There's been a terrific exchange on the Can We Be Too Open-Minded thread. Check it out; here's a particularly strong post from Olympe:

Well, I would say that if you're trying to make rules that work for everyone, then you should make them based on something that everyone can understand. And everyone can understand the physical world because we can all perceive it, in generally the same way (and yes, I know that it's possible that you see green where I see blue, but you and I will both die if we're chucked off a cliff, so physical perception clearly counts for something). Whereas faith and tradition and transcendentalism are very personal and different for everyone, so not everyone can understand those things and it's useless to make rules based on them.

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Someone else might say that faith, transcendental visions, and tradition are the proper standards for guiding action, and that other standards of evidence are credible.

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Well, even if you take that viewpoint, the aforementioned Catholic would still need to convince others that the Pope/Christ/whoever actually did have a transcendental vision. And it's all very well to talk about faith, but what faith? All faiths are different, and so are all traditions, so the Catholic would still need to convince me that HIS faith is the best. Even if a person were operating from the viewpoint that faith/tradition is the path to knowledge, they would still have to acknowledge that there are many other faiths and other traditions. They still couldn't interfere with my life, even if their viewpoint dictated that they should.

Since no one could possibly know, through faith or reason or whatever, that their opinion is right, my view of tolerance is to be practical and tolerate nothing that interferes with you and everything that doesn't. If a Catholic says that his views mandate his interference in my life, then I don't have to tolerate him and his views. That's how I see tolerance: don't tolerate anything that interferes with you and your marriage and family and all that is personal, tolerate everything that doesn't. By contrast, a Catholic couldn't claim the right to not tolerate me because of my religion, because my religion doesn't interfere with his personal life. Even if his religion mandates that he not tolerate me, he still would have to or be intolerant. I don't have to tolerate all viewpoints, just the ones that don't interfere with my personal life.

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Now, as a pragmatist, I get out of the circle by saying that I'll use rational arguments if rational arguments succeed more often than not in helping me attain my goals, if they help me make accurate predictions about events that will occur. It, too, is an act of faith, but it's an act of practical faith. But in order for it to work, I need to constantly test the principles I'm using, to make sure that they actually work, and that I'm not holding onto them because I'm stubborn.

This is how I ultimately justify my intolerance of intolerance, or how I say actions like those of terrorists and murderers are wrong. I don't believe they're wrong in any absolute, transcendental sense -- I just believe they're impractical, that a life built on those principles would be constantly frustrated and ultimately doomed. On the other hand, if I discovered that saying certain incantations or performing certain rituals led me to success, I'd probably wind up altering my faith in rational arguments.

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I like that. I"ve always felt that morality isn't about what's "wrong", as if there's some great moral Answer Key somewhere in the universe, but about what's the most beneficial in a tangible sense to everyone. That's where all the rules about "thou shalt not kill/lie/steal" came from, anyway: people decided that it was more practical to help each other rather than to harm.

Except that, if you're speaking to a devout Catholic, they may tell you that it is immaterial whether principles "work" and are practical or not---you should still live by them because God wants you to. You think that the point of principles is to successfully navigate our world; a Catholic may disagree with you and say that it is to serve the will of God.

I can't help but agree with Hume and say that empirical evidence is the only thing to trust when you are coming up with concepts that apply to everybody, since empirical evidence is the only thing that everyone understands.