Abstract
The relationship between toleration and liberalism has not been one of mutual entailment. Historically, many who have favoured toleration have not been liberals. The liberal who does not favour toleration has been a rarer specimen. Given societies as we know them, most liberals have regarded some form of toleration as both necessary and desirable. That would seem as true of present as of past liberal theorists and no less true of those contemporary liberal theorists who are commonly identified as ‘neutralists’. John Rawls is a clear example. For Rawls, religious toleration is one of the ‘settled convictions’ from which he develops his political liberalism; it constitutes a ‘fixed point’ that “any reasonable conception must account for”1 His political liberalism generalises that settled conviction by applying “the principle of toleration to philosophy itself”2. One of his principal concerns is to establish the grounds of toleration in modern democratic societies3 and toleration figures in a pivotal way in the political conception of justice that he goes on to construct. Accordingly, he ranks tolerance as one of the ‘great political virtues’ that a well-ordered society should cultivate amongst its citizens.4 The theories developed by other neutralist liberals, such as Nagel, Larmore, and Barry, would seem equally hospitable to the idea of toleration.5
I am grateful to Derek Bell for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter
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Reference
Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Barry and Larmore make scant use of the language of toleration but it is clear that they, no less than Rawls and Nagel, conceive mutual toleration as a central feature of a liberal society. All four thinkers provide reasons why people, who have different and conflicting conceptions of the good, should refrain from using political power to suppress or disadvantage conceptions with which they disagree–reasons that do not require them to forfeit their belief that those conceptions are wrong. It is not only the proponents of neutralism that associate toleration with political neutrality. Michael Sandel criticises neutralism because it fails to deliver a better quality of respect for diverse forms of life than mere toleration: Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1996), p.107. Kok-Chor Tan and Will Kymlicka both criticise Rawls for giving an unduly fundamental role to the value of toleration in his political liberalism: Tan, Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000); Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1995 ), pp. 152–63.
Glen Newey observes, “Toleration demands that the policy-makers have a particular motive, namely disapproval of the practice that they tolerate. But to the extent that they are thus motivated, the policy-makers contravene neutrality”; Virtue, Reason and Toleration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.124. Similarly, John Horton remarks, “… if we take neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good as central to liberalism, then it might reasonably be asked whether liberalism is properly described as tolerant even toward those conceptions it permits? Here the thought is not the familiar one that complete neutrality, however it is interpreted, is either incoherent or impossible, but simply that because liberalism professes to be neutral toward a range of conceptions of the good - that it has no objection to them - it cannot therefore be tolerant of them”; “Toleration as a virtue”, in 7 David Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 28–43, at p.36.
Thus Newey, in denying the possibility of a “neutralist justification of toleration”, is looking at things the wrong way round; Virtue, Reason and Toleration, p.130.
Rawls requires this only with qualification. The limits imposed by public reason apply to ‘constitutional essentials’ and ‘questions of basic justice’ rather than to less fundamental political questions, though Rawls thinks it highly desirable that even those less fundamental political questions should be settled by public reason insofar as that is possible (Political Liberalism, pp.214, 215, 230). Rawls also modifies the exclusionary character of public reason by allowing citizens, in certain situations, to present what they regard as the basis of political values rooted in their comprehensive doctrine, provided they do this in ways that strengthen the ideal of public reason itself’ (Political Liberalism, p.247).
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Jones, P. (2003). Toleration and Neutrality: Compatible Ideals?. In: Castiglione, D., McKinnon, C. (eds) Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_7
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