People don't want a peace treaty. They want a moral precept, a rule by which they can distinguish good behavior from bad.
At first blush, "tolerance" seems like a decent precept. You don't bug me, I don't bug you. But it takes only a moment's thought to realize that it doesn't work.
And that effectively makes it pointless. The peace treaty is routinely broken, and might as well not exist. The precept works perfectly well for the situations where it's not needed -- most of the time tolerance is also in your own immediate best interests. But as soon as you try to extend it to cover anything else, it fails.
Too bad. Back to the moral drawing board. Meantime, we can describe ourselves as "tolerant", if it makes us happy, and pretend it's the reason we're doing what we do. But it won't help us make any hard choices.
At first blush, "tolerance" seems like a decent precept. You don't bug me, I don't bug you. But it takes only a moment's thought to realize that it doesn't work.
And that effectively makes it pointless. The peace treaty is routinely broken, and might as well not exist. The precept works perfectly well for the situations where it's not needed -- most of the time tolerance is also in your own immediate best interests. But as soon as you try to extend it to cover anything else, it fails.
Too bad. Back to the moral drawing board. Meantime, we can describe ourselves as "tolerant", if it makes us happy, and pretend it's the reason we're doing what we do. But it won't help us make any hard choices.