ABSTRACT
Even a superficial view of political and social history since the eighteenth century shows that the struggle against authoritarianism to establish the values of tolerance and pluralism has been hard-fought—and this history often leads us to overlook the fact that values of tolerance and pluralism in themselves exact price. To be sure, individual students offered various reasons for reaching these conclusions. But still, the similarities in their responses disclosed a pattern that was, it seemed to me, nothing more than a reluctance to admit possibility of moral choice or exclusion altogether. As initially the principle of tolerance sponsors a basis for generality and inclusion, so there must be a means subsequently for reaching beyond those guides, even, in a sense, of denying them. Teaching about moral enormity like the Holocaust in which facts, if ever, do speak for themselves, soon discloses that imbalance—that we are not now, as a culture, in much of a position to speak about moral judgment.
