Toleration and Neutrality

Abstract

In liberal thinking, a neutral state is one that takes no position on the ends its citizens should pursue in their lives. It establishes the ground rules within which they are to live but refrains from steering them either toward or away from any conception of the good life. The idea that toleration requires the state to remain neutral on differences of religion is widely accepted. Recent liberal thinking has sought to generalize that idea: a society should not use political power of any sort either to favor or disfavor a particular conception of the good life, be it religious or nonreligious. The idea of the neutral state is therefore an attempt to realize political toleration in a thorough-going fashion. This chapter locates neutralist thinking in the work of contemporary liberal philosophers, particularly that of John Rawls. It examines how the ideas of toleration and neutrality are related and how the toleration secured by a neutral state differs from that exhibited by the pre-democratic regimes of earlier ages. It explains different ways in which state neutrality can be understood and how different understandings of neutrality bear on issues of distributive justice and public policy. It then turns to the question of how state neutrality might be justified. Finally, it considers how extensive the liberal state’s neutrality might be and whether there can be a rapprochement between neutralism and its opposite, perfectionism (the belief that the state should be guided by a conception of the good).