In medicine, a diminishing effect when certain drugs are given continuously. Several mechanisms are responsible, which include a change in the wall of the cell membranes that bind the drug, or a change in the way the drug is degraded in the body. Immunological tolerance represents the inherent or acquired failure of the immune system to distinguish between self and not-self, preventing an immunological reaction to foreign protein or organ graft.
Tolerance is a recent political term used within debates in areas of social, cultural and religious context, as an emphatic antithesis to discrimination, as such may advocate persecution.
The term "tolerance" itself, like "toleration", is controversial and disliked by some due to its implication that the "tolerated" custom or behavior is in fact an aberration.
Rationalization
In the wider sociological sense, "tolerance" carries with it the understanding that "intolerance" and conformity breeds violence and social instability. "Tolerance" has thus become the social term of choice to define the practical rationale of permitting uncommon social practice and diversity.
Authoritarian systems practice intolerance, the opposite of tolerance.
Politics and religion
Historically, political and religious tolerance have been the most important aspects of tolerance, since differences of political and religious ideology have led to innumerable wars, purges and other atrocities. The philosophers and writers of the enlightenment, especially Voltaire and Lessing, promoted religious tolerance, and their influence is strongly felt in Western society (see pluralism). While a lack of religious tolerance causes problems in many regions of the world today, differences of political ideology caused hundreds of millions of deaths in the twentieth century alone.
It is a common charge among critics that tolerance is only a "modern virtue" or a "secular virtue." Such criticisms are at least partially answered by the many examples of prominently "tolerant" individuals and societies throughout world history, such as the multi-religious society of Al Andalus (Spain) under the rule of the Umayyads and Almoravids, the early Ottoman Empire, Abraham Lincoln (insofar as he consciously changed the purpose of the American Civil War from mere reunification of the nation to one of granting equal citizenship to all Americans) and, at least early in her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Tolerating the intolerant
Philosopher Karl Popper's assertion in The Open Society and Its Enemies that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance illustrates that there are limits to tolerance.
In particular, should a tolerant society tolerate intolerance?
Philosopher John Rawls devotes a section of his influential and controversial book A Theory of Justice to the problem of whether a just society should or should not tolerate the intolerant, and to the related problem of whether or not, in any society, the intolerant have any right to complain when they are not tolerated.
Rawls concludes that a just society must be tolerant, therefore the intolerant must be tolerated for otherwise the society would then be intolerant and so unjust. However Rawls qualifies this by insisting that society and its social institutions have a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance. Hence, the intolerant must be tolerated but only insofar as they do not endanger the tolerant society and its institutions.
Similarly, continues Rawls, while the intolerant might forfeit the right to complain when they are not tolerated, other members of society have a right, perhaps even a duty, to complain on their behalf, again as long as society itself is not endangered by these intolerant members.
Tolerance as a virtue
As an Aristotelian virtue, tolerance is a middleground between softheadedness on the one hand (overtolerance) and narrow-mindedness on the other (undertolerance).
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