No one reforms that which he is indifferent to. No one preaches to the sea.

By definition, reform requires that one cares for something enough to change it. When your mother tells you to get your homework done on time, it is because she loves you and knows that doing so is in your best interest. When your father takes time to teach you a useful lesson, it is because he cares about you.

When a classmate takes time to explain a tricky concept, you instinctively appreciate this concept and the explanation, knowing that he or she must care in some small degree about you. Unfortunately, not all advice is genuine. Advertisers may seek exploitation. The self-righteous may seek attention. The domineering may seek control.  Let us dismiss those contradictory avenues of “advice” for the purposes of this discussion. They are not threatened by the specter of tolerance in the same way that genuine moral guidance is.

Now, consider tolerance. Its application AD NAUSEAM would not be appreciated. What use is the mother who is happy to tolerate all your bad habits? Who would wish for a father tolerant of all one’s adolescent misconceptions? What value would a doctor be who never suggested smoking, drinking, or overeating could be unhealthy?

Whether it takes the whole village or just the family, it is clear that human flourishing depends on loving relationships – the kind of loving relationship that patiently and selflessly works towards reform and improvement.

If you truly care about something, you want to see it thrive. No one plants a seed just to watch it sit there (except perhaps lousy gardeners). Yet the oft-lauded notion of tolerance is one of embracing stasis – of tolerating the seed as it is not as it could be. When you mute yourself to be tolerant of another person, you’re valuing peaceful dynamics or political correctness over the importance of the other person.

Perhaps the most interesting consequences are not with one who smokes or overeats but are instead with those of different faiths. After all, a doctor may believe overeating increases your risk of diabetes, but a friend of yours from a different religion may believe that your life choices will damn you for an eternity.

If a friend’s faith leads them to believe honestly that I am doing something detrimental to my own well-being, I would hope they would seek to warn me just as I would want a friend to warm me were I about to drive off a cliff. I can then evaluate whether or not I find their concern compelling.

If a Jain friend believes that smoking will give me cancer and eating meat will prevent my soul from reaching perfection, what sort of friend would he be if he only warned me about the smoking? Does he doubt his Jainism or does he not care for my soul?

Such advice is a two-way street. We all have different reasons for our beliefs, be them peer-reviewed literature, personal experience, divine revelation, the magisterium, or aliens from space. But if we, in good faith and for reasons accessible to all people, believe something to be harmful to an individual for whom we care, then we to have an obligation to speak up.

We also ought not to default to “tolerance” because of the asymmetry of the situation. If a friend says that his religion has taught him that all men, by virtue of being men, ought not to wear hats, I would be tempted to reply that I am not of his religion and thus do not care. This attitude, however, misses the point. I can disagree with his reasoning – as I likely would – but the fact remains that he believes hat-wearing would be bad for me, AS A  HUMAN BEING; my own faith is irrelevant to his concern.

We often mislead children when we explain the behaviors of others. Saying, “She lives chastely because she is a Catholic” or “He flosses because he is a dentist” is dubious. A child might conclude, “Since I am not a dentist, I need not floss.”  The reality is only that his being a dentist has led him to believe that flossing is a good. The value of flossing is independent of his profession, in his eyes at least.

But surely tolerance helps keep the peace much better, right? Well, a man who takes offense at a friend’s genuine moralizing is a bit like a pilot cursing an air-traffic controller for pointing out an impending crash. Even if the pilot fails to understand that the air-traffic controller speaks out of concern and not out of judgment, our society still expects the controller to speak up. Would you rather be an air-traffic controller who says nothing?

The next time someone gives you advice or discusses their faith with you, thank them for caring about you. Thank your parents for loving you enough about you to steer you down the right path. Thank your doctors, teachers, and priests for helping you to change your habits.  Thank your friends for their support. Thank all your benefactors – for their kind and generous intolerance.

Matt Cossack is a second year medical student at Creighton University. He was a former ROVER managing editor while earning his degrees in philosophy and biochemistry as an O’Neill resident.  He can be reached at mcossack@alumni.nd.edu.