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If the phenomenological tradition tends to base all ethical and political norms on the fundamental manifestation of the alter ego, which is both at odds with and identical to the self, can a practical principle such as tolerance be justified on the basis of such an originary manifestation? Can the openness to the other thus described even serve as a structure of justification for any kind of ethical and political universal? After examining the advantages but above all the aporias of such a means of justification based on the alter ego, this article attempts to show that a phenomenology that is supposed to give an account of tolerance cannot be established on the side of a history or an anthropology of the relation to strangers: indeed, throughout history, the immediate relation to the other is only rarely a relation to an equal human brother, and the recent, striking televisual interest in what is happening all around the world inevitably has something artificial about it because of the very phenomenality of the images received via screens. Finally, the article formulates and then examines a hypothesis that partially validates the justification of practical universalism via the experience of the other: the universalization of the experience of the alter ego to any other is not so much permitted by particular perceptual conditions as by the open possibility of finding oneself in the same field of speech, of which tolerance appears as the necessary condition.