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Legalising Toleration: a Reply to Balint

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Abstract

I re-present my account of how a liberal democratic society can be tolerant and do so in a way designed to meet Peter Balint’s objections. In particular, I explain how toleration can be approached from a third-party perspective, which is that of neither tolerator nor tolerated but of rule-makers providing for the toleration that the citizens of a society are to extend to one another. Constructing a regime of toleration should not be confused with engaging in toleration. Negative appraisal and power remain ‘possibility conditions’ of toleration but they are not necessary features of either a regime of toleration or the sponsors of such a regime.

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Notes

  1. For the sake of simplicity, I focus on the case of religious toleration, but the argument I make in this article is intended to apply to toleration generally.

  2. I suspect our thinking on this issue will be affected by our thinking on another: the morality appropriate to toleration. If, like Newey (1999) and Benbaji and Heyd (2001), we think that toleration must be supererogatory, it will follow that toleration cannot be morally, let alone legally, required. But if we think (as I do) that people can be duty-bound to tolerate, we are more likely to accept that a duty to tolerate might be legal as well as moral.

References

  • Balint, Peter. 2012. Not yet making sense of political toleration. Res Publica. doi:10.1007/s11158-012-9177-3.

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Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Peter Balint for his comments on an earlier draft of this note.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

    Peter Jones

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  1. Peter Jones
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Correspondence to Peter Jones.

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Jones, P. Legalising Toleration: a Reply to Balint. Res Publica 18, 265–270 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9178-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9178-2

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