A course on disagreeing without enemies would be dishonest if it pretended that warmth and listening are always the answer. Some calls for civility protect injustice. And some debates should not be had on equal terms. This final level takes the strongest criticisms of the course's own approach seriously, and then asks what survives them.

When civility protects injustice

In 1831 the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the first issue of The Liberator: "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice." He held that moderation about such a crime was itself a moral failure. In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from the Birmingham jail, wrote that he was more disappointed by moderates who valued order over justice than by open opponents. Critics today use the phrase tone policing for dismissing a complaint because of how it is expressed rather than what it says. When the powerful demand politeness from people they are harming, civility can become a tool for keeping things as they are.

This criticism is right, and it clarifies what this course has and has not asked. Nothing here requires softness about wrongs. What the course asks is narrower: that the condemnation be aimed at acts and systems, not at the humanity of the people involved. Many abolitionists denounced slaveholders fiercely while insisting that slaveholders, too, could repent. That is firmness about the wrong combined with refusal to deny the wrongdoer's humanity, and it is fully compatible with anger.

The paradox of tolerance

The philosopher Karl Popper, writing in 1945, raised a different worry. He argued that if a society tolerates without limit even those who would destroy tolerance, the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. This is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance of the intolerant can end tolerance itself. Popper's point is often quoted without its second half. He held that as long as intolerant views can be countered by rational argument and kept in check by public opinion, suppressing them would be unwise; the right to suppress arises only when their holders refuse argument and turn to force. For an individual, the lesson is that refusing to dehumanize someone does not mean letting them do anything.

Boundaries are not dehumanization

A person can decline to debate whether they deserve rights. A survivor does not owe their abuser a conversation. A community can exclude someone who threatens violence. These are boundaries, and the key point is that a boundary limits what you will do with a person, while dehumanization denies what they are. You can end a conversation, block an account or call the police and still see a human being.

False balance

Steelmanning and fairness can also be misapplied in public settings. When a news program gives equal time to a fringe claim and a broad scientific consensus, it creates false balance: presenting a lopsided question as if the evidence were evenly split. You can treat a person with full dignity while telling them plainly that the evidence is against them.

Who you are really talking to

In public disagreement, especially online, you are rarely talking only to your opponent. Others are watching. A committed opponent may never change, but the audience of undecided onlookers is often the people you actually persuade. Contempt that might feel satisfying toward a hostile opponent tells every onlooker how your side treats people who disagree.

What can be rebuilt

History offers hope. In 1971 Durham, North Carolina, held a ten-day community meeting on school desegregation. Its co-chairs were Ann Atwater, a Black civil rights organizer, and C. P. Ellis, a local leader of the Ku Klux Klan. They began as open enemies. Working side by side, they discovered they shared struggles of poverty and of being looked down on. By the end, Ellis tore up his Klan membership card in front of the meeting, and the two remained friends until his death in 2005.

A gentler case comes from the founding of the United States. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, allies in 1776, became bitter political rivals and stopped speaking after the election of 1800. Their mutual friend Benjamin Rush coaxed them back into contact, and in 1812 their correspondence resumed. It continued for fourteen years, until both men died on the same day, July 4, 1826. They never agreed on everything. They agreed that the other was worth writing to.

Worked example: drawing a line

Sam runs a community forum. A member, Rick, posts that a minority group "isn't really human" and should be driven out. Others demand that Sam ban him; a few say banning him proves the forum cannot handle disagreement.

Sam removes the post and suspends Rick, explaining publicly that the forum allows any view on policy but not calls to expel people for who they are. That is a boundary, and it protects the people Rick targeted. Sam does not call Rick a monster. He sends Rick a private message saying he can return after the suspension if he follows the rules, and asks what led him to write it. Weeks later Rick replies, and a long, difficult conversation begins. Whatever comes of it, Sam has protected his members and kept a door open, which is what disagreement without enemies looks like at its hardest.