonable to let others push you, and friction between groups. The objective is healthy social relationships, happy and healthy humans in community with each other. This objective is obviously harmed by overtly extreme intolerant acts; thus, they are a symptom which gets much discussed. And indeed, no relationship with hardcore Nazis will be healthy.
Contracts themselves are a sign of an unhealthy situation, though. They reflect a lack of trust, because you only have to write all that stuff down and hold people strictly to those terms when you don't trust each other. How often do you write out contracts for things with your closest friends? Not very often I'll bet. Probably only if really life alteringly dangerous amounts of money are involved, or the like. Normally, with people we trust and expect to see again, a set contract that can't be easily renegotiated moment to moment due to changing circumstances and nuances is just an obstacle to everything. Rules exist to justify punishing those who break them, but punishment never functions to do anything but satisfy vengeance urges. Better to blueball those particular urges, IMO.
So that's my take. The contract angle presupposes a certain kind of legalistic society self-definition. In short, the liberal society which grew the capitalism of today. The real problems are more fundamental than that and looking all the way to the human meat level is instructive as to why that very society contains the contradiction. It's really the paradox of punishment: it only ever gets handed out based on the power to do so, not based on deserving.
The quibble I'd make here—and I acknowledge this is a bit tangential to the actual point, it just jumped out at me because it's something that came up for me in therapy the other day—is that I think a contract is still a useful metaphor even if relatively few situations involve the very concrete idea of a list of highly specific terms signed and dated at the bottom.
First, many social situations are low-trust. I frequently feel discomfort or anxiety in ambiguous social situations, and often the source of that anxiety is "I don't know these people, I am uncertain of the appropriate way to behave towards them, and I have a highly incomplete model of how to anticipate their behaviours toward me". This is one reason that, historically, I've gravitated toward socializing via games like Magic, because "this is a competitive tournament and we are opponents" is a form of social contract, one that I can know about in advance because there is literally a rulebook for it. That understanding is incomplete, because like any social space, tournament Magic has its own social norms, but again, my comfort in these spaces increased the more clearly I understood those norms, which occasionally required someone telling me, making explicit those elements of the social contract that weren't in the literal rulebook, but which had their own penalties for breach: rather than a game loss, maybe an opponent who walked away thinking I was kind of a dick.
Second, a negotiated mutual agreement can act to make one or both sides more comfortable even if they trust each other completely, particularly in a space where the conventional or intuitive meanings of communication signals do not apply or apply differently. Kink spaces being one of the more obvious ones: if "Ow! That hurts!" does not mean "… and therefore, stop hitting me!", it is strongly in the interest of all parties to agree on that at the outset, lest one partner feel that they've broken trust by doing the hitting and the other that they did so by stopping. And if one partner's explicit hard boundary is breached, that doesn't mean someone broke Kink Law, call in the cops, but it does mean that negotiated space has been disrupted, and acknowledgement of that and work to repair it may be required.
Really, the short version is that trust is not telepathy. Someone I trust can still hurt me through ignorance, and vice versa. Negotiation is a way of preventing that, especially in situations where reading social context and nuance is difficult or misleading, and I think a contract is often a reasonable metaphor for that negotiation.
In a comment, I voiced agreement, and here in the feed I want to expand further. Contracts and rules only enter the pathological mode I described in situations where enforcement by violence is a constant threat. The issue is that the rules of such social games - just so, the example of a magic tournament is excellent here - are utopian. They imagine a perfect world where the requirements of the rules can always be fulfilled. So any violation is always the fault of the individual found wanting.
In magic tournaments, the interface between messy humans and idealistic rules is found in the judges. Judges navigate the muddy waters of the stack, state based layering, table etiquette in arranging zones of play and stacks of lands, deck lists and sideboards and wish cards, and what to do when a seagull gets inside the convention center and knocks over several tournament players' decks when it lands on a table. Judges are given sovereignty over the rules. Because they aren't in the competition, they are able to be seen as impartial. Because they are impartial and outside the rules, they have a perspective that lets them not be threatened by anything happening inside that game, and so their arbitration can be accepted as ruling on that game.
This system of delegated arbitration is key to both healthy and unhealthy ways that contracts and rules (all of which are social constructs) function. When it's in the form of negotiation from which anyone can walk away without losing much, it's generally healthy. When it takes the form of authority and some or all parties to the contract would lose badly, such as a manager at a workplace, it's generally more unhealthy. So it's not the presence or absence of rules; it's the consequences attached to them, and how they are applied - whether voluntarily or forcefully - and in response to what, and so on. It's endlessly open to nuance and complication, because that's what human relationships are.