The argument goes like this. As a virtue, tolerance regards those activities and things that fall between two extremes, between the unbearably harmful and the harmlessly unobjectionable. The tolerant know which activities and things fall within this domain and they respond to each as each deserves, quite often with an act of toleration, of patient endurance. Like all virtuous persons, they act with the constancy of habit, with ease and pleasure, with one eye on the good they hope to achieve and another on the good they find in the act of virtue itself. But of course, most of us have little virtue and what little we have falls short of perfection. We act tolerantly in response to objectionable differences of modest consequence but struggle with those that matter. When we succeed, it’s only as we restrain ourselves—only as we choke down our outrage and stifle our desire to oppose the differences we despise—and most of us find this act of self-restraint too difficult to produce much of the time. How can one despise and endure patiently at the same time anyway? So, more often than not, our imperfect tolerance, like our deficient courage, collapses into moral postures that are incapable of producing right action.42